Jolene’s Reviews > Catalina > Status Update

The therapist was going to just say this was about my dead parents and my dead uncle, maybe my aunt who was still alive in Ecuador doing this and that without me, eating salad and going for haircuts and knitting in front of the news. I was too cute and smart and interesting to have been damaged by such low-hanging fruit, could you imagine?

Like the other Facebook photo albums dedicated to his travels, this one was titled something in Spanish. La tierra del olvido. In his hands, Spanish had the aesthetic appeal of raw chicken, the liminal monstrosity stuck between a frightened animal and a date-night roast chicken.

The Latine campus groups seemed to be full of people who loved their families. When they performed moving spoken-word poems about their ancestors or about their abuelas cooking or singing or sharing gems of wisdom, I found myself disassociating and, like in a fever dream, all the abuelas melted together into one large, magnanimous superabuela that shared a room with Jesus in the sky and sat above us like a pancake.

It was my first time seeing white people dance outside of television and for what it's worth I thought it was very brave.

You can't pretend you don't give a shit when you're comping a secret society. You clearly care, a lot. The thing about being at Harvard is that in order to be there at all, you would have had to be the kind of person who applies to Harvard.

I could tell he wanted me to be impressed. He wanted me to ask him how he knew Spanish, but I was not curious because there were a finite number of explanations for a boy such as him at a place such as this and I felt no interest in exploring the known world.

It didn't seem right that a smart boy would be so stunningly sincere.

My grandfather taught me how to pick a lock with two bobby pins; he taught me the extradition laws of major Latin American countries; he taught me the difference between the Marxism of the Sandinistas and the FARC and how to make Nescafé taste good (cinnamon and condensed milk). He said it was simply what you had to know as a cultured person and that it was a shame that schools didn't teach anything these days.

Magnanimous of the man with the mind that brought forth Middlesex to also possess the heart to volunteer his time with artsy college kids. We had long aged out of being precocious, and we all tried so hard. A litter of children and their god. . . I wanted to think about him, I didn't want us to be friends. I lived in the real world, and the real world was sad, and he lived in literature, and literature was beautiful.