This is the ninth installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
The first time I fell in love with someone was also the first instance that I lost love. I was just shy of 12, and I had fallen in love with a gap-toothed kid with a bowl cut, an aesthetic combination that I hope he grew into or out of. If anything at all was true in the world, it was that I loved him. This knowledge existed in tandem with the understanding that no one else would understand, though. I knew that. I knew that no one could take this blistering feeling seriously, despite its very real burn.
But I didn’t have physical proof that I loved him until my heart broke into perfect halves the day he moved away. It wasn’t until that moment that I understood the extent of my devotion, young as it was. So goes the story of the day I learned that absence made my heart grow fonder – February 27th, to this day, conjures faint shadows of the lamentation I entertained all those years ago.
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This is the eighth installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
Anecdotes have served as the cornerstone to this column, either donated by readers or supplied by my own romantic mishaps. But until this week I had overlooked the best nugget of weird love I knew. In fact, I grew up with this story, a crucial piece in the canon of our family’s personal history that serves well when entertaining others at dinner parties. It is the story of my parents’ relationship, its frightening beginnings, and its eventual manifestations. Spoiler alert: I am born as a result of this union, so you know something went wrong along the way.
My parents fell in love in the 1970s. Now I can assure you, I have a very clear and balanced view of what love was like in the 1970s. It was all key parties and rollerblades with the Velvet Underground on vinyl repeating without cessation (though, if you were unlucky, it could have been the Bee Gees). Love wore wooden beads and understood that there was something sexy-creepy about Henry Kissinger, but it couldn’t quite put its finger on it. And love smelled kind of like patchouli, and an absence of ventilation. Weird love, embodied in an era!
But when I was taught about love as it bloomed in the 1970s, I understood that it started in a psychiatric hospital. My mother, a social worker on a ward, and my father, a nurse in the same hospital, had eyed one another in passing (their words, not mine). There was vague familiarity in the workplace, a glimpse caught in the cafeteria or at collective staff meetings. But their lives were fully thrown together by chance when my mother, attending a patient, was throttled and choked in a private room on the ward. Having upset the patient in some way, my mother was in danger of real damage until my father happened to be walking past the room. Bursting in and wresting the patient from my mother’s neck, my father inadvertently became a savior of sorts, gangly and long-haired and entirely right.
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Mental Hospital,
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Social Worker,
Weird Love
This is the seventh installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
Ahh, tis April! Please behold, for a moment, the glorious season of springtime. Behold Persephone, Greek goddess of spring, as she presides over the budding of the crocus, the copulation of the bunnies, the mass casualty incidents of college students. Behold the false promises of a sunny 60 degrees on one day, and a blustery 41degrees the next. Behold the crippling sense that the year has slipped from under your feet, and that you don’t remember what warmth feels like on your wintry, papery skin… No! Behold sunshine, and porch dinners, and the reclamation of your youth! (That’s what my youth looks like, right?)
Or, behold the feeling well expressed by Nazim Hikmet that seems to reflect the undergraduate experience of spring:
“Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING…
And me – poet, proofreader,
the man who’s forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras –
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged black chair?”
Yes, spring has sprung, and no one can deny the gravitational pull that hooks just behind the navel and draws all of us to seek the sun and stretch on lawns. Yet we are still sitting here like ragged black chairs, wondering where the love of spring is hiding. We are working, we are toiling. Perhaps it is my personal bias, but there are none who toil so much as the seniors who have undertaken the daunting task of a thesis, project, or similar culmination. So this one is for the thesis writers, the project planners, the play directors, the design leaders – because right now, they’re a little starved for love.
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Love,
Senior Project,
Thesis,
Weird Love
This is the sixth installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
I believe in the principle of full disclosure, occasionally to my own detriment. Owning up to your faults and fears, your secret desires and points of pride, those instances when you break wind – all of these moments and revelations are part of the process of strengthening a sense of basic trust among your fellow human beings. I’ll be the first to admit that my favorite form of stress relief – picking the dust from my laptop keyboard – puts a few innocent bystanders at unease. I’ve gotten odd glances while hunched over my computer, running a pencil along the grooves. But in honesty, it’s all that keeps me from becoming mutinous against my workload and self-destructing. So there’s that. I said it.
I want to believe we are an honest species, at our truest core. But I remember 6-year-old Madeline, who used to compulsively sneak food from the pantry just to see if I could get away with it (sorry Mom). I also remember the deep relationship I developed with the idea of Santa, which as it turns out was all predicated on lies and hurt. The number of times my friends and I have created falsely formal excuses for not being in class, or insincerely informal excuses for not doing our work on a Tuesday night, actively runs up against my desire for a collective sense of responsibility to be honest. There’s a persisting element of concealment that underlies almost every possible relationship, be it platonic or romantic, detached or obsessive.
With that in mind, please consider for a moment the web of lies that is college. While college life embodies an unreality-within-reality type of existence, there can be something to be learned from decidedly collegiate experiences or social phenomena. It is with this noble acknowledgment of how ridiculous – and still reflective of reality – college can be that I turn the scepter of attention to a spectacle currently raging at Tufts that is purportedly “destroying newsfeeds” with alarming disregard. I am referring to the many-headed hydra that is Tufts Confessions.
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The components of a scene, in no particular order:
1. A 1950s basement
2. A cat piss-stained rug
3. Wooden paneled walls painted in a shade of yellow called “Marigold”
4. The Exorcist playing on a 17” cathode-ray TV that had seen better days
5. 9-10 odd adolescents
Given these facts, what could be expected to ensue from this disjointed scene is a horror movie in itself. The teens are attacked from the shadowy corners of the basement room (WHY did you look behind that shady door?!), blood splatters the paneled walls and cat piss rug. It could be an utter disaster.
Given these facts, what really DID ensue from this disjointed scene was my first kiss. Fourteen years old, riddled with romantic misconceptions, and — entirely inappropriate — I locked lips with my first kiss while the young actress’s head spun a full 360° on screen. It WAS an utter disaster.
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This is an open, brief, and honest love letter.
You could even call it a love declaration. A love proclamation! It’s a love message written in smoke letters by a spiraling airplane.
This is a love letter to the Tufts Vagina Monologues.
I don’t intend for this to be an article detailing the many marvels of the Tufts Vagina Monologues team. There have been countless Daily articles, Facebook events, posters, and campaigns to detail the sheer force of the team’s effort. With a pair of ears or eyes, it was impossible to ignore the work of the many students who endeavored to bring the performance back to Tufts last week after a three year hiatus; flash mobbing and vagina screaming, these brave souls refused to let anyone go unaware of their ambitions to stage Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. I’ll let you read their lips: they were incredible.
I’d rather take a moment to celebrate the bravery with which two Tufts seniors, Stella Benezra and Dani Moscovitch, undertook the ordeal of casting, directing, producing, and promoting an event that had fallen by the Tufts wayside. Generating hype in all the right places and recruiting a crew of supporters and performers, the performance became larger than itself. It became a talking point, a conversation that resurged from time to time. “It’s coming. Are you?” was plastered all over campus, reminding us of the impending explosion that was the Vagina Monologues. It was effective; we noticed, and came.
The play itself is not without flaws; written many years ago, it has fielded criticism of being outdated or irrelevant to the struggles of modern vagina-owners. It is a representation, rather than a reality, but this is the challenge of any performance with an intended message. Regardless of the qualms, the production was imbued with eagerness, devotion, and complete dedication to a worthy cause in such a sensitive manner that the obstacles were met with grace. Let the critics have their own column, because it has no place here.
The ladies of the Tufts Vagina Monologues brought such strong vagina love to each of their performances that the love is catching all over campus. Shy of screaming VAGINA in the middle of classes, those that attended the performances and felt its resonance carried the pride with them. It’s a new feeling for some, to rid yourself of a shame that has never been explicitly articulated, but it’s a relief. It’s a rebirth.
This column isn’t about love, per se. This is about appreciating an event that allows self-identifying women of every walk of life to love themselves, and love a part of themselves that is often shamed. It’s an honest thank you for doing Tufts a real service, and for doing it with real grace and skill. Tufts Vagina Monologues, I gotta love you.
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Student Theater,
Vagina Monologues
This is the third installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
My hearing appears to be worsening these days. The number of times I have to lean toward a speaker with a particular ear, a la Grandpa Style, has been increasing with disconcerting frequency. On the heartening contrary, my eyesight maintains its 20-20 status, and my sense of smell could beat out a German Shepard on a good day. I try to keep a mental record of these measurements, informal as they may be, for the sake of self-awareness and in keeping with my premature preoccupation with morbidity. There are some things you can’t shake, like a familiarity with the lines around your eyes, or the smell of curry.
Love isn’t a sense in the way we learned in elementary school. We tried to disassociate our connection of the heart with emotion, despite its metaphoric convenience and the preponderance basic symbolism in our curriculum. Rather, we were taught that the heart pumped blood – valves, arteries, and walls. In middle school, we definitely didn’t learn to assign bodily organs with affection. We did that on our own, furtive and incomplete in our attempts to understand how what we felt was some variant of love. Shame, in that way, enters the picture, which at the time was incompatible with a childlike understanding of love. It’s only when we graze adulthood that shame and love cease to feel so disconnected.
But there’s always talk of that loving feeling, or of feeling love, and it cannot go overlooked that in a sense, love is a sense. Straddling that noun/verb line that muddles our own English sentences, “love” as a word embodies sense. And that, of course, makes sense.
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Taste
This is the second installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s REALLY NICE that in the United States, we try to celebrate a holiday that commemorates love and all of its squishy side effects.
There’s a civility involved in it; we nod to the continued phenomenon of affection by reminding ourselves of our relative companionship or solitude, all the while accepting that there is a day set aside to simply be in love. That is, if you are in love.
It’s hard to tell with certainty which population – that of the mirthfully matched or the sullenly solitary – feels the impact of the day more forcefully. Are those with significant others significantly happier with the arrival of the day? Or are those who pity their singular self that much more unbearable to listen to as they complain about their loveless life?
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Dating,
Friendship,
Love,
Valentines
This is the first installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
Love is a porch.
Love is kind of embarrassing outside of its cultural, historical context.
Love is washing an elephant.
Love is a collection of tropes that cease to resemble any form of genuine emotion, and is therefore something you cannot feasibly market as love.
Love is rubbing yourself on the Eiffel Tower.
Love is Susan Sontag. Illustrated.
Love is a cliché. And so is this hook to this column. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe.
I have grown up with the belief that love is something to find. “Finding love” is a process of looking, processing, and determining whether the image, activity, or person presented before me is a demonstration of love. It must have identifiable components that, when cross-referenced against some cosmic checklist, can be chalked up to love. A task completed, or neglected, “finding love” is contingent on the assumption that it exists in a form you must recognize.
To which I must cry “HELL NO.”
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