Second
Thoughts
A home for personal meditations, critiques of art and literature, politics, sketches, and deconstructions that dive beneath the surface of thought. Experiment with form here, relate with current events, read and talk about a book you’ve never read or perhaps want to read, and criticize something, anything, everything.
Day 501: When I Realized I Was Both Tom and Summer
From time to time, someone decides to resurrect the same debate about 500 Days of Summer (2009): was Summer the villain, or was Tom simply delusional? The response to that question rarely changes. Summer is perceived as a cold, evasive witch who purposely misleads poor Tom, while Tom is defended as a romantic, perhaps naive, but well-intentioned good guy. The framing of that narrative is quite unsurprising, almost expected, because it provides the natural urge to assign fault cleanly; a way to make sense of a dramatic, romantic split by assigning one person the role of the wrongdoer and the other the role of the one wronged.
This Is Why You Can’t Decide
Real commitment used to lead to milestones. A marriage, a mortgage, a job, a new city. These were all declarations, not just one-off choices or premeditated decisions. Today, permanence feels less like security and more like risk: to our identity, our autonomy, our finances, even our sense of self—especially as a woman who has been told both to settle and to have it all.
Fair warning, this essay is not nostalgic for compulsory marriage or shrinking yourself to fit into someone else’s script.
How to Live A Fulfilling Life Under Tyranny
Inside a community center at Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party (WFP) organized a watch party for the Super Bowl half time show for groups of migrant families—only one of many around the country. The air was heavy with anxieties of a possible ICE raid as people huddled around one screen to watch a great American artist perform. This is not an excerpt from Orwell’s 1984, or a 21st century fiction retelling of World War II. This was two weeks ago in the U.S.
Alternative Literary Modalities: Video Essays, Audio Books, and Accessibility
I am a strong advocate for the analog. I think music sounds better when on vinyl, pictures taken with my second-hand film camera are more charming, and my Omni-84 is a beast of an analog synth. What links these things together? The tactile, physicality of them all. Studying writing through my undergrad and my Master's left me with stacks of physical literature lining my shelves, but like many, I seldom open them. How tasteless! I can hear that one professor I had for Gothic Lit (who always pronounced French words heinously wrong) yelp—What a waste!
Jared Leto, Liberalism, and Coming of Age in the 2010s
The year is 2014. I’m 16 and my dream is to be a foreign correspondent for Vice Media. I romanticize the aesthetics of Occupy Wall Street and the Vietnam War protest movement, and my bedroom walls are plastered with photos snipped from a Time Magazine special on the Arab Spring. I procrastinate my math homework, instead pouring over features detailing strife in faraway places recounted by journalists who work at liberal legacy publications.