A War Zone With A Cafeteria

I just want to put it out there that I heard Hugh Ryan read By Any Other Name before it was in print on nerve.com, and certainly before jezebel.com picked it up, and definitely before you clicked either of those links to read it.

So there.

Hugh is a fellow Bennington grad and By Any Other Name is a great piece, one that I guarantee will get you thinking about a certain word, one that most, if not all, people have an opinion on. Be sure to check it out. Here's a snippet, again, courtesy of nerve.com:

Every morning on my way in to work, Diamond passed judgment on me. She was tall and gorgeous, with long black hair, dark skin, and the best back-of-the-truck Louis Vuitton that Chinatown could fashion. Her breasts she'd also gotten on the cheap — hormones from shady doctors or birth-control pills stolen from female relatives — but she knew how to work all those fakes into a real package.

Most mornings, she'd take one look at my sorry social-work ass — no-brand jeans, scuffed black shoes, second-hand button-down shirt — and utter a devastating two-syllable critique.

"Mmmhmm," she'd say, a sound made at the back of the mouth, up towards the nose, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Not to be confused with the positive "mmmhmm," made at the front of the mouth and an affirmation I rarely received.

Each time, I cringed. I was twenty-three, fresh from college, and had long repressed the cruelty of high-school fashion fascism. Now here it was, thrown right back at me, magnified a hundred times. There were many ways in which the Harvey Milk School, New York's high school for at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth, was a safe haven. But when it came to appearance (especially that of the teachers and staff), it was a war zone with a cafeteria.