Tag: Portfolio
Listomania
by The Cowl Editor on December 6, 2022
Portfolio
Best Study Tips For Finals
- Go to your professors’ office hours
- Don’t procrastinate
- Drink water
- Meet up with friends from your class
- Leave your phone off while studying
- Get lots of sleep!
- EAT (Nutrition is key!)
- Go to the library and steal someone’s area in the quiet corner
- Don’t put too much pressure on yourself
- Use the Pomodoro Method
- Exercise (or do yoga/meditate)
Tiff and Earl
by The Cowl Editor on December 6, 2022
Portfolio
Yo Tiff and Earl,
I forgot to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday for my family and friends. What should I do?
Sincerely,
Last-Minute Shopper
Hey Last-Minute Shopper,
If you walk down the street to the Dollar Tree, you can find some great last-minute gifts at a reasonable price! You can get as many gifts as possible without breaking your bank account in half, and make sure you also buy some cute wrapping paper, too!
Best,
Tiff
Hey Last-Minute Shopper,
Just write some apology letters and take the L.
Sincerely,
Earl
Oxygenated
by Sara Junkins '23 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Portfolio
Most of the statues in Riz’s Museum were everyday folk. Artwork unknown to the world, with titles substituted for numbers on the description plaques, but I knew them all, and so did my father.
Ruth the Beggar on her knees looking up with imploring eyes. The emaciated children in tattered vestments. Marcus the Musician who plays on street corners with an open violin case full of passersby’s pennies. All of them homeless sojourners we took in. All with stories that must not be forgotten.
But they are not always in this timeless stance. They are just as animated as you and I, but only at night, after all the visitors are gone, after they have given all that they can.
All elements, statues, sculptures, and paintings function as one system, one forest interconnected by the roots.
The museum sustains. Fulfills souls with spiritual oxygen. So in exchange for participating in gifting life, life is given.
Transformed to stone through cloudy mist by morning light and back to flesh in a billow of fire by night.
My father, the caretaker, brought them here. To this magical place. In exchange for home. It’s much easier to paint a picture of a house than to construct one…
At twilight, the sunset’s flames illuminate through stained glass and set aglow the fire of life in the midst of darkness’s onslaught. Doors open. Paintings become transparent. A world awaits within the walls, beyond the frames. True home, only once accessible through imagination, becomes manifest.
Basically, we ran a mystical form of Habitat for Humanity. I was given the task of painting some of the houses. Not because I’m the best artist, but because I wanted to help. I wanted these people to have exactly what they wanted after a life of hardship. This was my service work.
I was tasked with creating Ruth’s house. She was the newest addition to our collection, our family. I was nearly done with all the rooms, but the garden was taking some time. She requested a swing and an array of flowers, some of which I had never heard of before. It still astounded me that blotches of blue I called primroses and dabs of pink that would be dahlias would soon be someone’s reality.
My brother was working on a playground for the children, but this one had slides made of rainbows and clouds instead of sandboxes.
Everything was well, until one day it was not. A new group came in with my father. He always saw the potential, saw the goodness in people, but something felt off to me. A gaggle of guys from the city sauntered around as he explained the magic of this mountain museum. They paid him no attention, and never met his gaze.
“Troublemakers,” I thought, but my conscience instantly rebuked me. Of course, it’s not wise to judge a book by its cover.
Yet the following evenings, my initial instincts proved right. Fight after fight with the other inhabitants. Disturbance after disturbance. Disruption of our peaceful haven.
A bug in the system, toxin in the roots, a poison in the museum. The museum’s pure balance did not react well with incendiary hearts.
As the orange flames streamed in through the stained glass, they missed the marks, everywhere catching fire.
Hearts ablaze with fright, the protocol seared into our minds…one minute before all oxygen is cut off…
Breathless, we scramble to the closest exit and watch our precious mountain museum alight with unwanted luminescence. Then, the light dies and the silent night overtakes us. A death and sudden revival. All will be preserved and intact.
Ruth and the children shake, and the band of villains disappear into the mountain mist. The museum would spit them out again if they dared to come back, unless they had a change of heart, of course.
Tonight, we decide to sleep beneath the caress of starlight, on our Hushabye Mountain as our haven restores itself. The ballad resonates in the whispers of the trees, “the winds of night so softly are sighing, soon they will fly your troubles to sea.”
We slept with hope in our hearts.
Moonlit Painting
by Meg Brodeur '24 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Co-Editor
Portfolio
Through a curtainless bay window, the moonlight cascaded into our flat and illuminated your face with an ethereal shimmer. You asked me to paint you a picture of my future. So, with a grin teasing my lips, I told you to pose for a portrait. Rolling your eyes in feigned exasperation, you sat back on our flea market diamond, a shabby, chic, emerald sofa with threadbare upholstery. Although your face donned a crimson blush, your eyes remained unabashed. You were looking upon my own giddy expression with affection and something else. Something closer to admiration than infatuation. Something drifting past fondness and into a realm of inexplicable bliss. I brought my brush to the canvas, my hands shaking at the possibility of us being a dwindling flame. I worried we were teetering on the edge of forever and nevermind. But with each brushstroke, I began to gradually accept your devotion. Studying the intricate details beyond your silhouette, I confirmed that you weren’t just a mirage of my lifelong daydream. You weren’t merely a figment of my imagination, appearing out of the flickering candles and illuminated by the bright autumn moon. I reached out to touch the perfect little scars on your hands and watched fondly as your calloused palm pressed against my own. Our fingers came together like a lavender spindle intertwined with a sunflower blossom. Serene and calm, your lavender aura blended with my sunflower soul to melt away the prickers I manifested from my own anxiety. And even though I knew my thorns would grow back, that moment of reprieve meant everything. It meant that peace wasn’t a farfetched desire, but an inevitable part of my future with you. That wave of tranquil energy would find its way back to me in a rhythmic ebb and flow. So, I kept painting that picture of you, savoring the way your warm eyes shimmered in the autumn moon and candlelight.
Born To Be Middle-Aged
by Fiona Clarke '23 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Creative Non-Fiction
I have forgiven but not forgotten the senior who, a few weeks ago, asked me what grade I was in, in a tone clearly indicating her conviction that I must be at least two grades below her. With prayers, I smothered my immediate impulse to make a face like a sleep paralysis hag and bellow, “DO I LOOK SO YOUNG NOW?” Instead, like one of Jane Austen’s more polite heroines, I attempted to answer her as sweetly and blandly as possible, and life went on. But I have not forgotten.
I don’t know whether it’s that I have a baby face or that I act like a bug-eyed idiot fresh out of the juvenile hall or both, but whatever the reason, much to my chagrin and confusion, it’s been a recurring theme of my penultimate semester at Providence College that I should be mistaken for being younger than I am. I’ve been informed that I should be flattered when this happens, but I have not yet managed to be. I was even informed by some ghoul who, like my roommate, had clearly been watching a lot of Law and Order: SVU that I should be “extra happy” if people think I’m younger than I am because of how highly youth is valued in women. But after all, as the old man on the porch says in It’s a Wonderful Life, “Youth is wasted on the wrong people!” Maybe I’ll be flattered if, in five or ten years, my age is still underestimated, but here and now I still think wistfully of the one gray hair I found a few years ago and fondly anticipate being middle-aged.
Happily, there’s some evidence that I was born for middle age, or at least for what I imagine middle age to be. I’ve always been behind by months or years on pop culture and am unlikely to catch up soon; I don’t really check the internet—a phrase my much savvier younger sister has informed me is “weird” (“You don’t ‘check the internet’ like you check your email!”). I don’t know what’s on the New York Times bestseller list, but I do know what books I’m going to give my children to read. I recently spent the weekend fixing a table I found on the side of the road—we’re talking sanding, stripping paint, sanding again, staining, and staining again. Today I think maybe I’ll hang up a picture or two. It’s the high life for me and my baby face.
For Growing up in Rain
by Max Gilman '25 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Co-Editor
Portfolio
For grinded-teeth car rides; For growing up.
For being beaten into pavement; To prove a point.
For oily cat piss stains beneath the bed; For abandonment.
For coins and green paper; To live in a shadow.
For low-tide seas; For a shiny shell that breaks in a year.
Litter lent my nose the scent nostalgia
The other day and I refuse to see it pass,
But cometh the wind—
Cometh change,
Immortal is the fleeting day.
For weathered forehead scars; For fathers.
For ibuprofen bottles; To kill an ache.
For peeled orange slices; For open skies.
For confined education; To warp a nation.
For teaching gender; For control.
For suns that set orange, on shady beach sides
For love beneath umbrellas, that fades, but never dies.
Listomania
by The Cowl Editor on December 6, 2022
Portfolio
Things To Do To Make Yourself Feel Accomplished (Besides Running A Marathon)
- Submitting an essay
- Crossing things off a to-do list
- Sticking to a New Year’s Resolution
- Hitting 10K steps every day
- Making your bed in the morning
- Finishing a water bottle
- Getting out of bed
- Showering
- Getting an interview/job offer
- Actually showing up to your classes
- Doing something creative
- Doing well on a test you thought you failed
Up the tree
by Connor Rohan '24 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Portfolio
Up the tree, down the tree. Up the tree, down the tree. Freeze. There are eyes on me. If I don’t move, then I won’t be in danger. Up the tree…where’s the food? Shit, I don’t have any food. That’s not good. Down the tree again, and across the yard. There’s gotta be food somewhere. I was sure I had some, but I don’t know where it went. Keep crossing the yard. Freeze. What’s that noise? It’s loud. The large, roaring monster consuming the grass before me. It hasn’t seen me yet. I’m still safe. Crap, it’s looking at me. Run away. The little versions of those monsters chase me. Try to catch me to touch me, put their weird looking sausage mandibles all over my body. They call to me in words I don’t understand. I just stare back at them. They do realize I don’t speak their language, right? No matter how high pitched their voices get, I cannot understand them, unlike that tiny hairy beast that yells at me constantly, telling me to get the hell out and that it’s his home and that he’ll kill me. He says it so positively, yet his words are filled with malice. Where’s the food? The monsters are inside but thankfully they did something right and left a huge container of food outside. Seems like kind of a waste, but I’m not complaining. The smells mesh together to form something not very pleasant, but hey, food is food. Take the food, go back across the yard, and up the tree. I’m now safe in my home.
Caitlin and I: An Imitation of “Borges and I” by Jorge Luis Borges
by Caitlin Bartley '24 on December 6, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Portfolio
TW: Eating Disorder, Bulimia
I resent Caitlin for her name. It means pure, from the Gaelic, and she wears it like her Catholic school uniform. Tights, white collared polo, and a pleated skirt. I hate that skirt; the way Caitlin rolls it so that she doesn’t look like a prude but keeps it right above the knee so that she doesn’t look like a slut. I don’t believe in organized religion, but I find my body in a church when Caitlin decides, reciting random words until they sound like the gibberish of prayer.
I pick my cuticles until my skin rips and wear my hair in frizzy braids while Caitlin paints her nails in a French manicure and spends too much money on a haircut. She speaks to give correct answers and affirmations while my thoughts are held captive behind her lips, firmly pressed together, making them thin and pale. If I were to purge my opinions, would it feel just like the first time Caitlin tried to purge her dinner, a slight burning in the throat followed by short-lived satisfaction? See, she doesn’t always have control over my impulses. Our impulses. One day, I will slowly erode her from the inside out. There’s no reality in which purity exists, Caitlin.
The honey-colored highlights she got at seventeen have finally grown out. “Nothing gold can stay.” I read her that poem when she went to college and got a C in chemistry, no longer the honors student that Mommy likes to brag about. Her hair is darker now and some days it falls out in clumps in the shower, clogging the drain. She goes to sleep with it wet and cold on her pillow and doesn’t run a brush through it in the morning. She stops using her name.
Tiff and Earl
by The Cowl Editor on December 6, 2022
Portfolio
Hey Tiff and Earl!
As much as I love my family, I’m really nervous to go home for Thanksgiving. My family is going to ask me a ton of questions about everything, and I really don’t know what I want to do with my future/life. Any advice to help me feel a little better?
Sincerely,
Quarter Life Crisis Victim
Hey QLCV,
As cliché as this sounds, you still have plenty of time to think about what you want to do. People change their careers all the time, whether they’re 20 or 50! If you want to ease your family’s worries, you can always tell them you’re considering a few options like grad school or working after you finish your degree. Everyone’s path is different, and I’m sure you’ll find your niche eventually!
Best of Luck!
Earl
Dear Victim,
My deepest sympathies, but it’s time to make up the lie of your life. Say you want to be a snake charmer in the CIA; say you’re the real Jerry Seinfield; say you want to donate all your organs and have porcine substitutes installed. Whatever it is, stick with it until everyone believes you. It’ll blow up in your face eventually, but that’s another Thanksgiving’s problem.
Sweet turkey dreams,
Tiff