We’re excerpting parts of Meredith Turits’ second novel, which is still in progress. This is part three of three.
MY LESBIAN LONG-DISTANCE OPEN RELATIONSHIP
WHEN I MET my girlfriend, she couldn’t tell what gender I was and I couldn’t tell what country she was from. It was October 2009, and we’d both found ourselves at the only lesbian bar in Prague, where we were both studying abroad.
ISSUE TWO EDITORIAL STATEMENT
With our version of Modern Love, Millennials Magazine Issue 2, we’re not going to give you any answers. What you will find here are questions and arguments, searches for the meaning of intimate relationships in a time where closeness is more easily conducted in a chat window than in person, rather than conclusions about The Way We Love Now. We don’t know how we love now. We’re not even sure we know how to love, much less do it online.
CONSIDER THE ENGAGEMENT RING
In the early 2000s, it was considered stupid to marry in your early 20s. Whose idea was that?
LONG DIVISION
My parents divorced when I was 13 years old, which is arguably the worst possible time in a kid’s life for parents to get divorced.
NOT OKAY CUPID
I hate online dating. Which is odd, since there are multiple reasons why I should be the poster child for the online dating movement.
ON LISTENING
Many of us young’ns are tempted to look anywhere but old media for lessons in how to get ourselves jobs and–-if we care enough–-keep this industry alive. But there is so much to learn from people like Kevin, a man who might just epitomize old media. He made it his business to become a total expert in his field of state politics and always had a good question to ask. He knew that the story wasn’t about him, but always thought about the context of the stories to which he contributed. And, most importantly, he offered his kindness and his knowledge to the people around him.
NOT OUR CITY: PART 1
When we started fucking, since that’s all it was, he was up front.
WHY I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT
I HATE TAYLOR Swift. I hate her for how bad she was on SNL, and for the fact that she’s dating #4 on my Freebie Celebrity Fucklist, and because of, you know, that hair. But mostly I hate her because her songs are totally shit, in the sense that they are all kitsch, literally pre-digested. Listening to a Taylor Swift song is like doing lunch, baby-penguin-style: every bite of krill hawked, already chewed, into your waiting mouth. There’s nothing to unpack in her work, no analysis to be done, no production of thought; every square inch of Swift’s oeuvre is nothing but trope chewed over so many times it is, by definition, pabulum.
MILLENNIAL MOTHER
There is no graceful way to approach motherhood at seventeen. There is no easy way to share the news with your wide-eyed friends and worried adults. I approached motherhood like I might any challenge. There wasn’t time to figure out the benefits and disadvantages strung out before me — a baby was on its way and I needed to prepare.
