Goose pimples cover my arms,
Salt flats bubbling under a scorching sun.
The rawness of recycled air pierces through my
Nostrils and escapes through undreaming eyes–
“Can I get anything for you?”
Just some ginger ale for me, thanks.

Next to me a carefully cut bob sleeps–
Nicholas Sparks suspended in her right hand.
Diagonal, there’s a businessman–thin as a
Rod, the grime of many hours in a crumpled
Business-suit and none in the arms of home
Sits, accumulates in the sallow beneath his eyes.

By the window, a girl reads,
Her eyebrows crumble and reconstruct themselves
Like footage of a falling building in reverse–
Worlds and words flitting by, etching themselves
On the careful plane of her porcelain
Hands.

We pass through mountains of condensed molecules,
The only place where silence still lives, alone.
On the film of glass is white noise–
The way the TV looks when the channel isn’t...

It’s just like the stories said it would be. The reliable weight of the wheels, furling and unfurling the sound of Chicago’s heart-beat beneath the clunk of metal. Tasting it and spitting it back out again.

And again.

And again.

My back rests against the crushed velvet–a shade of Pepsi can blue, at once gaudy and comforting. Like grandma’s house. There is none but me on this Wednesday morning train, the only other passenger a silence that stretches its arms and expands to fill the space the way my uncle does after Thanksgiving.

Outside the window, apartment complexes of red clay brick, edges crisp and blackened by time and negligence, flit by in an assembly line of stories and lives I will never come to know. It’s a nostalgia for something I never had.

Slanted sunlight paints my forehead, nose and chin in the warm caramel of mid-morning light changing into its noon-time clothes...

“Autumn Sun” by Cathy McMurray

The air was stagnant, pausing to take a moment from the heat weighing on its shoulders, grey smog curling from its bated breath. A circuit-board of spices, carpets, and camels made up the city below. The marketplace, overrun with honking and haggling most days, was just beginning to wake up. But then, in the small crook between dawn and sunrise, a sound broke through the city of Cairo. It was the Fajr, or the morning prayer for the largely Islamic population. The cacophony of pitches, discordant and yet somehow fitting, was, for my ten-year-old self, the strangest sound I had ever woken up to.

Being Catholic, the concept of Islam, or any other religion really, was as foreign to me as the stalls bulging with fares from dates and lamb to miniaturized pyramids and “I Heart Cairo” bags. Just as the market seemed chaotic from the view of an observing...

Just yesterday I went with my family to a place called El Mercado La Merced here in Mexico City. For those of you who have never heard of this little treasure before, La Merced is an open market lined with crowded stalls overflowing with a rainbow of fruits, vegetables, candy, and “chucherias” (all at ridiculously cheap prices). When we first moved here, I had actually been told that this market is where all of Mexico City’s restaurants get their ingredients, usually ordering them early in the morning before the normal customers arrive.

And I can see why.

First of all, while I was accompanying my parents (and brother) on the stock-up-on-food-for-the-week trip, I was also there on a personal assignment. As part of my photography course at school, I was to take “environmental portraits” of people in the city just doing their own thing in their environment. The marketplace, of course...

Hey guys,

so today I wanted to talk a little bit about a topic that I believe is very relevant in the U.S. right now, what with election season being in full swing.

And that topic is integrity.

Or rather, lack of integrity. While, I mostly want to discuss this issue in terms of politics, it honestly is evident in so many areas of life. Integrity is such an understated, underappreciated, rare thing nowadays. But nowhere is this more rare than in that messy realm we call “government.”

The line between integrity and hypocrisy has always been drawn clearly in the sandbox where politicians play. While principles and ethics are as much a commodity as the production of sand castles, sticking constantly to those principles is like asking children to solely specialize in those castles. But children, capricious and fickle, cannot be relied on to faultlessly stick to one thing.

Politicians...

Hey guys,

So, today I wanted to discuss something that has been a part of my life since before I had lived half a decade on this earth. Moving. Now, I know that moving isn’t necessarily anything new and that it’s not nearly as hard or exciting as it used to be (especially when passage across the Atlantic was in a rat-infested aquatic vehicle with a 90% death rate. Ah, the good old days.) But alas, I think it interesting, since I myself moved about a month ago from Houston, Texas to the metropolis across the border, Mexico City.

Essentially I wanted to share my thoughts on the first half of moving–the goodbye. In my experience, this is often the most dreaded part. It’s the part that makes you want to spend the last of your days sobbing quietly into a crumpled up Kleenex anytime someone mentions the club meeting they’ve scheduled for next month. Indeed, since my move in particular...

Copyright of Dallas Clayton (one of my favourite artists)

I’ve always had an affinity for stories. That interlocking of words—words that alone are ratty threads of no extraordinary splendour, but together weave a tapestry of unparalleled beauty—has fascinated me since a young age. My dad, a self-proclaimed history buff, used to regale me with tales spanning the centuries; Gustave Eiffel and his contribution to France’s landscape; Napoleon’s exile and shameful defeat; the Aztecs and their advanced civilization; the scandal and outrage of Henry VIII’s turbulent matrimonial history. He had a way of bringing those dusty corners of the long-forgotten past back to life, delighting my imagination with images of human struggle and conquest, of bloodshed and victory, of gore and beauty.

Living in one of the most historically rich continents on earth, I got to tread in the footsteps of those...

Hey guys,

So the other day I was thinking about variability. Or rather, the lack thereof. Essentially, I was wondering: are we, as a society, naturally inclined to be conformists, or do we yearn for versatility and escape from the ennui of daily life? And is this yearning an innate instinct or do we simply make ourselves believe we must desire this as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the monotony we’re constantly surrounded with?

I mean, okay, first of all, let’s take a look at some rather extreme versions of monotony. Also known as Hitler’s Nazimania. Also also known as Stalin’s Soviet “Garden of Human Happiness”. (I’m sure you can substitute your own favourite dictatorship here).

Basically, we know the drill: the Marxist ideology of “one size fits all” was implemented, with a slightly one-sided triumphant score playing in the background, fists were thrown into the air, mustaches...

Hey guys,

So a while back, I read a book called Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea written by Los Angeles Times journalist, Barbara Demick. To be honest, I had no idea what this book was about or how much people had raved about it after its publication. I had chosen it after plopping myself quite comfortably in the middle of the “History” section of Barnes & Noble and was forced to narrow down my teetering pile of books I wanted to buy. I decided, what the heck, I know next to nothing about North Korea and I already have enough World War II novels at home. It might as well have been World War II.

So I bought it. And I read it. And I couldn’t stop reading it.

It was not unlike the time I was first introduced to Harry Potter and I devoured chapter after chapter in the first week; reading while eating, reading while socializing, reading while in the car, reading in the...

Or is ignorance really bliss?

Hey guys!

So today, I wanted to discuss something that has been tugging at my brain for a while. Actually, I started thinking about this during my 2-hour drivers ed lessons, but it didn’t fully form until I was listening to a PhilosophyBites podcast (which I highly recommend-they’re very interesting) in government class about “moral obligations” and the utilitarian idea that humans intrinsically have ethical implications towards working for the common good.

That made me wonder, should humans be “unselfish” and work hard to share their talents and make known their knowledge simply because that would mean a higher chance of survival for the race? Or should those efforts be quelled in favour of individualist progression, thereby leaving people alone to make their own choices (whether that means they choose ignorance or knowledge)?

It’s definitely an...