An Introduction

“All the world began with a yes.”

- Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

More than six years ago, sometime in early 2020, I began a blog out of sheer pandemic boredom. I was freshly eleven, insufferably pretentious for my age, and totally impassioned with a zeal for Social Justice©. Most posts are now archived, but you can see my former page, Tina’s Typical Tuesdays, here. 

Despite its admittedly corny start, I remain proud of that endeavour. It was consistent and unburdened by the thought of readership numbers or critical reception or social cringe in the way that all pandemic-era digital content was (seriously, let’s talk about those same-person P.O.V TikToks—if you know, you know). This sort of freedom, combined with the boldness of an eleven-year-old not yet chastened by that thing called Rejection, was a lethal combo. So there I was, writing feminist think pieces and advocating for brazen gun control. Don’t get me wrong—I still believe in all of those things. But my last post was in August of 2022. How did we get to where we are now: Tub Talk? 

I first encountered the term in eighth grade, when I was chatting with a then-boyfriend who I thought was so much cooler than me because he (allegedly) went to parties and played JV basketball and still nerded out over Percy Jackson. The epitome of middle school romance, honestly. When we touched on the parties that he promised to take me to despite the privile-curse that is my helicopter parents, he told me that his favourite part of them were tub talks. He explained tub talks as sort of conversational pockets where emotional intimacy was initiated, inadvertently, through deep and/or intellectual chats. In my mind, I imagined a few partygoers huddling off to the bathroom with a bottle of Pink Whitney and pulling their knees in to form some kind of impenetrable bathtub society. Like a cut scene from The Edge of Seventeen, maybe (Kelly Fremon Craig, if you’re reading this, call me).

Of course, I was left on a bit of a cliffhanger when I broke up with this boyfriend and moved three thousand miles away from home, never to experience such an event with him. At boarding school, I, for the first time, faced opposing opinions from kids who did not hail from hippie-go-happy California, cried late-night tears over history papers with friends I now call family, fell flat on my face in love, tumbled flat on my butt out of love, and essentially came to know Rejection and Failure as quiet companions. Whew. High school, right? 

I came to Andover expecting my education itself to radically change me. And it did, of course. This page, if anything, will be a manifestation of the ways in which my education taught me to read between the lines of everything I consume, to be an active, engaged, and critical member of the culture that I live in. But the fibre of me was really changed through that silly thing called tub talk.  

While the essays on this page won’t always be casual conversation, my hope is that the collection of them brings about that buzzy swirl of curiosity and nostalgia and buried vulnerability you stumble across when least expected. To Tub Talk!

Cheers,

TCP.