Not Like Other Girls: On Tomboys, Femininity, and International Women's Day

From around age 7 to about 12 most of my friends were boys. If you had asked me at the time why that was the case, I probably would have told you hanging out with boys was just easier because I had an older brother, and I just couldn’t imagine hanging out with girls who did “girl things”. I couldn’t tell you exactly what “girl things” were but I can tell you what I absolutely did not want in my life:

• Skirts and Dresses

• Makeup

• Heels

• Having my hair done in anything besides a ponytail

• Getting my nails done

• Boybands

• Hugs

• To be bad at anything, ever

I was definitively a tomboy, and will freely admit that for a period of time, I went through a “Not Like Other Girls” phase. To differentiate myself from mainstream girls, I became a hater. No pink, no pop music, no diaries with colorful pens or T-shirts with rainbows. If you ask me now, I’d say my disgust with “girl things” was much more a reflection on me than it was on girls: I was afraid that I would be found out - that I was not performing femininity in the same way that they were. I would be a fraud, and it was much easier to pretend that I didn’t like femininity than to discover that it was femininity that didn’t like me.

Imagine my surprise today, International Women’s Day over a decade later, when I looked around (virtually, of course, we are still in a pandemic) and realized the sheer number of women in my life. Women ARE my life. They are most of my friends and most of my day-to-day coworkers. They are my confidantes, my encouragers, and my support system. It’s women who read what I write, who tell me I’m pretty, who remind me of my value, who make me laugh.

I have changed in a lot of ways since the time when most of my friends were boys, but I don’t necessarily have a better relationship with womanhood. What I have is an understanding that things I like are neither “boy” nor “girl”, that I am not like other girls, because no girls are like other girls, and that we are all performing all the time. The binary is made up, the genders are performative, and the points don’t matter, who knew.

My thoughts on womanhood and gender identity don’t feel radical to me, and they aren’t meant to be. They’re not even original. Instead, I’m truly just taking the time to muse on group identity. I am no more woman than I am Black, I am no more Black than I am someone’s child, or sister, or friend. But today, I can only express gratitude that I have carved out a space in the world that is uniquely my own and that the women and nonbinary people in my life have found me there. They met me where I was at and loved me anyway and most days that is more than enough.

Stop Saying Rosa Was Tired: The Myth of Passive Change

Rosa Parks was not just too tired when she refused to get up from her seat on a Montgomery bus. I had heard this fact before, about two years ago on social media, but I never dug any further. I also never repeated it to anyone because it didn’t fit with the narrative I had been taught in grade school: that one day a woman stood up for herself, Martin Luther King Jr. had her back, and they worked for a little while until segregation was over and the war against racism was won. However, in my Women and Social Movements class, I learned Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama. That the NAACP couldn’t get behind her fight because she wasn’t the role model they needed. That had the NAACP started the bus boycott with her on their pedestal she would have been dragged through the mud, and as a teenager carrying the child of a married man, there was plenty of mud for dragging. Meanwhile, Rosa Parks was extremely active in the NAACP and was pristine enough to be made an icon. Rosa Parks was not tired from a long day’s work, she was tired from a long fight against segregation. So why do we keep repeating that Rosa Parks was just a tired lady flying solo, accidentally inciting a movement?  Why are students still being taught, in layman’s terms, that Martin Luther King Jr. effectively ended racism on the strength of his convictions and a couple of years work?

Individuals have always been the unit on which history is made. Groups of people working for a similar cause are reduced to their lowest common denominator, the brunt of the work placed on the shoulder of one to three charismatic individuals. For that matter, history is spoken of as being made in single moments, disregarding the preceding minutes, moments, months and even years of preparation that took place. There are surely many reasons for this: it is easiest to digest, it’s relatable, it’s impossible to learn everything, etc. and they are valid reasons. However, I think one of the biggest reasons is that by breaking the timeline of societal change into the smallest and most easily digestible chunks for the masses means that people get the idea that history is made like lightning strikes. It is sudden and unpredictable, the right person at the right time. And if history is only to be made in short bursts, why would anyone try to effect change at all? Leaders for social change are chosen seemingly by random, Rosa Parks just a seamstress, MLK a simple minister. Reducing movements to individual people in specific moments discourages the real effort it takes to make change happen because we cannot all be the chosen person, and we cannot all exist at the proper moment for large-scale change to occur.

This is partially why I think there is so much shock and disgust regarding global protests and rebellions in the present day. History has taught us that change is not that hard, that there are clear winners and losers and an obvious right way to do things. We are currently living in a time of change and we are in search of this easy history: an easy way to pick the side of the victor, while we, the un-chosen, watch it all unfold from afar. There are always protests, and there are always people calling them “annoying” or “inappropriate” because, in general, we are unfamiliar with the course of history. However, movements are messy, motives are shaky, and the world is full of gray areas. Once people think that change is defined as passivity, active work toward anything is subversive and unnatural. This is not limited to the Civil Rights Movement or Black Lives Matter or even just movements in general- the idea of passive change can be internalized and applied to just about anything in life. Celebrities become symbols of all luck and no talent, movies are either a waste of time or a masterpiece with no regard to the years and work that go in, and people everywhere are just waiting for something to happen to them.

Stop being fooled into thinking change is sudden. Stop repeating the lie that Rosa Parks is tired or that Abraham Lincoln ended slavery or Martin Luther King Jr. singlehandedly stopped racism. Respect change by at least attempting to remember every hand that has touched it. I am not proposing some grand conspiracy that the government is redacting the truth from our textbooks, but the people in power control the narrative and what is more beneficial than a narrative that implies you should be brave and stand up for what’s right- but only if you are the right person at just the right time. There is not always going to be a right person, and the right time is all the time. Putting a face on a movement does not make it one person. For people out there making things happen socially, politically, or personally every day is a movement. Change is not sudden.

Let's Reflect

I have just finished the first week of my second year at the University of Texas and I realized that I never posted a last weekly post on ThinkingMayan. I find myself needing some closure, some final summation of my experiences with weekly writing.

I find myself bored on a Saturday.

For the most part this blog was a selfish endeavor. It was therapy after struggling through a freshman year of college where I lacked motivation and drive. It held me to a higher standard that I had lost dealing with school and, above all, gave me an outlet to express the ill-formed ideas that I jotted in the corners of notebooks. That’s what my Trayvon Martin piece was and that’s how a lot of my best pieces begin. I didn't know who I intended to read the things that I wrote, besides my mother, but I was surprised every time to find people that had read it and appreciated it. People that would text me or tweet me to continue to write which was lovely but never my explicit purpose in writing. I wrote on a weekly basis to remind myself what I do well. I tell stories.

Over the course of this blog I am sure I have often come across as very serious at times. I’m sure this is how I come across in person as well, but I have always wanted nothing more than to be funny. Over the years I have found that there are just two things I could never quite figure out for myself: goofy and sexy.  Sarcastic, sure, humorous, at times, pretty, yes, but goofy and sexy are always just out of reach. I have learned through my writing that I can get by without either. Humor is tricky and important and the guiding force in my life. My brother could get a laugh pulling faces or making noises but it was never my nature to be silly; all I’ve ever had is my ability to use words. Goofy doesn’t teach you timing like writing humor does. You can’t throw everything up front and expect people to stick with the story, and you can only rely on the images you create. I also don’t want to imply that I do humor well. I think I’m hilarious as I also think well-timed cursing is hilarious, but my mother would very much disagree. Humor is so subjective. But one of the highlights of ThinkingMayan this summer was writing about my father and his injuries. I had no idea how he would take me writing about him, but I stood sheepishly to his side while he read and was surprised to hear him laugh loudly and hard and repeat the line, “If you have never seen an adult fall, be glad.” For all that my father and I do not understand about each other, we have always had a similar sense of humor. It was humor that often times made me continue to write: the idea of someone reading and laughing was worth the time of writing and editing and, in general, the “Excerpts from my Unwritten Memoir” posts were the most fun to do.

Not every idea was so easily fleshed out. There were several pieces I started that could never really hold water but it was okay. There were also, I’m sure, many lines I took out for fear of offending someone. Some of this I regret. I learned to loosen up quite a bit after the Trayvon Martin essay, after it was received so positively and I was so worried my words would be twisted. I also had to force myself to remain true to my thoughts in my Anniston piece, where I often felt that maybe I could be sweeter or gentler. On the surface of the issue, very few people were actually reading my work and in that sense it didn’t matter if someone was offended, but in a very real sense I felt like I received the response I did because I approached the issue so cautiously and respectfully that my sins were more easily forgiven. I could easily bring in a discussion in reference to life here, but that’s not what this post is so I’ll save it for another week.

At the sum of it, I enjoyed myself. I felt productive this summer. Though it was a selfish start, as I mentioned, I endeavored to entertain my online passerby, to inspire thought and create humor. If even one person got it, then all is not in vain. I will continue to write when the chances appear but this school year ahead looks like it will be giving me a run for my money. And by “my money” I mean “their money” because I gave them all my money in tuition. Special thanks to my mother, editor extraordinaire, and to anyone who has read every post or some posts or one post: you rock.

Excerpts from my Unwritten Memoir: Dentistry is for Suckers and Sadists

Dentistry is a skillful profession. Like any medical field it requires extensive knowledge and training, as well as a level of precision- and a level of sadism.

I have never enjoyed the dentist, probably due in part to the fact that my dental problems started relatively early. After losing my baby teeth, one of my back teeth grew in entirely missing enamel. Because we moved a lot we were constantly changing dentists who continually questioned what had been done to it and I was subjected to patch job after patch job until I was “old enough”, for which I was rewarded the joyless process of receiving a porcelain crown. None of my other problems have been so severe, but even though my father stressed dental hygiene like it was end-all-be-all I still had my fair share of cavities.

I am familiar with the filling process. There is the pre-numb gel. The probably-a-creation-of-Satan oral shots of Novocain. There is drilling I never really feel and then some cotton and some filling stuff and an extraterrestrial blue light that magically seals the tooth and then a little more drilling to make it even and lots and lots of saliva. It’s not fun but it’s usually doable. One tooth at a time. Except Tuesday I went to the dentist to receive three fillings. After I found out I would need three, I asked my very nice dentist what I was doing wrong to have multiple cavities and she told me that I was doing everything right. Turns out when you keep your wisdom teeth, like I have, they are prone to cavities. I don’t regret the decision to keep my wisdom teeth because fillings are usually cheaper and less painful than recovery after oral surgery. Usually

.The procedure started out fine. The office has televisions that hang above the chair to distract you and I put on Divorce Court because it was 11:30 on a Tuesday and there were few other options. The dentist, the hygienist, and I all laughed at the absurdity and then we were off to the races, the finish line being pain and misery. The pre-numb is never quite enough to dull the feeling of a needle deep inside your cheek. It is a profoundly disturbing and hard to describe pain that is meant to save you worst pain in the few minutes after. I have a pretty high pain tolerance. I sucked it up. Two cavities were on the left side of my mouth, my bottom wisdom tooth and the tooth after the next, so I got a total of about four shots on that side and two on the bottom right side for my second wisdom tooth. We waited a few minutes for the numbness to begin while listening to the couple on Divorce Court discuss the husband’s love of “booty” and the wife’s love of preachers. When the dentist felt I was numb enough, she tilted my head toward her and began to drill my wisdom tooth, and then quickly moved on to my next tooth which almost made me wish she had just pulled it out instead. After very few seconds of chaotic but comfortable drilling she pressed the drill to a spot on my tooth that made every nerve in my face twitch. My hands flexed, my feet crossed; I had never felt so sharp a pain in my life. She was moving quickly so I assumed that was it, but she returned to the spot again and again. I was writhing in the chair, trying not make her accidentally drill somewhere she wasn’t supposed while also attempting to remove myself from torture. She continued to dance around the spot and I calmed my breathing until she suddenly pressed directly on to it with the tip of the drill and I groaned so loudly I surprised myself.

She stopped and apologized and gave me more shots, about three more on the left and two on the right even though we hadn’t gotten there yet, just to be safe. We waited again. The Divorce Court judge ruled that the husband would have to pay her back for bailing him out of jail. And then I was forced to open my mouth like a child playing the airplane game, except this airplane was a drone and my mouth a war zone. My tooth was being bombed, my nerves destroyed. My hands kept balling into fists, my back kept arching and I jumped and twitched and groaned until she finally stopped again and looked closely at the tooth. “It never hurts this much,” I remarked as best I could with a numb jaw, hoping she would take the hint and do something- anything- else. “No, it shouldn’t,” she answered, sticking a tiny round mirror in for a closer look, “but there’s a spot here- I got it. I got it.” She put down the mirror- and picked up the drill again. WHAT DID YOU GET? GOT WHAT? I wanted to scream but there she went again drilling in the same place. She did not give me the cavity, of course, she was only trying to fix what I had apparently broken, but in that moment, with tears of pain sliding from under the dark glasses they had me wear, I hated her more than anybody, ever.

Finally moving on to the last tooth she paused to ask me if I was doing alright. “Mhmm,” I lie and turn my eyes back to the TV. Judge Judy is on now. I hate Judge Judy. She starts to drill the last tooth and finishes with the whole sealing process, but I don’t care anymore. I have lost all will to be present. If this was a hostage situation I would have long ago told them anything they wanted to know. I stand and press a finger to my bottom lip which I cannot feel, and notice that I am shaking. I smile as best I can and thank them for their time before walking up to the counter where I am forced to pay 90 dollars for having my life ruined, my faith in goodness destroyed, and three fillings, two of which wouldn’t have been necessary if I had just had my wisdom teeth pulled. This is what being an adult is, I mumble to myself as I stumble back to my car and call my mother. Recounting the experience, I began to cry for the second time in what turned out to be only a 45 minute appointment.

In short, President Obama, if you do manage to close Guantanamo Bay, to appease the critics you might consider replacing it with a dentist’s office.

Sincerely,
Maya

Why Trayvon Martin's Death is my 9/11

As I anticipate that most people will find this title inflammatory, I will include a preface: 9/11 is also my 9/11. 9/11 is everyone’s 9/11.

There is no denying the tragedy or undermining the impact of such a significant event, and that is not at all my intent.

There are several reasons why I would put these events in the same category, and I don’t expect everyone to feel the same, but at the basis of 9/11, the impact on people not closely or directly affected is something of a time marker. On each anniversary I recall being asked in my classroom, “do you remember where you were when you heard about the attack?” I imagine in the years following the attack, this was a sensitive moment. Each student would have a story of the time and often a six-degrees-of-separation chain that connected them to an individual there. For me, on September 11, 2001 I had just arrived in Oceanside, California and was soon to be enrolled in kindergarten. I don’t know what I was doing and I definitely don’t remember any moments of tension. My first memory of 9/11 is actually several years after, hearing a memorial broadcast on the car radio while waiting for my mother in the parking lot of a grocery store. Being 19 now, there is no division between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 America; it is all post-9/11 for me. The heightened airport security, the visceral tension and looped memorial videos on September 11th each year, the unfortunate and unwarranted negative attitudes toward Muslim-Americans: these things have always been America for me.

9/11 is also the moment in time where many people lost trust in their own safety, in other people, and for a growing segment of the population, in the government. Many people are quick to dismiss conspiracy theorists, which is understandable, and the theory itself has become a common joke on the internet (“jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”). However, for a large portion of people, 9/11 was fundamentally a shattering of illusions; a symbol that things are not always fair, that life is not required to meet expectations, that we are not always safe.

Something I remember exactly is where I was when George Zimmerman was ruled “not guilty” for the death of Trayvon Martin. Sitting on the couch in the upstairs of my Texas home, I had complete, albeit unspoken, faith in a guilty ruling. At the time, I don’t think even I knew how passionately I felt. I remember the shock and disbelief. I remember getting in an argument over the ruling through text with a friend and classmate and being so heartbroken that I was even having the argument that I lost the strength to continue it. The wounds were too fresh and too raw. I turned to social media for comfort, and though there was some to be found, I felt like I was being punched in the stomach again to find that many people shared my classmate’s views. At 17 years old, the same age as Trayvon when he was killed, and only a year younger than he would have been at the moment of the verdict, my world divided.

For me there is a pre-Trayvon world, where I understood that people differed but believed that when it really mattered they could be sensitive, unbiased, and understanding. I believed that our government and our judicial system was the be-all and end-all, the pinnacle of justice. I still believed that the people I associated with were more likely to share my own point of view.

Post-Trayvon Martin, the world was no longer such a safe place to me. I no longer put my trust in the judicial system. I no longer naively trusted the people around me to be fair and unbiased. Many of my friends, my classmates, their parents and relatives, laid their opinions bare on social media, with little tact or courtesy, and I felt personally attacked. In Trayvon Martin’s death I saw myself, and even more vividly, I saw my brother, who was just 20 at the time. The post-Trayvon world is a place of fear and insecurity.

I know why I should remember 9/11 and I know why I do remember 9/11; but its waves of impact are fading with each generation. With each passing year we become more removed from the trauma and can see only its effect. I believe, however, every individual will have their own event that will strike with the suddenness of lightning, illuminating and capturing a moment of time and replacing illusion with raw truth. This does not make the events of the past any less tragic. It is an unfortunate part of being alive, but a necessary one, that teaches us how to experience and respect the tragedies of others. Though I wish Trayvon’s death and subsequent lack of justice had not had to happen, my disillusionment has served me well today. In a time where deaths continue to occur suspiciously in front of an even broader audience, I am grateful for my own consciousness.

The trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was my event.

Trayvon Martin’s death will forever be my 9/11.

What I Learned from Spending a Day Doing Nothing of Value: An Autobiographical Essay

I should preface this by saying that in addition to my day, this essay also has no value: it is not scientific, there will be no facts or research beyond a quick Google search if necessary. It was not intended to be an experiment of any kind, but like many things in life it occurred accidentally, and like many, many more things in life I did nothing to stop it.

In my bed on December 5th from around 11 pm to 2 am I watched the first season of UK TV show Black Mirror (amazing, by the way) on Netflix and then decided to call it a night, at no point considering that I was to remain in that bed for a total of approximately 14 hours. Indeed, I actually awoke at 10 a.m., and sat up, performing the millennial morning ritual of slowly rifling through various social media sites: I call it the Haverford System, so named for excessive and lovable Tom Haverford of Parks and Recreation. My Haverford System is in time order, as in how much time I spend on each app from least to most: Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and Tumblr. It is a complete time waster, I recognize this, but I also give myself over to it completely. I don’t mind criticism I would, or will, receive for waking up and reaching for my phone like a baby reaches for a pacifier and I refuse to be shamed for it. I’m sure other people wake up and immediately turn on a TV or, way back in the day, a radio. People instinctively join the world the minute their eyes open, and I for one think that’s okay. Unfortunately for me, after finding out that it was relatively chilly and windy in Austin, Texas I rolled over and went directly back to sleep; this meant at 12 pm when I awoke for the second time, the Haverford System began again. Except this time I offered my own insight: I tweeted that I had woken up and gone back to sleep. Which leads to the first thing I was to learn.

My tweets are basically half-hearted apologies AKA Tweeting as therapy*

I often feel that people expect me to do great things, but no one as much as myself. So when I tweet things like “Omg just woke up” or “Made it to class…10 minutes late” or even “the only thing I've eaten today is macaroni and fun-size candy bars” it’s my unconscious way of apologizing for not taking advantage of….everything. I don’t take advantage of mornings, or education, or a healthy lifestyle and I can’t quite walk around apologizing to myself every time I make a dumb, but not necessarily harmful decision, so I tweet it. But Twitter is also a bit like I would imagine an AA meeting: you sit in a big room, and yell out your vices so friends and strangers alike can pat you on the back and say “yeah me too." I can’t pretend that I don’t want the attention or the reassurance. To make a series of general statements, my generation glorifies a dichotomy of lifestyles: we crave beauty and laziness, an unhealthy lifestyle yet all sort of activities, fortune without work, and fame without talent. Often the drawbacks are ignored, and we spend all our time piecing together a puzzle that does not necessarily fit together. We want the fast car and the nice house, but not the job. We want to be famous overnight, to be Kardashians or the next Usher protégé, but we also want to make fun of them, to criticize their choices. We want skills we do not cultivate, people that don’t exist. So we will all continue to tweet our disappointments with ourselves and allow people to throw yellow stars and retweets of support in our direction. Will I stop tweeting such a way? Probably not. Will I second guess what I tweet from now on? Absolutely. I can’t help now but to think when I tweet “who is this really for? And what do I want from it?”

I laid in bed and received a call from my mother. I don’t so much as wake up hungry, but expect to eat. That’s what I do in the mornings, whatever time that morning occurs: I get up and I eat. I didn't sit up to talk, just laid the phone across my face, and groaned that I wanted pancakes. She responded, “So go get them.” Super easy right? I wanted Kerbey Lane pancakes, it was about a 5 minute walk from my spot on the University of Texas campus, I just had to grab some clothes and shoes and get out there. Instead I looked up the Favor app on my phone, a food delivery service available in only 3 cities, one of which being Austin, where people literally just did you a “favor” and bought and delivered you food. Too ashamed to actually get someone else to travel further than I would to get me something that I could get myself, I decided against it, and continued to lay in bed. My mother had asked me what I had to do when I got out of bed, and I had grumbled a kind of “I dunno, nothing. I guess,” which was only partly true. It was false in the sense that I have an essay due Monday and two finals Thursday before I get to go home for Christmas but true in the sense that none of it was pressing and immediate.

At two in the afternoon my roommate woke up as well, though hers had just been a nap, and became immediately frantic as she had forgotten she was meeting someone for lunch. I finally got on my feet and feigned some sort of activity as well, though I had already sort of put my mind to doing nothing. I shuffled around our small dorm brushing my teeth and hair and making a cup of coffee in a pair of men’s boxers and a free t-shirt I had gotten for volunteering in such a bright highlighter greenish-yellow that I couldn’t see myself ever wearing it outside unless I needed someone to spot me from more than a mile away. I took my cup of coffee and my laptop and yes- I got back in bed. In my defense there is little more to this room THAN bed, it is one of only two seating options. Just as my roommate left to do things I assume normal people do on Saturday afternoons, I learned something else.

Don’t drink a large cup of coffee on an empty stomach

This is much less revelatory than earlier, but still very important. Don’t do it. For about 10 minutes I was convinced I was going to throw up and die. Just don’t.

Instead of leaving to fill my upset stomach with pancakes, I chose to wait it out and ate a handful of stale Wheat Thins while finishing the second season of Black Mirror. I tweeted how much I loved Black Mirror, in hopes that Netflix my throw me a gold star. They did not. I was starting to feel guilty that I had nothing going for me at that moment. I began to want to do something of value and so I began some research for my essay. I still uphold, however, that I did nothing of value this day because I researched a total of two minutes before realizing how much all the screen-time had affected my vision; my eyes were blurry and itchy and a pressure bloomed at the back of my skull. So I got up and put on clothes: a pair of black yoga pants and a long sleeve UT shirt. I played around on the internet till about 5 and then put on shoes to go down to the dining hall and have dinner. Realizing I need to take my ID and phone and having not a single pocket, I threw on an over-sized red knit cardigan as well. My brother refers to it as a slanket or sweater-blanket. Then came epiphany number 3.

If yoga pants had pockets I’d never take them off AKA I put a precedent on comfort

I put on these yoga pants because I wasn't going anywhere and didn't need to look nice. I put on this long sleeve because it is my favorite. I put on a sweater for the pockets. I spent my whole day inside because I had nothing to do outside and inside was softer and (slightly) warmer. My life revolved around making myself as comfortable as possible. I allow myself to have off days without limitation and set no boundaries on my lifestyle. But I'm not really guilty. Sure there were going to be days were I was going to have to work hard, be up early, look and act my best, but there were going to be far fewer where I had to do none of it. At 18 years old, looking ahead on my life, I can’t see much, but I know I don’t want to spend the rest of it alone, or living in my parents basement (particularly because they don’t have a basement), so there was always going to be people that would see me, that would expect things of me. So for now yes, I was going to be a slob and wear yoga pants and not iron. I would tweet and expect people to laugh and tell me it’s okay. And I would talk to my mother about how to sew pockets on my yoga pants.

At dinner I ran into a friend and we caught up, and I noticed just how much I had to say. I had spent 14 hours in bed and 3 more hours with no one to talk to and my tongue was heavy with unexpressed thoughts. I left and returned to my dorm and watched a movie I began to dislike immensely before I was even half way through, but I finished it anyway. And then I began to grow restless. I began to consolidate my thoughts, and I wrote this. Tomorrow I will have to do work, the day after that I will have to study, and for almost every day forward I will have something that needs to be completed. But today I was a noncontributing member of society. I recognized the pitfalls of the Haverford System, I learned not to drink coffee on an empty stomach, and I had a new found appreciation for my own comfort. For me, laziness is not a vice or a lifestyle, but somewhere in between: a conscious decision to take my time.

*Yes, I am probably going to tweet a link to this essay. Yes, this entire essay is basically one large self-gratifying apology. I didn’t promise anything.