Essays

San Francisco is a NorCal city brimming with reasons to go on walks and sponge up the city — all while reflecting on moments of gratitude. Oh, San Francisco: You’re such a wondrous and wild, magical and maddening, delicate and duplicitous creation. I celebrate your individuality daily; I also bemoan your dystopian quirks quite often. But you’re home for me: My touchstone that I’m forever grateful to have stumbled upon. As you know, I began our relationship while residing in my car. On an emotionally charged whim, I packed up my 2008 Prius and came your way by going west from Austin, Texas, still plastered on the promise poured by a hefty, albeit temporary, content contract. That nearly 2,000-mile drive — the longest one-way road trip I’ve ever taken and will probably ever take — would pr...

And we, as a society, failed miserably. And we continue to fumble over our misteps. Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale boasts, arguably, one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema by Brendan Fraser as a severely morbidly obese (a medical term used by the United States National Library of Medicine) man named Charlie, who suffers from major depression and binge eating; the performance recently nabbed Fraser an Oscar for "Best Actor" during the 2023 ceremony. The film itself, as a whole, is spectacular, as well, and an unprecedented look at the link between these two disorders and how they can lead to severe morbid obesity. However, some critics have ignorantly misjudged this film as a misrepresentation of the morbidly obese, focusing solely on the film as a portrayal of the cond...