Always Almost There

Always Almost There

I remember a faculty member telling someone in my class who had finally found a room to stay in, about a month into the start of our program, something about how she can probably finally take the big city in, now that she has a place to be oriented from.
February 26, 2024 — Yasmeen Khaja
A Hard Time

A Hard Time

I spent a couple of months thinking about a single replacement desk. How big would it be? What material would it be made out of? Would it have any storage? How high would the desk be, taking into consideration the chair I already have, and my preference for the way my elbows would eventually rest for hours at a time? Even without a desk, these are questions that any good work requires: context and observation.
January 22, 2024 — Yasmeen Khaja
The Potential of Things

The Potential of Things

Commitment is a concept. As in, the advice that I get about committing to something is conceptual. Actual advice sounds more like “We should both probably just do it,” which my friend said to me over Instagram when I told her that I think about writing all the time.
December 11, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
A Note on Remembering

A Note on Remembering

It was, like most things tend to be in hindsight—and yet very rarely during—a beautiful, ripe, hard, and hopeful time.
November 05, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
A Meditation on Change

A Meditation on Change

I have been glued to the weather app, desperately looking for smaller numbers that I can revel in because frankly, I was still sweating outside, shivering cold in the air conditioned indoors, and unable to find pleasure in the supposedly-changing weather. For a while, everything had been feeling, suffocatingly, the same.
October 08, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
Fluently, Not Fluency

Fluently, Not Fluency

A language, of course, is not only its words. It is how those words work together. It is what syntax can communicate, and it is the meaning that is delivered when it all comes together.
August 25, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
Conversations in Transit

Conversations in Transit

 I think everyone yearns to have a fleeting conversation with someone they don’t know. In an instant, you can puncture the fabric of disillusionment. There’s power in that.
July 30, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
The Incompleteness of Fact

The Incompleteness of Fact

Knowing something is ecological—it depends on the company we keep, the articles we read, whether we pay attention to our surroundings while walking in a city or if we tune them out. What I know, and what you know, are necessarily different.
July 03, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
Planning a Summer in Hindsight

Planning a Summer in Hindsight

Make summer plans. Open your notes app or take a pad of sticky notes. On any surface, write the words you want to bring into your world for this summer. Action words like ‘Play’ work just as well as abstract nouns like ’Theory.’ Define your summer with ideas in phrases, sentences, or even photos. Then go live it.
June 05, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
How Do You Look?

How Do You Look?

Getting dressed is a basic human pleasure, and even I can confess that style is the most charming when it is expressed. But the reliance on appearance as a fundamental, nay, lasting expression of who someone is, is disaffecting. My leggings simply don’t deliver. Did they change the way I was to be perceived? Maybe. It would be socially naive to suggest they wouldn’t. But what matters is if I can come to terms with that.
April 30, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
Amidst Plenty

Amidst Plenty

Abundance is not a bad thing, until it is multiplied into a material state of overabundance. It becomes hard to distinguish the former when we adapt to seeing the latter as a constant norm, as when the lack of extra plated food becomes abnormal… it becomes not enough.
March 26, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja
A Day on Paper

A Day on Paper

But I’m also a regular realist who, at the end of the day, knows that it’s just normal to be living a human life in tune with a two-steps-forward-one-step-back choreography. I’m not interested in the purely ultra-human, or in the achievement of optimal results. I’m interested in the complicated and interpersonal everyday that it takes trying to get there.
February 12, 2023 — Yasmeen Khaja