Last week, my family drove two hours to Amelia Island, a small beach town off the coast of Florida, on the Atlantic coast. It was my family’s quasi-annual beach trip. I say quasi-annual because, even though we’re supposed to do it every year, we’ve fallen off a few times. This year’s beach trip was going to be particularly special due to the fact that I’ve been dutifully home quarantining from New York since March inside for the months leading up to this. The idea was to finish off the summer with a small vacation to our favorite beach spot. A casual paradise so nice that John Grisham decided to set up camp there by buying up some prime beachfront property. 

I had mixed feelings about going to a beach in Florida around this time, with its COVID-ridden atmosphere and the state’s skyrocketing case count, but I decided that if I just kept my distance from everyone, then I’d have nothing to worry about. In Chipiona, Spain, beachgoers practiced social distancing by sitting a minimum of six feet apart under their umbrellas, satisfying their country’s ordinances. I decided that I’d see for myself if social-isolation was possible on a beach.

Overall, the place was pretty much abandoned, with clear beaches and little to no foot traffic in town. People were wearing masks everywhere you looked and everyone seemed happy to comply with social distancing. 

The ocean was bathwater temperature, so inviting that you could just walk straight into it. One of the amazing things about this stretch of the ocean  is how close the animals get to you. While you might see the occasional small  shark off shore, schools of fish will jump out of the water a foot away from you, Pelicans will dive straight into the water beside you, and everyday around the same time a pod of dolphins will swim across the same spot in front of our condos. 

There are fun things to do in the area, such as bike trails under vast canopies of trees, but we mostly stuck to the independent bookstore, ice cream shop, bakery, tourist traps, and antique stores (masks on of course). We got burgers from Tasty’s, a burger joint that lives up to its name, nursed a few sunburns, unsuccessfully searched for shark teeth, and watched a movie or two as we lounged around. 

That quick week of ocean air brushed away some of the ennui brought on by my endless Spring Break. I hope that everyone was able to experience some form of blissful relaxation throughout this summer from hell.

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

The other day, my friends and I treated ourselves to a bit of night swimming, whilst watching a movie on my projector screen. The idea was for us to watch “Jaws,” but when that didn’t pan out due to my lack of being able to attach a DvD player to my projector and the total lack of streaming services offering it for free, we watched “Double Jeopardy” instead. The film consists of several boat scenes and a truly nail-bitingly suspenseful underwater action scene. It was a new experience, but one that I’d dreamt up a while ago. I had a perfect set-up, with me and my friends in my lukewarm pool, in the dark, watching a movie being projected onto my pool house. I showed the film to my two friends Anna and Mary Catherine, after we ate the paella I made for dinner.

Speaking of making dinner, for the past few days, I’ve been inhaling some of the most glorious foods that I have ever eaten. My brother and one of his best friends, Jonathan, came over to cook us a few Italian dishes, and by that I mean more-or-less change our lives. First we were treated to my brother Bobby’s penne alla vodka, which was just as flawless as I remembered it. I scarfed down half the pan, but still left room for the second course, which had to have been some of the best ravioli I have ever eaten. 

After three hours of other people’s labor, the ravioli was ready, with ten pieces for each person. Ravioli is an immaculate creation. It’s carbohydrates stuffed and doused with cheese and butter. What’s not to love? I then washed it all down with a slice of red velvet cake, because when you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Or in this case an extra 15 pounds. The ravioli wasn’t just glazed in butter, it was glazed in homemade sage butter, topped with delicious fried sage. I could die right now with no regrets. Whoever the inventor of ravioli was (he or she now resides in heaven) would be brought to tears over the pasta I was served a few nights ago. It was bursting with flavor and ended with me licking the plate.

To top it all off, there was some extra dough, which I put to good use the very next day. I spent the day slinging around homemade dough that was so long that I could drape it across my whole body. My brother and I used it to make homemade fettuccine. Together we made a new family favorite: cacio e pepe, only with homemade pasta for the first time. I came out of it stuffed to the gills, which is the most fun you can have while in quarantine. 
In other news, I’ve been nursing away my corner-of-the-mouth-zits, brought on by my incessant mask-wearing. The internet has cleverly dubbed this phenomenon “maskne.” I’ve been trying to read and write more because I fell into the inevitable slog of “if you skip one day you won’t do it for a week.” I look forward to the next couple of days, which hopefully will consist of more good food, more movies, and much more swimming. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

I am sitting at the island in my new house, as I write this. Having between 4 to 5 grown adults under one roof squeezed the life out of my parents and their solution to quarantine was finding a new place to live. I don’t mean this to sound bougie. We’ve been house-hunting for the past 7 years and now, after all that time, we finally have something to show for it. 

Moving has been incredibly hectic and crazy, with me misplacing almost everything I need and everybody collapsing in bed at the end of the day from exhaustion. I’ve always loved looking at houses, particularly those that I cannot afford. So when my parents asked me to come check out a house, not too far from our current house, I was eager to walk through it and judge whether or not I felt like I could live there. 

After spending 13 years in a house that we outgrew in about 6 months, we were eager to move, and being on top of each other during quarantine helped jumpstart us into a house-hunting frenzy. We made extensive changes to our house and made it ready to sell, which it did within 21 hours of being on the market. 

My brother and his friends helped us move our stuff into our new house, becoming sweat-drenched and exhausted, lifting boxes in and out of stuffy houses, along with the moving company, “GTFO.” Technically, for these guys, “GTFO” stands for “get that furniture out,” since this is south Georgia, but I think we all know what they really mean. The day was a brisk 93 degrees, which never fails to make heavy-lifting so much easier. 

I’ve spent the last couple of days unloading my family’s oversized book collection into what we now call “the book nook” as well as helping organize the kitchen, since those are the two jobs that we deemed my spindly arms capable of doing. 

The house has copious amounts of character and a style that fits my family just right. I’m going to miss the old place because I have so many fond memories there. One time I took a garden hoe and started axing a tree in my backyard in order to make it thinner, because my imaginary friend, Lucky, had her parents visiting and they were allergic to fat trees. 

The tree still has a long line down the middle of it to this day. 

There was also the small bust that my parents had in the hallway that I would makeout with on occasion, as a child, but mostly only to shock my friends. A friend and I once dressed my dog, Lady, up in my old “Beauty and the Beast” dress, which prompted her to run-away for the 9th time, on the spot, while my mom tried to take a picture.

I had two pets while living there, both of which died over the course of living at that house. I started off at a private, Catholic elementary school and graduated from the local public high school in that house. I learned how to tie my shoes, learned that I had gotten accepted into college, and endured most of my speech therapy in that house. While I have made better strides in my quest at being a friend to the environment and to small animals, I had been on a very steep learning curve whilst living in that house, but now I’m happy to move on to other things.

I’m looking at my new house as an opportunity to put all of my stuff into different and interesting places. I will, for instance, have to figure out where to put my 3’x4’  framed poster of Marilyn Monroe and my full-scale, Shawshank Redemption Raquel Welsh poster that borders on old school soft porn.

We have a pool at our new house, which I have practically been living in, perfectly in line with my swimming-loving, water-sign self. I’d love to have more guests over when we are no longer at risk of COVID, but right now I’m letting my friends come by so long as they socially distance with masks. 

I’m here for the long haul, most-likely doing my second year of SLC from the deep south, via zoom call for the next semester and thankfully will be in my new house. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

Cancer season is upon us and as a board certified cancer, I would just like to tell everybody welcome to the most wonderful time of the year.

Also:

You’re on my time now. 

I was born at the end of June, making me an “end-of-June-cancer,” notorious for our moodiness. We’re inscrutable. 

According to Co-Star, the bible of astrology-related apps, I have power in my non-existent social life, pressure in my spirituality, and trouble with routine, thinking & creativity, and self. I am also prone to blaming people for my own discomfort and I’m in need of some variety (aren’t we all). 

As much as I hate to say it, that couldn’t be closer to the truth. 

I have writer’s block, painter’s block (if that’s a thing), and a whole smattering of other things that are inhibiting the creative electricity that usually lights up this bulb. All of my possessions were shipped from school recently and I couldn’t find my copy of “Fear of Flying,” the one thing that I wanted to find. I also drove through the Wendy’s drive thru today in search of adventure, and scarfed down a double cheeseburger, just to feel something. 

While I might be less than prosaic at the moment, I’m still looking forward to this season, seeing as how my birthday is within spitting distance. My original plan for my birthday, which I made back in January, was to take a day trip to Savannah’s downtown historic district. I would be perusing their consignment shops and collecting costume jewelry, but to say that life had different plans for all of us is an understatement. I’m not going to Savannah because I will be socially distancing like a responsible adult. Instead I will probably spend my birthday much like I’ve spent the last few days of summer: sitting on the couch, binge-watching Cheers. 

Being a cancer, I am sensitive and dramatic. Please hold back your shock. 

Crab-themed memorabilia is what we live and die by, with it being our zodiac symbol. Whenever I become a proper adult, I will hopefully be spending my end-of-June-birthday by throwing a party with cream puffs in the shape of crabs. I also hope to one day be able to afford all of the expensive, crab-themed, gold-plated jewelry that I want. 

For now however, all I want for my 19th birthday is a movie projector, so that I can watch movies in the most obnoxious way possible, and to find my copy of “Fear of Flying.”

Your favorite cancer,

Raquel Goddard

It took me longer than I care to admit to process the fact that I was done being up at Sarah Lawrence for the remainder of the semester and that my first year, as I knew it, was over. The separation has had me appreciating things that I took for granted while I was up there. I’m not going to miss the willfully ignorant Bernie Bros who start sentences by saying things like “Bernie Sanders should not have brought up Castro, but he actually made a really good point…” or the people who shamelessly air bomb the communal bathrooms as they watch youtube videos on the toilet. I won’t miss the copious amounts of work or the discomforts of dorm life, but I will miss many things, starting, of course, with the people. The level of character in the school and in the people is outstanding. But aside from them, there were many things that made my first year away from home really special. 

• The TeaHaus for keeping me warm through the winter

The Teahaus is an on-campus landmark known for it’s hot tea and for looking like Hagrid’s Hut in Harry Potter. Most of the time, I’d just grab lemon tea from the Barbara Walters Student Campus Center but the Teahaus is a cozy little hub where one can drink obnoxiously large mugs of tea. When it’s not there serving the students their tea it is serving up looks as one of the most aesthetically pleasing parts of campus.

• Sunsets like these

Some days the sunset would add in a pop of color at the end of the day and I still don’t know why the sky had to flex so hard by looking like a fresco.

• That transcendent swimming pool

While it might be overly-chlorinated, this pool can really hit the spot over the weekend whenever I felt like swimming. There’s not much else to say, except that I love taking laps in this uncrowded and criminally underused pool.  

• All of Bronxville  

For me, “Dumpling and Noodle” was that restaurant down the street that you could pop over to at any time, whenever you were sick of school food. “Slave to the Grind” was the altar for which many coffee addicts bowed in worship, though for me it was the place with the greatest chai tea in the world. “Topps Bakery” started my addiction to black and white cookies, thanks to a friend. “Taco project” has a healthy but still fast approach to Mexican food. “Bronxville Diner” is the place where I have gone for brunch and dinner with my friends, but I mostly only go for their patty melts and shakes. In other words, Bronxville has all the food a girl needs.

• The proximity to the city

It’s the next best thing to being there. I didn’t want to live directly in the city the first year I moved away, not wanting to have a baptism by fire. Thankfully, I have ample opportunities to enter into the city at will. The school provides shuttles from the local train station, into Grand Central. On weekends, the school has a bus that takes you to The Met and being a student in New York, you get in for free. 

• The immaculate winters  

Growing up in a sub-tropical climate, I was so looking forward to that satisfying crunch beneath your feet whenever you trek through the snow and this winter did not disappoint. I quickly learned that bright, glistening snow turns to sludge in a matter of days. Sometimes, however, when it really snows, the entire campus gets caked in ice and it looks like everything is sealed under glass, like in a museum. I was fed-ex’d a “Lands End” parka and snow boots by my dad, who knew that my fashion-forward, but ultimately thin coats, were not going to successfully keep me warm.

• Spring days on campus

Granted, I didn’t get to see many of these. Basically, on days when it’s really sunny, everybody gets the same idea. It seems like everybody on campus is lounging around on a blanket on the lawn, throwing a frisbee, having class outside, skateboarding, or even serenading people on the guitar. It looks as though someone put a beauty filter on the campus. People are playing soccer all over campus and sometimes even in the streets. These also are the days when the ice cream man decides to pull up curbside and feed us starving college kids. 

In summary and in summation, my first year at college was a success, thanks to these things and more. While I will forever wish I had been able to finish my first year on campus, I finished my work at home in Valdosta and will be looking forward to my next semester. I will however miss the cafeteria in the Barbara Walters Student Center where I ate the same things every day, so much so that the lady at the salad bar memorized my order. I’ll also miss the library where I went almost everyday for Italian class, and where I’d choke out Italian words that sounded exceedingly less romantic when I said them.

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

After being steam rolled by my homework, I hunkered down, reviewed old powerpoints, watched language tutorials on YouTube, looked over my flashcards, reviewed my Italian verbs, and rewrote my notes, only for all of my classes to get cancelled due to the Coronavirus. Living 4 miles from New Rochelle, ground zero for the US cases of COVID-19, I wasn’t eager to hang around Bronxville any longer. Instead of running off like a thief in the night, I booked an $87 flight home for the next day, in an attempt to put some distance between me and the Coronavirus.  

Ignoring my generalized anxiety about flying, I was sardined in cabin two of a miniscule airplane, side eyeing the woman next to me every time the elderly gentleman behind us hacked up a lung. I thought that 2020 was going to be my year but then my mother, who met me at the airport, attacked me with lysol and then shoved me in the trunk of her car to change clothes. I was driven home by my mother, brother, and my brother’s girlfriend, who then, along with my father, became my quarantine buddies for the subsequent weeks.

I would just like to add that I have noticed no discernable difference between my regular anti-social, daily routine and my social-distancing, quarantine routine. I wake up whenever I want, don’t change out of my pajamas, turn on random TV shows and movies that I probably won’t finish watching, and just overall sit around waiting to heat up my next meal. My sleep schedule is unnecessarily off-balance and my diet has also been unnecessarily off-balance. I have eaten cake, crepes, brownies, and ice cream as legitimate meals. 

I have been home for the past two weeks. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

(See if you can spot the difference)

Week one:

1. Making chocolate crepes for the group because morale is high. 

2. Writing handwritten letters to my aunt and feeling like a character in a Jane Austen novel. 

3. Being literary in a hammock in a romper in my backyard, trying to maintain my school work. The book that I am reading is a nice companion whilst in quarantine because it is a collection of stories about people in DC getting lost in their own worlds; the perfect combination of communal responsibility and going through individual struggles and I am suddenly struck by the similarities in circumstance.

4. Making Chrissy Teigen pasta because it is the only recipe that I can make with any certainty.

5. Watching a series of Hitchcock films like intellectual film snobs.

Week two:

1. Listening to the Cranberries and doing an impossible, Christmas puzzle that has been laying on various surfaces throughout the house for weeks.

2. I have made Chrissy Teigen’s pasta three times, because it is still the only recipe I can make with any certainty. 

3. Disney plus has kept me occupied and by now I have watched “The Jungle Book,” “Inside Out,” “Coco,” “Zootopia,” and “Big Hero Six,”on repeat and cried throughout.

4. I had many expectations for college but doing yoga with my psychology class via zoom was not one of them. Listening to my teacher’s dog howl in unison with us as we do elongated breathing has been a nice change from attending regular class on campus.

5. I have watched several vine compilations, including “people vs slides,” but am dismayed by the fact that my favorite vines are no longer on the internet.  

6. After much deliberation, I have decided that the Derry Girls character that I identify with the most is Orla. She doesn’t talk very much, always gets food on her face, and is kind of just there.

7. I have contemplated faking technological difficulties at least once in class (if any of my teachers see this then your class is not the one I’m talking about)

8. My mother has commandeered her bathrobe again so I am wearing my stained, two-sizes too big sweatshirt from summer camp when I was 12 as a substitute. 

9. I go for a walk with my mother and father in our neighborhood. We hear a low growling sound and my mother and I take off running, thinking that it’s a dog growling. My mother nearly dislocated my thumb because that’s what she decided to grab me by. As it turns out, it was just someone closing a metal door, not a dog growling, because we’re that out of touch with nature.

In conclusion, if you read in the paper that I have turned towards a life of crime and/or alcoholism, then mind ya business. Overall, that is the riveting tale of how my quaranting has been going. We’ve all played Clue but I have yet to win. Yet despite all of this, I don’t actually mind being in quarantine, deep down in my heart of hearts. If there ever was a time to have a quarantine, this would be it. The technology that we have allows us to still attend school and work, all the while we sit at home reading books and binge-watching television; the things we like to do anyway.

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

A week or so ago, my friends Theo, Chiara, and Petra, invited me to go and see a play with them at an NYU theater. Naturally, I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to see live theatre, so I only asked a few questions before saying yes. My initial plans for Saturday night were to eat an entire sleeve of Thin Mints alone in my dorm room while rabbit-holing on internet videos. Just a reminder that Girl Scouts of America support transgender youth and teach girls leadership values. I, therefore, show my love for them by eating their cookies by the box.

I postponed my cookie plans so that my friends could take me into the city to see experimental, post-traumatic theatre about the Japanese economy. Before the play, my friends and I went to a restaurant called “Tipsy Shanghai,” which, as their awning boasts, has been around for 100 years. The Chinese food could perfectly be described using the word “yummy,” filling me up with hot pork dumplings and noodles. 

Afterwards, we walked over to the theater at NYU. During the first act, I went cross-eyed trying to keep my eyes open. There were several lulls, I assume to make it seem pensive, and there were rows of tennis balls on stage despite having nothing to do with tennis. The play was entirely in Japanese, with the exception of subtitles projected onto the wooden panels hanging over the stage. The play did not consist of actual characters, scenes, or dialogue but instead was just people speaking in Japanese while touching the copious amount of objects on stage. Apparently, the play was supposed to be about the decline of the Japanese economy in the 90s and its ramifications. I could figure that out by the fact that the whole beginning part was about a washing machine that wouldn’t work, but then a time machine showed up that nobody used and that had something to do with immigration. I am unsure as to how it ended but it did seem like a fair amount of philosophizing happened in the final act but I was already too far gone to pay any attention. 

The underbelly of New York City theatre rears its ugly head. The play used “the emperor’s new clothes” model, meaning that it wasn’t good but no one will admit it out of fear of looking dumb. However, my friends did seem to like it and went on about what they thought the best parts of it were. My friends thought that I would like it the best, and quite frankly so did I, so you can imagine our disappointment when the play was done. 

I don’t think that it has anything to do with my imagination, education, or upbringing, but there are some things that I will never be able to wrap my head around, like abstract art, micro-food, extreme haute couture, and now conceptual fringe theatre. To some people, it might seem like I only like mediocrity, because I like more conventional media, such as, Hamilton, John Mulaney, and Fleabag. The truth is though that your average junk means everything to the person who likes it, despite whatever you might say about the “artist’s intentions” or “the underlying themes of the broken capitalist system” or what have you.

I like things that more closely resemble the human condition and the things that do show it deserve my love. I would rather give my money to profiles in humanity than participation-trophy-theatre. I don’t want to be the type of person who tells someone that there is something wrong with them for not understanding the meaning of art when in reality there was no meaning or art in the first place, nor do I want to be that liberal arts college student who annoyingly thinks that they have everything figured out and that they are artistic and deep because they once wrote rhyming couplets about breast milk. I do however want to be a great artist, since art is the spice of life. 

So go out into the world so that you might make good art and buy a box of Girl Scout cookies!

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel