Columns

It rains every other night, thunderstorms the likes of which I have only ever known in Mexico. The rain falls warm, the wind sings something sweet until it blasts open the windows and doors with a heavenly roar, the thunder crackles like my father’s laugh, the lightning dances in flashes through the sky.

It is easy to view individuals as numbers or as a collection of attributes, as a walking set of probabilities that can predict certain behaviors instead of humans with agency. We would do well to not fall into this trap, especially these days, when we’re already too often represented as pixels on a screen.

The Good Wine is not just about good wine — it is the savoring of decadence and long baths. It is slow dancing at a wedding, cinnamon rolls and the warmth of the sun. It is bliss, it is pleasure — it is that “Champagne Shit” as Janelle Monáe has recently put it. My Good Wine is as simple as your craft beer, your aperol spritz, your various kinds of martini or your French 75. 

Our culture puts so much hopeful-romantic emphasis on the “life-changing” lover, but I think that we can pull the curtain back on that — yes, our romantic partners can give us new experiences, but where do the newfound perceptions on life and love we procure from them really come from? 

But as this column has demonstrated, picture books are not the only thing from our childhoods that stick with us; there are so many little things that do as well.

Mexico has been known as a country of suffering and song and has even been romanticized for it. My family’s history is a reflection of the nation from which they stem — our stories are of pain and sacrifice. 

The movies are about personal struggles. Struggles that no one else can seemingly relate to, but that others face. It’s about those facades that we put up, and how others relate to them.

I dream of a bittersweet symbolic and literal end, one that releases me from the silly trivialities of life. I want to be old and nagging, receiving movie theater and bus discounts for the suffering I have endured in my very human experience. 

I fear that there has been too much commentary in this column as of late, so I am going to take this week to just tell a fun summer sex story.

Pointe is probably the greatest illusion I have ever encountered in my entire life. I remember expecting the entire experience to feel as beautiful as it looked. Instead, I was greeted by the fact that my foot looked as flat as a block in pointe shoes and my ability to balance in them was nonexistent.