Commentary

<p>I’m an awkward potato. I try to avoid speaking to my crush in public because my brain shuts down. I start speaking in broken English and I can’t meet his eyes. Any chance at a relationship crash and burns.  With COVID, dating apps became less about meeting up as soon as possible and more about [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I rise abruptly. It must be all that pent-up excitement. Today is my first day of university. I saunter over to the campus, laptop in hand, ready to take the campus by storm. It is one of the top universities in the country, the University of Lagos, my future looks bright, it&#8217;s going to be a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>If you’re a theatre kid like myself, you probably look forward to that one special day in June, the Tony Awards. They ignite a wave of excitement every year, but when they didn&#8217;t take place this summer, I was disappointed but understood why. Turns out they are happening, but just a little bit later. Because Broadway closed in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Saturday morning I woke up with a pain in my jaw that I have been experiencing for a few days. After taking an Advil I got on with my morning and drove to the house of physic medium  Shianne Doucette.  When I arrived at Doucette’s, she welcomed me in and let me get comfortable on [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I was 10 the first time I listened to Eddie Van Halen. I was zapping through TV channels when all of a sudden a tall, scruffy-looking, long-haired rocker with a sparkling red, white, and black guitar on a local music channel caught my eye. The first thing that came to my mind was, “how can he [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When I heard of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, my heart stopped with fear. She fought for so long to hold the United States Supreme Court seat and keep Donald Trump at bay. What now? How much more turmoil is my country going to be in?  As an American, the last four years have been hell, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>“In my culture, death is not the end, it’s more of a stepping off point.” These were the words of the first Black-led Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, the Black Panther, played by the late Chadwick Boseman. His death on Aug. 28 due to colon cancer sent the world and the Black community into immeasurable grief. Boseman will be [&hellip;]</p>

<p>For six months, this is the breathtaking, rural landscape I have woken up to every morning.  After loading the last box into Dad’s pickup, it hit me. I was going back to Fredericton for the first time since COVID-19 hit New Brunswick. If you told me last September my first-year would end with a global pandemic, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Warning: This commentary contains graphic and abusive content and derogatory and misogynistic language. From late 2018 until early 2020, up to 260,000 people entered a fee-based chat room called Nth room on a messaging application, Telegram. They would pay up to $1,200 USD in Bitcoins to access abusive and sexual content and the more you [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I want you to think back to the last time you went somewhere without your phone. I don’t mean the “Oh shit I drove to the grocery store and forgot it at home” type of thing. I mean, when did you last go out the door and leave it sitting on the counter?  Can you [&hellip;]</p>

<p>If you told me in my first year at St. Thomas University that when I graduated, I would be managing the student newspaper during a world-wide pandemic, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since STU announced they were cancelling in-person classes on March 13, everything changed, and not just at STU. We had to move The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>My love story with The Aquinian started as one of those love-at-first-sight moments you see in movies. I went to my first story meeting not knowing what to expect. I felt intimidated to be in the presence of these upper years that looked so knowledgeable and put together (eventually, when I became one, I realized they [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I&#8217;m the student who sits in the front of the class but never says a word. It&#8217;s like an invisible hand wraps around my throat to stop the words from coming out. My arms feel like lead so I can&#8217;t raise my hand. Even thinking about speaking up makes my chest grow tight. So, I [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Being Editor-in-Chief of The Aquinian during the federal election, rising Indigenous tensions in Canada and a global pandemic hasn’t been easy but it’s been worth it. We&#8217;ve told stories that don&#8217;t always get heard, and been a platform for voices that need to be listened to.   This year, I’ve stressed over the meaning of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Content warning: This story discusses an eating disorder. After months of removing all weight-loss-related content from my Instagram, it started appearing on my news feed again. But this time, quarantine style. “The quarantine 15,” “quarantine diet plans,” “how to not gain weight during a pandemic,” “what I’m going to look like after this is over,” [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A week into self-isolation, I decided to watch a Netflix docuseries about the porn industry called Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On.  I wasn’t surprised when the series said 40 per cent of teenagers learned more about sex from watching porn than what they’re taught in school.   High school sex education is like the scene from [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When I think of the word home, I think of Saturday lunches with my parents and my dog at my home in Quito, Ecuador. My pa, ma, ñaño, my brother and I sit at the kitchen table in our pyjamas and we can see the city and the mountains surrounding it from the kitchen. Mom has [&hellip;]</p>

<p>To anyone and for everyone. People who get bullied a lot will fuck up their own lives sometimes just to feel like they can make a difference. This couldn’t be any more true for my buddy Jameson. He introduced himself to me in Grade 2 as a kid with a tracheotomy tube sticking out and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>On Dec. 31, 2019, the first official case of COVID-19, or the coronavirus, was reported in Wuhan, China. Since then, much has changed, and a world of roughly eight billion people have descended into pandemonium. As I write this from my home, let’s be sure that in times like these we do not forget the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The second time I came to Fredericton felt like the first. All the anxiety, stress and waiting during the final years of high school were part of a journey that was about to begin. Now, this journey is at its end. I enrolled at St. Thomas University knowing I wanted to study journalism. My first [&hellip;]</p>