Dragon I Only Buy Books When I Need It Of Just Because I Want It Tee Shirts
This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: SCAD Heart Attack Survivor Warrior Awareness T-Shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long sleeve tee One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): It began with the house. It was the particular house, but it also was where the house was and where she discovered she wanted to be. It was a run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse.The house sat high on a tiny lot on Highland Street, which ran atop a hill that bordered a long expanse of grass and trees. It looked like a small, sloping park, but it was actually a cemetery, the old graves clustered in the southwest corner. Unless you were squeamish about graves—Sam wasn’t—the sloping green hill was quite pretty. Highland itself offered a wide view of downtown. You could see the steeples of churches, and you could see how the small city was in a valley surrounded by hills. You could even see the kidney shape of Onondaga Lake, although it was often partly obscured by low-hanging clouds. If you turned your head to the left, or if you looked out the side windows of the house, you could see Syracuse University up on another hill. You would locate it by the quilted low white bubble of the Carrier Dome (named for the nearly absent Carrier Corporation—all that remained were a handful of jobs, the dome, and Carrier Circle, a treacherous traffic roundabout that Sam hated). Soon after you spotted the dome you would notice the various spired and turreted campus buildings.The decision to leave her husband—the act of leaving, really—began the moment she made an offer on the house. It was a Sunday; Sam woke up at 5 a.m. She attributed this unnecessarily early waking to the approach of menopause. Her period still came each month, but odd things had started changing in her body, even her brain. One of which was suddenly becoming awake at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, her mind shaking off sleep with unnegotiable clarity, as if she had already drunk a cup of coffee. And just as with coffee, she felt alert, an adrenal burst, but she could also feel the fatigue underneath it all, the weariness. That morning the wood floor was cold against her bare feet, but she couldn’t find her slippers. It was still dark. She tried not to wake her husband. She used her phone to illuminate the way to the bathroom. She peed, flushed, washed. She brushed her teeth without looking in the mirror. She pushed up the blinds to peek outside. The sky was gradually lightening with the dawn, and half a foot of snow had fallen overnight. The sunrise that was creeping up now cast a pink and gold glimmer, and a little crust of ice on top of the snow glittered from the sky and from the streetlamps. The trees, the roofs of the houses, even the salt-crusted cars looked beautiful.Sam figured that she was the only person on earth who thought late-March snowstorms were wonderful, and this made her feel a bit proud of herself. Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life. For example, back when Sam used to shop the sales at the Talbots in DeWitt with the other suburban ladies of her class and age, she separated herself. Sure, Sam had discovered that the classic A-line or sheath dresses made of solid-colored ponte knits were so forgiving, so flattering (“flattering,” that tragic word) to a grotesque midlife misshapenness—a blurriness, a squareness, really. But despite shopping because of an “insider” email-blast notification of a super sale, Sam believed that she was different from the other women. Inside she was mocking the calibrated manipulations, mocking herself, noting the corporate branding and lifestyle implications of the preppy styles and colors. The classic plaids, the buttons on the sleeves, the ballerina flats evoking a tastefully understated sensibility. It even occurred to her that the other women could be having the same interior thoughts and that the idea of conformity—at least in modern America—was never consciously sought after. No one older than a teenager thought, I want this because everyone else has it. No, Sam knew that you were allowed to keep a vain and precious sense of agency. This was the very secret to consumerism working in a savvy, self-conscious culture. Her sense of resistance was as manufactured as her need to buy flattering clothing. Nevertheless (!), Sam also believed that her having such self-critical, self-reflexive thoughts as she shopped set her apart from the other women. Surely. So she still believed herself to be (however stealthily) an eccentric person, not suited to conventions of thought or sensibility.Lately this desire to be contrary to convention had taken on a new urgency well beyond clothes or matters of taste. An unruly, even perverse inclination animated her. It had been looking for a place to land, for something to fasten on. So now (not before), this odd inner state pushed her toward a highly destabilizing wildness (a recklessness) that she couldn’t suppress any longer.She pulled on the same clothes she had worn the day before: stretched-out jeans and a black cowl-neck sweater. She no longer wanted to open her closet full of clothes. Why did she need so many, so much? In the last few months, things that used to captivate her no longer did.She crept downstairs and made herself a coffee.It was Sam’s habit to check out the real estate listings online. She had the bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses. She knew many of the other people there also had no intention to buy but had come to snoop into other people’s lives or to calculate land values or to imagine a fantasy life brought on by the frame of fresh architecture. This last impulse made sense to her. She had even wanted, at one point, to study architecture (and history, and women’s studies, and literature), but she had talked herself out of it and she had gotten married and then pregnant instead. She settled for becoming an architectural amateur.Unusual old structures (Syracuse had many) excited her: They were a visible-but-secret code, the past rendered in materials that could be seen and touched. For example, the abandoned AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street. Its tiny perfect form sat on a sturdy, intact limestone foundation. Paint-peeled crumbling white brick rose into a bell tower next to a large Gothic-pointed stained-glass window. But the building was lost in the concrete dead zone around I-81, grown over with box-maple saplings and covered with graffiti, the windows long boarded up. It belonged to the oldest Black congregation in Syracuse, built 100 years ago to replace a structure at another site that dated to the 1840s, when it had been a part of the Underground Railroad. Now the church sat stranded and forgotten. Syracuse had so much history that it could neglect wide swathes of it. When Sam saw a building that no one else seemed to see anymore, she would stop her car, get out, walk around the perimeter, and even lay her hand on a brick as a form of communion and respect. Fascinating old buildings and houses, empty or still in use, called to her from all over the city. She sometimes drove out of her way just to glimpse one of her favorites. But open houses gave her the rare chance to go inside, which was a much more intimate experience. As soon as she crossed the threshold into a house’s space, she could feel it shape who she was—or would be—in some deep way. Whenever she had a chance to walk inside one, she did, which always worked as an act of imagination, an act she loved. What would it feel like to live here, wake up here, argue with your husband here?This open house intrigued her because it was cross-listed on an Instagram account for architecture nerds:Unique Arts and Crafts bungalow designed by Ward Wellington Ward in 1913. For sale for $38,000! Intrepid buyers only—needs complete rehab. Most original details intact. See link in bio for more #cheapoldhouses#saveoldstuff#bungalow#restoration#casementwindowsforthewinShe was the only fantasy lurker attending the open house at 110 Highland Street that Sunday morning.The house was falling apart. The house was beautiful.It had leaded-glass windows, built-in shelves, and hidden storage benches. Two of the benches were framed by wood-beamed closures (“the inglenook”) and sat at either end of (oh, what she longed for!) an elaborate tile-lined fireplace (“Mercer Moravian tiles”). Sam imagined sitting in the nook, gazing at the fire, reading a book. The tiles were dirty with layers of dust but still intact. She could pick out a narrative in the relief images. (“Saint George and the Dragon,” the agent said.) The clay finish was a rustic, uneven glaze, the colors pink, green, and white. She touched her fingertips to the tiles and felt an undeniable connection. Someone on some podcast had talked about “grounding.” It was when you walked outside with bare feet and let the earth connect with your body. It was supposed to right you, your circadian rhythms or something. Help you get over jet lag. Or maybe it was to mitigate the endocrine disruption of chronic toxic exposure. Or to counter EMF, the low level but constant electromagnetic waves from Wi-Fi and cellular towers. Or maybe all of that, grounding promoted as a systemic cure-all. Sam scoffed at the idea, even despised it as New Age crap, yet as her fingers touched the tiles, she felt grounded. There was no other word for it, as if a corrective current flowed from the house through the dusty tile and into her hand and, truly, her whole body. The tiles were set against patterned deep red brick topped by a mantel made of dark oak, also dirty but intact. Maybe it was Gustav Stickley or it was William Morris who wrote about the Arts and Crafts ideal, how the fireplace should be a work of everyday art. It looked handmade and warm, and its beauty was in its utility and simplicity: She was cold, she needed a fire. The hearth drew her in, invited her to sit. She now understood the fireplace as a form of secular worship. She imagined it would make her feel close to something elemental. (“Obviously, the chimney will have to be looked at.”) To keep her sanity over the long Syracuse winter, Sam needed this beautiful, old, heat-squandering open fire. At her house in the suburbs, they had a glass-fronted gas fireplace that gave off some regulated, efficient BTUs of heat and a low, exhausting fan hum. The gas flame had a cold blue at its center.“This house is on the historic register as the Garrett House. It even has a Wikipedia page. Designed in 1913 by the architect Ward Wellington Ward.”“Yes, I read that in the notice,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with him.”“Oh, good. So you know his houses are very special. Garrett had it built in 1913. After he and his wife died, it fell into neglectful hands, but none of the original details are ruined. Clearly it needs some TLC: a heating system, electrical updates, new roof, mold abatement. Possibly a chimney rebuild. Better drainage in the basement. Shore up the foundations. But it’s still a wonderful house, no?”“Yes,” Sam said.Later she drove to the big suburban Wegmans and bought some wild halibut, diced sweet potato, and triple-washed organic baby spinach for dinner. She also got her daughter’s favorite fruit, mango, and her husband’s favorite cereal, No-Grain Vanilla Granola, and several liter bottles of that German mineral water she liked. She took the groceries to their house. No one was home yet. And then, instead of cooking, she got in her car and drove back into the city. It was nearly six, and the sun was starting to go down. The sky was backlit, iridescent, spring bright, and as she drove she watched the clouds close to the horizon glow pink and orange. She drove back to the city because she had to see the house in this dusk light, this ridiculous, almost garish light. She crested the hill. She pulled into the house’s tiny driveway. The roofline was steep, and the shitty asphalt tiles were coming undone. But. The front and side windows faced the sunset. The city in all directions gleamed, and it looked as if an ocean lay beyond the clouds, some giant lake or shore. Ward Wellington Ward, this architect, he must have known. He thought of the sky and the trees as he designed his house; he knew how much you need those early-spring sunsets in Syracuse, even if they glisten off a foot of snow.She retrieved the business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.What drew her to the house was its nature: The house was a paradox, both rustic and elegant. It felt hand-constructed, personal. Yet it reeked of artifice, “Arts and Crafts” meant to evoke home and nostalgia through cozy appropriations of English cottages and, oddly enough, some idea of a country church. Also, the state of the house. Dirty, falling apart, empty for too long.It was wrecked. It was hers.She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.Excerpted from Wayward by Dana Spiotta, copyright © 2021. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. TikTok, an app dominated by Gen Z, is the place for a lot of things: You can discover emerging designers, partake in dance challenges, watch beauty tutorials, and even stream fashion shows. But there’s another space on TikTok that’s also taking off—let’s call it BookTok.Digital book clubs are increasing in popularity on the app. Various “bookfluencers” are creating content around their favorite reads, and developing accounts that are strictly devoted to book talk. There’s a page for virtually everyone’s tastes—whether you’re a mystery lover or diehard rom-com reader—and each is the perfect place to find a review on a book you’ve been eyeing, or maybe even rediscover some favorites. The power of #BookTok is not to be underestimated: Some TikTok book accounts, like @alifeofliterature, have featured old books and propelled them back onto best-seller lists; proving that Gen Z’s appetite for books is very much alive. Navigating the app can be a tiresome feat—there’s so much to discover!—but fear not: we at Vogue have rounded up a selection of BookTok pages that are well worth a follow. Spring is the perfect time to pick up a new book, after all—there are tons of new releases this season—so what are you waiting for? Below, the 8 bookfluencers to know.Followers: 212,000Why to follow: This page has a fun, curated take on book recommendations. Videos are broken down into categories like “books that will give you major flashbacks,” “books that made my world stop,” and “oh, you haven’t read the classics yet.” There’s a book suggestion for everything, no matter what you’re in the market for.Followers: 209,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s quick-fire book reviews are entertaining and honest. She’ll take a book like Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and entice you to pick it up. She also offers handy tips on how to save money when buying books.Followers: 82,000Why to follow: This BookTok page is less service-based, and more about funny takes on being a book lover in general (including the anti-social tendencies). The user also rates book covers by “how many shots it would take” for her to hook up with them.Followers: 288,000Why to follow: This book devotee frequently offers her recommendations, and makes funny TikToks about trying to find comfortable positions to read in and what happens after she’s done with a novel (hint: fan art is involved).Followers: 49,000 followersWhy to follow: This page’s tagline is “I like big books and I cannot lie,” need we say more? Its TikToks are broken down by categories such as “books with a strong female lead,” “books for true crime podcast fans,” and cheekier ones like “books to read based off your favorite baked goods.”Followers: 78,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s series of book pet peeves is a highlight (one is when fans get mad about the casting of a TV adaptation; another, when people get mad about breaking book spines). She also rounds up books that made her cry and that have major plot twists.Followers: 193,000Why to follow: Her page’s tagline is “shut up and read,” and its TikToks give you everything you need to do so. She has highlighted books with Middle Eastern and Southern Asian representation, and also made comical videos about her bookshelf organization obsession.Followers: 37,000Why to follow: This page works a bit like a 24-hour librarian who’s always around to help with a suggestion. Plus, the user gives advice on how to read multiple books at once and how to get a copy of a book before it’s released. At 9 a.m. on a cool Karachi morning I am nudged awake by a “slow-rise” alarm ringtone. I zombie-swipe through several text message notifications: Am I interested in hosting a reality-TV show sponsored by a hair removal cream? Do I have availability in the month of February for a drama series in Lahore? And, most urgently: “Mira ma’am car is waiting downstairs & please don’t forget to bring golden heels.”We are going to film a wedding sequence tonight for the comedy series for Pakistani television that I am shooting in Karachi.I shower, grab a banana and my golden heels as I head out the door, wheeling the small red suitcase I carry with me to set, and back, everyday.The driver smiles brightly. “Salaam!”“Walaikumassalaam!”When I walk into the rented home where we’ve been shooting for the last month, the makeup artist is sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. “Your eyes are puffy. Too much partying last night?” Tahir smiles slyly.“I was working, actually. I’m a writer too, remember?”“Oh, yah,” he exhales. “I want a signed copy.”“Sure.”“I’m going to wash my hands, don’t worry,” he says, flinging his cigarette over the neighbor’s wall. He knows I hate the reek of smoke.I settle into the makeup chair. Slowly, my eyes are made bigger by a combination of brown eye-shadow, black eye-liner, and fake lashes. My hair is blown-out, hair extensions clipped on. While Tahir works on my face, I read the script. I’m playing the meddling, micromanaging older sister of a family of four siblings. Our parents are long dead; I am determined to have my way, to arrange my siblings’ marriages, loves, lives. Slowly, the cast trickles in. Somebody borrows somebody else’s aloe vera eye patch. Someone talks of the fight they had with their spouse the night before. A senior actress says she’s put on too much weight. We rush to reassure her: she’s as glamorous and beautiful as ever.***In the fall of 2019 I got married under a giant redwood tree in Marin, California. My friends and family had flown in from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. As I looked out at the flushed, beaming faces of the guests, I saw my mother in the front row, resplendent in a purple shalwar kameez and traditional gold jewelry. In the row behind her, a friend from Burning Man—a woman with a soft corner for polyamory, MDMA, and electro-funk—clutched a faux-fur wrap. A minute ago, extolling my husband’s qualities, a friend had described him as “the most non-Pakistani Pakistani man Mira has ever met.” Friends hooted.My husband, Bilal, lives and works in San Francisco. Before getting married, my notion of home had been tethered to Pakistan. It’s where I’d grown up, the place I’d scurried back to just a few years after graduating from college in the States. My then-boyfriend and I broke up not long after I moved back—not because we had lost interest in one another but because we couldn’t find middle ground between Karachi and Oakland, where he lived. Several years later, the irony of getting married in the Bay Area was not lost on me.I wish I could say that moving to the Bay—where I now spend half the year—has been easy. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. without too much angst. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco; eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them; speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. “What is this I’m hearing?” she said. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco—such a pretty city—and be with him like a normal person?”“What about my acting career?” I said.“Take a theater class in Frisco.”Nobody calls it that, I wanted to say. “I’m a television actor,” I said. “I can’t just give it all up and start again. It’s a very competitive industry.”“You’re married now.”“So?”“So go and be with your husband!”Luckily, my husband understands and nurtures my desire to be as close to my job as possible. “It’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” he recently said to me. “When you have nothing to do…I worry.” He has seen me obsessively whipping up Sichuan food in our home in San Francisco; doing repetitive batches of laundry; watching TV for hours on my phone. He has seen me unmoored, restless, anxious.***In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t—you shouldn’t—teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India—under the grip of a new authoritarian populism—critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.But I viscerally understand Baldwin’s point: to disavow home—the simultaneous charm and frustration of it—is to live in denial about a very fruitful tension between love and freedom.I love the openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. But my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive. The moment I land in the city and the car begins speeding down Shah Rah-e-Faisal, one of Karachi’s longest boulevards, the city thrums with possibility: There is work to be done, and this port megacity is the best place to do it. A flock of pigeons always sits atop the Aisha Bawany Academy building, a girls’ school. Other buildings flank the road, but the pigeons have marked the school as their own. Anticipating their inevitable presence—in January, in scorching June, in October—has become a ritual, their fleeting company a kind of talismanic nod.In the last four years, my husband lost both his parents. “Growing up, Lahore was home,” he recently told me. “At some point, the U.S. became home. Now, with Amma and Abba gone, I feel permanently displaced.” I haven’t experienced the trauma and shattering grief of rapid parental loss. But I have seen my partner paralyzed with it, his emotional reserves depleted, his walls up. His words help me understand my own relationship with the shifting condition of home. After his mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Lahore, where he’d spent an idyllic childhood, became imbued with heaviness. Years before his mother died, his heart had carried the loss of home. Happy memories hurt, and were locked away. Unhappy memories summoned panic and guilt (for choosing to live and work in the U.S. while his mother lay sick in Pakistan). His parents’ deaths, far from freeing him from a sense that he needed to return to Pakistan, threw into relief his complicated relationship with the homeland. We got married not just in the Bay, but also in Lahore, where Bilal’s aunts and uncles enveloped him with love. I had anticipated that he would want to spend a few years in the U.S., but I hadn’t anticipated a life perennially on the move (going to Pakistan to work, shuttling to the Bay to be with my husband).This month, when my first book comes out, I will go on a virtual book tour; I will talk about the ways in which Pakistan animates my book, the ways in which my characters—an actress on the set of her first major TV show, best friends who agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret—negotiate personal freedom in a traditional society. The short stories are about the comedy and heartache of lives lived in the intense in-between.When the Zoom book events end, my mother will call. What did I have for dinner last night, she will want to know. Which friends did I see? Why is Biden not moving faster on climate change? Do I have fresh flowers in the house? I will patiently answer, but a piece of my heart will miss sitting next to her, feeding a fire, as we did in January, in Lahore. I will look out the window at Bilal working in the backyard, the sharp San Francisco sunlight hitting his laptop, obscuring his screen.A transcontinental life is difficult in the best of circumstances, but even more so during a pandemic. When international travel ground to a halt in March of last year, Bilal and I were separated for three months. Later in the year, when I flew from San Francisco to Karachi to resume work on a TV series, our time apart stretched interminably long, as people fell sick, and the shoot dragged on. My life too is unfolding in the intense in-between, one moment waking alone in my apartment in Karachi, the other a visitor in San Francisco. Bereft of people, what is home?Mira Sethi is the author of Are You Enjoying? a collection of short stories forthcoming from Knopf on April 21. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: Themaskhouse This product belong to hung3 Dragon I Only Buy Books When I Need It Of Just Because I Want It Tee Shirts This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic 100% pre-shrunk cotton (heather gray color is 90% cotton/10% polyester, light heather gray is 98% cotton/2% polyester, heather black is 50% cotton/50% polyester) | Fabric Weight: 5.0 oz (mid-weight) Tip: Buying 2 products or more at the same time will save you quite a lot on shipping fees. You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: SCAD Heart Attack Survivor Warrior Awareness T-Shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long sleeve tee One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): It began with the house. It was the particular house, but it also was where the house was and where she discovered she wanted to be. It was a run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse.The house sat high on a tiny lot on Highland Street, which ran atop a hill that bordered a long expanse of grass and trees. It looked like a small, sloping park, but it was actually a cemetery, the old graves clustered in the southwest corner. Unless you were squeamish about graves—Sam wasn’t—the sloping green hill was quite pretty. Highland itself offered a wide view of downtown. You could see the steeples of churches, and you could see how the small city was in a valley surrounded by hills. You could even see the kidney shape of Onondaga Lake, although it was often partly obscured by low-hanging clouds. If you turned your head to the left, or if you looked out the side windows of the house, you could see Syracuse University up on another hill. You would locate it by the quilted low white bubble of the Carrier Dome (named for the nearly absent Carrier Corporation—all that remained were a handful of jobs, the dome, and Carrier Circle, a treacherous traffic roundabout that Sam hated). Soon after you spotted the dome you would notice the various spired and turreted campus buildings.The decision to leave her husband—the act of leaving, really—began the moment she made an offer on the house. It was a Sunday; Sam woke up at 5 a.m. She attributed this unnecessarily early waking to the approach of menopause. Her period still came each month, but odd things had started changing in her body, even her brain. One of which was suddenly becoming awake at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, her mind shaking off sleep with unnegotiable clarity, as if she had already drunk a cup of coffee. And just as with coffee, she felt alert, an adrenal burst, but she could also feel the fatigue underneath it all, the weariness. That morning the wood floor was cold against her bare feet, but she couldn’t find her slippers. It was still dark. She tried not to wake her husband. She used her phone to illuminate the way to the bathroom. She peed, flushed, washed. She brushed her teeth without looking in the mirror. She pushed up the blinds to peek outside. The sky was gradually lightening with the dawn, and half a foot of snow had fallen overnight. The sunrise that was creeping up now cast a pink and gold glimmer, and a little crust of ice on top of the snow glittered from the sky and from the streetlamps. The trees, the roofs of the houses, even the salt-crusted cars looked beautiful.Sam figured that she was the only person on earth who thought late-March snowstorms were wonderful, and this made her feel a bit proud of herself. Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life. For example, back when Sam used to shop the sales at the Talbots in DeWitt with the other suburban ladies of her class and age, she separated herself. Sure, Sam had discovered that the classic A-line or sheath dresses made of solid-colored ponte knits were so forgiving, so flattering (“flattering,” that tragic word) to a grotesque midlife misshapenness—a blurriness, a squareness, really. But despite shopping because of an “insider” email-blast notification of a super sale, Sam believed that she was different from the other women. Inside she was mocking the calibrated manipulations, mocking herself, noting the corporate branding and lifestyle implications of the preppy styles and colors. The classic plaids, the buttons on the sleeves, the ballerina flats evoking a tastefully understated sensibility. It even occurred to her that the other women could be having the same interior thoughts and that the idea of conformity—at least in modern America—was never consciously sought after. No one older than a teenager thought, I want this because everyone else has it. No, Sam knew that you were allowed to keep a vain and precious sense of agency. This was the very secret to consumerism working in a savvy, self-conscious culture. Her sense of resistance was as manufactured as her need to buy flattering clothing. Nevertheless (!), Sam also believed that her having such self-critical, self-reflexive thoughts as she shopped set her apart from the other women. Surely. So she still believed herself to be (however stealthily) an eccentric person, not suited to conventions of thought or sensibility.Lately this desire to be contrary to convention had taken on a new urgency well beyond clothes or matters of taste. An unruly, even perverse inclination animated her. It had been looking for a place to land, for something to fasten on. So now (not before), this odd inner state pushed her toward a highly destabilizing wildness (a recklessness) that she couldn’t suppress any longer.She pulled on the same clothes she had worn the day before: stretched-out jeans and a black cowl-neck sweater. She no longer wanted to open her closet full of clothes. Why did she need so many, so much? In the last few months, things that used to captivate her no longer did.She crept downstairs and made herself a coffee.It was Sam’s habit to check out the real estate listings online. She had the bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses. She knew many of the other people there also had no intention to buy but had come to snoop into other people’s lives or to calculate land values or to imagine a fantasy life brought on by the frame of fresh architecture. This last impulse made sense to her. She had even wanted, at one point, to study architecture (and history, and women’s studies, and literature), but she had talked herself out of it and she had gotten married and then pregnant instead. She settled for becoming an architectural amateur.Unusual old structures (Syracuse had many) excited her: They were a visible-but-secret code, the past rendered in materials that could be seen and touched. For example, the abandoned AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street. Its tiny perfect form sat on a sturdy, intact limestone foundation. Paint-peeled crumbling white brick rose into a bell tower next to a large Gothic-pointed stained-glass window. But the building was lost in the concrete dead zone around I-81, grown over with box-maple saplings and covered with graffiti, the windows long boarded up. It belonged to the oldest Black congregation in Syracuse, built 100 years ago to replace a structure at another site that dated to the 1840s, when it had been a part of the Underground Railroad. Now the church sat stranded and forgotten. Syracuse had so much history that it could neglect wide swathes of it. When Sam saw a building that no one else seemed to see anymore, she would stop her car, get out, walk around the perimeter, and even lay her hand on a brick as a form of communion and respect. Fascinating old buildings and houses, empty or still in use, called to her from all over the city. She sometimes drove out of her way just to glimpse one of her favorites. But open houses gave her the rare chance to go inside, which was a much more intimate experience. As soon as she crossed the threshold into a house’s space, she could feel it shape who she was—or would be—in some deep way. Whenever she had a chance to walk inside one, she did, which always worked as an act of imagination, an act she loved. What would it feel like to live here, wake up here, argue with your husband here?This open house intrigued her because it was cross-listed on an Instagram account for architecture nerds:Unique Arts and Crafts bungalow designed by Ward Wellington Ward in 1913. For sale for $38,000! Intrepid buyers only—needs complete rehab. Most original details intact. See link in bio for more #cheapoldhouses#saveoldstuff#bungalow#restoration#casementwindowsforthewinShe was the only fantasy lurker attending the open house at 110 Highland Street that Sunday morning.The house was falling apart. The house was beautiful.It had leaded-glass windows, built-in shelves, and hidden storage benches. Two of the benches were framed by wood-beamed closures (“the inglenook”) and sat at either end of (oh, what she longed for!) an elaborate tile-lined fireplace (“Mercer Moravian tiles”). Sam imagined sitting in the nook, gazing at the fire, reading a book. The tiles were dirty with layers of dust but still intact. She could pick out a narrative in the relief images. (“Saint George and the Dragon,” the agent said.) The clay finish was a rustic, uneven glaze, the colors pink, green, and white. She touched her fingertips to the tiles and felt an undeniable connection. Someone on some podcast had talked about “grounding.” It was when you walked outside with bare feet and let the earth connect with your body. It was supposed to right you, your circadian rhythms or something. Help you get over jet lag. Or maybe it was to mitigate the endocrine disruption of chronic toxic exposure. Or to counter EMF, the low level but constant electromagnetic waves from Wi-Fi and cellular towers. Or maybe all of that, grounding promoted as a systemic cure-all. Sam scoffed at the idea, even despised it as New Age crap, yet as her fingers touched the tiles, she felt grounded. There was no other word for it, as if a corrective current flowed from the house through the dusty tile and into her hand and, truly, her whole body. The tiles were set against patterned deep red brick topped by a mantel made of dark oak, also dirty but intact. Maybe it was Gustav Stickley or it was William Morris who wrote about the Arts and Crafts ideal, how the fireplace should be a work of everyday art. It looked handmade and warm, and its beauty was in its utility and simplicity: She was cold, she needed a fire. The hearth drew her in, invited her to sit. She now understood the fireplace as a form of secular worship. She imagined it would make her feel close to something elemental. (“Obviously, the chimney will have to be looked at.”) To keep her sanity over the long Syracuse winter, Sam needed this beautiful, old, heat-squandering open fire. At her house in the suburbs, they had a glass-fronted gas fireplace that gave off some regulated, efficient BTUs of heat and a low, exhausting fan hum. The gas flame had a cold blue at its center.“This house is on the historic register as the Garrett House. It even has a Wikipedia page. Designed in 1913 by the architect Ward Wellington Ward.”“Yes, I read that in the notice,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with him.”“Oh, good. So you know his houses are very special. Garrett had it built in 1913. After he and his wife died, it fell into neglectful hands, but none of the original details are ruined. Clearly it needs some TLC: a heating system, electrical updates, new roof, mold abatement. Possibly a chimney rebuild. Better drainage in the basement. Shore up the foundations. But it’s still a wonderful house, no?”“Yes,” Sam said.Later she drove to the big suburban Wegmans and bought some wild halibut, diced sweet potato, and triple-washed organic baby spinach for dinner. She also got her daughter’s favorite fruit, mango, and her husband’s favorite cereal, No-Grain Vanilla Granola, and several liter bottles of that German mineral water she liked. She took the groceries to their house. No one was home yet. And then, instead of cooking, she got in her car and drove back into the city. It was nearly six, and the sun was starting to go down. The sky was backlit, iridescent, spring bright, and as she drove she watched the clouds close to the horizon glow pink and orange. She drove back to the city because she had to see the house in this dusk light, this ridiculous, almost garish light. She crested the hill. She pulled into the house’s tiny driveway. The roofline was steep, and the shitty asphalt tiles were coming undone. But. The front and side windows faced the sunset. The city in all directions gleamed, and it looked as if an ocean lay beyond the clouds, some giant lake or shore. Ward Wellington Ward, this architect, he must have known. He thought of the sky and the trees as he designed his house; he knew how much you need those early-spring sunsets in Syracuse, even if they glisten off a foot of snow.She retrieved the business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.What drew her to the house was its nature: The house was a paradox, both rustic and elegant. It felt hand-constructed, personal. Yet it reeked of artifice, “Arts and Crafts” meant to evoke home and nostalgia through cozy appropriations of English cottages and, oddly enough, some idea of a country church. Also, the state of the house. Dirty, falling apart, empty for too long.It was wrecked. It was hers.She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.Excerpted from Wayward by Dana Spiotta, copyright © 2021. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. TikTok, an app dominated by Gen Z, is the place for a lot of things: You can discover emerging designers, partake in dance challenges, watch beauty tutorials, and even stream fashion shows. But there’s another space on TikTok that’s also taking off—let’s call it BookTok.Digital book clubs are increasing in popularity on the app. Various “bookfluencers” are creating content around their favorite reads, and developing accounts that are strictly devoted to book talk. There’s a page for virtually everyone’s tastes—whether you’re a mystery lover or diehard rom-com reader—and each is the perfect place to find a review on a book you’ve been eyeing, or maybe even rediscover some favorites. The power of #BookTok is not to be underestimated: Some TikTok book accounts, like @alifeofliterature, have featured old books and propelled them back onto best-seller lists; proving that Gen Z’s appetite for books is very much alive. Navigating the app can be a tiresome feat—there’s so much to discover!—but fear not: we at Vogue have rounded up a selection of BookTok pages that are well worth a follow. Spring is the perfect time to pick up a new book, after all—there are tons of new releases this season—so what are you waiting for? Below, the 8 bookfluencers to know.Followers: 212,000Why to follow: This page has a fun, curated take on book recommendations. Videos are broken down into categories like “books that will give you major flashbacks,” “books that made my world stop,” and “oh, you haven’t read the classics yet.” There’s a book suggestion for everything, no matter what you’re in the market for.Followers: 209,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s quick-fire book reviews are entertaining and honest. She’ll take a book like Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and entice you to pick it up. She also offers handy tips on how to save money when buying books.Followers: 82,000Why to follow: This BookTok page is less service-based, and more about funny takes on being a book lover in general (including the anti-social tendencies). The user also rates book covers by “how many shots it would take” for her to hook up with them.Followers: 288,000Why to follow: This book devotee frequently offers her recommendations, and makes funny TikToks about trying to find comfortable positions to read in and what happens after she’s done with a novel (hint: fan art is involved).Followers: 49,000 followersWhy to follow: This page’s tagline is “I like big books and I cannot lie,” need we say more? Its TikToks are broken down by categories such as “books with a strong female lead,” “books for true crime podcast fans,” and cheekier ones like “books to read based off your favorite baked goods.”Followers: 78,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s series of book pet peeves is a highlight (one is when fans get mad about the casting of a TV adaptation; another, when people get mad about breaking book spines). She also rounds up books that made her cry and that have major plot twists.Followers: 193,000Why to follow: Her page’s tagline is “shut up and read,” and its TikToks give you everything you need to do so. She has highlighted books with Middle Eastern and Southern Asian representation, and also made comical videos about her bookshelf organization obsession.Followers: 37,000Why to follow: This page works a bit like a 24-hour librarian who’s always around to help with a suggestion. Plus, the user gives advice on how to read multiple books at once and how to get a copy of a book before it’s released. At 9 a.m. on a cool Karachi morning I am nudged awake by a “slow-rise” alarm ringtone. I zombie-swipe through several text message notifications: Am I interested in hosting a reality-TV show sponsored by a hair removal cream? Do I have availability in the month of February for a drama series in Lahore? And, most urgently: “Mira ma’am car is waiting downstairs & please don’t forget to bring golden heels.”We are going to film a wedding sequence tonight for the comedy series for Pakistani television that I am shooting in Karachi.I shower, grab a banana and my golden heels as I head out the door, wheeling the small red suitcase I carry with me to set, and back, everyday.The driver smiles brightly. “Salaam!”“Walaikumassalaam!”When I walk into the rented home where we’ve been shooting for the last month, the makeup artist is sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. “Your eyes are puffy. Too much partying last night?” Tahir smiles slyly.“I was working, actually. I’m a writer too, remember?”“Oh, yah,” he exhales. “I want a signed copy.”“Sure.”“I’m going to wash my hands, don’t worry,” he says, flinging his cigarette over the neighbor’s wall. He knows I hate the reek of smoke.I settle into the makeup chair. Slowly, my eyes are made bigger by a combination of brown eye-shadow, black eye-liner, and fake lashes. My hair is blown-out, hair extensions clipped on. While Tahir works on my face, I read the script. I’m playing the meddling, micromanaging older sister of a family of four siblings. Our parents are long dead; I am determined to have my way, to arrange my siblings’ marriages, loves, lives. Slowly, the cast trickles in. Somebody borrows somebody else’s aloe vera eye patch. Someone talks of the fight they had with their spouse the night before. A senior actress says she’s put on too much weight. We rush to reassure her: she’s as glamorous and beautiful as ever.***In the fall of 2019 I got married under a giant redwood tree in Marin, California. My friends and family had flown in from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. As I looked out at the flushed, beaming faces of the guests, I saw my mother in the front row, resplendent in a purple shalwar kameez and traditional gold jewelry. In the row behind her, a friend from Burning Man—a woman with a soft corner for polyamory, MDMA, and electro-funk—clutched a faux-fur wrap. A minute ago, extolling my husband’s qualities, a friend had described him as “the most non-Pakistani Pakistani man Mira has ever met.” Friends hooted.My husband, Bilal, lives and works in San Francisco. Before getting married, my notion of home had been tethered to Pakistan. It’s where I’d grown up, the place I’d scurried back to just a few years after graduating from college in the States. My then-boyfriend and I broke up not long after I moved back—not because we had lost interest in one another but because we couldn’t find middle ground between Karachi and Oakland, where he lived. Several years later, the irony of getting married in the Bay Area was not lost on me.I wish I could say that moving to the Bay—where I now spend half the year—has been easy. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. without too much angst. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco; eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them; speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. “What is this I’m hearing?” she said. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco—such a pretty city—and be with him like a normal person?”“What about my acting career?” I said.“Take a theater class in Frisco.”Nobody calls it that, I wanted to say. “I’m a television actor,” I said. “I can’t just give it all up and start again. It’s a very competitive industry.”“You’re married now.”“So?”“So go and be with your husband!”Luckily, my husband understands and nurtures my desire to be as close to my job as possible. “It’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” he recently said to me. “When you have nothing to do…I worry.” He has seen me obsessively whipping up Sichuan food in our home in San Francisco; doing repetitive batches of laundry; watching TV for hours on my phone. He has seen me unmoored, restless, anxious.***In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t—you shouldn’t—teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India—under the grip of a new authoritarian populism—critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.But I viscerally understand Baldwin’s point: to disavow home—the simultaneous charm and frustration of it—is to live in denial about a very fruitful tension between love and freedom.I love the openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. But my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive. The moment I land in the city and the car begins speeding down Shah Rah-e-Faisal, one of Karachi’s longest boulevards, the city thrums with possibility: There is work to be done, and this port megacity is the best place to do it. A flock of pigeons always sits atop the Aisha Bawany Academy building, a girls’ school. Other buildings flank the road, but the pigeons have marked the school as their own. Anticipating their inevitable presence—in January, in scorching June, in October—has become a ritual, their fleeting company a kind of talismanic nod.In the last four years, my husband lost both his parents. “Growing up, Lahore was home,” he recently told me. “At some point, the U.S. became home. Now, with Amma and Abba gone, I feel permanently displaced.” I haven’t experienced the trauma and shattering grief of rapid parental loss. But I have seen my partner paralyzed with it, his emotional reserves depleted, his walls up. His words help me understand my own relationship with the shifting condition of home. After his mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Lahore, where he’d spent an idyllic childhood, became imbued with heaviness. Years before his mother died, his heart had carried the loss of home. Happy memories hurt, and were locked away. Unhappy memories summoned panic and guilt (for choosing to live and work in the U.S. while his mother lay sick in Pakistan). His parents’ deaths, far from freeing him from a sense that he needed to return to Pakistan, threw into relief his complicated relationship with the homeland. We got married not just in the Bay, but also in Lahore, where Bilal’s aunts and uncles enveloped him with love. I had anticipated that he would want to spend a few years in the U.S., but I hadn’t anticipated a life perennially on the move (going to Pakistan to work, shuttling to the Bay to be with my husband).This month, when my first book comes out, I will go on a virtual book tour; I will talk about the ways in which Pakistan animates my book, the ways in which my characters—an actress on the set of her first major TV show, best friends who agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret—negotiate personal freedom in a traditional society. The short stories are about the comedy and heartache of lives lived in the intense in-between.When the Zoom book events end, my mother will call. What did I have for dinner last night, she will want to know. Which friends did I see? Why is Biden not moving faster on climate change? Do I have fresh flowers in the house? I will patiently answer, but a piece of my heart will miss sitting next to her, feeding a fire, as we did in January, in Lahore. I will look out the window at Bilal working in the backyard, the sharp San Francisco sunlight hitting his laptop, obscuring his screen.A transcontinental life is difficult in the best of circumstances, but even more so during a pandemic. When international travel ground to a halt in March of last year, Bilal and I were separated for three months. Later in the year, when I flew from San Francisco to Karachi to resume work on a TV series, our time apart stretched interminably long, as people fell sick, and the shoot dragged on. My life too is unfolding in the intense in-between, one moment waking alone in my apartment in Karachi, the other a visitor in San Francisco. Bereft of people, what is home?Mira Sethi is the author of Are You Enjoying? a collection of short stories forthcoming from Knopf on April 21. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Vist our store at: Themaskhouse This product belong to hung3
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You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: SCAD Heart Attack Survivor Warrior Awareness T-Shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long sleeve tee One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): It began with the house. It was the particular house, but it also was where the house was and where she discovered she wanted to be. It was a run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse.The house sat high on a tiny lot on Highland Street, which ran atop a hill that bordered a long expanse of grass and trees. It looked like a small, sloping park, but it was actually a cemetery, the old graves clustered in the southwest corner. Unless you were squeamish about graves—Sam wasn’t—the sloping green hill was quite pretty. Highland itself offered a wide view of downtown. You could see the steeples of churches, and you could see how the small city was in a valley surrounded by hills. You could even see the kidney shape of Onondaga Lake, although it was often partly obscured by low-hanging clouds. If you turned your head to the left, or if you looked out the side windows of the house, you could see Syracuse University up on another hill. You would locate it by the quilted low white bubble of the Carrier Dome (named for the nearly absent Carrier Corporation—all that remained were a handful of jobs, the dome, and Carrier Circle, a treacherous traffic roundabout that Sam hated). Soon after you spotted the dome you would notice the various spired and turreted campus buildings.The decision to leave her husband—the act of leaving, really—began the moment she made an offer on the house. It was a Sunday; Sam woke up at 5 a.m. She attributed this unnecessarily early waking to the approach of menopause. Her period still came each month, but odd things had started changing in her body, even her brain. One of which was suddenly becoming awake at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, her mind shaking off sleep with unnegotiable clarity, as if she had already drunk a cup of coffee. And just as with coffee, she felt alert, an adrenal burst, but she could also feel the fatigue underneath it all, the weariness. That morning the wood floor was cold against her bare feet, but she couldn’t find her slippers. It was still dark. She tried not to wake her husband. She used her phone to illuminate the way to the bathroom. She peed, flushed, washed. She brushed her teeth without looking in the mirror. She pushed up the blinds to peek outside. The sky was gradually lightening with the dawn, and half a foot of snow had fallen overnight. The sunrise that was creeping up now cast a pink and gold glimmer, and a little crust of ice on top of the snow glittered from the sky and from the streetlamps. The trees, the roofs of the houses, even the salt-crusted cars looked beautiful.Sam figured that she was the only person on earth who thought late-March snowstorms were wonderful, and this made her feel a bit proud of herself. Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life. For example, back when Sam used to shop the sales at the Talbots in DeWitt with the other suburban ladies of her class and age, she separated herself. Sure, Sam had discovered that the classic A-line or sheath dresses made of solid-colored ponte knits were so forgiving, so flattering (“flattering,” that tragic word) to a grotesque midlife misshapenness—a blurriness, a squareness, really. But despite shopping because of an “insider” email-blast notification of a super sale, Sam believed that she was different from the other women. Inside she was mocking the calibrated manipulations, mocking herself, noting the corporate branding and lifestyle implications of the preppy styles and colors. The classic plaids, the buttons on the sleeves, the ballerina flats evoking a tastefully understated sensibility. It even occurred to her that the other women could be having the same interior thoughts and that the idea of conformity—at least in modern America—was never consciously sought after. No one older than a teenager thought, I want this because everyone else has it. No, Sam knew that you were allowed to keep a vain and precious sense of agency. This was the very secret to consumerism working in a savvy, self-conscious culture. Her sense of resistance was as manufactured as her need to buy flattering clothing. Nevertheless (!), Sam also believed that her having such self-critical, self-reflexive thoughts as she shopped set her apart from the other women. Surely. So she still believed herself to be (however stealthily) an eccentric person, not suited to conventions of thought or sensibility.Lately this desire to be contrary to convention had taken on a new urgency well beyond clothes or matters of taste. An unruly, even perverse inclination animated her. It had been looking for a place to land, for something to fasten on. So now (not before), this odd inner state pushed her toward a highly destabilizing wildness (a recklessness) that she couldn’t suppress any longer.She pulled on the same clothes she had worn the day before: stretched-out jeans and a black cowl-neck sweater. She no longer wanted to open her closet full of clothes. Why did she need so many, so much? In the last few months, things that used to captivate her no longer did.She crept downstairs and made herself a coffee.It was Sam’s habit to check out the real estate listings online. She had the bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses. She knew many of the other people there also had no intention to buy but had come to snoop into other people’s lives or to calculate land values or to imagine a fantasy life brought on by the frame of fresh architecture. This last impulse made sense to her. She had even wanted, at one point, to study architecture (and history, and women’s studies, and literature), but she had talked herself out of it and she had gotten married and then pregnant instead. She settled for becoming an architectural amateur.Unusual old structures (Syracuse had many) excited her: They were a visible-but-secret code, the past rendered in materials that could be seen and touched. For example, the abandoned AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street. Its tiny perfect form sat on a sturdy, intact limestone foundation. Paint-peeled crumbling white brick rose into a bell tower next to a large Gothic-pointed stained-glass window. But the building was lost in the concrete dead zone around I-81, grown over with box-maple saplings and covered with graffiti, the windows long boarded up. It belonged to the oldest Black congregation in Syracuse, built 100 years ago to replace a structure at another site that dated to the 1840s, when it had been a part of the Underground Railroad. Now the church sat stranded and forgotten. Syracuse had so much history that it could neglect wide swathes of it. When Sam saw a building that no one else seemed to see anymore, she would stop her car, get out, walk around the perimeter, and even lay her hand on a brick as a form of communion and respect. Fascinating old buildings and houses, empty or still in use, called to her from all over the city. She sometimes drove out of her way just to glimpse one of her favorites. But open houses gave her the rare chance to go inside, which was a much more intimate experience. As soon as she crossed the threshold into a house’s space, she could feel it shape who she was—or would be—in some deep way. Whenever she had a chance to walk inside one, she did, which always worked as an act of imagination, an act she loved. What would it feel like to live here, wake up here, argue with your husband here?This open house intrigued her because it was cross-listed on an Instagram account for architecture nerds:Unique Arts and Crafts bungalow designed by Ward Wellington Ward in 1913. For sale for $38,000! Intrepid buyers only—needs complete rehab. Most original details intact. See link in bio for more #cheapoldhouses#saveoldstuff#bungalow#restoration#casementwindowsforthewinShe was the only fantasy lurker attending the open house at 110 Highland Street that Sunday morning.The house was falling apart. The house was beautiful.It had leaded-glass windows, built-in shelves, and hidden storage benches. Two of the benches were framed by wood-beamed closures (“the inglenook”) and sat at either end of (oh, what she longed for!) an elaborate tile-lined fireplace (“Mercer Moravian tiles”). Sam imagined sitting in the nook, gazing at the fire, reading a book. The tiles were dirty with layers of dust but still intact. She could pick out a narrative in the relief images. (“Saint George and the Dragon,” the agent said.) The clay finish was a rustic, uneven glaze, the colors pink, green, and white. She touched her fingertips to the tiles and felt an undeniable connection. Someone on some podcast had talked about “grounding.” It was when you walked outside with bare feet and let the earth connect with your body. It was supposed to right you, your circadian rhythms or something. Help you get over jet lag. Or maybe it was to mitigate the endocrine disruption of chronic toxic exposure. Or to counter EMF, the low level but constant electromagnetic waves from Wi-Fi and cellular towers. Or maybe all of that, grounding promoted as a systemic cure-all. Sam scoffed at the idea, even despised it as New Age crap, yet as her fingers touched the tiles, she felt grounded. There was no other word for it, as if a corrective current flowed from the house through the dusty tile and into her hand and, truly, her whole body. The tiles were set against patterned deep red brick topped by a mantel made of dark oak, also dirty but intact. Maybe it was Gustav Stickley or it was William Morris who wrote about the Arts and Crafts ideal, how the fireplace should be a work of everyday art. It looked handmade and warm, and its beauty was in its utility and simplicity: She was cold, she needed a fire. The hearth drew her in, invited her to sit. She now understood the fireplace as a form of secular worship. She imagined it would make her feel close to something elemental. (“Obviously, the chimney will have to be looked at.”) To keep her sanity over the long Syracuse winter, Sam needed this beautiful, old, heat-squandering open fire. At her house in the suburbs, they had a glass-fronted gas fireplace that gave off some regulated, efficient BTUs of heat and a low, exhausting fan hum. The gas flame had a cold blue at its center.“This house is on the historic register as the Garrett House. It even has a Wikipedia page. Designed in 1913 by the architect Ward Wellington Ward.”“Yes, I read that in the notice,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with him.”“Oh, good. So you know his houses are very special. Garrett had it built in 1913. After he and his wife died, it fell into neglectful hands, but none of the original details are ruined. Clearly it needs some TLC: a heating system, electrical updates, new roof, mold abatement. Possibly a chimney rebuild. Better drainage in the basement. Shore up the foundations. But it’s still a wonderful house, no?”“Yes,” Sam said.Later she drove to the big suburban Wegmans and bought some wild halibut, diced sweet potato, and triple-washed organic baby spinach for dinner. She also got her daughter’s favorite fruit, mango, and her husband’s favorite cereal, No-Grain Vanilla Granola, and several liter bottles of that German mineral water she liked. She took the groceries to their house. No one was home yet. And then, instead of cooking, she got in her car and drove back into the city. It was nearly six, and the sun was starting to go down. The sky was backlit, iridescent, spring bright, and as she drove she watched the clouds close to the horizon glow pink and orange. She drove back to the city because she had to see the house in this dusk light, this ridiculous, almost garish light. She crested the hill. She pulled into the house’s tiny driveway. The roofline was steep, and the shitty asphalt tiles were coming undone. But. The front and side windows faced the sunset. The city in all directions gleamed, and it looked as if an ocean lay beyond the clouds, some giant lake or shore. Ward Wellington Ward, this architect, he must have known. He thought of the sky and the trees as he designed his house; he knew how much you need those early-spring sunsets in Syracuse, even if they glisten off a foot of snow.She retrieved the business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.What drew her to the house was its nature: The house was a paradox, both rustic and elegant. It felt hand-constructed, personal. Yet it reeked of artifice, “Arts and Crafts” meant to evoke home and nostalgia through cozy appropriations of English cottages and, oddly enough, some idea of a country church. Also, the state of the house. Dirty, falling apart, empty for too long.It was wrecked. It was hers.She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.Excerpted from Wayward by Dana Spiotta, copyright © 2021. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. TikTok, an app dominated by Gen Z, is the place for a lot of things: You can discover emerging designers, partake in dance challenges, watch beauty tutorials, and even stream fashion shows. But there’s another space on TikTok that’s also taking off—let’s call it BookTok.Digital book clubs are increasing in popularity on the app. Various “bookfluencers” are creating content around their favorite reads, and developing accounts that are strictly devoted to book talk. There’s a page for virtually everyone’s tastes—whether you’re a mystery lover or diehard rom-com reader—and each is the perfect place to find a review on a book you’ve been eyeing, or maybe even rediscover some favorites. The power of #BookTok is not to be underestimated: Some TikTok book accounts, like @alifeofliterature, have featured old books and propelled them back onto best-seller lists; proving that Gen Z’s appetite for books is very much alive. Navigating the app can be a tiresome feat—there’s so much to discover!—but fear not: we at Vogue have rounded up a selection of BookTok pages that are well worth a follow. Spring is the perfect time to pick up a new book, after all—there are tons of new releases this season—so what are you waiting for? Below, the 8 bookfluencers to know.Followers: 212,000Why to follow: This page has a fun, curated take on book recommendations. Videos are broken down into categories like “books that will give you major flashbacks,” “books that made my world stop,” and “oh, you haven’t read the classics yet.” There’s a book suggestion for everything, no matter what you’re in the market for.Followers: 209,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s quick-fire book reviews are entertaining and honest. She’ll take a book like Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and entice you to pick it up. She also offers handy tips on how to save money when buying books.Followers: 82,000Why to follow: This BookTok page is less service-based, and more about funny takes on being a book lover in general (including the anti-social tendencies). The user also rates book covers by “how many shots it would take” for her to hook up with them.Followers: 288,000Why to follow: This book devotee frequently offers her recommendations, and makes funny TikToks about trying to find comfortable positions to read in and what happens after she’s done with a novel (hint: fan art is involved).Followers: 49,000 followersWhy to follow: This page’s tagline is “I like big books and I cannot lie,” need we say more? Its TikToks are broken down by categories such as “books with a strong female lead,” “books for true crime podcast fans,” and cheekier ones like “books to read based off your favorite baked goods.”Followers: 78,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s series of book pet peeves is a highlight (one is when fans get mad about the casting of a TV adaptation; another, when people get mad about breaking book spines). She also rounds up books that made her cry and that have major plot twists.Followers: 193,000Why to follow: Her page’s tagline is “shut up and read,” and its TikToks give you everything you need to do so. She has highlighted books with Middle Eastern and Southern Asian representation, and also made comical videos about her bookshelf organization obsession.Followers: 37,000Why to follow: This page works a bit like a 24-hour librarian who’s always around to help with a suggestion. Plus, the user gives advice on how to read multiple books at once and how to get a copy of a book before it’s released. At 9 a.m. on a cool Karachi morning I am nudged awake by a “slow-rise” alarm ringtone. I zombie-swipe through several text message notifications: Am I interested in hosting a reality-TV show sponsored by a hair removal cream? Do I have availability in the month of February for a drama series in Lahore? And, most urgently: “Mira ma’am car is waiting downstairs & please don’t forget to bring golden heels.”We are going to film a wedding sequence tonight for the comedy series for Pakistani television that I am shooting in Karachi.I shower, grab a banana and my golden heels as I head out the door, wheeling the small red suitcase I carry with me to set, and back, everyday.The driver smiles brightly. “Salaam!”“Walaikumassalaam!”When I walk into the rented home where we’ve been shooting for the last month, the makeup artist is sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. “Your eyes are puffy. Too much partying last night?” Tahir smiles slyly.“I was working, actually. I’m a writer too, remember?”“Oh, yah,” he exhales. “I want a signed copy.”“Sure.”“I’m going to wash my hands, don’t worry,” he says, flinging his cigarette over the neighbor’s wall. He knows I hate the reek of smoke.I settle into the makeup chair. Slowly, my eyes are made bigger by a combination of brown eye-shadow, black eye-liner, and fake lashes. My hair is blown-out, hair extensions clipped on. While Tahir works on my face, I read the script. I’m playing the meddling, micromanaging older sister of a family of four siblings. Our parents are long dead; I am determined to have my way, to arrange my siblings’ marriages, loves, lives. Slowly, the cast trickles in. Somebody borrows somebody else’s aloe vera eye patch. Someone talks of the fight they had with their spouse the night before. A senior actress says she’s put on too much weight. We rush to reassure her: she’s as glamorous and beautiful as ever.***In the fall of 2019 I got married under a giant redwood tree in Marin, California. My friends and family had flown in from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. As I looked out at the flushed, beaming faces of the guests, I saw my mother in the front row, resplendent in a purple shalwar kameez and traditional gold jewelry. In the row behind her, a friend from Burning Man—a woman with a soft corner for polyamory, MDMA, and electro-funk—clutched a faux-fur wrap. A minute ago, extolling my husband’s qualities, a friend had described him as “the most non-Pakistani Pakistani man Mira has ever met.” Friends hooted.My husband, Bilal, lives and works in San Francisco. Before getting married, my notion of home had been tethered to Pakistan. It’s where I’d grown up, the place I’d scurried back to just a few years after graduating from college in the States. My then-boyfriend and I broke up not long after I moved back—not because we had lost interest in one another but because we couldn’t find middle ground between Karachi and Oakland, where he lived. Several years later, the irony of getting married in the Bay Area was not lost on me.I wish I could say that moving to the Bay—where I now spend half the year—has been easy. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. without too much angst. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco; eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them; speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. “What is this I’m hearing?” she said. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco—such a pretty city—and be with him like a normal person?”“What about my acting career?” I said.“Take a theater class in Frisco.”Nobody calls it that, I wanted to say. “I’m a television actor,” I said. “I can’t just give it all up and start again. It’s a very competitive industry.”“You’re married now.”“So?”“So go and be with your husband!”Luckily, my husband understands and nurtures my desire to be as close to my job as possible. “It’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” he recently said to me. “When you have nothing to do…I worry.” He has seen me obsessively whipping up Sichuan food in our home in San Francisco; doing repetitive batches of laundry; watching TV for hours on my phone. He has seen me unmoored, restless, anxious.***In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t—you shouldn’t—teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India—under the grip of a new authoritarian populism—critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.But I viscerally understand Baldwin’s point: to disavow home—the simultaneous charm and frustration of it—is to live in denial about a very fruitful tension between love and freedom.I love the openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. But my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive. The moment I land in the city and the car begins speeding down Shah Rah-e-Faisal, one of Karachi’s longest boulevards, the city thrums with possibility: There is work to be done, and this port megacity is the best place to do it. A flock of pigeons always sits atop the Aisha Bawany Academy building, a girls’ school. Other buildings flank the road, but the pigeons have marked the school as their own. Anticipating their inevitable presence—in January, in scorching June, in October—has become a ritual, their fleeting company a kind of talismanic nod.In the last four years, my husband lost both his parents. “Growing up, Lahore was home,” he recently told me. “At some point, the U.S. became home. Now, with Amma and Abba gone, I feel permanently displaced.” I haven’t experienced the trauma and shattering grief of rapid parental loss. But I have seen my partner paralyzed with it, his emotional reserves depleted, his walls up. His words help me understand my own relationship with the shifting condition of home. After his mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Lahore, where he’d spent an idyllic childhood, became imbued with heaviness. Years before his mother died, his heart had carried the loss of home. Happy memories hurt, and were locked away. Unhappy memories summoned panic and guilt (for choosing to live and work in the U.S. while his mother lay sick in Pakistan). His parents’ deaths, far from freeing him from a sense that he needed to return to Pakistan, threw into relief his complicated relationship with the homeland. We got married not just in the Bay, but also in Lahore, where Bilal’s aunts and uncles enveloped him with love. I had anticipated that he would want to spend a few years in the U.S., but I hadn’t anticipated a life perennially on the move (going to Pakistan to work, shuttling to the Bay to be with my husband).This month, when my first book comes out, I will go on a virtual book tour; I will talk about the ways in which Pakistan animates my book, the ways in which my characters—an actress on the set of her first major TV show, best friends who agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret—negotiate personal freedom in a traditional society. The short stories are about the comedy and heartache of lives lived in the intense in-between.When the Zoom book events end, my mother will call. What did I have for dinner last night, she will want to know. Which friends did I see? Why is Biden not moving faster on climate change? Do I have fresh flowers in the house? I will patiently answer, but a piece of my heart will miss sitting next to her, feeding a fire, as we did in January, in Lahore. I will look out the window at Bilal working in the backyard, the sharp San Francisco sunlight hitting his laptop, obscuring his screen.A transcontinental life is difficult in the best of circumstances, but even more so during a pandemic. When international travel ground to a halt in March of last year, Bilal and I were separated for three months. Later in the year, when I flew from San Francisco to Karachi to resume work on a TV series, our time apart stretched interminably long, as people fell sick, and the shoot dragged on. My life too is unfolding in the intense in-between, one moment waking alone in my apartment in Karachi, the other a visitor in San Francisco. Bereft of people, what is home?Mira Sethi is the author of Are You Enjoying? a collection of short stories forthcoming from Knopf on April 21. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. 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You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: SCAD Heart Attack Survivor Warrior Awareness T-Shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long sleeve tee One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): It began with the house. It was the particular house, but it also was where the house was and where she discovered she wanted to be. It was a run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse.The house sat high on a tiny lot on Highland Street, which ran atop a hill that bordered a long expanse of grass and trees. It looked like a small, sloping park, but it was actually a cemetery, the old graves clustered in the southwest corner. Unless you were squeamish about graves—Sam wasn’t—the sloping green hill was quite pretty. Highland itself offered a wide view of downtown. You could see the steeples of churches, and you could see how the small city was in a valley surrounded by hills. You could even see the kidney shape of Onondaga Lake, although it was often partly obscured by low-hanging clouds. If you turned your head to the left, or if you looked out the side windows of the house, you could see Syracuse University up on another hill. You would locate it by the quilted low white bubble of the Carrier Dome (named for the nearly absent Carrier Corporation—all that remained were a handful of jobs, the dome, and Carrier Circle, a treacherous traffic roundabout that Sam hated). Soon after you spotted the dome you would notice the various spired and turreted campus buildings.The decision to leave her husband—the act of leaving, really—began the moment she made an offer on the house. It was a Sunday; Sam woke up at 5 a.m. She attributed this unnecessarily early waking to the approach of menopause. Her period still came each month, but odd things had started changing in her body, even her brain. One of which was suddenly becoming awake at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, her mind shaking off sleep with unnegotiable clarity, as if she had already drunk a cup of coffee. And just as with coffee, she felt alert, an adrenal burst, but she could also feel the fatigue underneath it all, the weariness. That morning the wood floor was cold against her bare feet, but she couldn’t find her slippers. It was still dark. She tried not to wake her husband. She used her phone to illuminate the way to the bathroom. She peed, flushed, washed. She brushed her teeth without looking in the mirror. She pushed up the blinds to peek outside. The sky was gradually lightening with the dawn, and half a foot of snow had fallen overnight. The sunrise that was creeping up now cast a pink and gold glimmer, and a little crust of ice on top of the snow glittered from the sky and from the streetlamps. The trees, the roofs of the houses, even the salt-crusted cars looked beautiful.Sam figured that she was the only person on earth who thought late-March snowstorms were wonderful, and this made her feel a bit proud of herself. Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life. For example, back when Sam used to shop the sales at the Talbots in DeWitt with the other suburban ladies of her class and age, she separated herself. Sure, Sam had discovered that the classic A-line or sheath dresses made of solid-colored ponte knits were so forgiving, so flattering (“flattering,” that tragic word) to a grotesque midlife misshapenness—a blurriness, a squareness, really. But despite shopping because of an “insider” email-blast notification of a super sale, Sam believed that she was different from the other women. Inside she was mocking the calibrated manipulations, mocking herself, noting the corporate branding and lifestyle implications of the preppy styles and colors. The classic plaids, the buttons on the sleeves, the ballerina flats evoking a tastefully understated sensibility. It even occurred to her that the other women could be having the same interior thoughts and that the idea of conformity—at least in modern America—was never consciously sought after. No one older than a teenager thought, I want this because everyone else has it. No, Sam knew that you were allowed to keep a vain and precious sense of agency. This was the very secret to consumerism working in a savvy, self-conscious culture. Her sense of resistance was as manufactured as her need to buy flattering clothing. Nevertheless (!), Sam also believed that her having such self-critical, self-reflexive thoughts as she shopped set her apart from the other women. Surely. So she still believed herself to be (however stealthily) an eccentric person, not suited to conventions of thought or sensibility.Lately this desire to be contrary to convention had taken on a new urgency well beyond clothes or matters of taste. An unruly, even perverse inclination animated her. It had been looking for a place to land, for something to fasten on. So now (not before), this odd inner state pushed her toward a highly destabilizing wildness (a recklessness) that she couldn’t suppress any longer.She pulled on the same clothes she had worn the day before: stretched-out jeans and a black cowl-neck sweater. She no longer wanted to open her closet full of clothes. Why did she need so many, so much? In the last few months, things that used to captivate her no longer did.She crept downstairs and made herself a coffee.It was Sam’s habit to check out the real estate listings online. She had the bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses. She knew many of the other people there also had no intention to buy but had come to snoop into other people’s lives or to calculate land values or to imagine a fantasy life brought on by the frame of fresh architecture. This last impulse made sense to her. She had even wanted, at one point, to study architecture (and history, and women’s studies, and literature), but she had talked herself out of it and she had gotten married and then pregnant instead. She settled for becoming an architectural amateur.Unusual old structures (Syracuse had many) excited her: They were a visible-but-secret code, the past rendered in materials that could be seen and touched. For example, the abandoned AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street. Its tiny perfect form sat on a sturdy, intact limestone foundation. Paint-peeled crumbling white brick rose into a bell tower next to a large Gothic-pointed stained-glass window. But the building was lost in the concrete dead zone around I-81, grown over with box-maple saplings and covered with graffiti, the windows long boarded up. It belonged to the oldest Black congregation in Syracuse, built 100 years ago to replace a structure at another site that dated to the 1840s, when it had been a part of the Underground Railroad. Now the church sat stranded and forgotten. Syracuse had so much history that it could neglect wide swathes of it. When Sam saw a building that no one else seemed to see anymore, she would stop her car, get out, walk around the perimeter, and even lay her hand on a brick as a form of communion and respect. Fascinating old buildings and houses, empty or still in use, called to her from all over the city. She sometimes drove out of her way just to glimpse one of her favorites. But open houses gave her the rare chance to go inside, which was a much more intimate experience. As soon as she crossed the threshold into a house’s space, she could feel it shape who she was—or would be—in some deep way. Whenever she had a chance to walk inside one, she did, which always worked as an act of imagination, an act she loved. What would it feel like to live here, wake up here, argue with your husband here?This open house intrigued her because it was cross-listed on an Instagram account for architecture nerds:Unique Arts and Crafts bungalow designed by Ward Wellington Ward in 1913. For sale for $38,000! Intrepid buyers only—needs complete rehab. Most original details intact. See link in bio for more #cheapoldhouses#saveoldstuff#bungalow#restoration#casementwindowsforthewinShe was the only fantasy lurker attending the open house at 110 Highland Street that Sunday morning.The house was falling apart. The house was beautiful.It had leaded-glass windows, built-in shelves, and hidden storage benches. Two of the benches were framed by wood-beamed closures (“the inglenook”) and sat at either end of (oh, what she longed for!) an elaborate tile-lined fireplace (“Mercer Moravian tiles”). Sam imagined sitting in the nook, gazing at the fire, reading a book. The tiles were dirty with layers of dust but still intact. She could pick out a narrative in the relief images. (“Saint George and the Dragon,” the agent said.) The clay finish was a rustic, uneven glaze, the colors pink, green, and white. She touched her fingertips to the tiles and felt an undeniable connection. Someone on some podcast had talked about “grounding.” It was when you walked outside with bare feet and let the earth connect with your body. It was supposed to right you, your circadian rhythms or something. Help you get over jet lag. Or maybe it was to mitigate the endocrine disruption of chronic toxic exposure. Or to counter EMF, the low level but constant electromagnetic waves from Wi-Fi and cellular towers. Or maybe all of that, grounding promoted as a systemic cure-all. Sam scoffed at the idea, even despised it as New Age crap, yet as her fingers touched the tiles, she felt grounded. There was no other word for it, as if a corrective current flowed from the house through the dusty tile and into her hand and, truly, her whole body. The tiles were set against patterned deep red brick topped by a mantel made of dark oak, also dirty but intact. Maybe it was Gustav Stickley or it was William Morris who wrote about the Arts and Crafts ideal, how the fireplace should be a work of everyday art. It looked handmade and warm, and its beauty was in its utility and simplicity: She was cold, she needed a fire. The hearth drew her in, invited her to sit. She now understood the fireplace as a form of secular worship. She imagined it would make her feel close to something elemental. (“Obviously, the chimney will have to be looked at.”) To keep her sanity over the long Syracuse winter, Sam needed this beautiful, old, heat-squandering open fire. At her house in the suburbs, they had a glass-fronted gas fireplace that gave off some regulated, efficient BTUs of heat and a low, exhausting fan hum. The gas flame had a cold blue at its center.“This house is on the historic register as the Garrett House. It even has a Wikipedia page. Designed in 1913 by the architect Ward Wellington Ward.”“Yes, I read that in the notice,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with him.”“Oh, good. So you know his houses are very special. Garrett had it built in 1913. After he and his wife died, it fell into neglectful hands, but none of the original details are ruined. Clearly it needs some TLC: a heating system, electrical updates, new roof, mold abatement. Possibly a chimney rebuild. Better drainage in the basement. Shore up the foundations. But it’s still a wonderful house, no?”“Yes,” Sam said.Later she drove to the big suburban Wegmans and bought some wild halibut, diced sweet potato, and triple-washed organic baby spinach for dinner. She also got her daughter’s favorite fruit, mango, and her husband’s favorite cereal, No-Grain Vanilla Granola, and several liter bottles of that German mineral water she liked. She took the groceries to their house. No one was home yet. And then, instead of cooking, she got in her car and drove back into the city. It was nearly six, and the sun was starting to go down. The sky was backlit, iridescent, spring bright, and as she drove she watched the clouds close to the horizon glow pink and orange. She drove back to the city because she had to see the house in this dusk light, this ridiculous, almost garish light. She crested the hill. She pulled into the house’s tiny driveway. The roofline was steep, and the shitty asphalt tiles were coming undone. But. The front and side windows faced the sunset. The city in all directions gleamed, and it looked as if an ocean lay beyond the clouds, some giant lake or shore. Ward Wellington Ward, this architect, he must have known. He thought of the sky and the trees as he designed his house; he knew how much you need those early-spring sunsets in Syracuse, even if they glisten off a foot of snow.She retrieved the business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.What drew her to the house was its nature: The house was a paradox, both rustic and elegant. It felt hand-constructed, personal. Yet it reeked of artifice, “Arts and Crafts” meant to evoke home and nostalgia through cozy appropriations of English cottages and, oddly enough, some idea of a country church. Also, the state of the house. Dirty, falling apart, empty for too long.It was wrecked. It was hers.She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.Excerpted from Wayward by Dana Spiotta, copyright © 2021. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. TikTok, an app dominated by Gen Z, is the place for a lot of things: You can discover emerging designers, partake in dance challenges, watch beauty tutorials, and even stream fashion shows. But there’s another space on TikTok that’s also taking off—let’s call it BookTok.Digital book clubs are increasing in popularity on the app. Various “bookfluencers” are creating content around their favorite reads, and developing accounts that are strictly devoted to book talk. There’s a page for virtually everyone’s tastes—whether you’re a mystery lover or diehard rom-com reader—and each is the perfect place to find a review on a book you’ve been eyeing, or maybe even rediscover some favorites. The power of #BookTok is not to be underestimated: Some TikTok book accounts, like @alifeofliterature, have featured old books and propelled them back onto best-seller lists; proving that Gen Z’s appetite for books is very much alive. Navigating the app can be a tiresome feat—there’s so much to discover!—but fear not: we at Vogue have rounded up a selection of BookTok pages that are well worth a follow. Spring is the perfect time to pick up a new book, after all—there are tons of new releases this season—so what are you waiting for? Below, the 8 bookfluencers to know.Followers: 212,000Why to follow: This page has a fun, curated take on book recommendations. Videos are broken down into categories like “books that will give you major flashbacks,” “books that made my world stop,” and “oh, you haven’t read the classics yet.” There’s a book suggestion for everything, no matter what you’re in the market for.Followers: 209,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s quick-fire book reviews are entertaining and honest. She’ll take a book like Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and entice you to pick it up. She also offers handy tips on how to save money when buying books.Followers: 82,000Why to follow: This BookTok page is less service-based, and more about funny takes on being a book lover in general (including the anti-social tendencies). The user also rates book covers by “how many shots it would take” for her to hook up with them.Followers: 288,000Why to follow: This book devotee frequently offers her recommendations, and makes funny TikToks about trying to find comfortable positions to read in and what happens after she’s done with a novel (hint: fan art is involved).Followers: 49,000 followersWhy to follow: This page’s tagline is “I like big books and I cannot lie,” need we say more? Its TikToks are broken down by categories such as “books with a strong female lead,” “books for true crime podcast fans,” and cheekier ones like “books to read based off your favorite baked goods.”Followers: 78,000Why to follow: This bookfluencer’s series of book pet peeves is a highlight (one is when fans get mad about the casting of a TV adaptation; another, when people get mad about breaking book spines). She also rounds up books that made her cry and that have major plot twists.Followers: 193,000Why to follow: Her page’s tagline is “shut up and read,” and its TikToks give you everything you need to do so. She has highlighted books with Middle Eastern and Southern Asian representation, and also made comical videos about her bookshelf organization obsession.Followers: 37,000Why to follow: This page works a bit like a 24-hour librarian who’s always around to help with a suggestion. Plus, the user gives advice on how to read multiple books at once and how to get a copy of a book before it’s released. At 9 a.m. on a cool Karachi morning I am nudged awake by a “slow-rise” alarm ringtone. I zombie-swipe through several text message notifications: Am I interested in hosting a reality-TV show sponsored by a hair removal cream? Do I have availability in the month of February for a drama series in Lahore? And, most urgently: “Mira ma’am car is waiting downstairs & please don’t forget to bring golden heels.”We are going to film a wedding sequence tonight for the comedy series for Pakistani television that I am shooting in Karachi.I shower, grab a banana and my golden heels as I head out the door, wheeling the small red suitcase I carry with me to set, and back, everyday.The driver smiles brightly. “Salaam!”“Walaikumassalaam!”When I walk into the rented home where we’ve been shooting for the last month, the makeup artist is sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. “Your eyes are puffy. Too much partying last night?” Tahir smiles slyly.“I was working, actually. I’m a writer too, remember?”“Oh, yah,” he exhales. “I want a signed copy.”“Sure.”“I’m going to wash my hands, don’t worry,” he says, flinging his cigarette over the neighbor’s wall. He knows I hate the reek of smoke.I settle into the makeup chair. Slowly, my eyes are made bigger by a combination of brown eye-shadow, black eye-liner, and fake lashes. My hair is blown-out, hair extensions clipped on. While Tahir works on my face, I read the script. I’m playing the meddling, micromanaging older sister of a family of four siblings. Our parents are long dead; I am determined to have my way, to arrange my siblings’ marriages, loves, lives. Slowly, the cast trickles in. Somebody borrows somebody else’s aloe vera eye patch. Someone talks of the fight they had with their spouse the night before. A senior actress says she’s put on too much weight. We rush to reassure her: she’s as glamorous and beautiful as ever.***In the fall of 2019 I got married under a giant redwood tree in Marin, California. My friends and family had flown in from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. As I looked out at the flushed, beaming faces of the guests, I saw my mother in the front row, resplendent in a purple shalwar kameez and traditional gold jewelry. In the row behind her, a friend from Burning Man—a woman with a soft corner for polyamory, MDMA, and electro-funk—clutched a faux-fur wrap. A minute ago, extolling my husband’s qualities, a friend had described him as “the most non-Pakistani Pakistani man Mira has ever met.” Friends hooted.My husband, Bilal, lives and works in San Francisco. Before getting married, my notion of home had been tethered to Pakistan. It’s where I’d grown up, the place I’d scurried back to just a few years after graduating from college in the States. My then-boyfriend and I broke up not long after I moved back—not because we had lost interest in one another but because we couldn’t find middle ground between Karachi and Oakland, where he lived. Several years later, the irony of getting married in the Bay Area was not lost on me.I wish I could say that moving to the Bay—where I now spend half the year—has been easy. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. without too much angst. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco; eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them; speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. “What is this I’m hearing?” she said. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco—such a pretty city—and be with him like a normal person?”“What about my acting career?” I said.“Take a theater class in Frisco.”Nobody calls it that, I wanted to say. “I’m a television actor,” I said. “I can’t just give it all up and start again. It’s a very competitive industry.”“You’re married now.”“So?”“So go and be with your husband!”Luckily, my husband understands and nurtures my desire to be as close to my job as possible. “It’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” he recently said to me. “When you have nothing to do…I worry.” He has seen me obsessively whipping up Sichuan food in our home in San Francisco; doing repetitive batches of laundry; watching TV for hours on my phone. He has seen me unmoored, restless, anxious.***In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t—you shouldn’t—teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India—under the grip of a new authoritarian populism—critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.But I viscerally understand Baldwin’s point: to disavow home—the simultaneous charm and frustration of it—is to live in denial about a very fruitful tension between love and freedom.I love the openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. But my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive. The moment I land in the city and the car begins speeding down Shah Rah-e-Faisal, one of Karachi’s longest boulevards, the city thrums with possibility: There is work to be done, and this port megacity is the best place to do it. A flock of pigeons always sits atop the Aisha Bawany Academy building, a girls’ school. Other buildings flank the road, but the pigeons have marked the school as their own. Anticipating their inevitable presence—in January, in scorching June, in October—has become a ritual, their fleeting company a kind of talismanic nod.In the last four years, my husband lost both his parents. “Growing up, Lahore was home,” he recently told me. “At some point, the U.S. became home. Now, with Amma and Abba gone, I feel permanently displaced.” I haven’t experienced the trauma and shattering grief of rapid parental loss. But I have seen my partner paralyzed with it, his emotional reserves depleted, his walls up. His words help me understand my own relationship with the shifting condition of home. After his mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Lahore, where he’d spent an idyllic childhood, became imbued with heaviness. Years before his mother died, his heart had carried the loss of home. Happy memories hurt, and were locked away. Unhappy memories summoned panic and guilt (for choosing to live and work in the U.S. while his mother lay sick in Pakistan). His parents’ deaths, far from freeing him from a sense that he needed to return to Pakistan, threw into relief his complicated relationship with the homeland. We got married not just in the Bay, but also in Lahore, where Bilal’s aunts and uncles enveloped him with love. I had anticipated that he would want to spend a few years in the U.S., but I hadn’t anticipated a life perennially on the move (going to Pakistan to work, shuttling to the Bay to be with my husband).This month, when my first book comes out, I will go on a virtual book tour; I will talk about the ways in which Pakistan animates my book, the ways in which my characters—an actress on the set of her first major TV show, best friends who agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret—negotiate personal freedom in a traditional society. The short stories are about the comedy and heartache of lives lived in the intense in-between.When the Zoom book events end, my mother will call. What did I have for dinner last night, she will want to know. Which friends did I see? Why is Biden not moving faster on climate change? Do I have fresh flowers in the house? I will patiently answer, but a piece of my heart will miss sitting next to her, feeding a fire, as we did in January, in Lahore. I will look out the window at Bilal working in the backyard, the sharp San Francisco sunlight hitting his laptop, obscuring his screen.A transcontinental life is difficult in the best of circumstances, but even more so during a pandemic. When international travel ground to a halt in March of last year, Bilal and I were separated for three months. Later in the year, when I flew from San Francisco to Karachi to resume work on a TV series, our time apart stretched interminably long, as people fell sick, and the shoot dragged on. My life too is unfolding in the intense in-between, one moment waking alone in my apartment in Karachi, the other a visitor in San Francisco. Bereft of people, what is home?Mira Sethi is the author of Are You Enjoying? a collection of short stories forthcoming from Knopf on April 21. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. 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