StarkMarkings Victoria Chen

As the school year comes to a close so does StarkMarkings Season 2! With school behind (actually not yet, we both still have finals...) and summer ahead, listen as Angelena and Victoria reflect on this past SM season and the year at large. (PS. If you get far enough, Victoria will explain why her life is like a cartoon... the story involves a puppy and a bagel).

Announcement: We will be taking a summer break (although there might be sporadic, bonus summer uploads)! We'll be back in the fall with Season 3... stay tuned. In the meantime, subscribe to our newsletter, which will continue to run all throughout the off-season.



We hope you enjoy this episode! (If you end up liking it, consider leaving us a rating!)



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How are the people online so perfect? Will the boys at school like me? How do I prevent wrinkles? Growing up means change. And the change you go through on the outside can be just as dramatic and as perspective-altering as the change you go through on the inside.

In this episode, Victoria talks to Sara Amar, a junior in college who exudes self-assurance, to discover her secret to seemingly unwavering confidence and Rebecca Boylan, an English professor who incidentally assigned The Picture of Dorian Gray, sparking the inspiration for this episode. If you're not familiar, the novel by Oscar Wilde is about a young man who switches places with a portrait of himself, allowing his physical being to remain young while the painting grows old. Would you wish to stay forever young? Are beauty and youth inherently intertwined? In this episode, Victoria poses these questions, and both Sara and Professor Boylan take their shots at answering. Listen as both guests discuss their relationships with their physical appearances, the role of beauty standards in their lives, and their thoughts on aging. 

We hope you enjoy! (If you end up liking the episode, consider leaving us a rating!)

Link to our monthly newsletter: https://starkmarkings.substack.com/

Link to our website: https://starkmarkings.com/

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We release episodes every other Friday; growing up is timeless.

Can we really be best friends with anyone forever? In this episode of Common Nonsense, Victoria and Angelena call up their childhood BFFs to find out. 
Whether you move away, like Victoria did from Madison, or simply grow apart as people, some friendships have a natural end. Others stand the test of time for reasons both in and out of our control, like Angelena and Anna. Either way, it is difficult for the fondness cultivated between two people who, past or present, ever called each other “best friend” to fade. Maybe best friends forever isn’t total nonsense.


P.S. (Hidden in the episode is a dramatic reading of a cringey email chain and an unsent apology letter)




Link to our monthly newsletter: https://starkmarkings.substack.com/
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We release episodes every other Friday; growing up is timeless.

It takes time to think through our past and come to conclusions about our present. As we grow up, the simple black and white nature of our youth slowly breaks down. As a result, we get stuck in stalemates with familiar people and familiar ideas alike. Conflicting experiences beg the question: what is the right way to make sense of the world? There’s that cliché rom-com line, “I need some time to figure things out.” So, with the request for time, we often come to a standstill in our personal growth. But, a standstill isn’t a plateau; it’s a moment of recalibration. A pause when we might not be moving forward, but our minds are racing in a million different directions, unweaving the simplicity with which we used to characterize our surroundings.

This episode, we interview Brandon Wu, a junior in college, and Korean-American poet Eugenia Leigh. In our conversations, notice how, in both coming of age stories, our guests find themselves in moments of stillness. Once we discover the simplicity we took for granted as children is counterfeit, stalemates and standstills give use continuous opportunities to pause and reconstruct our perspectives anew.

(content warning: this episode deals with themes of abuse)



Link to our monthly newsletter: https://starkmarkings.substack.com/

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Order Eugenia's new poetry collection Bianca here



We release episodes every other Friday; growing up is timeless.

“Don’t talk to strangers” is a mandate for every child issued before trips to the grocery store, on school playgrounds, and basically anywhere in public. But as we grow older, should we still take this advice to heart? In the first episode of StarkMarkings’ Season Two sub-series “Common Nonsense,” listen to Victoria and Angelena talk about their run-ins with strangers: people they’ve never met before and haven’t seen since the wholesome, worrisome, or awkward interaction that brought them together. Among other anecdotes, hear about the time Angelena confessed her love to someone she didn't know and Victoria’s connection with a stranger in a graveyard. In this new series, you might realize that the common sayings we've heard over and over again aren't common sense at all, rather they’re nonsense. Enjoy the first episode of “Common Nonsense.” Growing up is timeless.

Link to our NEW MONTHLY NEWSLETTER: https://starkmarkings.substack.com/

Link to our website: https://starkmarkings.com/

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We release episodes every other Friday; growing up is timeless.

It’s easy to forget that everyone is doing life for the first time. We all start out with no knowledge of the world, and as a result, we’re reliant on stories, ambitions and explanations that other people give us—until we experience things for ourselves.

What happens when your new experiences give you no choice but to question who you’ve been up until that point? What do you do when you start to feel like old habits, interests or even people don’t suit you anymore?

This episode’s stories show the power of making your own choices in the face of these questions. While trusting your judgment for the first time can be scary, it’s necessary for understanding who you want to be and forging who you are.

We interview Adriana Termeer, a former ballet dancer turned whale enthusiast and a junior in college and Dr. Joseph Hartman, a DC-area native who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and holds a PhD in Political Theory. Both share stories of how they learned to carve out who they are from the environment they grew up in, navigating which parts to keep and which to let go.



Link to our NEW MONTHLY NEWSLETTER: https://starkmarkings.substack.com/

Link to our website: https://starkmarkings.com/

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We release episodes every other Friday; growing up is timeless.