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-Kate Casper | Tuesday, November 28, 2023
For breakfast, I order a pastry and “un cappuccino” from Cafe Settimiamo across the street from Guarini, and I chug it on the way to my favorite class (which I rarely prepare for). And in my favorite class which I rarely prepare for, we’ll read a William Carlos Williams poem called “This is just to
Kate Casper | Tuesday, November 7, 2023
In a niche cocktail bar in Venice, we fit right in — in our post-Flixbus outfits, still shivering from the chilly walk/run to our establishment of choice on Fondamenta Frari. Fife and I found Il Mercante by chance through a fateful Google search: “Cool speakeasy Venice.” We spent two hours there and too much money.
Kate Casper | Friday, October 27, 2023
There was this girl in my poetry class during my freshman year. She was a senior. She was sophisticated and cool and unlike me in every way, except she also had brown hair. She wrote poems about things I didn’t understand like pink Gucci mules and buckets of beers at CJ’s and postgames at Crossings.
Kate Casper | Wednesday, October 4, 2023
In a shower in Munich, stuck in a beer-fueled post-Oktoberfest daze, the shower water went from BP-communal-shower hot to arctic-tundra cold in a matter of seconds. So, naturally, I decided to flee the scene. And by flee the scene, I mean pause the Tom Odell song I’d been playing on repeat (it’s called “Black Friday,”
Kate Casper | Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Call it my cute, American ignorance, but I really believed Italian grocery stores would accommodate my need for ready-made vodka sauce. I really believed I could walk into Fantasia on Via di S. Giovanni and purchase a jar of that heavenly mix of onion, basil, tomato, garlic, parmesan and — you guessed it — vodka.
Kate Casper | Tuesday, September 5, 2023
In my castle made of Scotch Tape and digital photographs of high school memories and broken Christmas lights and piles of graphic tees my mom is begging me to donate, I decide: It’s probably time to leave the country. It’s not that I don’t love this place, where every photo is a reminder of “something
Kate Casper | Tuesday, April 18, 2023
I remember almost missing my flight back to South Bend at the end of Winter Break. I was still in line for TSA 10 minutes before the plane took off, and by the grace of God, I made it (I really shouldn’t have made it). I remember that plane ride back to campus — I
Kate Casper | Tuesday, April 4, 2023
In a niche coffee shop in Vienna, I fit right in, wearing my favorite sweatshirt with the watercolor fish and some orange converse sneakers, the ones owned by every self-proclaimed “Indie Kid” I’d ever met. I plugged my half-alive phone into the wall, sipped on a honey lavender latte and began politely eavesdropping on the
Kate Casper | Monday, March 27, 2023
I’m sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs on Fieldhouse Mall, watching seas of accepted students wearing Notre Dame drawstring backpacks on their tours. They’re walking past landmarks like LaFun and Stonehenge, places that are now just pitstops on a tour, but might very well become their stomping grounds in only a short time. I
Kate Casper | Tuesday, March 7, 2023
I’m in the ACE building, and I promise I’m the least productive person here (besides the guy who’s been napping for the past hour next to a box of Girl Scout Cookies). I’m surfing through my high school newspaper archives, reminiscing about those simpler times at my alma mater, T.C. Williams High School. And, while