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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Tagged as:
Column,
Lost,
Love,
Romance,
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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Tagged as:
Love,
Senior Project,
Thesis,
Weird Love
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.
Tagged as:
Column,
Love,
Romance,
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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Tagged as:
Love,
Romance,
Senses,
Smell,
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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Tagged as:
Column,
Dating,
Friendship,
Love,
Valentines
