Perfectly imperfect: Plato in a Vogue shirt

In a world filled with people with rotting, old souls hidden underneath a preserved body, imperfection is a rarity. We only want the best: we won’t come near gluten anymore,  we use apps to track how much glasses of water we drink because apparently we will die without these notifications and we contour our faces as if we’re the Caravaggio of our own skin using chiaroscuro to get the highest cheekbones as possible. This is not a lecture on makeup, makeup gives you the opportunity to have a different appearance every time you step on Goffman’s front stage and it has the power to discover yourself once you’re behind the curtains. This is an ode to imperfection, a love song to big noses, crooked teeth, Steve Buscemi-eyes and all the features society just cannot accept.

You have to be careful in the land of the free

Thursday afternoon, dating the sixteenth of a June in bloom, blood trickled over the streets of Birstall in northern England. A woman was lying on the asphalt, her skin torn by bullets and the sharp-edged blade of a knife. Although her hair had a chocolate-coloured touch rather than one as black as ebony, this Snow White also had a taste of the ruby-red apple dipped in poison. Jo Cox, on the up and up of Britain’s political ladder, ate of humanity.

Kids these days

 “…with their selfies and their texting.” If you’re between the ages of 15 and 29 I’m sure you’ve heard some variation of these words before. Usually spoken by someone born in the 60’s or 70’s. ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’, Jack Weinberg said. And while this is a gross generalization, he sure was up to something. It’s like adults are so happy to finally be able to say what their parents said about them, and their grandparents in turn said about their parents, they forget how unfair it was to them then, and to us now. As if we are somehow responsible for everything wrong with the world. But what is going on with kids these days?

A feminist on the streets, a stereotype housewife between the sheets

Sex: a topic my friends and I discuss on a daily basis when we’re having dinner, in the queue, on the toilet, on the train.. actually, we talk  about sex almost everywhere. As the young, left and hip feminists we are, my friends and I are not ashamed talking about the exchange of bodily fluids. In fact, we feel liberated discussing our recent one night stands.  It’s a form of freedom us women have fought for and now it seems we are finally taking back the night, the morning and even the day (why not?).

One Hundred Years of Solitude on an unGodly Earth – part 1: the existential loneliness

Caution – I have not penned an ode to Gabriel García Márquez’ downright magnum opus (if you wish me to soft-soap this tremendous author in an abundance of superlatives, I’d gladly be your guest). Before you send me to the gallows, I might be able to offer you a Mad Tea Party as a substitute. The guest list consists of Alice, Frankenstein, and later on Brave New World’s cast and Nietzsche will join us. Caution again – a certain Hatter and March Hare are not invited to this kind of tea party.

Ink and prejudice

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been awestruck by tattoos. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, I just know I immediately considered someone 100% cooler if I could find some ink somewhere on their skin. It might have been Wentworth Miller in Prison Break, it might have been Angelina Jolie in Wanted, it might have been just David Beckham in general. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that I am absolutely in love with this beautiful form of self-expression. But not everyone is, apparently.

Rizzo: the Pink Lady we all secretly wanted to be

Rizzo is the ultimate bad girl and a heroine for many girls, including me. She isn’t shy about her sexual escapades, doesn’t back down when times get tough and her leading skills are worth a big round of applause

Letter to a Woman with a Child Never Born

Today, splendid Child, as I was frolicking in the delicate April breeze, I have plucked you from the meadow, your honeyed odours falling in drops on the musings of my heart, apple of my eye. You lay sleeping, slumbering, rolling in the soft dust your dreams are made of, curled up between the early tulips in tones of orange and coral and cherry-red, but I only had eyes for you, stroking your petals painted blackest of night, beautiful one. Yesterday, heavenly Child, the pear-shaped tears of March’s downpours mollifying my skin, I have taken you from your bed of flowers, without permission, you were breathing my name, chiming like a cascade of water falling to splinters on the creamy lake of my eardrums, my beloved. You mirrored me, the one who gifted you with life, save my fair locks of hair, since I crowned your blossoms, those divine little ringlets, in gold, and I rustled the name I have picked for you in the ruby-coloured rose field, the name that my body has been reverberating ever since they have planted the idea of you there, my darling.

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers anno 2016: love in a digital age

Love has to take you by your throat until you almost suffocate, it releases you, so you can breathe for a while, and then it has to push you into a dark void of  intense suffering and finally it takes you in its arms to comfort and cherish you. It’s love. Unexpected, suffocating, exhausting pre-digital love.

Little Miss Sunshine as critique on neoliberalism

I can still remember the first time I saw Little Miss Sunshine. Let’s say I was still in my pre-adolescent phase: naive, innocent but already unknowingly influenced by the big beauty  industry. Every time my mother took me to the newsstand, I couldn’t help myself from secretly peeking at those glossy magazines with beautiful women on the front page. I was determined that, when I was grown up, I would be just like them: tall, slim, blond, a white smile, the perfect makeup , not a single roll, not a single milligram of fat would cover my body.