Status Updates From Unprecedented Times

i’m starting to consider DNFing this one… but it’s an ARC so may have to power through unfortunately

“It’s not very interesting to talk about one’s parents, I say. I think there is a reason they are killed off in children’s books. Because how are you supposed to change your life if adults are on your ass?”

Damn girl

“I remember how, back in middle school, when I was pathetic, I’d have crushes on boys who didn’t like me back. Still, I would befriend them, give them advice for how to woo their real crushes, girls on the cheer squad, because I wanted so desperately to feel loved, even secondhand.”

Oh no

“I love Georgia, but white girls always choose each other—a fact of physics as inalterable as gravity.”

Lol damn

“Do you think we’re acting like a real couple? I say. There’s actually a literal epidemic of Indian girls dating Jewish people. My mom thinks we get along well with you guys. Like, we have similar family values, apparently.”

👁️👄👁️

“He’s referring to you by your initials, says Georgia. That means you’re a real writer.”

Them's the rules

“I figure out when Georgia and Derek are having sex because I have Georgia’s location on my phone and she becomes stationary for a while. She is a prone blue dot, unavailable to respond to my texts or make jokes about his dead-fish face.”

Girl

“The horrible truth: Georgia is not as pretty as me— this is an objective fact. And yet she matches with more men than I ever did. Why do I only match with men my color or darker, whereas Georgia racks up the entire United Nations? Why do the men of Stanford prefer a girl with no lips?”

Girl why are you like this

“I imagine my mother and father at our four-seater table. A feast of my least favorite foods. And this makes me sound like a diasporic poet, but I wish I could make her happy like a round yellow mango. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”

I'm probably the last Asian to learn about mango diaspora poetry

“He cut me a fresh mango from the garden, Mom says. And for lunch, I made all the foods you don’t like to eat. Like salty upma. Appa was so happy. We are free now to eat whatever we like.”

Yikes

“Sex with Esme is a whole different beast than sex with Trevor Yates. There is no sweaty thrusting, no penis like a secret, sentient little alien.”

Sentient??

“It is just that, from a literary standpoint, sleeping with someone is better than sleeping with nobody at all.”

She might have a point here 🤔

“Do I like America? Well, it’s all right, I guess, Kavya is saying. I mean, it has unparalleled resources, so it was the natural place to apply for someone of my ambition. But the standard of living is terrible. People live impoverished lives, and I mean this culturally and socially too. It cannot remotely compare with, say, Japan. Or anywhere in Europe.”

I mean

“As we walk, Esme tells me about her pottery classes. She is really interested in female anatomy, and she is creating a line of functional dishware shaped like vaginas. I look at the pictures of twisty, gelatinous genitalia on her phone but can’t think of anything funny to say.”

Subversive

“I am proposing that all white folks here, out of respect to people of color, give up their seats and stand at the back of the room, finishes Mullet Girl.

No way, Clara whispers. This bitch wants to Rosa Parks in reverse?”

HUH

“Easha wrote an eponymous novel about Leela, a millennial brown woman who, as far as I can tell, does nothing but mope and sleep with white men, but it is cool and literary, so Leela was a bestseller.”

...what

“I hooked up with a British guy this summer, I say. For the record, I chose him in a subversive way. He mostly just pleasured me. In fact, the whole thing could be viewed as colonial reparations.”

Girl I'm judging

“I spent high school marching, organizing, and writing op-eds until it became apparent that nothing kids like me did could ever stop corporations and it was practically child abuse for adults to stand by and let us try.”

Well... She's not wrong

“I have an inkling that we might have been matched as roommates because of our shared interest in, or perhaps fear of, death by climate change.”

Oh

“In Okeechobee, I often felt, to borrow my mother’s expression, like a big fish in a small pond, except the pond was actually a swamp and full of racist alligators.”

Christ

“To make the freshmen feel included, the RAs have memorized all of our names—or so I think, until Jeff, the smiling senior handing me my welcome packet, says with his full chest, Welcome, Roshini!

My heart gives an involuntary jump of recognition. I accept the packet, and my new identity, without question. But then Mom leans in and says, That’s the wrong one. Her name is Rishika.”

Yikes

“Listen: I am not ungrateful. I have always known I am the luckiest girl on earth. I was born in America, for starters, in the belly of the empire instead of its jaws—–and I was even born at all....”

Damn what a beginning

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? Ha ha ha! You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. —KAMALA HARRIS”

Damn we're just out here starting with a Kamala Harris quote lol

do NOT read this if you were in college when the pandemic hit (unless you want to relive that)