Tag: Essay

Kuchen—A Love Story

When I was eleven years old, my mother took me for Kaffee und Kuchen | coffee and cake at the Café Landtmann in Vienna. We sat in an elegant room with high ceilings, under severely beautiful lamps. We were tourists, like several other customers, but there were a handful of old Austrian men, too, wearing…

Pink Sugar–an ode to queer femininity

I recently bought a Pink Sugar perfume dupe online. The bottle has a white label with looping writing across its front, nauseatingly pink cotton candy liquid sloshing inside. I wear it almost every day, as some return to my 10-year-old self: bright red hair extensions, shimmery lips from dollar-store lip gloss, Hello Kitty keychain dangling…

Going Dutch

“What about me seems Dutch?” I asked my husband, thinking he’d say something like ‘you’re a hard worker’ or ‘fairness is important to you’ or ‘you’re an innovator’. He thought for a moment. “Well, you’re quite tall,” he said. Another thought came to him. “And you like cheese.”  * I have an indistinct memory of a…