Natalia Queenan

During my last few years at Columbia, the times I regret most were those of self-isolation. There were moments when my anxieties felt too overwhelming and unimportant to voice out loud, especially if other humans were present. Most of these moments were followed by spontaneous overshares to the right humans, which made them feel much more manageable.

After my banana bread manifesto on radical empathy was published, I spent the day extremely grateful for the kind responses, especially by those close to me. I spent the rest of the week making wild logical leaps while criticizing myself and my friendships. I started wondering if my most distinct and important personality trait was giving, and if the friends I had were perpetually expecting gifts of care.

Prem Thakker is a junior in Columbia College studying history, hailing from Grand Forks, North Dakota. If you would like to hang out, he’d love to take a walk in Morningside Park, share a meal at a dining hall, or toss a Frisbee with you. You can also find him on Twitter @prem_thakker. His column, Colon, Closed Parentheses, runs alternate Mondays.

I take bananas from the dining hall whenever I go, wait for them to ripen, and bake banana bread. For me, baking is a social act, a gesture of care without expectation, an attempt at nourishing the relationships around me. My apartment always smells like sugar, my peers are well-fed at least once a week, and my friends know well that there’s no pick-me-up like simple carbohydrates after a panic attack. From where I stand, this small act of domesticity is met with awestruck appreciation.

After admission to this great university, you walk through those looming iron gates, establishing your personal residence on an island of academia. In the foreground, Butler Library asks you to choose from the wealth of knowledge it contains: Homer? Plato? Vergil? From which (old, white, and male) philosophical perspective will you construct your opinions—that is, until you discover a flirtier, more intersectional lens (read: bell hooks)?

Each time my 10-year-old sister calls me, I jump a little. She’s not old enough to have a cell phone, I think, and I hope that it’s going to be a casual conversation. Usually, she tells me about her essay assignments, asks me to clarify certain points of Greek history and geometry, and complains about our little brother. Most nights, our mother is still coming home late.

The first time I saw a Facebook birthday fundraiser, I nearly dropped my phone. My stomach turned over and goosebumps covered my arms. You may be thinking this is excessively dramatic—you’re probably right. Still, for some odd reason, a post which ultimately benefited a good charity still made me feel gross. I’ve thought about it, and concluded that this gross feeling was caused by the performative friendship that our generation gravitates toward.

I’ve been searching for the definition of “home” for a long time. There is, of course, the surface-level definition, which poses “home” as synonymous to “house.” It simply classifies a home as a permanent place of dwelling and removes any emotional connotation. The adjective “homey” implies warmth, comfort, and an intrinsic sense of familiarity. Yet, describing a home as homey is repetitive—so what specific characteristics attach us to our living spaces? How does a place provoke intrinsic feelings of comfort, familiarity, and warmth?

Everyday, I walk by St. John’s on my way to campus, and the pure, driving force behind cathedrals never fails to fascinate me. The stained glass is scientifically impressive, the flying buttresses are architecturally interesting, and the high ceilings are an HGTV dream. The physical features of a beautiful church are incredible on their own, but the building process is truly enigmatic. So many people, working tirelessly and altruistically to construct a specific, extravagant shrine they never quite see to fruition. This work is a product of faith, a selfless declaration of belief and morality; it is incredibly difficult to translate to the modern, secular world. Perhaps, this resonates with the difficult placement that religion finds in contemporary society—our culture believes strongly in empirical data and individuality, which disallows blind faith in something larger than humanity.

In Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology at Barnard, we learned about two theories that attempt to explain the evolution of eukaryotic cells. The older, more traditional view was discovered by a man, and is founded in aggression; it tells of a war between mitochondrial cells and cytoplasmic cells. The mitochondria were absorbed into a larger cell after a struggle for power. Somehow, a symbiotic relationship was accidentally produced from this initial narrative of conquest. However, this theory overlooks necessary details in the cells structure—it fails to explain the system as a collective whole.