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A t the be ginning of their careers, doctors must bury a few mistakes in the morgue, lawyers wave goodbye to a few mistakes outside jail and journalists publish a few on the front page of a newspaper. Each type of error may be painful, but the last — however embarrassing — has some chance of partial remedy.
P eople assume a lot about me be cause of the color of my skin. First off, I’m a racist. Then, I am rich, unaware, stuck-up and out to keep the black man down.
I mag ine, for a moment, if Jara Krys were a “straight” woman instead of transgender. She lost her virginity at 13 , learned the sex trade from a pimp in high school and started selling her services to cover costs. She came to UPenn on a full scholarship , but after a few years she decided she’d like to work as a prostitute full time. Her price is $300 an hour; it’ll cost you $1,200 if you want her for the entire night.
I w a s eating breakfast at Boston University when one of my classmates in the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists sat down across from me. I had a foggy headache from number theory that morning — as I did every morning of summer 2012 — so I was happy enough for a little light conversation. But neither of us knew how to chitchat, so we started talking philosophy. My interlocutor was an extreme skeptic. He told me the tables and chairs around us might be a figment of my imagination, and that, for all I knew, the entire conversation between us was taking place inside my own head.
I nsid e the tightly packed cluster of nine story walk-up apartment bui ldings, it was damp and dark. There were about five feet from the wall of one building to the wall of the next. This constituted the passage way in and out of the complex. I ducked my head to avoid some laundry hung out to dry (God knows how!) on a pole extending from a second-story window.
A bout 11 years ago, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was signed into law. Pro-life propagandists pushed the law through largely by publicizing the “gory story” of intact dilation and extraction , emphasizing the fetus’ soft little body wriggling in the doctor’s hands outside the womb. The campaign was so effective that many who are pro-choice would now call partial-birth abortion infanticide.
M ode rn studies have a delightful way of discovering the obvious. For example, modern psychologists have found that if you physically act in a certain way — against your natural impulses — your natural impulses will gradually align with your actions.
F or 10 years now, one of my mom’s high school friends has been in continuous, debilit ating pain. Whiplash in a minor car crash pinched a nerve, and all the surgery and opioids in Michigan couldn’t get it to stop screaming. The pain was so relentless that eventually her husband didn’t trust her to be alone in the house with rope and knives. His life became a bewildering storm, trying to raise their three children, work a full-time job and care for a full-time invalid. Sleep ceased early on; later he very nearly lost his business and, finally, his sanity.
H e was a senior by the looks of him — tall and skinny with three weeks of want-a-beard scruff — all anxious about college and how to get there. He walked up to me in the West Philadelphia High School cafeteria and, looking somewhere off to the side, started asking me nervous, jerky questions. Where was I studying? What year? What major? How old was I? Did I know how to do fractions?
Y o u we r e brilliant. You took 16 APs in high school and got fives on every one. You knew the SATs so well you could score a 12 on an essay without looking at the prompt. You won about six science fairs and divided your summers between RSI, PROMYS and a couple of internships. If the sky was falling you could hold it up, and if the world spun backwards it would correct itself at your command.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “I’ve asked myself many questions and answered all of them. What I cannot answer is why I don’t commit suicide.”