At some point, if I didn’t understand a question, I took to giving random answers. Somehow, I deemed this preferable to revealing that I didn’t understand the question at all. If there was only one word that I didn’t understand, as in, “Do you like poetry with onomatopoeia?” I could ask, “What’s onomatopoeia?” But frequently,…
Author: Kai Raine
My Move to India, or How I Got Conned
In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, there’s a paragraph where the main character remembers on the stupid decisions made by herself and her friend at the age of fifteen. She reflects that people should be locked up for a year at that age in a paragraph that seemed puzzling as a teenager, and…
You Are What You Read
I’ve always been in love with books. When I was a teen, this love turned all-consuming and obsessive. It got to the point where I would go to work with my mother because her office was next to a bookstore. There I would sit all day, devouring books like my life depended on it. At…
Language Acquisition, or Making Little Girls Cry
When I tell a story of my childhood, I sometimes preface the story with, “Look, I was an especially slow child.” Truth be told, I don’t think that was quite true. I think I was an especially confused child with a tendency to overthink everything without even knowing, confusing myself even further. I emphasize this…
Reluctant Unaccompanied Minor, Forgotten
My mother has frequently joked that I’ve looked 32 since I was 12. (When I turned 24, I joked that by my mother’s own logic I was now 64 and the oldest member of our family. One of my sisters objected that I was misunderstanding: I stagnated at 32 at the age of 12, she…
Veganism: Knowing What You Need
Being vegan isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. A lot of my friends have told me that they simply could not be vegan because it makes them miserable to so limit foods that they enjoy so much. I can sympathize. At times when I break my vegansim (generally for convenience’s sake), I very much enjoy the taste…
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
For the second half of my first decade of life, I had a reputation as a liar. I was in my teens the first time a friend (irritated to realize that I’d been nodding along with no idea what she was talking about) pointed out that I should ask when I didn’t understand something. What a…
The Living Murphy’s Law of Transportation: Introduction
For about a decade from my early teens into my early twenties, I was the living embodiment of Murphy’s law when it came to transportation. Though I traveled a great deal in those years, I rarely had any trips that simply went as planned. It came to a point where my sisters would flat out…
Veganism: Why It Works for Me
Two and a half years ago, I became vegan because of the moral considerations: for the environment and for the animals. I remained mostly vegan because I realized it made me feel healthier and more energetic. If I had to pinpoint one major change that kickstarted my journey to a healthier, happier lifestyle, it was…
“Where Are You From?”: The Unanswerable Question
After Japan, I lived in Buffalo, NY for a few years. I moved at the end of May, and from September, I attended 9th grade at a Catholic girl’s school. On the day of freshman orientation, the teachers emphasized how people were coming to this school from all sorts of places. “We even have someone…