Kacper Niburski / The Silhouette

Dear Kacper,

I think I should start with a hello, though it may be wasted on you. Business, and the slack jaw rapidness of an auctioneer, is your mode of conversation, so I’ll instead hope that wherever you are, it’s sunny and you’re happy.

I can’t tell if you are, to be frank. I know that’s hard to believe me not knowing you or really me not knowing me, but you’re young, Kacper. You’re a freshman in university.

You see, I’m you but older though it’s very well possible my archaic lexicon gives that fact away. Words like archaic and lexicon are surefire indicators of how ancient you’ve become.

I’m sorry for becoming old, but there was nothing we could’ve done about it. Your knees crack when you bend and you feel tired even after you wake up and you drink coffee and you’ll figure out the rest as it goes on. Sometimes you won’t; I’m sorry for that too.

That’s why I am writing to you now, freshman Kacper, in order to help fill in the blanks that I, and you by extension, didn’t know way back when you began this whole damned thing. I want to ensure that in the future of this university odyssey that you are just now beginning, I won’t have to write an apology letter to the both of us.

I fear that this message won’t get to you in time, however. I’m afraid that when you receive it, you’ll be starting your fourth year at McMaster with a dirty mop of a haircut and a laziness that seems palpable; your parents will look at you as a they do to a trophy collecting dust, a forgotten memory of triumph reserved for better days; you’ll be a mess of yourself, of who you thought you should be, and who you never were – and the three categories will never be in agreement, and you won’t either, and you’ll wonder if anything ever is, if it ever was.

And then you’ll look back to your freshman self, and you’ll see a boy who seemed steeped in sunlight, who thought that if he only tried in whatever he attempted, he would eventually have success, and that boy, with an indefatigable dream of becoming anything but that boy, would be smiling.

From there, you’ll try to rearrange the haze of memories that you somehow once lived, and there will be millions of them plastered on your ceilings, walls and picture frames. You’ll collect them all if only to see how they changed the way you shake your hand or the way you talk, and at that point, you’ll write a letter to that same boy in an attempt to ensure that his smile lasted.

And here is what you’ll get:

Try in everything you do, Kacper. It’s a simple truth and for that reason, you’ll forget it most of all during the complexity of university. But remember that you don’t want to wake up one day and wonder where the hell the time went and where did you go with it.

Know that in the next four years, shit happens and loads of it will come flushing your way after those cherry-blossom twilight days you find yourself in end. But also know that this is not necessarily bad: terrible events will always occur, even after you’re gone. That’s not exactly comforting, but it’s enough. You are me, and I’m still here, and together we have always gotten through things no matter how bad they seemed at first. As you’ve been led to believe, and still believe to this day, there is sun even on the cloudy days. It’s just somewhere else.

When those cloud-drunk days dwindle down, and you’re feeling like an overflowing sewer gutter trying to drain away rain, get up. Shake the sleep from those legs. Act. Do. Feel. Wear socks. Funny socks. Colourful socks. Live, for Christ sake, and if you’re in those socks while the thirst of life is at your tongue, then you’re all the better for it.

Fall in love, Kacper. It is just about the best thing you can be in, though it won’t always be successful at it. There will be times when you can’t imagine why you allowed yourself to be so exposed, so vulnerable. It’ll all seem so stupid, so forced, so unimaginably regrettable. But those moments will pass, and the relationship will pass with them, and you’ll find yourself still holding her hand after it all and look how soft it is and look how happy the two of you are.

There will be the best nights of your life you’ll never be able to remember and other times that you’ll remember too much that wish you could forget. Both of them will enrich you in different ways because both, on days when you’ve forgotten all about the trivial problems that swarmed you once daily, will one day be called “the days.”

Write about it all. No matter how small or big. Even if you’re exhausted. Especially if you are. Talk, talk, talk until your mouth dries or your hand cramps or until you’re satisfied that you’ve printed your uniqueness on the white pages in front of you. Because the future is made of the words you compose and the words you don’t and you have so much to say. In the end – our end, Kacper – you’ll be left behind with the sentences you use and others will be left with you in those same sentences, and that means something.

What it means you’ll only find out when you grow to be my age. Until then, Kacper, I hope the world for you, I hope that you want more than just a rocky globe, and I hope that we can laugh about it all, whatever it is, after the fact.

Until we meet, warm regards,

Kacper

At the heart of every tragedy, you’ll find a woman.

And though that bears a misogynistic truth in an otherwise patriarchal construct, it is no more apparent both in a literal and figurative sense than in McMaster Thespian Company’s production of Euripides’ Medea. As a tale lacking in a sense of right and wrong, the tragedy focuses on Medea and Jason, two heroic Greek figures who marry, fall out, and believe that their misguided passions for each other is a surefire sign of the deepest form of love. That is to say, Medea kills her own sons and Jason’s would-be bride.

While the plot seems borderline impossible, MTC’s production of Medea highlights the fervent and blossoming independence of women by reworking it into the burgeoning background of feminism in the 1950s. Chris Vergara, an experienced veteran of the MTC cast, wonderfully casts the shadow of an era that was inherently countercultural by both establishing and subsequently deconstructing an otherwise repressive phallocentric society. The lines dividing an antiquated Greek culture blur with the sound of television’s crackling and records playing in attempt to acknowledge the faults in the world we live in.

Though the archaic syntax and occasional flubbing of lines added to the difficulty in deciphering - let alone understanding - the dialogue, the overall message was unmistakably clear: hate breeds from love and love from hate.

In the end, the play was more than some overarching statement of feminism. It was more than a portrayal of empowerment. It was about humanism, and the way each of us, man or woman alike, lose their humanity when we are treated like anything but.

Graziella Mastrangelo was flawless as Medea, convincingly transforming into both a killer lady and a lady killer. When Jason, acted by Dan Megaffin, tore across the stage in a fit of unparalleled grief, shaking with each step, the audience shook with him. And as the Nurse, acted by Jessica Teicher, cried to the gods in a futile hope of restrain, one could not help but wonder if she wasn’t acting. For a fleeting second sitting there in your seat, you were sure that the Nurse was warning of a murder going to happen on stage. In front of your eyes. In a few moments. Now. Then. Forever.

Though the 2300-year leap may come at a price with choppy archaic dialogue, it was an incredibly rich play which was only bolstered by avant-garde approach. As Malcolm Carnie, an Arts and Science student resoundingly expressed, “Their interpretation of Medea was just fantastic.”

By: Kacper Niburski

Despite a scraggly beard that shares the consistency of a porcupine’s quill, I was once a child. Though that soul may have died with pubescence, I remember an idyll world that beamed when I was happy and that cried when I cried. I remember developing a universe that centered around me because as far as I could tell, I was indeed that center. And I remember feeling nothing was particularly important because everything was.

Moonrise Kingdom, a film by Wes Anderson, is exactly this – a moment, a feeling, an entire worldly existence of childhood captured in the amber of film. At the very surface, it is no more a story of two children wrapped in the unadulterated swirl of pre-sexual fantasies and love. They elope, as loosely as that word can be applied. They try to find their paradise, Moonrise. And they dance around in underpants when time permits.

It is entirely unrealistic. A consistently aesthetic universe somehow contains the foibles of the major characters - characters that often reach a spiritual equilibrium without consulting the terms of good and evil. But that is the point.

Beyond the fantastic picturesque scenery and the inescapable moral scruples describing a world that seems anything but moral, it is a movie about what it means to be children.

It is about the limitations of time in the desire for unlimited aspirations, about when imagination is free from the dissatisfaction and realism of adulthood, about the triumphs in simply living fully rather than filling up our time with seemingly triumphant endeavors.

At its very core, it is about the world – our world – constrained only by on our ingenuity, not by what we know. Because as children we know nothing, and that means everything.

Now as I type here as a presupposed adult with worries, debts, and an ever-growing anxiety, I know this film is good. My inner child tells me as much.

By: Kacper Niburski