3. Mozarella

As far as the eye can see, islands. Floating in the nothingness. No stars to light up the endless abyss around them, no sun or clouds or birds or anything else, for that matter. Just emptiness with the occasional stone island. Every once and a while, dust from under the abyss coalesces together, forming platforms of stone. Rising and falling, the islands form, sway and eventually crumble. Upon each island lies a brick, a little ivory brick. This ivory brick has a gleam to it that seems to, against all odds, glow in the abyss. Polished to perfection, smooth and flawless, a perfect glittering white. As the islands sway to and fro in the abyss, one ivory brick turns to two. Two to three. Three becomes four, and slowly, these ivory bricks form towering structures on the islands. Some become recognizable structures—a skyscraper, a house, a tree. Others shoot up into the sky, becoming a distant point into the sky. But ivory is not all that the islands have become home to. Time passes, and th...

  I cannot bring myself to study after AP tests. Maybe because they felt like finals, or I studied like never before to prepare and have no mental capacity left to spare, but I am done. Then I realize, I have some finals and presentations to prepare and give and steel myself to do work, again.  Junior year was everything everyone told me it would be, and somehow it was worse. This was one of the few things I wish was overhyped, but in all honesty was underhyped. I thought people were joking and trolling when they talked about the horrors of their junior year. I always told myself their problems were born out of their habitual procrastination and it was all avoidable. So imagine my surprise to find out the never ending work load, the constant decline of grades, and the lack of motivation to get out of bed every morning. Junior year was hell. But now that I’m on the other side (or basically on the other side at this point), I have to admit, it was worth it.  Did I learn val...

Wow. I remember when we initially started blogging, I enjoyed looking back at past years’ cohorts and reading through different blogs. I recognized some familiar faces and thought of how cool it was that they had something that documented their growth in writing and thinking throughout one of the most fundamental years of their lives -- junior year. I also remember the plethora of students writing their last blog about ending junior year and how it went by so fast. I almost scoffed while reading and thought about how lucky they were, being at the end of the hardest year of high school and being able to look back, getting ready to go to college. I thought they were exaggerating about how quickly the year went by and how they wished they had taken everything in. I doubted their reflections and thought it was all some nonsense in a sappy and over-exaggerated farewell. However, now that I’m on the other side, I’m left with the exact same feelings and takeaways those students wrote about f...

is the title of a novel that has buried itself between my brain folds. Don’t bother searching it up or anything; I’ve never read this novel, nor do I plan on doing so. 500 chapters of power fantasy slop doesn’t sound too great. Yet, no matter how far I scroll down the list, I can’t escape the stupid title.  The all too familiar joke where a liberal arts degree lands you a barista job at a coffee shop; a “useless” degree. Can’t make money from a liberal arts education, can’t find a job with a liberal arts degree. Yet, while talking with my friends, probably complaining about some class, I find the need to drop the banger line. Hey _____, don’t you just wish sometimes that you could just transmigrate into another world where you don’t have to be sorry for being a liberal arts major? Yeah man, me too.  The title is fraught with shame, yet it’s surprisingly endearing to me. It’s not disgraceful, can’t be, because I haven’t gone down that path (nor had any plans to do so in the fir...

Most people’s minds seem to follow a linear pattern. This event happened, then this one and that one and on and on, with neat little dates, a sequence easily translated into a straightforward timeline from the distant past up until the present day. I’ve heard my friends easily tell me that a specific event happened in a specific year or date or time, and I have no idea how they do it. I’ve mentioned my memory being like puzzle pieces, with different memories that have to be pieced together, but I never mentioned that I am terrible with puzzles. Even if I did have all the pieces, I would get terribly lost trying to organize them into what is at the start, what’s inbetween, and what is at the end. I’m not good at trying to organize past events. My childhood, in my head, is organized by grade, since I can tell what grade I was in based on which teachers I had and I felt that was a much better way to track stages of my childhood rather than tracking my age, which wasn’t terribly easy to tr...

  I love sandwiches. To me, the sandwich is life. Sandwiches have been around for a long time. However, the most famous story about them is that they originated from the Earl of Sandwich in 1762. While I don’t really care for the background of the story, I can do the math. It’s been 264 years since the alleged invention of the sandwich. That means that for at least 4% of the time that the sandwich has existed, I have been eating them. That’s a lot of sandwiches.  I still have vague memories of my first sandwich. According to a grainy video recorded by my father, he sat me down when I was a toddler in the middle of our kitchen, and brought over a small table. On that table, he produced a rather large stack of bread, cheese, and store-brought sandwich meat. It was about a solid 4-inch tall stack of bread, and more than enough meat to feed me for 3 meals. Honestly, the sandwich was pretty mediocre. It was bland and pretty tasteless, but to me, that memory was special. Out of all ...