Hosted at North Haven’s Clarion Inn, the convention drew all kinds of toy seekers — from parents and children lugging boxes filled to the brim with new toys, to adults scouring for childhood favorites.

“I love the atmosphere, the vibes,” Carlos Solis, a comic book collector and vendor from Boston, said. “Everybody’s hunting down stuff they used to have as a kid. In the morning, it was packed. You could barely walk.”

According to Solis, Connecticut shows always have a great turnout.

Organizer Andrew King said the convention was held in honor of the late John Kozin, the New England convention’s former organizer and a “huge” GI Joe and Transformers fan. Bob Budiansky, who wrote 58 of the original Transformers comics, Ron Rudat, the figure designer behind G.I. Joe, and Kirk Bozigian, former Vice President of Marketing at Hasbro, were all present on Sunday.

“I wanted to do the best GI Joe and Transformers show possible,” King said. 

Matt Ryan, creator of the “Brenda Steelhammer” comics and art director at Bad Elf, was also selling comics at the convention. He recounted fond memories of his grandparents sending him comic books in care packages from Florida. Now, he writes light-hearted fantasy adventure comics inspired by his daughters. 

Ryan wants his young readers to “forget about the outside world for a little bit and just have a little joy ride with [him].”

For Cliff Saccoccio, English teacher, aspiring author, and comic book vendor, walking through the packed aisles was a bit like walking through memory lane. 

“When I was little, my mom dropped me off at the comic book store when she went grocery shopping. It was more or less like a second home,” Saccoccio recalled. 

Ryan Lewis, a vendor of hand-painted and 3D-printed toys, first started making toys for his daughter to play with.

“I never had a printer until I brought my daughter to something like this, and I noticed I couldn’t afford anything that was at one of the events that was going on,” he said. 

Since acquiring his own printer, Lewis has not only been making custom toys for his daughter but also making sure that other kids can walk away with something, too. 

At his vendor stand, he had a $1 bin, and shoppers could roll a dice for the chance to win something. 

“I like having kids be able to get stuff that’s easier, accessible,” he said. 

Dan Ungar, vintage video game seller and full-time teacher, recalls an experience as a vendor where a man who lost everything in a fire picked up a few games that he had as a kid and started crying. 

“I ended up just giving him the games,” Ungar said. “It touched me… the fact that he had so many awesome memories of it”.

King also mentioned giving away toys at conventions, including Matchbox cars, Hot Wheels and Squishmallows.

“It’s seeing a little kid, and giving them a toy, and changing their day, and putting a smile on their face. That’s the best part,” King said.

The Clarion Inn is located at 201 Washington Ave.

The post Toy & Comic Convention bridges generations of fun appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It’s outdated, you know? The idea that you’re supposed to choose between your passions and financial stability. I choose both, I say. The right side of my lips pinch together. My facial expressions have always been uneven like that. 

It’s outdated, I repeat into the phone that evening, my IKEA lamp perched overhead. 

Umma rambles on the other end of the phone, something about how cousin Lana interned at all these major film agencies but now she’s working at a furniture startup. About how Jin-woo from across the street is a computer science major now. How Uncle Park sold his start-up for $100 million, how Yale is the past and Stanford is the future and “you shouldn’t have rejected Stanford for a humanities school.” 

You don’t know the job market as well as I do, I lie. For Umma, I produce soothing placebos of million-dollar book deals and million-dollar movie deals. How humanities majors might not have the best starting salary but “that doesn’t mean we don’t have an upwards trajectory.” 

“Act as if,” preaches the reddit thread r/thelawofattraction. Or, fake it till you make it. On Sunday I talk to Sara about the eventfulness of my summer as if it were a continuous strand of string rather than thumbtacks scattered across a corkboard. I don’t mention that the corkboard was one-half existentialism and one-half nearly-crashing-Dad’s-honda-while-parallel-parking. I imbue constellations of meaning into this web-development internship or this trip to see my childhood friend. I don’t say that my employer asked for nine iterations of the homepage and that visiting Jocelyn was a mutual therapy session. 

Sunday afternoon I’m training as a peer mental health counselor and the counselee scenario I’m supposed to act out goes something like “you’re a second-semester sophomore with crippling loneliness and are considering self-harm.” I’ve never considered self-harm, I think, somewhat pleased by this realization, but by the end of the scenario I am crying. 

For a second I was convinced that was real, the instructor remarks. I laugh. 

No, no, no, I wave my hands. Not at all. 

Monday morning I’m tucked into my chair-desk watching Professor Leitus draw a story diagram on the board. Fiction is realism, he remarks. We read stories, not because we want to watch the knight slay the dragon, but because stories sneak around somewhere near the truth. 

I like writing because I can fold myself inside the word fiction. Oh, it’s just fiction, I’d say. It’s not like I mean any of it.

Monday evening I lean on a beanbag and stare at the drawings on my wall. I wonder if being a writer just means that I’m monetizing entries in my diary.

I wonder if that would be so bad. 

I go on Student Information Services, click “declare English.” I can always undo it later, I say into the phone. Umma, it’s not like law school is going anywhere.

The post FICTION: Saturday morning I consider being an English major appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I first observed the tanks through the open blinds of a neighbor’s window. Night had shrouded the streets to the extent that it was difficult to use my bedroom window as anything more than a mirror. Piercing through the black, a neon green rectangle flickered, replacing my face and encapsulating what seemed to be the silhouette of a child’s legs. As I peered closer, I noticed that the rectangle was actually a tank in the window across the street. The silhouette sunk lower in the tank, fruitlessly lurching against a pair of hands pressing him down. I forgot to breathe as I watched the child’s delicate skin ripple and break from the impact of kicking against a lid clamping him down and closing him off from the world. His chest heaved in an attempt to fill his lungs with anything — even water — and I fought the urge to dash across the street.

This is completely normal, I assured myself. This town is just like any other.

Just then, as the boy mustered one last kick, the green liquid peeled back his flesh, unveiling grey shark-skin beneath. Like mouths, gills resembling tally marks opened between his face and ears; his pale hair drifted to the floor of the tank. When his hands reopened, thin, ghostlike webbing bloomed in the space between his fingers. His new strokes were lithe and froglike.

I shuddered a sigh of relief. Ignoring the raw, red crescents dotted across my palms, I resumed my studying.

Every afternoon since then, I have returned to my windowsill to watch the shark-boy grow. A recent development: two adults — I assume, his parents — took a more active role in his physical development. I could read the father’s lips: Bite, bite, he would taunt, brandishing a steak dripping ruby above his head. He tossed it up with the piercing accuracy of an insult, and the boy sprung up, drenching his parents’ clothes while snapping a juicy piece between rows of piercing teeth. The parents stepped back, proudly admiring their work.

One day, the mother’s eyes met mine. She shut the blinds and that’s how they remained.

At school, I noticed these similar, sharklike features on my peers. In the halls, some students flaunted their agility by pumping their gills open and closed.  The insides resembled the undersides of chanterelle mushrooms, the kind I would often uproot. Conversely, many peers were secretive, shrouding their gills with strands of deliberately placed hair.

School was a cold dive into a den of sharks: when raising my hand to answer a question, the wide, glinting eyes of my classmates raised goosebumps on every inch of my arm. As I strode down the hallway, tension curled its heavy fingers around my throat; my peers breathed like wire traps, keen to masticate the leathery carcasses of their peers in the snap of a moment.

Sharks lurking in the lull of the ocean deep.

“Opioids activate receptors on nerve cells and release your …” the biology teacher, Ms. Brown, droned on in the background. Students’ faces were dyed technicolor in the glare of their phone screens, their webbed hands scrolling surreptitiously. I glanced down at my web-less hands, feeling naked. My eyes landed on the desk beside me, where a girl doodled on the margins of her notes, balloons of color blooming from her highlighters. Jellyfish, I mused. Then, I realized with a gasp: her fingers weren’t webbed. My gaze immediately jumped to her neck and found the signature, shark-like gills lining her neck: only they were dormant, like pencilled tally marks and nothing more.

In a burst of impulse, I took out a sticky note.

Hey, my name is Aria. I like your jellyfish, I wrote, gingerly placing the note on her desk.

She flicked her eyes to the note and flashed me a grin. I’m Ashley. Let’s talk later, she mouthed.

“This is — BY FAR — my favorite part of the school.” Ashley swung open a small mahogany door, and sunlight spilled through the opening. Inside, the late sun cradled statues, art stands, and canvas in a golden halo. A freshly-painted mural spread across the cerulean wall: eyes and eyes and eyes, blending together and tearing apart.

I paced around the room, hovering my hand over the paintings and the statues. “I guess Ashbourne’s art department isn’t as bad as they say it is.”

“Oh but it is,” Ashley interjected. “That … and that … and that.” She pointed. “All my work.”

“Oh but you’re fucking brilliant,” I said, face frozen in awe.

Ashley blushed a deep red and mumbled thanks.

I took her hands in mine, and stared into her eyes. “We need to paint together sometime.”

“How about … right now?” She slid open the cabinet in the wall behind her, displaying an array of paints. We shared a mischievous grin before running to grab brushes on the counter to begin our work.

During the next few months of school, Ashley and I became inseparable. After bio, she would show me a new part of the school, and then we’d retreat into the art room until the latest bus left the school. One day, I missed my stop and she offered to bring me to her home.

As we descended the school bus to the path leading up to her house, Ashley’s steps faltered. The spasmodic staccato of her gait indicated a desire to retreat, but she continued dragging her feet forward. Gingerly, Ashley slipped her key into the front door and twisted, her movements growing more frantic as the key didn’t budge. As our eyes slid up the length of the door, we found a pair of wide eyeballs staring back: jiggling in their sockets like boiled eggs. The door crashed open, revealing a hulking man.

“You’re late,” he spat. “Who’s this?” he demanded. “Do you want her to see your tank, too?”

Ashley’s eyes darted back at me. “N-no,” she stuttered. “But —”

Feeling the sudden pressure in my bladder, I blurted if I could use the restroom. The man took a reluctant step back, pointing directions to the nearest restroom.

While washing my hands, I jolted from a loud crash. Glancing out from the narrow door slit, I gazed in awe at her tank — it dominated her room, spanning its length and rising halfway up the dimly-lit wall. Mr. Gong loomed like an apparition, his hands spread out over the lid while a woman — I assumed Mrs. Gong— lurked from afar. Beneath it, fluorescent lights cast a gradient of translucent shadows across the carpeted floor.

“Open your gills,” he demanded. The solution within shook from the impact of his baritone. That’s when I noticed Ashley clinging beneath the lid, still as a stone. Her hair drifted from the clips in her hair, unveiling five long knife wounds. They weren’t gills, really. They were dormant, premature, sleeping.

Ashley’s huge, saucer-like eyes blinked frantically in the tank, growing scarlet from the solution. She cupped her hands around her neck in a strained attempt to breathe. Her skin was wrinkled and pale, and I knew she hadn’t evolved, not like the boy I’d seen grow in the tank. Her very anatomy protested against the unrealistic expectations weighing down on her.

I felt my legs wind like springs, ready to pounce, when I found Ashley …morphing. A film glazed over her eyes, and a sense of calm pulled over her face like a new skin, her breath sputtering from the gills on the sides of her head. I could see her new self bursting to the surface.

My gaze flicked to her mother. Her eyes glinted, nails digging into her palms. Her jaw shifted as her teeth ground beneath her skin. But she didn’t move.

Sitting cross-legged with my back absorbing the cool of the tank, I waited for my friend as her parents left. “That’s such a weird decoration for a shark,” I mumbled, surveying a likely self-painted Eiffel Tower mural with plastic jewels plastered in glitter-glue.

I wiped the thought away as clumps of water tumbled and plopped to the floor from Ashley’s hair, which was tousled like kelp. I glanced at Ashley, half expecting an empty shell where a girl used to be. She asked: “Did you finish the bio lab?”

I shook my head.

After the accidental encounter, I sat sheepishly with the Gong family and pretended Ashley hadn’t been struggling in frigid waters for the past hour. Her mother conjured an entire instant Italian feast, complete with a baked Costco pizza sprinkled with pre-marinated tomatoes and anchovies. Making conversation, Mrs. Gong asked which APs I was taking, what I scored on the SATs, and what tank model I kept at home. While I obediently listed off my APs, I caught Mrs. Gong side-eyeing her daughter.

“Ashley should’ve taken more AP classes,” she murmured.

After that day, I felt a different energy emanating from Ashley. In contrast to her calm, deadly presence underwater, above land, she became anxiety incarnate. In class, her knee sporadically bounced beneath her desk, and her expressions became tight and twitchy. Her usually clean-brushed hair and mascara-swept lashes were replaced with tousled hair and dry, red eyes.

During the AP Biology test the next week, I discovered the root of the problem.

Silence amplified the pulsing of asynchronized clocks: analog clocks, digital clocks. The clicking of pens and the bobbing of knees.

In my peripheral vision, Ashley hurriedly surveyed the classroom and shakily copied down the answers from a hidden slip of paper, almost dropping her pen before stopping it in its path with a loud smash.

She hyperventilated as if she didn’t know the next time she would come up for air. A student complained of the noise as Ashley began to cry.

By wearing a skin she didn’t fit into, Ashley was beginning to slip. And she wasn’t the only one.

Students at school gasped for air without being underwater. If they weren’t focusing, pure oxygen sputtered through their collapsed gills, and their eyes swam like whirlpools from suffocation. Their legs wobbled like vestigial structures.  Each night, they typed away at their computers as if working were the only thing keeping them afloat — keeping them from drowning.  After all, they’re sharks, I thought.

During lunch, I mustered the courage to warn Ashley.

“Hey, Ashley, I’m worried for you,” I breathed. “Cheating isn’t fair to anyone else, or yourself, either.”

“Mind your own business,” snapped Ashley. Everyone else at the table went silent, and I sunk into my chair as if tethered to an anchor.

I should’ve noticed already: the power dynamic between friends, the utilitarian approach to weighing and manipulating relationships. Here, friends were like means to an end: the Future Connection, the Homework Helper, the Popularity Booster. In the way some students stole college portfolios, essays, personas — and yet no one was speaking out. In this symbiotic web of manipulated relationships, I had committed a blunder and tumbled through the cracks.

Success is king here, I thought, and everything else follows.

“Let’s calm down,” chirped Aria with her perfectly symmetrical, plastic smile. It was the same one others wore when anticipating the results of a contest or test. Wishing for your undoing. After all, success is relative to the failure of others.

From then on, I built a mental cocoon distancing myself from my peers. It was a simple feat — even the texture of their skin pricked like tiny teeth called placoid scales. As if I had the electroreceptor organs of a shark, I easily maneuvered the subtle shifts in the atmosphere through the pores of my skin. I found that the longer I stayed, however, the more I fell prey to the siren song of a completely self-centered world devoid of ethics.  If dishonesty pays, I thought, then what’s stopping me from doing the same?

When I returned home that day, my parents were waiting for me with a tank of their own.

“Of course, there’s no pressure to use it,” Dad insisted. “It’s completely up to— ”

“But we highly recommend it,” Mom interrupted. She paused. “No pressure, of course.”

I took note of the strong recommendation and bit back my disgust. Acid reflux lurched against the roof of my mouth.  Living in a tank isn’t living, I thought unconvincingly. Was I really giving in? No — you’ll forget to breathe. You’ll lose yourself, the way Ashley did. And that boy. And countless others.

Back at school, the speakers crackled while requesting a moment of silence.  Amanda Green, they said, cause of death — to be determined. Discovered with pills scattered around her body.

Everyone knows why she passed, I realized in the way their beady eyes remained dry, without a hint of moisture. Jordan scrolled through Instagram while the homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lyon squeezed her palms together in prayer. I closed my eyes and tried fruitlessly to conjure the girl I had never heard of until her death. I wondered if she was the type to hide gills behind strands of hair or flash them like medallions of war. I wondered which tank model she used.

I imagined Amanda Green, sprawled on the carpeted floor, pills tumbling into the crevices in her throat. I saw her gasping for air, clutching her collarbone as her gills heaved into overdrive. Her ghostly hands caressed my skin as phantom pains, and she seeped like stinging seawater into the cuts in my skin.

I gasped. How was I to survive in this ecosystem that cast aside those who couldn’t adapt?

My knees buckled as my fear grew into a desperate cry for survival. Like a taut violin string ready to snap, my body was on the brink of bursting open.

In my room, I took a step back, watching the tank with tired, weary eyes. Surprisingly, I didn’t recall the memories of Ashley and the boy, nearly drowning in their respective green tanks. Instead, I pictured:

Mom, massaging lotion into her palms, cracked dry like asphalt after a long day at the nursery.

Dad, blue light sinking into the furrows of his forehead as he typed in the kitchen with the lights off to allow my sister and me a good night’s sleep.

Mom and Dad, sacrificing everything for my success. My eyes swam.

The realization crashed into me like a tidal wave: I would become a shark for them. But did they truly comprehend the sort of monster their daughter would become?

I collapsed back onto my mattress, eyes glued to the tank. They lingered there until the lights faded.

Today, I woke to the groan of a tank filling with water. The cadencial drip drip of water leaking from the faucet resembled an elegy. I rested my fingertips on the edge of the tank and peered down at my distorted reflection. With an eerie sense of calm, I stripped off my clothes and slid beneath the water. I surrendered to the cool liquid and let it consume me. Now, at the base of the tank, I watch my reflection in a trance. The gentle ripple of the surface refracts light to form patterns across my skin, intertwining like bodies rhythmically collapsing into each other. The ambient noise of the outside world ceases to be comprehensible; waves of sound thumping against a barricade of glass.

I have gills, I think. My smile: perfectly symmetrical, all lips. My eyes: bloodshot and glazed over. I chuckle, and air bubbles scramble to the surface. Was I expecting to see something new hatch from the skin I’ve concocted for myself?

The reflective sides of the glass mirror each other and multiply my image to infinitudes. It looks like a time vortex or a pathway to another dimension. My future has never felt so infinite, so tangible as it does encased in a tank conceived of glass. The water doesn’t unlatch my skin or reveal anything new; instead, it cradles my every curve and corner in a fluid embrace.

Always swimming, swimming from my own blood.

I don’t want to stop.

In my town, children click their mechanical pencils, scroll through Instagram, stare at their reflections on dark tank surfaces. Here, children forget to breathe, forgo sleep, grow skin like sandpaper.

And like many places, our town trades our present for the future.

Doesn’t yours?

The post FICTION: A Town of Sharks appeared first on Yale Daily News.

With significantly higher rates of COVID-19 infections plaguing racial minority groups across the country, the pandemic shines a light on a structural chasm: healthcare inequity. The inequity stems from a variety of problems, including rampant poverty which leads to crowded households and the inability to work from home. To celebrate her efforts spearheading these problems, Nunez-Smith has been given the highest honor the Greater New Haven Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People can offer — the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award. A ceremony lauding her achievements was held on Oct. 7 through a Zoom meeting. The achievement comes after Nunez-Smith won the 11th Annual Visionary Leadership Award at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas earlier this year.

“The Reverend. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award is presented to an individual who has significantly advanced the cause of freedom and racial equality in the Greater New Haven area and beyond through demonstrated, sustained and outstanding leadership,” Greater New Haven NAACP President Dori Dumas wrote in an email to the News. 

The NAACP has been committed to civil rights activism for African Americans since the 1900s. In the past, it has contributed to landmark civil rights victories including Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools. Today, the organization is committed to creating inclusive spaces for Black Americans in the healthcare, education, climate and justice systems. In the healthcare system specifically, the association is fighting for affordable health care, battling systems of oppression in health care and increasing access to nutrition in marginalized communities, according to the NAACP website. 

Nunez-Smith hopes to give a platform to “patients who are often erased from the health care narrative,” she told the News. Some of her past efforts have focused on supporting diversity within the healthcare workforce and emphasizing community engagement within marginalized groups. 

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by an organization that has worked so hard to achieve justice for Black communities in Greater New Haven and beyond,” Nunez-Smith wrote to the News. 

Dumas said that the NAACP’s Board wanted to commend Nunez-Smith’s efforts to “shed national attention on the health and healthcare disparities of marginalized populations” and thank her for “the important work she has done and is doing, and for being a champion for health equity, health access and diversity.”

Nunez-Smith continues to create solutions and address health disparities as chair of the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force in the Biden administration and as founder of the Equity Research and Innovation Center at Yale. 

“We are thrilled that her passionate dedication, hard work, and expertise are being recognized by the NAACP with this award,” Tesheia Johnson, director of clinical research at the School of Medicine and deputy director and chief operations officer of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, wrote in an email to the News.

Earlier this year, Nunez-Smith was also awarded the 11th Annual Visionary Leadership Award at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The award recognizes individuals for outstanding work that has expanded beyond the Elm City. 

The Annual Visionary Leadership Award honors pioneers who have had a global impact, such as previous awardees Rosanne Cash, singer-songwriter and author, and George Takei, an activist and actor.

“The committee’s decision to recognize Dr. Nunez-Smith among this group was a testament not only to her applied scholarship in public health and medicine, but to her lived commitment to healthcare justice and equity,” said Shelley Guiala, executive director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. 

Nunez-Smith joined the School of Medicine in 2010 as a principal investigator. 

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