I purchased my first ever Spring Weekend ticket while on the treadmill. I was #1998 in the virtual queue and the little figure on the screen walked atop the progress bar from left to right, imitating my leisurely pace, dragging itself to the finish line. Every day felt like that at the time. Between ...
When the air tastes like radiance and the days drip with donut-pink glaze, it’s easy to fall in love with the whimsy and effervescence of life. It is also tempting to believe you aren’t perhaps fully cooked—maybe only a tad bit caramelised.
Learning to hate is both easy and hard. It is easy in that once felt, hatred takes close to no effort to maintain. It persists through all kinds of weather. Learning to hate is hard in that you need to get hurt to begin. And then it hurts to keep hating. And then when you’re finally tired of hating, ...
If you’d asked my twelve-year-old self to close her eyes and go to her happy place, she would have done so dutifully: contemplated, ruminated, and then cast herself to the Burbank, California IKEA.
My mother likes to bring up that I used to be a heavy sleeper—a good sleeper—when I was young.
“It’s all about a larger journey: Your work is never done,” Erin Niimi Longhurst writes in her book, A Little Book of Japanese Contentments. That's the beauty in it. The journey is the process and importance of discovering what keeps you going. It’s about learning to “let go of the things ...
My grandfather grew up in small-town, middle-of-nowhere East Java, right around the old Dutch sugar plantations.
As the weather becomes gentler and clouds give way to warmer blue skies, I am reminded of how much I love the coming of spring, but not spring itself. I often give it the cold shoulder when answering the “What's your favorite season?” icebreaker because, when comparing spring to her seasonal siblings, ...
My bedroom is a shape no other room should be. It’s built like a square horseshoe, a left bracket symbol with elongated sides. The bed is nestled snugly into a space so small that when I sit with my back against the wall—head tilted forward on account of the sloped ceilings—my feet rest on the ...
Over spring break, I went to visit my closest friend from home and stayed at her college apartment. We made steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast and, to my surprised delight, she offered me a bag of chocolate chips to sprinkle on as a topping, alongside frozen berries that turned our bowls gorgeous shades ...
I’ve bought a journal every year since 2018. It’s been seven years, though it doesn’t feel too long ago that I was a middle schooler gripping a ballpoint and carving letters into paper for no apparent reason. I struggle to remember exactly what drove me to my first notebook, what motivated me ...
Our sunroof only opens when it rains. When blue skies are all you can see, they no longer feel like blue skies. It’s the rain that makes us excited. At its beckoning, we pile into the car, wrists hanging over our heads like lazy and futile umbrellas. Our shoes stain puddles on the carpet and we shake ...
There’s something sweet in the air. It usually hits me at night on the walk back from North Campus, right between Wriston and Keeney. Each time, I’m left disoriented, unable to keep walking. It’s a green, sharp, scent–one of freshly mowed grass, sweat, clear sky, crisp morning air. It’s youthful—gentle, ...
Disclaimer: mild spoilers, I tried my best to live in the abstract but I would love it if you watched the movie before reading.
Solutions by The State News
