Pop Culture

This film employs the act of doing laundry, in its habitual, cyclical mundaneness, to reflect a deep longing for a cultural heritage under the strain of constant, quiet erasure. Invoking two voices, mother and daughter, Tagalog and English, I choose to render this immigrant experience through the insecurities surrounding language, and its intimate relation to generational relationships.

Most love stories begin with a hello, ours began with a ransacked lunchbox, a stolen spork, and a touch of pyromania.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I am a material girl. Some might call me a shopaholic for thinking that a pair of Maison Margiela tabi ballerina heels—ones that would make my feet look like horse hoofs and allow me to trot around grounds—would bring me the most joy in the world, but it’s just the truth and I cannot lie.

I recently started watching the Netflix TV series Shadow and Bone over spring break, adapted from the seven novels that span Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse.

Not long ago, I was a high school student who had assigned readings. Some novels I loved, some I hated, and many I’d forgotten about. However, four years after I read Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening in the twelfth  grade, the piece of literature once again crossed my mind.

What do straight cisgender people want?

I asked my mother all the pressing questions, and she came with all the answers. 

The first Panic! At the Disco song I heard was, surprisingly, not “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” I was sitting in my childhood bedroom

My fluttering feet had splashed up into the air–suspending, if just for a moment–in that beautiful, blissful moment when an overwhelming sea of blue rushed and rippled over my streamlined body as I swam in my neighborhood pool.

Whenever I read, watch, or play different forms of post-apocalyptic fiction, I always end up wondering what I’d do if I were in these worlds, whether they be ravaged by nuclear blasts, invaded by aliens, or torn apart by natural disaster.