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The white kids I was friends with at school wouldn’t dare step foot to my side of the tracks, though it never felt as dangerous as the media always made it out to be.

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Thirty minutes of Mendelssohn or one dose of Valium? It’s your pick because, according to a study at the University of Baltimore, both the music and the drug have the same anti-anxiety benefits for heart patients.

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Whatever the case may be in the Chinese production of black-market DVDs, my companion friendship-harpooned my fantasies that night and forever: instead of inhabiting glamor, I was the same old me, with my hopes of a night spent canoodling and dissecting a thought-provoking foreign film burning a hole in my bag.