Weekly editor Nochill Cecile has decided to permanently retire to Gerts amid the continued and utter failure of The System and under the crushing weight of uncertainty, regret and disappointment. “I feel like I’m one step closer to fully realizing my full bougie nihilist potential,” she said loudly to a crowd of disconcerted onlookers, who were hailed to the scene upon hearing Nochill snap aggressively and wondered if a game of pickup acapella was about to happen. “Why did you actually leave though?” I asked her, catching her in a private moment. “Honestly, I’ve had enough of dudes who major in regurgitating theories and misinterpreting the Communist Manifesto. Can all these turtlenecks just sit the fuck down and read past the ‘Introduction’ of Capital?” she confessed to me. “What would you like to drink?” the bartender asked me, “I’ll have a whiskey on the rocks. Cecile do you want anything else?” “Yes, I want a blanket acknowledgement that we need to engage in a revolution right now, but apparently that’s too much to ask for.”
Throughout her career at The Weekly, Nochill held all of her resentment towards the world inside of her. She was quiet. She was introspective. But that was 2016. Nochill came back in 2k17 with full force, bursting into the office in the sub-basement of the SHMU Building, declaring: “NEW YA, NEW MOI!!!!” She was brassy. She was assertive. She was done with pseudo-intellectual ‘noise artist’ bros who threw around the word ‘neoliberal.’ When asked about this “new her,” she replied “I’m leaving old Cecile behind. New Cecile is louder, sassier, and just doesn’t give a shit. New Cecile will finally teach that entitled white boy in her conference about nuance! Her new mission is to have softboys fear her. I am done.”
However, Nochill confessed she wasn’t altogether done with the future: “I’m starting a brown girl only reading club where we get together and are able to share complexed, fully-formed, nuanced thoughts on socialist political theory, without being interrupted by a ‘well, actually…’ We also share receipts of softboys that wronged us. There are chants. We hold hands. There are also free samosas.”
Fed up with no one believing that she’s sworn softboys off for good, and being in the mood to dish out some receipts, Nochill offered the crowd of friends and curious onlookers highlights from her short, yet expansive, encounters with that softboy who usually sits in the corner of your conference section, plays bass in a shoegaze band, wears a baseball cap backwards and is probably from Toronto (or Maine). “I live for drama,” she whispered, before she began recalling her worst encounters with these boys:
“Was Lenin a Marxist?”
”Did you know Beyonce perpetuates corporate feminism?”
“So, I’m an ecofeminist.”
“So, do you ferment your own Kombucha?”
“Reverse racism”
“I recently read Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, have you heard of her?”
“Do you wanna go to a David Lynch documentary screening together?”
“I’m kind of over the New York scene”
“Hey sorry it’s not you, I’m just in a rough place right now and trying to figure my life out”
The brown girls only reading club is a far off venture. For now, Cecil Nochill will fill up her time with a Wes Anderson marathon (not The Darjeeling Limited though) and spend her time at home with her parents, who will guilt her about being a halfway activist because they went to one anti-Trump march in Toronto. She still keeps a small photograph of Marx in her wallet.