Thought Catalog

You’d essentially have to have lived under some enormous, wifi-less rock for the last four or five years to not know who Phelps is, but just in case you are really that uninformed about the pinnacle of human achievement and physical prowess that is the Olympic Games, let me inform you.

Ayn Rand looked on fondly as the mighty hockey stick of capitalism bore down on the Soviet players, crushing their fur hat hopes and beet soup dreams as they cried tears of pure vodka. It was there that Ronald Reagan was born.

“Don’t you remember,” said my mother, “don’t you remember what Daddy does? That woman was in a concentration camp. And Daddy works with a motor company to find out what kinds of people put her there, and people who were in our family, too. What Daddy’s doing is very important.”

My mother told us not to touch the fishhooks at the very lip of the riverbank, right where the land met the water, as cloudy as a cataracted eye. I promised, in my solemn eleven-year-old way, that no, we would not go anywhere near them and yes, we would keep our shoes on.

And now, with a new name and the false, clean sense of erased history, he takes a train and joins his cousin in Georgia, where an untangled root of his family strain found soil before. He finds himself in Savannah (or possibly Marietta, or Bainbridge, where he will one day be forgotten in the amalgam of the family burial plot, a plot he will buy himself) and begins his tenure at his cousin’s Laundromat.

The kiss was not well-executed. Our foreheads were interlocked, attempting to preclude the act. She was rubbing my temples, my shoulders, relaxing the malaise out of my muscles, working to my bone marrow. Why did I let her touch me, was I aroused by illogic? No. I wanted to be transcendent, cerebral. I wanted to be a poem.

Here, in no particular order, our 10 favorite comments for the month of April.

“One Thousand And One Nights” is a perfect example of Orientalism and the Western gaze: the evocation of exoticism within the fictive boundaries of the Orient, the conflation of culture in this Orient, and the hodge-podge of Judeo-Christian iconography with a dusting of Bollywood glamour.

We’re thinking about how these things weren’t supposed to happen to people like us. We’re thinking about sepia, scalloped-edged family portraits and New World dreams, and how these well-reaped dreams have inverted like well-worn myths. We’re thinking about mnemonic devices and smiles that should have been, that were not, that never are.

Two days after my mother had cradled a small piece of happiness in her hand, her body performed its most treacherous act and unraveled that knotted ball of chromosomes. Mitosis taught her an important lesson: to become whole, you must at first be broken.

And here at Thought Catalog, we think we have some of the best commenters on the internet. We’re always reading you, laughing with you, and occasionally cringing away from our computer screens.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but old and/or dead white men still matter, and this is why: they matter in the way that their works speak to the development of constructs regarding race and racism.