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Matt Sumell's love stories are bitter and angry and often involve the narrator hitting people. When I say "love story," I don't just mean romance—I mean familial love, too. In his new book, Making Nice, Sumell writes, "I must have been five or six when my father and I were walking outside Mario's Barber Shop and I looked up and wanted to hold his hand but could only fit mine around his thumb, so I kicked him." His stories are also tender, funny, heartbreaking, grief-stricken, poetic, and beautiful. And in some ways, reading Making Nice reminds me of a charming kid I once met at the beach, who soon after winning strangers' attention directed it to the scars on his leg from where he was mauled by a Rottweiler. Alby, Sumell's protagonist, is not at home in the world. He strives for connection, and Sumell's stories are alive with that feeling.

VICE spoke with Sumell about fruit flies, childhood, and violence.

VICE: One of the first things that struck me about your writing (along with it being so funny and nuanced) is that there's a palpable aggression in your stories. Not just toward a particular character—though Alby does get into a number of fights—but in general. Why all this aggression?
Matt Sumell: Well, Ann Beattie's take on this is that "When you write fiction, you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions." Often you don't. So while the question of how aggression does and doesn't serve us is something I try to explore throughout the book—because I'm absolutely fascinated by aggressive characters, by impulsive and reckless choices—I'm not exactly sure of the 'why.' I have some ideas, maybe, a little experience. I mean, the title of the book is based on something my mother used to say to me when I was kid. (Keep in mind this is a woman who knew me before I did, who bore witness to the colicky baby, the terrible tantrums, the irritability, my habit of terrorizing pigeons.)

Every time I approached the family dog she'd say, "GENTLE." She was there for the first punch I ever threw and it got to a point where she could see them coming. I'm not sure what it was she recognized: a look in my eyes, how I set my jaw, the sudden quiet in the middle of an argument—my voice dropping off a cliff. I don't know how, but she knew, and my siblings were spared many blows because of it. Because a split second before I'd let fly she'd say: "Matt. No. Make nice."

Do you think being very aggressive is genetic?
I think a significant part of this is primitive wiring, and there's more than a few studies I can point to that demonstrate the heritability of aggression. But if you'd rather not read a New York Times article about gladiator fruit flies—although you really, really should—just look to nature for example and inspiration. Cats murder things they don't eat all the time. So do killer whales. I recently read about "knockout mice" that lack certain serotonin receptors in their mouse-brains and run around acting like grade-A dickheads. Barracudas seek-and-destroy shiny shit, robins attack red feathers in their territory, and Alby wants to punch dudes wearing white jeans and jewelry. I'm half-kidding, of course, but maybe it really is his genes that're making him hate those jeans.

It's not hard to imagine how aggression—or the ability to become aggressive in certain situations—provided us some kind of survival advantage way back when; a don't fuck-with-me-ness that was selected for the gene pool. Thing is, it just doesn't serve us any longer. For the most part it's an evolutionary remnant; a vestigial non-structure, like goose bumps. Alby gets cold, Alby gets chicken skin. Alby sees a dude wearing sunglasses indoors, Alby gets mad. They're both useless reactions to stimuli, but the latter's harmful.

Who fucking cares if he's likable? More important to consider is whether or not he's compelling.

Is it really that simple though?
Of course not. People way smarter than me best guess that genetics account for only half. How they come up with that percentage I have no idea, but the other big chunk of this thing is environment. Abuse, family stress, fear... obviously all that comes into play. But just consider the culture. I don't know about you but I grew up on old-school Looney Tunes, which is straight-up gun violence. Tom and Jerry? Non-stop attempted murder. There was G.I. Joe, He-Man, Ninja Turtles, Thunder Cats, and Transformers. Not enough problem-solving-via-violence for you? How about the Transformers' retard-cousin, Voltron? How about Knight Rider, or Dukes of Hazard, or Magnum P.I.? Consider the helicopter from Magnum P.I., then stop considering the helicopter from Magnum P.I. because it had exactly jack shit on Airwolf—which blew everything up with missiles, had a lair in an extinct volcano, and a theme song that had me assaulting my mom's furniture.

I'm talking Rowdy Roddy Piper and Jimmy Superfly Snuka here. I'm talking Crocket and Tubbs, B.A. Baracus and plans coming together. And when I was growing up those plans often-involved full contact street hockey, no-pads tackle football, or going to the movies to see shit like Bloodsport, Conan the Barbarian, and Action Jackson. My biggest childhood hero was Lenny "Nails" Dykstra, a tobacco chewing, steroid taking, hard-nosed ballplayer for the New York Mets who—of course—ended up doing jail time for grand theft auto, identity theft, some lewd Craigslist stuff and, like, making his housekeeper take part in oral-sex-Saturdays. There's just so much to explore.

Hormonal imbalances also factors into aggression. Hunger. Horniness. Proximity to fuckheads. The majority of the book takes place on Long Island and LA—two places with more per capita assholes than anywhere in the world outside of Florida. Of course Alby would be hotheaded. And what does he do to cool off? Has a couple or ten drinks. Only problem is alcohol consumption increases aggression too. It fucks up our amygdalas and blah blah science blah, but all I really know is that booze increases emotionality while decreasing the ability to govern it. We lose executive function after a few too many. So Alby becomes wildly reactive and, occasionally, explosive.

You've told me that some people write off what you're exploring as just "machismo."
I think it's so much more complicated than that. Beneath Alby's hard surface, there's a slippery, elusive sensitivity. There's a vulnerability at work. There's a lot of pain in it. There's grief. There's a guy who misses his mother. There's humor and there's beauty. There's a lot of self-aggression at work, too. Alby's heartbroken, and he's angry that he's heartbroken, and then he's frustrated that he's angry that he's heartbroken. One feeling attacks another, one thought another, so the whole grief-suffering-aggression thing gets complicated fast. One thing's for sure though: he's as hard on himself as he is everybody else.

Do you think Alby is likable?
I certainly don't think Alby is "unlikable"—I mean, reading Alby as "just an asshole" seems an act so devoid of empathy and understanding and nuance that it stuns me. He's funny and vulnerable and surprising. But also, who fucking cares if he's likable? More important to consider is whether or not he's compelling.

In my experience I've noticed a fair amount of people tend to write about "assholes." Why is that? What's the value in writing from the perspective of an "asshole"?
Well, if the implication here is that I write from the perspective of an "asshole," then I suppose the first thing is to define what exactly an "asshole" is. Back at Irvine we had exactly this conversation during a workshop of mine—go figure—and after a lot of back-and-forthing about it Geoffrey Wolff said he would define an asshole as someone he wouldn't want to spend time with, including time on the page. If that's the working definition, then I'd say I don't write from the perspective of one.

But let's go with "part-time asshole." For starters, I love the comedic effect. Unchecked aggression is, for whatever reason, hilarious to me. See Looney Tunes, MacGruber, Curb Your Enthusiasm. More than that, though, I love the license it gives me. I feel freer to buck the social niceties I might otherwise feel beholden to if, say, I were writing a memoir. There's no pressure to present the best or even the better version of myself because there is no myself. Ain't me. So I get to have the fun of indulging the bad choices, of exploring the baser, uglier impulses. And really: nice people making ethical choices all the time? Doesn't even sound fun.

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Muslim women protesting in France in December 2003. Photo credit: Getty Images

Since last week, when six writers pulled out of the PEN Gala in protest of an award being given to Charlie Hebdo, the literary world has been consumed by a series of arguments over the controversial publication. Is the famed French satirical magazine racist against Muslims? If so, it inappropriate to fete it at a fancy Manhattan fundraising party? Is honoring it in that way somehow an endorsement of Islamophobia—or, conversely, would not honoring it be a capitulation to the terrorists who murdered the magazine's staffers in January?

The people arguing over these questions are mostly American and British writers, many of whom weren't familiar with Charlie Hebdo until the publication was attacked. Very little bandwidth has been given to the views of French Muslims—who, presumably, would have something to say about the cultural context of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons and their alleged racism.

To find out if their perspectives differed from those being tossed about on the English-language internet, I reached out by email to seven French Muslim individuals to gather their thoughts on the controversy, and have gathered their replies below. (They have in some cases been edited for length and clarity.)

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Hajer Naili. Photo credit: John Walder. Courtesy of Naili

Hajer Naili, 29, a multimedia reporter at Women's eNews and a contributor to Al Jazeera Plus, now based in New York:

I, like every French citizen, followed the Charlie Hebdo attack. I was here though. I cried to see such attack happening in my country and to see fellow journalists and cartoonists being assassinated. There was no excuse for such attack. I stand against these extremists and those who think the attacks were justified.

Yet I do not stand with Charlie Hebdo when they provoke and insult the beliefs of billions of people including myself. By awarding Charlie Hebdo, PEN is honoring cartoons that are denigrating Muslims, their identity and beliefs. It is encouraging misinformation and the right to hate.

When the prophet Muhammad is being depicted with a turban shaped like a bomb, Charlie Hebdo is sending the message that those who follow or take the prophet as an example are terrorists or at least condone terrorism. I do not condone terrorism! I have never! And I never will! Today, drawing the prophet of Islam seems to have become an international sport. Everyone wants to compete and hope to be the best in pushing the offense to the extreme. The recent drawing contest of cartoons of the prophet in Texas is just the latest illustration. The very large majority of Muslims stand up against terrorism. Why don't we listen to their voice? I believe in the freedom of expression but if used to misinform and attack individuals, it becomes dangerous. I believe in the freedom of expression as a way to empower individuals, to exchange and debate ideas and opinions within the boundaries of respecting one's identity. I'm afraid that by giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, PEN is just telling the world that it's OK to ridicule someone's beliefs and to spread inaccurate facts. There is a thin line between the freedom of expression and hate speech. Unfortunately, Charlie Hebdo crossed that line years ago.

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Mabrouck Rachedi. Photo credit: Thomas Haley. Courtesy of Rachedi

Mabrouck Rachedi, 38, a French writer born on the outskirts of Paris in Essonne. Rachedi is the author of five books, most recently Tous les hommes sont des causes perdues ("All Men Are Lost Causes") (éditions L'âge d'homme, 2015):

I am proud of my Arab-Berber-Muslim cultural heritage, but I insist on making clear that I speak now as a Frenchman. My public stances are a function of nonreligious principles learned in the schools of the Republic. It is these principles that lead me to hold up freedom of speech as a cardinal virtue. In the Charlie Hebdo affair, I insist on distinguishing between two facts. On one hand, the attacks on the newspaper and the kosher supermarket, which I firmly condemn without the slightest hesitation.

On the other, in the world after the attacks, a kind of forced-march unanimousness slipped in behind the republican spirit. Any voice saying anything other than, "I am Charlie" automatically became suspect, jeopardizing the very idea of free expression.

I haven't always agreed with Charlie Hebdo's editorial stance—far from it—but I've always recognized the magazine's right to express its opinions. By shooting at people, the killers took aim at freedom of speech in the form of the freedom of caricature. That is why I think that, no matter one's opinion of Charlie Hebdo, PEN's tribute is justified. Since its founding, Charlie Hebdo has been anticlerical, anti-system, anti-conformist, etc. The argument that the satirical paper is unsavory because it targets the weak in French society seems inadmissible to me. Would it not be a confession of weakness to demand a favorable regime while, at the same time, calling for equality? That is all I ask: equality for all, and nothing but equality. For all French people, no matter who they are. To be socially underprivileged needs not necessarily mean being weak. Being strong also means building a solid identity that mere caricature is not enough to rattle.

Mina A., a 35-year-old executive in public service who lives in the Paris region:

First of all, I should say I'm of Moroccan origin—Berber to be precise. My parents are Muslim, but I'm an atheist. They had ten children in total, of which five are atheist and five believers. Of these five, three are practicing. Oddly enough, the most devout are the youngest.

When I was younger, no women wore hijabs, nor men beards, in my neighborhood. My parents practiced a form of Maghrebi Islam, which was more discreet, less ostentatious, and above all, very far from the political Islam of some of today's youth. What I mean to say is, a politicized form of Islam has taken root in our neighborhoods and in the minds of the young, a form very far from that of our parents. And this is the Islam that took aim at Charlie Hebdo.

"The act of calling them racists is a complete misread of what these caricaturists stood for in France."

On January 7, I was, like all French people, completely in shock. Cabu, Wolinski, and Charb were very famous cartoonists; I'd grown up with them. The act of calling them racists is a complete misread of what these caricaturists stood for in France. They were, in every struggle, against the [far right-wing party] National Front.

Lastly, I insist on saying to Americans: There is no "Muslim community" in France. In France, we do not think in terms of "communities." I am of Moroccan descent and an atheist—so, in your opinion, what "community" would I belong to? The strength of secularism was to allow social mingling. And secularism is no myth. I went to the same school with all the other French children. No one spoke of religion, or of belonging to a community.

Today things are different, for some people, albeit a minority, are attempting to impose religion in schools (the hijab, halal menus). This is a reality.

"Je suis Charlie" because I would like us to be able to discuss and critique the return of religion to the public sphere without being called a racist or an Islamophobe.

Jamal, 30, a French-born sales consultant now living in Ireland:

The whole country has been in a state of shock after these horrible assassinations. In the streets, everywhere in the country, and abroad, you had the opportunity to see French people of color showing the world that they were horrified and against any form of terrorism or violence.

I am French, born and raised, from an Algerian background, so I know how much racism and terrorism can be destructive for our society. I grew up in a beautiful city in the south of France (Toulon), where being racist was normal. For me, racism in all its forms have always been a plague, and I've always fought against it.

"I think they are more stubborn than they are courageous."

I remember I was only a teenager when in Algeria terrorists were killing, kidnapping, raping, burning, bombing, the country lived in a constant fear, babies, kids, women, men, old people were dying for no reason—during those ten years I was worrying for my family every day on the other side of the Mediterranean. I respect their resistance, their faith, their courage, they never gave up, never lost hope. The people didn't deserve to live ten years of a horrific civil war. Thirteen years later, the country hasn't bandaged all its wounds yet and I don't want that to happen in France.

I don't know if the cartoonists were really racists or not, but in the last few years their work only served to stigmatize a fringe of the French society. Charlie Hebdo has always been the newspaper that people liked to hate, a satirical newspaper with shocking covers. It's their right to do it, so I respect that. It's also my right to say that I don't like everything they do. The freedom of speech is vital, but respect is more important for me. I would have enjoyed it so much if the drawings would have helped people unite instead of playing the game of the politics by digging deeper and larger ditches between people, fostering racial discrimination (Islamophobia). They absolutely did not deserve to die in such horrible conditions, just because they were insulting and provocative, just because they were cartoonists, or because their drawings depicted the Prophet Muhammad, who himself was known for ignoring people who were insulting him.

A Muslim has to answer to a bad deed with a good one.

I think [the staff of Charlie Hebdo] are more stubborn than they are courageous. They are more determined than ever now, but people aren't queuing anymore to purchase their newspapers.

I don't think it's fair to the millions of people who are suffering from the comparison with deadly terrorists that the work of Charlie Hebdo is highlighted and rewarded. But, at the same time, in the name of the freedom, I am not against [the PEN award] because somehow I feel detached from this polemic.

I think it's all political maneuvers, and nobody can do anything about it.

Mehdi Ouamrane, 34, an administrative manager in a construction firm in Paris and a practicing Muslim:

For me, Charlie Hebdo has become what it always abhorred. The tipping point has a name, and it is Philippe Val [who ran the magazine from 1992 to 2009]. There's a before and an after. Before him, Charlie Hebdo was a hideout for avuncular old May '68-ers you'd be a bit embarrassed to have over for a family dinner. They were harmless, just kind of embarrassing with their trivial jokes and less-than-clever wordplay. But I put up with them because I knew what they were about deep down. Deep down, they meant well.

After Philippe Val, you found Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner in the newspaper's ranks, and Siné was nowhere to be seen. That alone says it all. Siné was fired for the antisemitism in one of his cartoons. Now that's hilarious. After Val, Charlie Hebdo voluntarily began to serve the powerful. Look back at the trial where Sarkozy, Hollande, etc. all paraded by to testify in favor of the paper and you'll see. [Famed satirist] Professeur Choron would never have allowed representatives of the state to defend Charlie Hebdo.

I'd like to emphasize that drawing cartoons is not courageous. I'm sorry, but that just isn't part of my definition of courage.

"If you ask me, a prize from the comics world would have been much more logical."

As far as the treatment of marginalized communities is concerned, Charlie Hebdo applies a double standard with great calm. It slags Islam every chance it gets because it makes for better sales. The paper has gone from [being full of] good-natured anarchists to a neoconservative editorial line.

At no moment did this paper deserve a literary prize. It's a newspaper with cartoons that objectively have little literary quality. If you ask me, a prize from the comics world would have been much more logical. Whatever, prizes are like Oscars—everyone forgets them in the end. If it lets them travel a little, good for them, but they should know they don't deserve a literary prize because they write very badly.

I admire the American writers who rose up and denounced the fraud that this prize represents.

It's clear that France has a mental block about Islam. Muslims are more up on French culture than the French are on Muslim rites. Mental laziness is a plague in France, and lots of people are just fine with mass media when it comes to forging their opinions. On the other hand, where true religious and social intermingling exists, problems are few. It's high time to confront reality for what it is and stop making people believe that Muslims are to blame because there are no jobs, no economic growth, and a bad feeling throughout the country. With the invention of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, and National Identity, [former prime minister Nicolas] Sarkozy kicked off racist speech in my country. During his term, he was hard on Muslims and some people thought it was only natural to declare your racism. But it's not OK. My generation won't accept that. I take every chance I can get to educate people. Sometimes I use discussion and sometimes a form of intellectual violence or provocation. Because when it comes to people's capacity to take part in a constructive discussion, there's a long way to go.

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Youssef Faraj

Youssef Faraj, 33, a Muslim philosophy teacher, community worker, and hip-hop educator in Brussels, Belgium:

I don't think Charlie Hebdo is a satire magazine. We can surely acknowledge the fact it was always attacking the church and government as powerful and symbolic institutions in France. Nonetheless, it has attacked minorities and marginalized communities in France by focusing on a highly sensitive target: their religious identity. Thus, this fragment of identity is always targeted through an increasing Islamophobia crystallized by systemic racism. The writers and novelists protesting against PEN are totally accurate.

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Karim Frikh, 35, who is preparing for the entrance exam to law school after having trouble finding a job in these times of crisis:

When the Danish cartoons were picked up by various European newspapers, including France Soir in early 2006, I understood why journalists felt the need to defend freedom of expression at any price, especially freedom of the press. More than the content—the nature of the caricatures, insulting or not—it was the form they said they wished to defend.

Faced with the public debate, and in reaction to the consequences and threats France Soir received, Charlie Hebdo decided, knowing the danger, to publish the Danish cartoons, no doubt to prove that we must not give into threats and censorship.

For this action precisely, even if I clearly know that many journalists are in prison all over the word and must be rewarded for their commitment too in China, Eritrea or Iran, Charlie Hebdo deserves without question the prize they have been awarded, in my opinion.

When they published the Danish cartoons again in 2012, not only did I find it inappropriate, but I thought it an unnecessary act whose sole objective was to fill the paper's desperately empty coffers.

Cynically riding the wave of growing Islamophobic sentiment in France, this republication followed on the heels of a revolting and deliberately anti-Muslim film [ Innocence of Muslims] whose emergence the right to freedom of speech, largely guaranteed in the US, had allowed.

For all that, this lapse in conduct cannot erase the memory of the political commitment and convictions Charlie has shown.

"Though I think of Charlie Hebdo as provocative and juvenile, I have never thought of it as racist."

Sadly, history has shown that they had the courage of their convictions and were at peace with the idea of paying the ultimate price for them.

Though I think of Charlie Hebdo as provocative and juvenile, I have never thought of it as racist. Certain members of the editorial staff could be [racist], just like more than 20 percent of France's voting population. For example: Though I agree with her on some issues (gender equality, the struggle against homophobia, etc.), Caroline Fourest holds suspect views in her discussions of Islam—in my opinion, probably without even knowing it.

I think that it was inappropriate to mock Islam and the Muslims, even in spirit of "fairness," during a confusing period of discrimination when the secularism is instrumented in a certain way to express an intolerance in all but name.

The paper is clearly anticlerical in general, but not specifically Islamophobic.

I think it's a good thing this prize was given by an international organization, not French or at least not attached to a particular state.

And I know you didn't ask me this question, but: Yes, I am still Charlie.

I am French, even if many people who ask me the question "Where are you from?" look really surprise whenI simply reply with false naïveté, "Toulouse. Southern France." My parents immigrated, I did not.

I am Muslim in the way that many people are Catholic or Jewish in France—that is, in my own way, as I see fit. I observe the essentials (Ramadan, etc.), but I'm not curious about attending mosque a lot (except when my family requests I give to the needy in our name).

I hope we will not forget those who, every day, fight physically to defend democracy and its freedoms, whatever their religion or political leanings:

1. the soldiers, many of whom are of Muslim faith, in Syria and Iraq or the Sahel, faced with a sect that calls itself the Islamic State,

2. the gendarmes and policemen, including Ahmed Merabet [the Muslim police officer who died trying to stop the Charlie Hebdo attack], who keep the public peace within our democracies,

3. the ordinary citizens like Lassana Bathily, who found it in themselves to help the forces of order save Jewish hostages during the attack on the kosher supermarket.

France has shown its gratitude to the anonymous heroes of this massacre. But public opinion must also recognize these heroes.

Edward Gauvin and Yérim Sar contributed reporting.

Interviews with Mabrouck Rachedi, Mina A, and Karim Frikh were translated from the French by Edward Gauvin.

Follow James on Twitter.

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Check out Esther Pearl Watson's website and Instagram and get her books from Fantagraphics.

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Photo via Flickr user Ricky Beantown

Weed makes me horny. I used to think it was because I've dated so many stoners that I've just trained myself to associate the skunky smell with sex, but it turns out there might be some science behind it. The right strain can help you feel more relaxed, sensual, and connected to your partner, which is great for an anxious nutcase like me. So, when I spoke with Dr. Julie Holland, author of the must-read Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having and What's Really Making You Crazy, I was shocked and saddened to learn that a side effect of smoking marijuana can be a dry vagina.

Sorry, stoner chicks. It's a phenomenon that's been brought to light on internet forums and dubbed "cotton vagina" on Urban Dictionary. Because marijuana is still a Class 1 drug, limited research has been done on the subject, but just as allergy medicines can dry up your vag thanks to your mucus membranes, pot can do the same. To hear more on this discovery, I followed up with Dr. Holland to talk about using coconut oil as lube, THC to CBD ratios, and why weed can leave your vagina parched.

VICE: Hi, Dr. Holland. Thanks for the article you sent me about dry vaginas.
Dr. Julie Holland: There aren't that many articles. Think about what drives research. Drug companies pay for research so they can develop new drugs, and the government pays for research if something is dangerous. This is a situation where no one is going to do research on this. There's no need, and there's no money in it.

Personal research!
I do think it's important to say it's variable, and it's personal. Each person responds differently to pot and each strain acts differently. You're not going to have a lot of consistency. I've had patients tell me that [smoking weed] makes it harder for them to climax or take longer, but I also have patients who feel it's pro-sexual. It may be that the higher CBD strains are more pro-sexual than the higher THC strains.

Is vaginal dryness a marijuana side effect just like dry mouth?
Exactly like dry mouth. It's the same thing. It's the drying of the mucus membranes. Now not all pot is going to give you dry mouth, but if you have had a strain that is giving you dry mouth, it will also make you more dry [down there]. In general the thing that makes women dry is the pill. Because there's all this different mucus that happens throughout your cervical cycle. As Mother Nature designs it, when you're fertile, you're wet. But if you're on the pill, you don't ovulate; you don't get that mid-cycle wetness.

RELATED: The Real Nancy Botwin?

So if I'm on the pill and smoke weed, I'm like a desert?
Well, what would be nice if we had more non-hormonal contraception options.

Speaking of weed and vaginal dryness, have you heard of that cannabis lube?
Foria? I've heard of it. I haven't tried it and don't have any data, but here's what I will say that's very important: I believe it's in a base of coconut oil and I think that coconut oil is excellent for lubrication. I've had patients tell me, I've had friends tell me, it is better than any other lube they've tried. I talk about coconut oil in Moody Bitches. I am a big proponent of coconut oil as a lubricant. I think the coconut oil base may be part of Foria's charm.

And coconut oil smells so nice.
In Ayurveda medicine, they say not to put anything on your skin that you wouldn't put in your mouth. I'm a big fan of coconut oil!

I'm going to try it tonight! Is there anything else a stoner should know about the effects of marijuana on our sex lives?
There's the whole head versus body issue. The critical mind needs to be put on pause to really enjoy yourself and get in your body, to not worry about how long it's taking or what you look like. There are some strains of cannabis that help you get in your body and more aware of your body, but there are some strains that make you more in your head, more critical. You really need to experiment a bit to find what works for you.

Follow Sophie St. Thomas on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Nana B Agyei

This March, I turned the same age my mother was when she had me. Since that birthday, I've been contemplating motherhood on a deeper level than ever before. My mom has made it clear that she expects to have grandchildren. When she brings it up, I nod my head and change the subject. I don't know how to tell her that there's a possibility I will never have kids. I don't know how to tell her that, because admitting to having even a slight disdain for motherhood feels wrong.

Women who don't want to have children are often told that they are making a selfish decision. Selfish for not wanting the responsibility parenthood entails, for not wanting to invest their time and money into another life. One such "selfish" woman, Holly Brockwell, recently wrote in the Guardian about her failed attempts to get sterilized in her 20s. Doctor after doctor refused to do this for her because they were convinced she would change her mind. They also called her selfish. "I've explained that I'm a blood donor, an organ donor, a bone marrow donor, and even tried to give my unwanted eggs to childless couples—only to be told they're not suitable because I'm a carrier for cystic fibrosis," she wrote. "Even this didn't sway them."

We live on a dying planet slowly being ravaged by the sheer weight of humanity, yet the pressure to keep creating new life still somehow exists. Childless women shouldn't be criticized—they should be cheered. Thank you for not making any more humans! We have more than enough! In fact, we have millions who've been abandoned and could use a home. Oh, but they wouldn't have your eyes, or your chin, or your family's genetic predisposition for heart disease? Never mind, forget I said anything.

Here's what I can't figure out: Do I feel obligated to have children more than I feel a true desire to have them? This feeling of obligation comes pouring into me from literally everywhere. When it's not my family, it's some television show or movie. It's that consistent plot line of someone somehow getting forced into parenthood and becoming a supposedly better person because of it. Seth Rogen isn't a lazy stoner anymore! Kate Hudson is no longer so obsessed with furthering her successful career! What everyone seems to want me to know about parenting is that it will only make my life better, no matter how much of myself I have to give up. That's why, when I admit hesitation, I am made to feel like that is a statement I will regret.

I don't understand why becoming a mother is still seen as a woman's top priority in life.

People, like my mom, insist that it's because of my age, or because I am just not yet in the right mindset. I am then reminded of that biological clock. It's going to start ticking before I know it, and when it does, I'm going to transform into a baby-making machine. I don't get why I'm told this so often. I don't understand why becoming a mother is still seen as a woman's top priority in life.

During this year's Passover dinner, my mother's best friend did her dirty work for her and spoke to me about a friend of theirs who is in her mid 40s and childless. She spoke of this woman in a pitying tone, angering me enough to suggest that perhaps this woman is happy to not have children. Those words could not compute in her head. Her response was, "She just waited too long, and now she can't. If you wait too long, you'll regret not having one."

When I see puppies, I know I want one. When I see babies, my reaction is different. Some babies here and there might get a "how cute" out of me if they're wearing sunglasses or have a little mohawk, but never do I think to myself that I want one. I've seen firsthand what it entails to be a parent. When I was 16, my mother remarried and gave birth to my sister, my first sibling. When I was 22, my father had a daughter with the woman he remarried, my second sibling. As much as I love them both, their presence in my life at such a late age has done nothing but make me more aware of how exhausting and unfulfilling I think of motherhood se being.

I don't particularly enjoy spending a lot of time with children. I just can't muster up the patience to watch repeated episodes of Dora the Explorer. Neither can I feign enthusiasm for playing stupid games like hide-and-seek. I get deeply irritated hearing them cry every single time they hear the word "no" (actually, maybe I'm just jealous that they're socially allowed to do that). The feelings I have about children should signal that motherhood is not for me. But the response I get when I tell people this is never, "OK, then don't be a mom." Instead, it's a creepy-sounding sentiment along the lines of: You won't know how much you'll love having a child until you have one.

Wait, what? If this were a some sort of internet thread, I'd post that meme of the Star Wars fish-alien thing saying, "It's a trap!"

Why do people say this? Is it true, or is it more feeding into the culture of women being considered worthless if they never procreate? What the hell kind of advice is that anyways? You would never tell a sociopath to just murder someone if they're unsure of their ability to be a serial killer. This feels a lot like that. What if I go through with giving birth, banking on suddenly having all of my feelings changed as soon as that child is in my hands, but the feelings don't change? Now I'm stuck being a mother, when that's really not what I want to be. I'd rather not be a mother at all than be one who deeply regrets it. Not only would I be miserable, but my child would be too.

When I fantasize about my ideal future, children are an afterthought.

That's another thing never really talk about: How many of us are actually fit to be parents? My generation seems more financially unprepared than the ones that have come immediately before. We are branded as the generation that will never grow up because we rely on our parents to financially support us well into our 30s. According to a Canadian survey from 2014, 43 percent of those polled aged 30 to 33 admitted to not yet being financially independent. How can someone who can't support themselves support a kid?

When I fantasize about my ideal future, children are an afterthought. I see a successful career, a husband, multiple dogs in the backyard, and then think to myself: "Oh, I guess I'll have a kid or two." Right now, I don't know what exactly this means. It could very well be what everyone says. I'm still young. I'm not yet in the right mindset. My biological clock is still being would up. However, is it possible that my fantasy is telling me now that parenthood is really not something I want, but rather feel obligated to take part in? You know, like going to Coachella, but even more expensive. I guess the only real answer right now is that I'll have to just wait and see.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Commander, U.S. Naval Forces. Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Katherine Stafford treats a mother and child after a medical evacuation aboard the USS Bataan. Bataan transferred 277 persons in distress to the Armed Forces of Malta offshore patrol vessel P61.

Last month, a collision between a crowded Libyan vessel full of refugees with a Portuguese container ship off the coast of Tripoli led to the deaths of several hundred people. The sinking—one of the largest tragedies the Mediterranean Sea has seen—followed last year's controversial EU decision to cease the Italian-led stop-and-rescue operation, Mare Nostrum. It was replaced by the Frontex-led operation Triton, the aim of which is not to save lives, but to reinforce sea borders and deter people from future seacrossings. As recently reiterated by the head of the EU's border agency, saving drowning refugees is, even after the tragic death of up to 900 people, not Triton's priority or interest.

The EU's decision to substitute rescue missions with border patrols has come at a high price. Between January and April 2015, more than 1700 people are reported to have perished in the Mediterranean, one hundred times the deaths recorded in the same period last year, according to Amnesty International. Most of the dead fled from well-known conflict regions including Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Palestine, to name just a few.

To name refugees migrants is not an arbitrary decision. It's a political one.

Most passengers from last month's Libyan vessel heading towards Europe were, accordingly, of Syrian, Eritrean, and Somali origin. Although all three countries are regularly cited among the world's largest refugee-producing states, the crisis that followed the latest vessel sinking was titled by media not a "refugee crisis" but a "migrant crisis."

Following the tragedy, hashtags like #migrantcrisis, #MigrantLivesMatter, and #migrantdeath widely spread on Twitter. Politicians and media reports from all political spectrums labeled the victims as "dead migrants" or "migrant victims," the boat a "migrant vessel" and the people responsible as "migrant smugglers." There is, of course, nothing factually incorrect with considering refugees migrants. Refugees, in seeking a safer and better life elsewhere, migrate from one location to another. But semantics matter. To name refugees migrants is not an arbitrary decision. It's a political one.

Related: Europe or Die

Refugees are individuals and groups who fear for their lives and flee from persecution, violence, and disasters, either anthropogenic or produced by nature. Their journey is provoked by violence, desperation, and trauma. They are forcefully uprooted by events beyond their control and compelled to and seek refuge and asylum elsewhere.

"Migrants," on the other hand, typically describes people seeking better livelihoods, moving for better job opportunities, education, or marital prospects. Though they can be from anywhere in the world, migrants are mostly construed as non-white and poor, perceived as being driven by economic motives. White middle-class migrants are, on the other hand, designated a far less toxic label: that of "expats," a term that underlines both racial and class privileges, as well as upward mobility.

The reflexive use of these labels in the media conveys more than just literal meaning: it is worth noting the way that refugees and asylum seekers have been referred to as "migrants" with reference to the disasters in the Mediterranean. Equally telling is the use of the term whenever anti-asylum legislations are debated in parliaments, a symptom of the assumption that asylum seekers are simply another kind of "economic migrants." This has led to the invention of the so-called "bogus refugee," a term widely used by conservatives and the political right since the 1980s, to dismiss the life-threatening concerns of asylum seekers and declare them as "benefit seekers," "system exploiters," and "queue jumpers."

By naming modern-day refugees migrants, we erase and negate their suffering, ignore the forced nature and politics behind their movements, and consciously or subconsciously question the violence that has left them little choice but to leave their homes and risk their lives by crossing the sea and fortified borders. We also circumvent compassion by converting them in our minds from human beings to a one-dimensional image, defined by its "otherness" and imposing nature. The modern-day refugee becomes a migrant when we imagine her as someone who has more than a single choice, who has voluntarily decided to leave her homeland for greener pastures elsewhere.

Demonizing "migrants" as threats and enemies to the welfare of the state is far easier than demonizing "genuine refugees," who are quickly reduced to victims.

This notion contrasts with the historical figure of the refugee. For many, the refugee's experience of forced displacement is a tale from the past. In Europe, legislators set benchmarks to conceptualize the figure of the refugee and determine who can be considered a "genuine" refugee depending on political, economic, social, and cultural interests. This denial of the reality of refugee life, particularly the choiceless nature of the decision to flee one's home, has other consequences: it effectively aids the criminalization of the act of seeking asylum. The European right to seek asylum has turned into a guarantee of rejection and deportation for thousands. This severe approach is also recognizable in the EU's Mediterranean Sea politics, where officials use militaristic language when talking of immigrants in terms of 'combating' them while 'defending' borders. Demonizing "migrants" as threats to the welfare of the state is, after all, far easier than demonizing "genuine refugees," who are quickly reduced to victims.

When the media labels refugees "migrants," there are subtle but powerful politics at play. The public is left to believe that crucial categorical and political distinctions are irrelevant in the face of the mass-arrivals of racialized people, who are perceived as a monolithic and one-dimensional group.

But migration isn't always just migration, and semantics are rarely just semantics.

Sinthujan Varatharajah is a PhD student in Political Geography at University College London, where he researches spaces of asylum and resistance. He was born in a refugee camp in Germany.

Follow Sinthujan on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Brett Florence

I sliced cookie dough into small chunks, placing two cuts on an aluminum pan to bake for 20 minutes. These were not for eating; they were mementos of my mother. She used to bake just two: One for me, one for you, she'd say, as if rationing out love.

My belly felt bloated with the memory, giving me a feeling of being both full and empty. I should have let these memories go by now. It's been more than 25 years since my mother abandoned me as a child, and the recollection still feels like a fresh wound.

When the cookies were done, I watched them cool on the counter. I didn't feel hungry, but I knew I should eat.

Malnutrition started early for me. With a distracted mother, I often went unfed. As a child, I hungered for things like Pizza Hut Supreme, which I saw on a TV commercial. The oily, crisp brown crust, thick cheese that hung like a garland from the smiling mouth to the greasy slice. Such an indulgence must surely be happiness. I wanted a taste. I closed in on the tube, pressed my palms against the screen. An electrostatic hiss ran down my arm. "Get your fingers off my set," my mother yelled from the kitchen.

The woman next door called me "sliver"—not because I was thin, although I was—but because she invited me over for a piece of pie once. The Dutch crumble topping made with brown sugar, molasses, and butter made my eyes water. "A small piece, please."

"If your mother's having trouble again, you can always come here." She looked as if she might lock the door and never let me leave, her own eyes so sad and hungry.

My stomach turned. I backed out of her kitchen and ran home. Only when I was safely seated next to my mother, asleep on the couch, did I realize I had taken the neighbor's fork.

I have a tendency to grip too tightly—forks, people, relationships. The night my boyfriend Jeff broke up with me, he blurted, "I'm not happy. I need you to move out. I'm not in love with you anymore."

The news was sudden. I felt unstable, as if the floor under me had turned liquid.

He sighed heavily. "I know this is hard. It's hard for me, too, but I've given it a lot of thought."

Jeff had always been selfish, but I did not know he could be cruel as well, maybe not intentionally, but unintentionally seemed even more difficult to bear.

"I don't want to rush you, but if you could be out by the end of the month, I'd appreciate it."

The end of the month was three weeks away.

"I'll help you pack and stuff. Financially, too, if you need it." Then he put his arm around my shoulder. Tears streamed down my face. I wanted to be the kind of woman who didn't cry. If I had seen it coming after three years together, maybe I could have hardened myself to this conclusion.

He stood up. "I'm going to pack some stuff."

"You're leaving?"

He sprinted upstairs. I got my cell phone and looked for a friend I could call at midnight.

He came back down with a bag.

"Where're you going to stay?"

"I don't know, maybe the office."

He paused before exiting the back. "I left some money on the dresser to help with the move and a deposit."

The door swung closed and he was gone.

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Photo by Flickr user vizzzual.com

I found a place quickly. What choice did I have? Before I left, I hesitated, then came back in to take a single set of silverware—fork, butter knife, soupspoon—which I was sure Jeff wouldn't miss.

I had taken the utensils to eat with, but in my empty apartment, with only a few spoonfuls of instant oatmeal past my lips, I grew nauseous. I took the unused fork and placed it over my heart, as if it could be a talisman. There was no furniture in my dining room, so I lay on the cold Saltillo tile, and slid the fork until the cool metal rested against the skin of my belly.

I remembered times when eating came easy—meals with Jeff, when we were full of smiles. He was the one person with whom I wanted to share my heartbreak, and yet he was the cause and desiring nothing to do with me.

Missing him brought up the old feelings of missing my mother. She had left me in the middle of the night when I was six. I was alone in our house for a week, rummaging for food in cabinets, wondering if she'd come back or what would happen to me. It was my father who eventually came to get me. I went to live with him, and my mother mysteriously ended up in prison. Later, I found out she had been convicted of kidnapping and the attempted murder of an ex-lover.

My father sent me to visit her once, when I was seven. She would not look at me. She spoke to the air and pointed at her chest with such force I thought she might pierce her own heart. She said she was having a hard time on the inside. I feel the same way, too, sometimes.

Afterward, she told my father not to bring me back.

Lately, I've been reading what it means to forgive. One expert, from The Forgiveness Movement, said it's more than just letting go of a past transgression; it's realizing that what you think happened to you never really did.

I thought some boyfriends concluded that I was crazy, but in truth, I never gave them a chance to know me, never spoke about my mother. I thought Jeff threw me out like trash, but a year later, he called and said he regretted everything.

I thought my mother didn't want me, but when she tried to explain why she ended up in prison, she said: "I had to protect you." She told a story about the man she allegedly tried to kill, how he tried to hurt me. Of course, it wasn't true. But it gave me solace that maybe it was how she dealt with her past, her lies like my armory of stolen forks. It's a tale she's fabricated. Mine goes something like: It was my fault. I wasn't good enough for her, or perhaps any man, to stay. And I wonder with every romantic failure if I'm doomed to relive losing my mother again.

As an adult, I have not been able to sustain a relationship with my mother. She lost custody of her first daughter (my older half-sister), and left me in the middle of the night. She's been back in and out of prison. When she relinquished custody of her third daughter, whose biological father had died, it became too hard for me to continue a relationship with her.

So most of my memories of my mother are from when I was a little girl, and I hold on to them tightly. Like when I was five, my favorite food was Fruit Loops. Left alone at the kitchen table with the cereal box, Toucan Sam's beaky grin kept enticing me to refill my bowl. With each bite the roof of my mouth became tattered from the hard O's but there was a point when the cereal absorbed enough milk to go down easy.

Mother walked in after my third serving and scolded me for eating so much. I didn't understand; there was still cereal in there if she was hungry. She pointed to my bulging belly, looked with disapproval at how it came out from under my shirt. I tried to pull the cotton fabric over my tummy to hide. But she snatched the box away.

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Photo via Flickr user Nicola

"You have to start eating," a friend told me after the breakup with Jeff, the signs of weight loss too noticeable to ignore. "Your body is breaking itself down."

The food in my refrigerator had gone rotten from not eating it; inside my kitchen trashcan, there were maggots squirming among the waste. Catabolysis is a biological process in which the body breaks down its own fat and muscle to survive. When a maggot is ready to pupate, its body breaks down its current state, enabling it to transform into a fly. Such a natural cycle: Self-feeding engenders damage, but also renewal.

My own transformation came one day, passing a bakery, when I smelled bread, fresh and warm out of the oven. I bought a sliced loaf with herb butter and, licking at the soft white skin, I felt a sweet release. I let go of my stories, or they let go of me. Even memories get hungry. And that's what hunger is for: indicating when we're finally ready for more, ready to move past old heartache and filled once again with love.

Follow Tammy Delatorre on Twitter.

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^{One Version of Events No. 5 (Spheres), 2015, HD video, duration variable. All images © Neil Goldberg}

Over the course of roughly 20 years Neil Goldberg has created a poetic body of work that is unified more by ideas than a singular visual style. His ongoing interest in moments of vulnerability has motivated him to create surreptitious photographic portraits of individuals who just missed the train and to film shoppers circling a salad bar as they decide what to eat. Goldberg also draws on material from his own life, often to powerful and haunting effect. For instance, after his father died, Goldberg cast his father's hearing aid in gold and filled his Toyota with autumn leaves that appear to pour out from every door.

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^{My Father's Camry Filled with Leaves, 2009 (inkjet print)}

In his new solo exhibition, One Version of Events, on view at Participant Inc. (253 E. Houston in Manhattan) through May 24th, Goldberg focuses loosely on eating and being eaten, this time including more visible brutality than one generally encounters at the salad bar. In one series of drawings he envisions various wild animals devouring him and his loved ones. And in the central video installation, One Version of Events No. 5 (Spheres), he depicts countless portraits of predator and prey, caught in the moment that one has locked its jaws around the other's neck. The pairs of animals drift gently through a quiet black void, contained within austere bubbles. These images begin to feel at once sorrowful, tender, and even humdrum. In another video installation from the same series, Goldberg features a wolf in pursuit of an elk. But the two animals gradually become more abstract, transforming into simple forms outlined in white. And by the time the inevitable capture occurs, they read simply as amoeba-like blobs merging, or two mapped regions with undulating borders, a pair shifting territories that join.

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For a piece very different in tone, though no more appetizing, the video Shit Hunt finds Goldberg himself as a pursuer of another sort; the artist hustles down the streets of New York, on the lookout for dogs who have just defecated so that he can ask their owners if he can buy the droppings for $5. According to Goldberg, many New Yorkers declined his handsome offer and even those who agreed to it tended to pause for a moment to stare bemusedly at the money in their hand, apparently wondering how to feel about the exchange that had just taken place. He made a policy of replying, "I'd rather not say" whenever someone asked what he intended to do with the poop.

^{Shit Hunt, 2014 to 2015, HD video 2 min and 30 sec}

I recently visited Goldberg in his Lower East Side studio, where we spoke about his work.

VICE: You've dealt with eating before in your work.
Neil Goldberg: Yes, in Salad Bar. I just find that moment so tender, on one hand. I love watching people giving their order to a waiter or waitress. Maybe that will be the next project. There's something kind of open and needy and touching and vulnerable on their faces.

On everyone's face? Aren't there some demanding customers out there?
I guess I'm thinking of the people I choose to eat with! I'm sure some people are like Why isn't the food I have yet to order already here?

But this show deals with animals eating each other. What brought you to focus on this exchange, and on these moments of going in for the kill?
I think the fundamental structure of life, as pertains to our need to eat, has always been horrifying and borderline unbelievable to me. I always say: imagine if there were a Hollywood science fiction pitch meeting. The screenwriter says to the producer OK, there's this planet and on this planet there are creatures that chase each other. Every now and again one creature catches another, tears its body apart, and puts that body inside its own. Can't you just imagine the producer saying OK, but can't you bring it down a little bit? The fact that life involves, inevitability, one organism overriding another's will to live—and that being built into the structure of life—has always felt incredibly powerful to me.

In the videos and images from your show, it seems that the categories of predator and prey dissolve in a way.
That's a good way to put it. There's a moment of disinterest in the eyes of predators. A kind of blasé attitude at a certain point. And it feels like there's almost a type of relenting or resignation on the face of the prey, though I realize I'm projecting.

I was the kid who was depressed for a month when I saw Old Yeller and Old Yeller gets shot. So this is partly a way for me to deal with this intrinsic horror. I was talking to this astrophysicist, Michelle Thaller, and I asked her about eating. She said, "we're all atoms." And she didn't put it this way, but the gist was that eating is a technicality—in that the fundamental building blocks never change. Atoms don't change. So this fluidity between predator and prey is meant to get at the idea of this constant exchange of our composition.

Why did you choose to put these images inside of bubbles? Inside of these glass-like spheres?
It was mostly an intuitive decision—I know that word 'intuitive' is suspect. But I think I was trying to vignette these couples. Much of the show is about relationships and couples, in a weird way. It was a way to frame these pairs and I wanted to suggest the cosmically infinite. There's something about the way that moment speaks to something about the structure of the universe, of our known world. Another thing this astronomer talked about was the way galaxies and universes will consume each other.

This footage of chases was taken from what, documentaries?
Yeah, all from the Internet. There's something about the low-res quality of the images that feels like it supports what I'm trying to communicate about these dissolving bodies.

Well, it echoes the idea of going to an atomic level. The pixels are these little units that make up an image.
Yes! I love that.

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And had you done stuff with animals before?
My first video project was called She's a Talker. It was 90 gay men, from all 5 boroughs, combing their cats and saying, "she's a talker."

Many artists work from the personal, but the choice not to erase an autobiographical origin in one's work feels particular to me. Can you talk about this choice to include the element of the personal in much of your work?
As much as I don't connect to the term conceptual, there's not really a novelistic impulse in my work. My work is rooted in experience. I'm not interested in creating fiction. That's not because I disparage it as a form. It's just not the way my mind works. So I use the literal as a conduit to something that is maybe less specific. My students are often saying, "Memoir is too personal. People won't be able to relate to it." But I actually think the more personal it is, the more people will relate to it. So the reason I don't obscure the autobiographical nature of the work is because I think it paradoxically allows for a richer identification.

[body_image width='1386' height='924' path='images/content-images/2015/05/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/10/' filename='neil-goldberg-405-body-image-1431270441.jpg' id='54390']^{The Gay Couples of Whole Foods, 2013 to 2015, series of 45 inkjet prints on archival paper}

Despite a common assumption that anything directly relating to personal experience is somehow limited and narcissistic.
Yes, or sentimental. I feel like I'm doing my Wallenda tightrope walk over a chasm of sentimentality. It's also harder to disown work that is unambiguously rooted in the personal.

In a sense you're not putting yourself in the position of "the creator" when working with autobiography. You're partly like a character. Less reliable.
Right. You're implicated.

[body_image width='1195' height='924' path='images/content-images/2015/05/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/10/' filename='neil-goldberg-405-body-image-1431269364.jpg' id='54387']^{Neil Goldberg, Wild Animals Eat My Family and Me (Jeff and Hyenas), 2015, graphite on paper (Collab with Kerry Thompson)}

Let's talk about Wild Animals Eat My Family and Me.
So elusively titled, isn't it?

It's a series of graphite drawings. I notice that the infant (who is strangled by a snake) is the only one who appears to be conscious, and in a state of anguish.
Remember the magazine Highlights For Children? They have it at pediatrician's offices. You might be too young.

No I do remember seeing it at the doctor's.
OK, so they would always have a wildlife illustration and there was often something borderline sinister about it. And I have a distinct memory of there being an image on the cover of a piglet being squeezed to death by a python, which couldn't have been there. That's over the line! So I created that Highlights cover as part of the show, and that's also what the image of the baby is based on.

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^{Highlights, 2012, marker and gesso on found object}

Do these graphite drawings belong to, subvert, or invoke a specific tradition?
I'm getting a lot of "I didn't know you drew!" I didn't draw them. They were a collaboration with Kerry Thompson, who is very interested in the tradition of wildlife illustration. We spent a lot of time reworking them. I wanted to invoke Audubon. And I was thinking what if humans were demoted in the food chain?

People might think they are a bit Goya-like.
I'm getting Goya a lot. But I didn't want the impact of it to be about disembowelment.

To depict disembowelment in Goya's time and ours may be quite different.
That's a good point. When you and I could right now get a really explicitly detailed, high-definition video of someone getting their head slowly cut off, it probably does mean something different.

How does identifying these figures, who are about to be ravaged, as members of your family change the way we look at the images?
That they are members of my family is essential to my own experience of the pieces. So much of wanting to make these pieces was wanting to see what that felt like to see them. What would it mean for other people? Well, you want there to be stakes in your work. I think if we're talking about the availability of images of incredible horror-- we don't feel a type of empathy or compassion or identification...

Unless it's personal?
Yes. So I wanted that experience. And with these images I really wanted to have the opportunity to be a spectator to my own work, in a sense.

By having someone else execute the drawings?
Yes, with me kind of choreographing it.

A removed involvement.
Yes. Almost like being at a restaurant and ordering something to eat.

On May 10^th at 7:30pm Goldberg will present an evening of storytelling related to the exhibition at Participant Inc. More details here.

Joseph Keckler is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and operatic bass-baritone whom the Village Voice named "Best Downtown Performance Artist" in 2013. Follow him onTwitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Tambako

In honor of the women who've known both the distinct pleasures and displeasures of raising us, VICE reflects back on some of our mom's most badass moments. Happy Mother's Day, moms and mom figures of the world.

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My mother's motto is "I get what I fucking want." One time something happened at my school. I don't remember which one of my siblings was in trouble or who had been bullied; we are Catholic, and my mom was pretty much preggers for 20 years straight. There were many trips to principal's offices. Anyway, the principal refused to meet with my mom, so she got a wheelchair and oxygen machine and paid our nanny to wheel her into the principal's office. When she got there, the secretary said the principal couldn't speak to her. In between breaths of oxygen, my mother told her she would sit in his office until he saw her. She sat for two hours, in a wheelchair, and he eventually sees her. She always gets what she fucking wants. —Mitchell

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Matt and his mom back in the day

My mother Barbara, a brilliant and beautiful woman, is the chief breadwinner for our family. Despite having to tolerate three narcissistic, oft-depressed men in my brother, father, and me—and being a professional psychologist to boot—she's somehow fun to be around. It's not easy to tease out one moment that defines her general predilection to asskickery, but my mind tends to settle on something that happened before I was even born, when she dove headlong into student activism as a student at Barnard College in New York. Students were protesting military recruitment and other Vietnam War-related activity on Columbia University's campus (back then, Barnard was Columbia's women's college as the latter did not admit women). Mom clashed with her father, a rather buttoned-down Republican who worked on the business side at the New York Times. She found the paper's coverage of the activism to be profoundly biased, and was radicalized further by it, before eventually bringing him over to her side.

I like to think I have some small dose of her courage and fire in my own heart. —Matt

***

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In the summer of '91, or '92, or maybe '93, my parents had a purple Westfalia camper van and we all drove it down from Oregon to camp in Death Valley, California. This was before my parents split up and moved into houses next door to one another. Back when they were still together.

The plan was to camp and relax for a week in the desert. But right when we arrived, my mom began having reoccurring dreams about a baby. The baby was cute but rambunctious and wanted to play all night. She would wake up feeling less rested than when she passed out. It was a problem. After three nights of this, my father being my father said the only solution was to ask the baby what it wanted and give it that. So my mother fell asleep, the baby came, she asked.

The baby said, "I never got to have a life. I want you to bring me into the world and be my mom." She asked the baby's name and he said, "Larkin." She said, "OK, Larkin," and the dreams stopped.

At the end of the week, my dad was driving the purple van back home towards Oregon. Death Valley is full of these old, circuitous pioneer roads through the desert, up and down mountains. We were working our way up a hill when I started screaming and crying uncontrollably. I was one, two, maybe three years old, so it wasn't a big surprise, but my parents were startled at the abruptness and force of my tears.

My dad pulled the van to the side of our tiny dirt road. My mom climbed into the back seat to get me. She opened the Westfalia's sliding door and right there, at her feet, was a handmade cross stuck in the ground. It was a grave marker from the 1800s. On it, someone had carved a birthdate and, only a month later, a date of death. There was also the name: "Larkin." I stopped crying.

My mom shut the sliding door. My dad kept driving home. Seven years later my mother remarried, and she and her new husband had a son. Larkin will be 16 in June. —River

***

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I called my mother to interview her for Mother's Day.

"Well, don't say the bad thing right now," she started off. "Say: 'When Mommy was young, she have lots of good memory.' See, when I was in junior high, I was number one to graduate from junior high. And my writing was even selected to be in the national publication. Isn't it good? I did not even know until I go to high school. My friend tell me, 'I saw your writing in the Youth Council.' The question was Why do we need education? So I say, "With education, we can understand the world around us. With knowledge, you can do lots of things to help people and improve our lives."

"And you won."

"What did I win?"

"Yeah."

"Nothing! You just get publication. I did not even know I won. And my teacher didn't tell me he submit my writing. It was just regular composition in the class. I did not even know until my friend tell me. I always like to read the poems. And Mommy read lots of books. Mommy love the good quotations. All my life, Mommy read lots of novels. Both American novels and the French and Russian. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina. I read all the translations. I read lots of books when I was young. Start when I was junior high, I went to library borrow book. I see the librarian sit there and read. I say, 'That is my profession. I can read and get paid.' All my life, I still read. I really like to read and I like to study. I like good information. Good column I read every day. Isn't that funny? Your mommy is a funny person. I always read, and talk to myself. That's the way I can survive."

"What is something good that you did as a mother?"

"Well, Mommy always let you have a tape. And Mommy always play alphabet game. How many words can we say with A? Like, 'apple'... That is how we play. Always buy tape for you. And we read all those children book. Those help. So, before you go to nursery, you and your sister can read and can write alphabet and count to 100. You and your sister teacher always say, 'Those two are so smart.' And you really happy. And teacher say, 'You two have very good start.' And that is Mommy contribution." —James

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My mom is a tiger. She's the fiercest woman I know, but at her core there's this pure gentleness and love. When she was 11, she immigrated from the Philippines with her three younger siblings. Their parents were already in Chicago, so my mom played the maternal role, comforting her siblings while they flew away from a home none of them would see again for decades.

In the US, my mom skipped two grades because she was brilliant, but she was teased for her accent and her lanky limbs and her Snoopy lunchbox. Immigrant kids don't have it easy now, and they didn't have it easy then. But my mom is a fighter. She smoothed out her accent—she now speaks way better English than my Chicago-born dad—and ended up a pom-pom girl and a beauty queen and a total heartthrob. One guy was so lovesick over my mom that he carved her name into his forearm and showed her.

After she graduated at the top of her class, her dad—who was more traditional—thought she should get married and settle down. But my mom wanted a career in medicine, so she worked two jobs and put herself through nursing school. She ended up saving enough money to buy her own penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, when she was 23. (I turn 23 next month and I rent a room in Bed-Stuy.)

My mom has done a bunch of badass things since. As a nurse, she worked in the ICU with premature babies the size of her fist and saved dozens of lives. At the age of 53, in spite of some health complications, she still runs half-marathons and looks like she could be my sister. But the most badass thing of all has been the love and patience she's shown towards me. I was a fat and happy baby, but a moody and confusing teenager. Through difficult times my mom has not only put up with me, but supported me, my insane choice of career and city, and my ridiculous artist dreams. She always says she just wants me to be better than her: Go further, do more for the world, live more freely. To me, that's the truest mark of a great mom. Little does she realize how lucky I'll be, if I even manage a fraction of what she's done. —Jennifer

***

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Drew and his mom, doing Paris right

I don't know if my mom would qualify as a "badass" per se, but I'm not sure if a mother could love her son more than my mother loves me. Growing up, my mom drove me 45 minutes to school every single day, while also serving as our family's primary breadwinner while my dad was switching careers in his mid-30s. I never realized how hard she worked to make sure our family stayed afloat when I was younger (How could I? I was five!), but in later years, I came to fully appreciate all that she did for me. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW INSANELY DIFFICULT THAT IS???

It's one thing to drag yourself out of bed to go to a lifeforce-leeching job day in and day out, let alone ferry your kid to and from school, but to work hard enough to support your entire family while doing it, AND always be there for your five-year-old kid, teaching them about the world you physically brought them into? That's some Wonder Woman-level stuff. Looking back, I don't know how my mom could have possibly had a moment to herself. But she never complained, never asked for anything in return, and remained positive so that I might turn into a happy, well-adjusted human. That's not a moment of badassness. It's an ultra-marathon of sacrifice. —Drew

***

Follow your mom on Twitter if she's on Twitter.

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Photos via Flickr user Nightlife of Revelry

"I think you need help," she said. The glow of our TV illuminated her tears.

Eating too much Coricidin makes you walk like a robot from a shitty 1960s sci-fi movie. I struggled to sit down like a "normal" person, eager to beat back this assault on my integrity.

"I don't need to go to the hospital," I told her. I was convinced she'd back off and let me Robo-trip in the dark, in peace.

"No. I mean eMOtional help!"

I was tripping pretty hard by then, the "-MO" syllable reverberated in my head like a superball made of unadulterated, psychic pain. That night was years ago, but I still remember the anguish radiating off of my mother in that tiny family room of ours, a strong black woman helpless, at the end of her rope with an only son who was set on killing himself with drugs and alcohol.

The day after my mom confronted me while tripping in her den, I watched L.A. Confidential, slept on the floor and woke up in time for the gnarly Prince Super Bowl halftime show. We didn't discuss the previous night. Just like we didn't discuss me screaming at her that I was going to kill myself the week before. After Prince ripped it, I fell asleep feeling like I had a concussion and seeing closed-eye visuals of the women in my life having their faces ripped apart by clawed demon hands. I awoke the next day to what I thought was an OD on the DXM in the little red caplets of cough medicine. I called 911, and when they came, they told me I was simply having a panic attack. I went to intensive outpatient rehab a few days later, mainly to get the heat off. I only lasted a week. I just couldn't imagine not drinking.

Having been sober a little over three years, it can be difficult to touch base with that version of me. I can get complacent and forget that not being a suicidal, hateful drunk who'd put anything in his mouth or up his nose to get outside of himself isn't my default setting. But it's also important for me to run back that mixtape of songs to die to, if only to keep me grateful. For so long, the alcoholic life was the only one I knew. I was convinced I would die blacked out in a gutter, or at best, a shooting gallery somewhere surrounded by people I could barely stand but still called my friends. Over time, as my disease progressed, I made myself perfectly OK with a morbid outcome. Many of my "Nevers!" became "When can I do that again?" or "Fuck it." Incomprehensible demoralization was my jam.

Even at my worst, I didn't have the luxury of being oblivious to the pain I was causing my family, especially my mom, since she was usually the one bailing me out of my fuck-ups. Booze and drugs were the only things that helped shut up the million-man committee in my head telling me I was a shit human being.

If I was enjoying my drinking, I wasn't controlling it, and if I was controlling it, I wasn't enjoying it.

I realize today that I am immensely fortunate to have the mother I do. Our moms are supposed to be our ultimate, unconditional protectors. But as strong as my mother was, she couldn't protect me from myself, couldn't love me sober when I was in the throes of active addiction. And only now do I know how much that pained her. Only now do I try my best every day to make things right. When I was ripping and running, my dreams and goals, my fear of consequences, my love for her and her love for me couldn't keep me out of hell. My family was the last thing I was thinking about while hunkered down on stools in seedy bars and smoking crack on blocks where The Wire was shot. All I knew is that I wanted be outside of myself, and if my mom knew, if anyone knew, what it was like to be poor old me, they would see why I got faded every chance I had.

Looking at my prepubescent self, I can see character defects long before I took my first drink. Back then I was my mom's only child, her little gifted black boy. But I was angry. And dishonest. And jealous. Most of all, I was scared of everything. The release I got from drinking was a perfect complement to my egomaniac-with-an-inferiority-complex vibe.

My first drink was in freshman year of high school, a warm Natty Boh (Baltimore's beloved, formerly home-brewed piss beer) that I didn't get a couple sips into before the party was broken up. Like a good drunk, I figured I'd give it another shot. There was no booze in my house growing up. But I wanted to get to the bottom of what was so great about alcohol. Lying to my mom about going to my friend's house to play Goldeneye one summer night turned into listening to Jagged Edge's "Where The Party At?" on repeat during a bro-down and drinking Bacardi like it was water. I blacked out, the first of many nights spent time-traveling. I went on to disrobe, puke, smash a table, and cuss out a bunch of strangers. I would only find this out from my mortified friends after waking up in my friend's mom's bed with no idea how I'd gotten there (without her in it, much to my chagrin).

As terrified and disgusted as my friends were, as worried as my mother was when I finally stumbled into the house, all I knew was that I wanted to feel the way I did that Jagged Edge and Bacardi night, all the time, for the rest of my life. It wasn't long before alcohol and drugs became the most important things in my life. Even more important than my mom, the woman I'd drunkenly tell you I'd kill for, but would steal $20 bucks from after I'd sobered up and the shakes started kicking in. If I was enjoying my drinking, I wasn't controlling it, and if I was controlling it, I wasn't enjoying it.

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I didn't get a lot of the consequences I deserved. I know it's only by some sort of cosmic grace that I'm not dead or locked up. Those were certainly the outcomes I was gunning for, once passing out behind the wheel on the Beltway, my shirt covered in vomit, lucky as fuck to have only dented some guy's Honda Accord fender. There were pangs of occasional guilt over how losing her only son would break my mother in two, but I couldn't let anything get in the way of my drinking. And no matter how bloody my knees got, my momma was always there with some hydrogen peroxide and emotional gauze. I knew nothing of how to live like a normal person, but today I know that's not because I was the piece of shit I told myself I was, but because I was sick and fucked up in the game on account of alcoholism.

In 2007, I thought a geographic cure would alleviate that sickness. My mom drove me up to New York, my delusional thinking rubbing off on her. In true alcoholic fashion, I moved up there with no job, no plan, and almost completely unannounced to the near-stranger who would be housing me. I thought that living in a rehearsal space would be the creative boost I needed to break free of everything I'd left behind in Baltimore. But I was the problem, and wherever I went, there I was. I figured I could reinvent myself in NYC. Perma-broke and coked out on other people's dimes, I called my mom constantly, if only to hear a soothing voice. But mostly, I called to beg for money. I thought I was owed the world.

A tough guy afraid of his shadow, I took out my anger on the late-aughts hipsters of Bedford Avenue almost nightly. The same day I swore (again) that I was gonna sober up and get some writing done, I got thrown out of my favorite dive for throwing a pint glass at a table of strangers I'd thought, out of sheer sleep-deprived, coke-induced paranoia, were gossiping about me. I went home, resigned to my fate, to cool off. But I was so drunk and tired—man, was I fucking tired—that I'd forgotten about the piss bottles I kept around my bed. A deep sip on a full Smart Water bottle that contained no water at all sobered me up enough to get up and out to another bar — a drink would fix this — which I would be thrown out of as well for telling three women I'd kick their teeth in. I thought they were talking shit too. I wasn't partying. I was disastering.

By her own admission, my mother says she never stopped loving me through all that hell. But now she can finally like me again.

None of these things seem sane or acceptable now. How could I possibly justify it, if only to myself, but to say that I was sick and dying on my feet? But it was the only way I knew how to be for a long time. And I was convinced I was smart enough to figure this whole thing out at some point and do right by my friends and family, and my mother.

For so many years, I thought my mom was weak for not picking the "right" man in my father (a man I've since come to have a great relationship with). I now know her to be stronger than any action movie star, pro athlete, or hard-living rock star I idolized growing up. It wasn't until I stopped drinking and started living that I realized the strength of her mind and spirit through all those years.

The night the tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I was rolling my face off, thinking life couldn't get any better. It was the start of a weeklong broken-heart bender. One lonely, desolate morning a few days into that bender, I got an email from my mother. She wrote that she was afraid I was going to die: "I feel helpless and it is the greatest pain I've ever felt." Even that emotional appeal, which brought tears that only some lines of coke and a blackout would stop, wasn't enough to get me sober. Driving to work with my tail between my legs days later, I finally mustered the courage to call her and say I was gonna get help. Maybe she believed me, maybe she didn't. Either way, it was another in a long line of tries at this sober thing. I just wasn't ready.

Years later, almost to the day, an email from my mom tells me how proud she's been of me. It's like an echo from the abyss that was my past life. It's taken me many years, but I'm finally realizing my privilege in having both my parents active in my life. I've realized a new sense of gratitude for having parents like mine. They weren't perfect, but they loved me through all the shit.

How could I have called my mom a bitch, or told her that I hated her, sometimes to her face? It doesn't compute today. By her own admission, my mother says she never stopped loving me through all that hell. But now she can finally like me again.

Check out "Prohibition in Northern Canada":

I didn't get sober because I'm some great guy with a noble heart. I was just beaten and completely out of answers, worn down from the daily thoughts of suicide and the obsession of craving booze. I was ground down to the gristle from the worried looks of friends and co-workers, and the helplessness of trying to control my drinking. I was dying from the heartache I was causing my mom.

Toward the end, I needed a lot more of the coke and the dope and Mad Dog 20/20 to get the desired effect. Eventually, it all stopped working, and the reality of my unmanageable life set in like a fog of death. I got sober a few weeks before turning 27. I went to meetings to support someone, with no intention of doing much to help myself. I was determined I would die at 27 like the greats, while not having contributed a fraction of what they had. Thankfully, my suicide pact with myself didn't pop off.

Sober life has not been perfect. I've been sad, irresponsible with money, dishonest, angry, and downright selfish in sobriety. I'm still Kasai at the end of the day, and I know this shit is a lifelong journey. But I wouldn't trade my shittiest day today for my best day out in the killing fields getting fucked up.

In the past few years, I've been two things I never thought possible: sober and happy about it. I've also found what it means to be honest, to think of somebody else for a fucking change, to not want to die every day, to take a hold of the life I was meant to live. I fall down all the time, and I can still be an asshole, but the gift of being able to look my mother in the eye and not collapse under the weight of my shame, of hearing her say she can finally get a good night's sleep not having to worry about me being dead in a basement somewhere: Those are greater blessings than anything else I used to think would guarantee happiness.

Follow Kasai Rex on Twitter.

Four days after charging $14,000 on my credit card for egg freezing surgery, I was jolted awake at 6 AM with an agonizing throb in my right ovary. At 28 and in pretty stellar physical health, I knew dry heaving in pain wasn't normal. It felt like someone had rammed a rusty hunting blade in my right side and was slowly twisting it deeper—within minutes, I had blacked out. I came to feeling paralyzed and knew I was in trouble when I didn't have the strength to grab the Percocet bottle a mere two feet away. Why the hell did I do this to myself? I thought, laying drenched in a cold sweat on the floor, replaying all the reasons why I happily chose to freeze my eggs just a few days prior, at the ripe age of 28.

It started innocuously enough. On the cusp of my 28th birthday, I had a frank conversation with my gynecologist where I explained my situation. A rising media career and newfound happiness with my singledom, coupled with an insatiable desire to travel, meant that I didn't envision getting married anytime soon, and couldn't imagine having kids before 35. She was eager to help and suggested I go to NYU, known for pioneering the technology since 2004. A month later, I walked into my consultation hoping egg freezing would buy me more time, but I walked out with a new epiphany: egg freezing would use genetic testing on embryos to ensure only the healthiest, pre-screened egg would be implanted. The doctor told me about a 33-year-old woman who froze her eggs and, upon testing 13 embryos, found that 12 of the 13 had chromosomal abnormalities. They were able to isolate and implant the one fully healthy embryo. The argument for egg freezing seemed overwhelmingly convincing to me, and I booked my surgery a few weeks later.

The doctors I spoke with were impressed by my pragmatism and told me I was ahead of the curve in choosing to do this now, at 28, when my eggs were the healthiest they would ever be. But not everyone was as supportive: An old coworker nearly spit up her salad as I casually mentioned I was freezing my eggs over lunch. "But you're so young, successful, and beautiful. You'll definitely get married! Why would you do this?" she cried, without quite realizing how insulting her tone was. Her response only re-affirmed why I was doing this: not for a man, or a ticking clock, but for me, and the ability to live out my dreams on my own schedule.

Egg freezing is having its moment in the public eye. Celebrities like Sofia Vergara and Kim Kardashian have come out with their own tales of egg freezing, and despite some backlash, America is beginning to embrace the marriage between technology and fertility. Recently, Maria Menunos told Good Morning America that she'd frozen her eggs at age 33, describing the decision as "a bit of an insurance policy." While statistics are hard to come by—egg freezing is bucketed an experimental procedure by the ASRM (American Society for Reproductive Medicine), making standardization of collecting data near impossible—it seems Menunos is in good company: egg freezing is now a mainstream topic, so much so that companies like Facebook and Apple have made headlines for covering the cost of egg freezing for their employees.

The long process of freezing my eggs was daunting, emotional, and took over my life for a month. A week after my initial consult, I found myself the youngest by a mile in a room full of women over 35, at a two hour '101 of Egg Freezing' class at NYU. I was used to the older women's stares—most assumed I faced major fertility issues or was sick with some life-threatening disease. I openly explained that I was just being pragmatic. The overwhelming response was, 'I wish I had done it at your age. This is too much to handle physically and emotionally now.' The nurse overseeing the class showed us how to inject the various hormones ( HCG, Estrogen,ect) in our thighs. Egg Freezing 101 barely covered risks in a slide show. I'm sure it was in the fine print somewhere.

Less than .025% of women who freeze their eggs end up with ovarian torsions. (Lucky me, finally reaching the 1% at something.)

On Day 1 of injections, I sat at the edge of my bed, teary and trembling, holding 50ccs of Menopur hormones. You never truly feel quite as single—and somehow empowered—as the day you have to stab yourself with a syringe full of hormones, knowing you're suddenly in charge of your whole future. It was powerful and it was terrifying. In an effort to stay positive I started a tradition: with every injection I set intentions for the qualities I hoped my kids would have, then blasted Florence and the Machines and danced like a 7 year old to distract myself from the burn and sting of the needle. I also started meditating twice a day. Those small traditions were what kept me sane.

The schedule was grueling. I stabbed myself with various hormone injections every morning and night, and every 24 – 48 hours I had a 7 AM blood test and ultrasound at NYU. There's nothing like starting off your day in stirrups. I was advised not to date—I would have been a wreck under the hormones, and sex was strictly verboten—or have client outings. Drinking and smoking were off-limits for the duration as well. My estrogen count started at 61 and shot up to over 1,900 in just two weeks. By day 13, I was overwhelmed, crying in public and at work. My mother flew in to help. I've never felt more loved by her than when she, a former nurse, injected me with hormones and pulled me up by the hand, the two of us dancing wildly in my tiny living room.

On the 16th day, I went in for surgery under general anesthetic. The actual surgery is fairly simple and takes less than 30 minutes: my eggs were removed with a large needle placed strategically through ultrasound guidance. I emerged from surgery an hour later, woozy but otherwise happy the 19 eggs were retrieved (10 – 15 is considered a success I was told). My stomach was noticeably swollen to the size of melon. When I insisted that my belly felt abnormally enlarged, the nurse simply gave me a one-sheeter on 'Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS)' and told me to call if I worsened. For the next three days, I waddled around. A waitress mistook me for pregnant, and on Monday, I showed up to work looking 6 months pregnant. I was so uncomfortable I went home early. I was planning to call NYU on Tuesday when, mid-slumber Monday night, the excruciating pains hit.

I was rushed to the ER. Upon my arrival, I was diagnosed with ovarian torsions. With torsions, your ovary twists on itself, occluding blood supply. Ultimately, this can lead to the death of the ovary. Ovarian torsions account for less than 3% of gynecological emergencies. Less than .025% of women who freeze their eggs end up with this condition. (Lucky me, finally reaching the 1% at something.) Normally, a woman's ovaries are the size of walnuts. Due to the sudden blast of hormones, mine had ballooned to the size of grapefruits. Despite the morphine drip, the irony of the situation wasn't wasted on me and I had a good chuckle: I froze my eggs so that I could have babies, and in doing so I had almost lost an ovary forever.

The nurses explained the needle would have to go in inter-vaginally. When I asked about morphine or drugs, they said they couldn't help.

The ER doctor (who, as fate would have it, was my high school crush, whom I hadn't seen in 13 years) explained I was spared from surgery because my ovary had "untwisted" on its own. But he was concerned that my swollen belly was too big. I had over 2 liters of fluid built up from the original surgery and it kept getting worse. We decided to drain the fluid, but no one explained how this was going to happen. I was wheeled to the NYU Fertility Center a few hours later, surrounded by seven women in a room, and put on stirrups. Dread washed over me at the sight of a needle the length and width of a shish kebab and a long plastic draining tube attached to a giant liter plastic bottle. "You're going through my belly, right?" I asked innocuously, almost sure this was a mistake. The nurses explained the needle would have to go in inter-vaginally. When I asked about morphine or anesthetic drugs they said they couldn't help.

A girl my age with shaky hands inserted the needle over and over again as I clutched a nurse's hand with all my might and screamed out in pain so loudly they gave me a gauze for my mouth. I felt it all. The needle would pierce its way through me, and then she'd swivel it in a circle. I'd scream as the needle hit my insides. The image of my own blood and mixed with fluid filling up a full liter bottle was oddly comforting, and after 20 minutes of excruciating attempts to remove more fluid, I wailed one last time in total agony after the last stab failed to procure more fluid out of me. The women left, and I doubled over in fetal position, crying and wanting my mom more then than ever before.

I barely made it through the first night. My best friend Alexandra slept over and told me that every 15 minutes until morning I'd awake drenched in a cold sweat, screaming for Percocet. I had to switch to Oxycodone the next day to manage the pain. She stayed with me that whole week, as I was physically unable to even roll out of bed on my own, much less standing up. Walking to the bathroom 16 feet away was a team effort and took a solid 10 minutes. Mandatory bed rest ensued as I was at high risk to have a repeat ovarian torsion: My ovaries were still the size of grapefruits. I couldn't leave my apartment for two weeks and wasn't allowed to workout for a month following the ER trip.

Last weekend—a month later—I finally went to yoga, had a glass of wine on a first date, and wore my favorite dress. On my date, I nonchalantly explained that I'd frozen my eggs and was pleased to receive a progressive, supportive reply. While I'm still not back to the old me, I have a newfound appreciation for my body as a vessel for life, not just something to starve into a bikini.

I'm often asked if I had known the risks, would I have still gone through with freezing my eggs. My answer is a whole-hearted "Hell yes." What happened to me was terrifying, but incredibly rare. For me, the benefits of egg freezing still far outweigh the small risk. I can live out my dreams, on my timeline – and that's priceless for me. After the ER I decided to share my story on social media so that another 28-year-old woman won't have to think she's crazy for planning her future before age 35. Dozens of young women have reached out to me for advice since, and I've finally been able to do the one thing no one could do for me: give an honest perspective about what freezing your eggs at 28 means, and what sometimes goes wrong.

Follow Vicki Rox on Twitter.

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All photos by Mario Zanaria

Doris Mirescu's productions take place "elsewhere."

Romanian-born and Sorbonne-educated, Mirescu has been making what she calls "live films" in New York City since 2007. Her work combines theater and cinema in ways that both expand and confound perception. During one of Mirescu's pieces, spectators might share the same space with actors for a few passing moments, the audience's gaze instead scuttling back and forth between live-feed images on screens offering multiple perspectives on what's happening just beyond reach.

Mirescu's latest undertaking, her last before returning to Europe, is an adaptation of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris, in which psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to a space station orbiting a distant planet. Once aboard, Kelvin is disturbed to encounter his late wife Hari who had killed herself years ago as a result of his emotional neglect. At first her presence torments him, but then he falls in love with her all over again, knowing all the while that she isn't "real." What are these figments appearing to the cosmonauts, these echoes from the past? "We are you, yourselves, " Hari says. "Your own conscience."

Mirescu's production is staged in a vacant Upper West Side townhouse, where several entire floors have been meticulously set dressed. Scenes being played upstairs, in the next room, or on the fire escape outside are simultaneously projected for us as we sit in an ad hoc screening room, helplessly, happily lost in the crosscurrents of images and feeling she sets in motion. For Mirescu, efficiency is the enemy of art. With palpable affection for time wisely wasted in the theater, she manages to transcend the film's longueurs, at once attenuating and amplifying them by eliminating cinematic cuts, which might have found their theatrical equivalent in successive blackouts. Neither characters nor spectators are afforded a reprieve, and the result is a mise-en-scène thrumming with tension between performer, media, and role.

VICE spoke with Mirescu about Heidegger, souls, Mirescu's storied career, and the end of her time in New York City. Solaris will have two encore shows on May 10 and 13 at an undisclosed location in Manhattan.

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VICE: How did you first begin blending theater and film?
Doris Mirescu: I have always loved film, but I also love the immediacy of theater, the vulnerability and fragility and transient aspect of it. Form is an extension of content. The presence of technology in the room is not an outside force. I want the cameras to be human.

I work with this idea constantly. The presence of the machine is always an intrusion. But if we allow the performers to acknowledge the intrusive presence of something not human, then we are not hiding, we are not pretending, not lying. Everything is shown. The very process of capturing an image is shown. The cameras are seen. The cables are seen. The camera operators "act" upon the world they are filming. They are in it. They choose. They make. They participate. We can see them "working." They become "actors," they are as important as those involved in the action they are filming. Everything is done live. It is all alive because I want to look at the disturbance, the disease at the core of things. It takes the time that it takes. The transitions are not edited out. They cannot be. This is raw. This is life.

I like to find oblique ways of looking at things. I like to multiply levels of perception.

Why did you choose Solaris to be your last project (for now) in NYC?
The "last" project is also the first gesture toward a new understanding of perception, of technology, of cinematic language. Leaving in a sense means going toward what I do not know yet, what I long to discover, what is still not articulated. I like to explore, to search, to question, to challenge form and content, to be challenged by form and content. At the core of Tarkovsky's Solaris there is a quest. A quest for the true meaning of life, of love, of time. A quest that forces one to face the unknown, the void. There is this movement from what is known—"earth"—toward what is foreign, what shakes all certainty. We move from the known, the obvious, the surface, to the beyond, the hidden, the secret. It is a metaphysical quest. It is also an artistic one. Kelvin starts by saying "I am not a poet" and ends up being faced with the ultimate essence of poetry—the unexplainable. He is faced with the very meaning of love. Something he denied, something he said no to. He is being looked at by his own conscience, his own sense of shame. His quest is also my own. This movement from surface to meaning, emotion, and truth, to a true sense of responsibility—this is the ultimate artistic gesture, the only one that matters.

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Over the years you've made work in a lot of unconventional venues that lend themselves to unconventional experiences. For instance, there's a sense of both physical and metaphysical vastness in your Solaris even though the audience is contained in one tiny room. Could you describe your relationship to theatrical space?
I try to destabilize "theatrical space." I'm not really interested in frontality. I like to find oblique ways of looking at things. I like to multiply levels of perception. Meaning can be created both vertically and horizontally. In front of us and behind us. Around us, in us. We see things, but things should be able to look back at us, from all sides. I question the notion of "presentation."

Space is an experience of time. The present and the past and the future combined. Space is alive. It reveals and hides at the same time. It frames and defines. For me, what contains is as alive as what is being contained. In the case of Solaris, space has many resonances. Solaris takes place on a "space" station. The notion of space itself is at the core of the experience. Space enfolds both being and time, existence and memory, what Heidegger calls Dasein, "being there." The audience room in Solaris becomes an experience of Dasein, an experience of being there and not there, an experience of space as a small, but extraordinarily complex and open entity. A brain cell. The human ability to create universes within universes, ad infinitum.

Related: "VICE Shorts: 'Mr. Happy'"

In Solaris, the character Snaut says, "We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in that foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that we fear, that we have no need for. Man needs man." Holding the mirror up to nature is an old metaphor for what the work of art is meant to do. Does this resonate with you? Is another person always an "other world"?
In Solaris, we see the confrontation between what is and is not human. Between the I and the utterly "other." The other is ultimately unknowable and as such is an experience of the infinite. I am faced with the other and the other faces me. The other questions me and endangers me and loves me. I must be able to embrace the other as other. The encounter with otherness is the essence of the artistic gesture. It's as terrifying as it is beautiful and necessary. Otherness in its alterity reveals something primordial about me. My own existence. My own soul. But it will forever remain outside of myself. And therefore I will forever long for what faces me and is not me. I am faced with the ultimate experience of transcendence, with meaning that goes outside of myself, and yet is also myself. Because it is other.

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You've said that the combination of film and theater in your pieces represents a confrontation between death and life.
Maybe not confrontation, but a symbiosis between life and death. It's not hostile. It's an experience of life as a whole, actually. The cycle of life and death. Totality and infinity.

What is static about film—it's edited, already finished at the moment it is shown—is reevaluated and reinvented, because it all happens on stage, live and in real time. None of it is pre-recorded or controlled, dead. All of it is vulnerable because it's open to the reality of what happens in that moment in time. Theater is open to mistakes and therefore to change, to life. The vulnerability of life lived in the moment. Both for the actors and for the cameramen. Plato's allegory of the cave is so essential here. People watch shadows projected on a blank wall (the birth of cinema!). This is as close as these people get to experiencing reality. Yet the philosopher/creator/spectator should be able to see better and realize that these are only shadows and that true reality is elsewhere.

So here we are. The fundamental difference between cinema and theater, between what is and is not real, between projected shadows and reality, death and life.

Jessica Rizzo is a DFA candidate in the dramaturgy and dramatic criticism program at the Yale School of Drama.

Illustration by Heather Benjamin

What is it about tiny houses that's so appealing? Is it their tidy cuteness, their manageability? That they sometimes seem like solved Rubik's Cubes, everything in its neat and perfect place? To me, they're like an architectural version of taking deep breaths—a sign that everything is under control. They also foster the fantasy, from afar at least, that my surroundings could finally become peaceful and understandable, if only because they've been whittled down. The vision is romantic but neutered—like an adult fort, or a living dollhouse.

So after years of reading stories and watching shows about various tiny houses—tree houses, pod houses, shipping-container houses, dumpster houses, micro cabins, trailers, all of which are generally under 500 square feet, and sometimes even under 100—I rented a tiny, partially off-the-grid house in Western Massachusetts. The eight-by-20-foot wood cabin, set on the edge of a field beside a forest, was straight out of a pioneer-girl childhood fantasy, with little windows on all sides, a tiny front porch, a pointy roof, and a sweet little chimney. The owners had placed the house (it had wheels and had been built nearby) several hundred feet behind their main home, on a long country road about a half hour's drive from the closest town.

The house had no internet, no cell service, no landline, and no running water. (In the warmer months a gray-water system originating from the main house filters water into the surrounding plants and gardens and woods.) There was also a composting toilet. A miniature wood stove provided heating. The house did have electricity, though, which maybe kept it still on the grid.

For my three-day stay, I'd been given about six gallons of water in three different containers, although I didn't use all of it, in part because I didn't bathe beyond washing my hands and brushing my teeth. The "bedroom" was in the open loft above the kitchen, accessible by ladder and set up with a full-size futon. There was room for a couple books and cups on either side, but that was about it. A small stained-glass reading lamp was mounted above a little window that looked out on the trees. There was just enough room for a person under six feet to sit up in the middle of the bed, which is where the roof peaked. The futon had been made up with a cozy down comforter and flannel sheets. It was wonderful, and I slept better than I had in months.

In his book The Small House, tiny-house builder, dweller, and pioneer Jay Shafer presents the tiny house as an antidote to American McMansions—our "bloated warehouses full of toys, furniture, and decorations"—and as a partial solution to energy overconsumption. "My decision to inhabit just 90 square feet," he wrote, "arose from some concerns I had about the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because I just do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space."

Admittedly, I'm not as concerned about large houses' impact on the environment as I am about my own desire to feel more in control of things than I do where I live now. While my Brooklyn apartment isn't exactly a McMansion, I've never been particularly (or, at all) in touch with the processes that go into making it easy to live in. And so, instead of reading up on how water, heat, and electricity work, I tried living in a tiny house, which I'd let myself believe promised an implicit degree of understanding and control. I'd thought that, by virtue of living so small, I'd somehow turn into someone who understands how a whole house works. That, because of the smaller scale, I'd magically understand the basics of what makes it possible for humans to live indoors. This was in part because compost toilets and firewood seemed easier to figure out than indoor plumbing and apartment radiators, but it was also because I'd hoped that a tiny house might just automatically make me feel more in tune with my surroundings. One thought I'd had before I got there, for instance, was that if the tiny house's roof should spring a leak, I'd somehow be able to fix it not because I know anything about roof-fixing but simply because it would be small enough to reach by ladder, and that I'd be able to jury-rig something until I could actually figure it out.

I think there's a bit of truth to this. If the house is small enough, I could go up there on a normal ladder and cover the hole with duct tape (a tarp?) in a way that I'd be too scared to do with a regular-size house, but mostly I think I was just channeling some of the fun I remembered having with dollhouses. Specifically, the satisfying feeling of being in charge of it all—the top, the bottom, the sides, the interior—watching over it, master of everything.

To a certain extent that was the case. It felt great managing the fire, for instance. It was gratifying to help create heat—not that I built the stove or anything, but putting logs into a metal box, and being capable of creating enough warmth in below-freezing weather to not die, to in fact be totally comfortable, for days, felt amazing. And the compost toilet was a pleasant and convenient surprise.

But I also realized, pretty much as soon as I got there, how absurd and ridiculous it was to have fantasized that by simply being in a smaller space I might magically gain any kind of greater grasp on how actual on-the-grid utilities work.

Because although I'd hoped that living without running water might somehow briefly transform me into a badass homesteader type, I just ended up going through a bunch of plastic bottles and then brought them back to Brooklyn with me, because I was too embarrassed to leave them in the recycling there, for the owners to see.

Plus, it was lonely living in a space so streamlined. Even though the house had been built for two (the double bed, the ample bench seating), it was hard to imagine more than one average-size person moving around in there without tripping too much. Not to mention having any kind of bathroom privacy or room for intimacy. (This is the third time I have put my curiosity about how people have sex and/or go to the bathroom in truly tiny houses back into this story, so I guess by now I should have taken the hint and dropped it, but maybe it was my interest in those topics, and not in electricity and plumbing, that I really wanted to "improve myself" by trying to understand. Although I still don't totally.)

In Shafer's book, which was the only book in the tiny house when I got there, almost like a Gideon Bible in a roadside motel room, he writes, "If you do only one thing to make your new home more environmentally sound, make it small." Which, if I ever find myself in that position, I will keep in mind. It seems easier than making it tiny.