I am from Vancouver, Canada, which, aside from being a danger zone for anyone with a sushi addiction, has a reputation of being pretty expensive as far as cities go. Sure, it’s no London or Singapore, but its real estate is crazy expensive — the average price of detached homes in the city is $2.6…
How to make Brigadeiros – A not-so-amazing cooking lesson
Today, I made brigadeiro. For those of you who don’t know me well, I am not good at cooking. At all. About a year ago, I tried to make beijinhhos — a typical Brazilian dessert that looks like this: This is what I did: Yes, I burned it. To be fair, it wasn’t bad at…
Hola, Me Llamo Genaro
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡HOOOLLLLLAAA GEENARRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOO!!!!!!! ¿Como Estaasss? – my coworker says as I walk into his cube. The way the R rolls off his tongue (pun totally intended) is with such emphasis it sounds like a car stuttering to a complete stop. No matter how many times I tell him and countless others in the office, “You don’t…
The Prototype Theory of Love and Attraction
This post is about love. This post is about science. This post is also about psychology, and the nonsensical (but extremely fun) theories you can come up in the field. For the next minutes, allow me to guide you through a psychological theory I have been working on, and one that I wish to put…
Refugees and Jesus: The Meaninglessness of Christianity without Love
[I]s it not already and in itself alarming that Europe’s Christian culture is barely in a position to uphold Europe’s own Christian values? With these words, Victor Orban justified his government’s resistance to welcoming those refugees presently streaming into Europe on the grounds that the influx of Muslim migrants is a threat to so-called “Christian values.”…
Understanding the psychoanalytic theory of dreams
This is the first post of our Academic Dialogues series, to be continued on a weekly basis. In this series, we attempt to revisit some of our favourite (and typically obscure) topics learned in previous classes. This post is about dream interpretation and psychoanalytic theory. If you know nothing about these topics and would like to be…
“My Life”: Stills from an imaginary Netflix series
I seem to take some weird pictures with my phone, a lot of which seem almost cinematic — if my life was interesting enough to have movie (or better, a Netflix series) made out of it. So anyway, if indeed my life was made into a series, these are some of the still shots you would find in this week’s…
Self-Reflection, Weird Cat Metaphors and Growing Up
I open my eyes as the alarm blares in the background, I blink, I squint at the sun accosting my sleepy and unprepared face, and burrow deeper into the blankets, hiding my head under a pillow. The alarm continues to blare and I hiss in annoyance, rising slowly. As I lash out my arm to…
On moving home after college, especially when that home is in another country
Going to a Top-20 university has the tendency to instill in students just a tad bit of arrogance. Right off the bat, on Frosh-O weekend (now “welcome weekend” at Notre Dame, because somehow it is so offensive to say “freshman” these days), first-year students are told, “you’re the most accomplished incoming class this university has…
Memory as the Intersection of Past, Present and Future
If you read Rafa’s “Theories of Time Pt. I: The Fundamental Paradox of Nostalgia & the Perils of the Treasure Chest,” I would just like to commend you for putting up with the type of hyper-intellectualized, abstract discourse with which I have put up for the past four years—the type in which we can take a very simple…
Lehrmda 