Vivi Hyacinthe

Meghan Trainor, as well as two-thirds of the population, exhibit a disregard for the power and agency granted to them by the hard work of those who came before them. Roughly one-third of eligible adults voted in the 2014 midterm elections. The rest of their neighbors and peers relinquished the power granted to them by the 15th Amendment and 250 years of war and refinement. And just as the battle for gender equality enters the ring for the public's tragically short attention span, Trainor's ballad to her future husband, "Dear Future Husband," reinforces the notion that women don't truly live until they acquire a new surname.

This is for the high school English teacher who pulled me out into the hallway to ask me if I plagiarized a paper that had received an A.

That's a lie. The anecdote, I mean. I would never say something like that out loud—my life is not an episode of some pitiful laugh-track sitcom. But the statement itself has some cold truth to it. Columbia can be a lonely place.

Neil Patrick Harris opened up this year's Oscar ceremony with a largely accepted truth: The Academy praises only the best and whitest actors in the industry. As I began to feel my brain cells abandoning me while waiting for the awards part of the broadcast, I reviewed the nominations for the only category that people actually remember: Best Picture. To the chagrin of nine-year-old me, who wanted to be an acclaimed movie star worthy of her own Disney sitcom, this year's Best Picture nominees revealed a disheartening trend of exclusively white male protagonists. I embarked on the small detour of editing the taglines for the fictional nominations to make them gender neutral:

My pill bottle is ashamed of me.