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In the 11th grade, I was outed as a Homosexican by a wicked lesbian with a brawny, murderous jawline. She was the nefarious and lesbianly athletic bastion of projectile teenage misery, and I, the unpopular, inconsequential bystander of her hatred for my then best friends.

The salon sat at the bottom floor of the developing world’s version of a gated community— a five star hotel. The hotel was precariously perched, hosting an army of foreigners working on war, while staying in business under a regime denying war crimes. As a Tamil-Sri-Lankan-American I am neither entirely foreign, nor comfortably local.

I tell this story often.

Some people peak in high school. I wasn’t so lucky. I lost a lot of sleep as a teenager, lying in bed with my eyes glued to the stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, trying to figure out a way to dodge the assaults from older girls that plagued me each day at John Jay High School in Westchester, New York.

It was one of the first warm evenings of spring when my new neighbor Steve—leaning over his balcony and through the bougainvillea—suggested we should take the kids to Faraya, a ski town a few hours from what was starting to look like a war in Syria.

Usually, I lie. At a party, someone asks the question. It’s someone who hasn’t smelled the rancid decay of week-dead flesh or heard the rattle of fluid flooding lungs. I shake the ice in my glass, smile, and lie. When they say, “I bet you always get that question,” I roll my eyes and agree.

It started before a friend told me that he wanted to date white women and before another friend told me “fuck white people.” It started before two 14-year-old girls on their way to a birthday party were crushed to death on the Yangju Highway, before George Bush put North Korea on the Axis of Evil, and even before either of my parents was born.

Eight days after I buried my mother, I learned that she was considered indigent in the state of Colorado. This, above all else, broke my heart. Somehow, the knowledge that my mother was officially poor erased all the progress we’d made in the second half of her life—poof—just like that. There we were again, in the mid '80s, after my father left us, bankrupted his company and tried to bring us down with him. My mother and I hunkering down while she tried to fight him in court, garnish his wages. Me, working one, two and then three jobs during high school, shape-shifting on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

I am in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, holding a head of cabbage stable on the cutting board with both hands, while my mother thrusts a cleaver into it, slicing it in half. The leaves are densely packed in a squiggle of translucent white and green. She hands the knife to me, instructing me to cut the cabbage into thin shreds. When my slices are too coarse, she thwaps the back of my hand with a wet soup spoon and tells me to cut them finer.

What train do you want to take? my date asks. I don’t answer, because I have no idea where we are. It's Halloween 2011 and we're going to Brooklyn Bowl to see Donald Glover, the writer/actor/comedian touring the country with his buzzy new album, Camp. I am told that Donald performs under the computer generated rap name Childish Gambino. Neither my date, nor I, can imagine a day two years in the future where hundreds of thousands of people will actually be anticipating the release of his third album, Because the Internet. We have just come from hearing Angela Davis speak about Black women, writing, and using our creativity to battle oppression.

Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed's newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of "the scathing takedown rip," Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.

I. I am waiting for a letter to arrive in the mail. It will be short, no more than one page, and will be covered in black ink, with the occasional flourish of institutional logo. The signature at the bottom will belong to a high-ranking officer at my Midwestern college of 12,000 students, and the words that preface it will briefly explain the method and, more importantly, the verdict, of an almost three-week long investigation, in which students, faculty, and staff were questioned by the school’s legal staff as to if, in fact, I had committed acts constituting an official case of racial harassment.

My eyelashes are mascara-less stumps and I’ve been commando in the same stained, hot pink sweats for 36 hours, but I don’t care. It’s 2011, and my mom and I are at my grandmother’s house in Michigan hoping for some rest after a hellish year spent cycling through chemo, radiation, and surgeries.

Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it.

Wives and husbands come and go, children leave, friends fade into abstractions on Facebook. The dog is generally there for life, all of his or all of yours, whichever comes first. Hunter, who died Sunday night at home and surrounded by his people, was there for life. It was really his second life, which began when I pulled his numb body from a freezing, half-empty swimming pool 10 years ago this month.

It was exactly two weeks ago today that I first heard of Renisha McBride. I read half the story—the 19-year-old African American girl, shot in the face by a 54-year-old white man, after she'd been in a car accident, walked down the road, and knocked on his door seeking help—and dutifully posted it to the hate crimes blog I manage.

Spirits, alcoholic ones, have their way of sinking their depressive tendrils deep inside, drawing up everything we keep locked away. My man and I spent the night apart, out and about Brooklyn. We lace fingers and make our way home, bellies full of fried food and spirits. He falls asleep soundly, peacefully.

I blame rap music.

Eight hours after I broke off my four-and-a-half-year relationship, I went to the shooting range to fire a gun. I had never shot a gun, and in fact had never even entertained the idea of ever wanting to shoot a gun. Here is what I wanted, all along, more than anything: a man with an Old English name who drove a Volvo and wrote poetry. I imagined he took an active interest in his health and hygiene, used Tom’s toothpaste and owned a juicer. Likely, he pursued an interest outside of himself—cooking, perhaps, or landscaping, or better yet, volunteer firefighting—and I wanted him to be good to me. I wanted his love and dedication. It really was that simple.