3. Mozarella

  “Pyaar, pyaar dosti hoti hai,” arguably one of the most famous lines from a Bollywood movie was delivered by Shah Rukh Khan in the blockbuster bollywood film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998. It simply means, “love is friendship” (this was in response to one of his friends asking him what is love). For those who are unfamiliar with Shah Rukh Khan, he is India’s love guru. His timeless movies and unforgettable lines are still used to rizz up girls today (not that I’ve ever tried), but that’s beside the point  Friends. We live in a world where technology dominates our lives. Almost every aspect of our lives exists online or is handicapped by it. Relationships are not. They are one of the few special things left untouched by technology, although one could argue Tik Tok and other such platforms are getting in the way of that as well.  I was scrolling through my instagram reel’s feed the other day and I came across a reel where a man was describing friendship and he said somethin...

                                                                    Image Citation Human civilization always treats time as sacred and meaningful. A lifetime is long, a century can seem infinite. Living a long life is important, waiting a long time matters. Time is such a significant aspect of human life and almost everything we place value on is tied to how much time has passed like memory, growth, and even (POAS!) legacies. But, time is not consistent across the universe. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity , time stretches or compresses depending on how fast you move or how strong gravity is around you, also known as time dilation. If someone were to move close to the speed of light, or spend time somewhere with very strong gravity, like near a massive planet or black hole, th...

I don’t remember exactly when I first learned this, but one thing that many of the novels I read when I was younger spoke about how power best suits those who do not want it. This sentiment, to me, has always gone hand-in-hand with another saying—absolute power absolutely corrupts. While these sayings are clearly opposites, they compliment each other solely because they are opposites that speak about the same thing. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a well-known saying about the dangers of power and giving it to one person, and “Power is best held by those who do not seek it” is a saying that expresses how power isn’t dangerous when placed in the correct people’s hands. Of course, both sayings have their own merits. I can completely understand how giving one person too much power can lead to horrific consequences. Just looking at all the dictatorships proves that fact well enough. However, some people do better than others at handling power on their own, especially when it comes ...

Every day, I basically follow the same routine. Wake up, scramble out of bed, go to school, come back, take a shower, and stare at my phone. Wake up, school, study. Wake up, study, binge novels in my free time. Constant, unceasing, endless stimulation.  It disgusts me. Some days, I go to sleep with eyes throbbing, my body telling me to stop. What am I wasting my time here for? Schoolwork isn’t going to help me be successful. Certainly not the 300 chapters I’ve read in the past two days. I’ve got to stand out, I’ve got to be a leader, I’ve got to be something special in order to have a chance to maintain my mediocrity.  And so I fall into stories, with their beautiful idyllic worlds. It just seems so perfect. No college, no big and scary world. Simple and straightforward. Good and evil. The stronger person wins. And even if you fail, you can still go and live a quiet life on some hill somewhere. Yet deep down, I know I can’t be doing this. I feel disgusted with this procrastina...

  Imagine this: it’s 2005, you are a sixteen-year-old girl living in Palm Beach, and to make some extra cash, you decide to become a masseuse for a rich old guy because your friend told you she made $240 in an hour doing this. Spoiler alert, this guy is Jefferey Epstein, and now you are forced to become a prostitute essentially for him and his other rich buddies. These pals include a former and future president, the Prince of England, and the former Prime Minister of Israel. You are forced to endure years of both sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of these men. To make things worse, when things finally come to light, people on the internet make jokes about the horrific abuse you went through. Some are even blaming you for what happened, while others are creating idiotic conspiracies to try to justify their president being in the files. We are often told that our words have power, but does the majority of the human population understand that? I guess not, because within t...

It’s miserably cold. I pull myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and head out to the park in front of my house, just in time to catch the sunrise. My shoes are sopping wet as I trudge through the morning dew, leaving behind a snail-like trail in the grass. And then, not even five minutes later, the stupid stick I spin smacks me in the middle of my forehead. This is almost a common occurrence; once I was left with a comically large bulge that didn’t go away for a whole two weeks. Another time I tried a parallel (kinda like a pizza toss?) and failed with ringing ears. Just yesterday, the end of my baton hit my nose and I left the ground stained with splatters of red. Perhaps this is the price I pay for Schadenfreude -ing…. What is this stick spinning? Basically, it’s a competition where I have to create a four minute routine and spin a fiberglass stick with a metal dome in an “L-pattern” of 150 yards by 70 yards. And what makes it so fun is how you’re able to select any song to spin to, as lon...

Every single time after I watch a movie, my finger drifts to the app with blue, orange, and green circles on my phone: Letterboxd. I’m pretty sure I downloaded the app when I was thirteen, and since then, I have logged almost every film I have ever seen for all twenty of my eager followers. Yeah, social media has rotted our brains. I mean, what is more quintessentially Gen Z than writing a witty remark for a review of Green Room or One Direction the London Session (yes, I have actually watched and logged a One Direction interview).  You could say that I am “performative” or whatever, I mean, I guess you could say that? I have logged a short film of David Lynch cooking quinoa, and three out of the four of my favorite films released between the years of 1975 and 1995. Is it really my fault that I enjoy niche classics and underground electronic music? Sue me for watching the 1970s Nosferatu on a biweekly basis, can’t a girl enjoy avant-garde horror? Rant aside, I don’t only wa...

                                                                                                  Image Citation     (Movie Spoilers for Being John Malkovich ) This past weekend, I finally got around to watching Being John Malkovich . This is a bizarre movie, and I definitely recommend it. However, if you’ve read this far, I guess you don’t mind me spoiling it: Craig Schwartz is a loser, unemployed puppeteer living with his animal fanatic wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), and their pets in a cramped apartment. He has an unfulfilling life until he takes a temp job on the 7½ floor of a Manhattan office building. There, he becomes obsessed with cheating on his wife with a coworker, Maxine (who has no inter...

  “Money can’t buy happiness,” for some reason, is a phrase that I have heard that I’ve never quite understood. To me, the only people who would say such things and mean it are those who have never known what it is like to be poor. While the statement is factually true, in a real-world perspective, it rings as a clear lie. If you take the saying literally, yes, happiness is not a tangible object that can be bought. However, in a more practical sense, happiness can technically be bought. Happiness can come from many places, many of which involve the use of money. Some can find happiness in looking pretty, and with money, one can buy better clothes and have more resources in order to look nice and be happy. Others find joy in going to see interesting things, and trips to exotic and special places require money. Some relish in the excitement that their loved ones feel when recieving special gifts, and with money, they can buy more gifts and find more unique gifts.  Those who parr...

I like Reverend Insanity . And no, this is not just another plug for you to read the novel (Which you should). The novel manages to make you think deeply about societal structure, individual freedom, and how you should approach life, and is surprisingly deep for works of the same medium. One of my favorite quotes from the novel is a rather long-winded monologue about societal structure. According to the main character, “‘Power is like the carrot dangling in front of a donkey. The desires of humans are stimulated by it, and each of them secure their personal gains with someone with authority for it. After climbing up one level, there will be a higher level. While they are busy currying favour for personal gain, their hard work is squeezed out from them and their value is exploited by the upper position.’” And he’s somewhat right. Just look at our society now! We are struggling so hard, trying to get into college, form connections with important people, just to probably never amount to a...

  Power. It’s a loaded term. If you ask 100 different people they’ll give you 100 different definitions, but what I’ve noticed is that the definition of power has changed and evolved throughout history. From Mesopotamia to European colonization of the New World and Asia, power used to be land. It was a tangible quantity tallied in size and resources. Why did Rome fall? Why did the Mongols fall? What led to the fall of the British Commonwealth? Too much power?  Wrong.  Too many people had their hands in the cookie jar. All those empires accounted for the vast majority of the known world at their times of conquest and with the exception of the Roman empire, they all fell in under 500 years. The fall of the British was a turning point for those who desired power. It demonstrated that loud, exposed power never lasts. Even before the end of the British empire, individuals like Rockefeller and Carnegie Mellon understood that true power lies in business and the ability to quietl...

I used to enjoy keeping my window open when I sleep because my window happens to face the east, allowing me to see the sunrise over my neighbors’ rooftops. But with a patio heater conveniently placed right outside my window, it looks like there’s an 8-foot tall silhouette looming over my room. I ultimately decided to sacrifice the pure bliss from waking up to a sunrise-painted sky for the feeling of comfort of knowing that I won’t get jumpscared in the middle of the night. Lights out—it’s completely dark now. Then I’m reminded of what’s out of the ordinary, and they seem to appear even brighter. Do you see it too? Endless rainbow static at night. Pixels that seem to form an indiscernible shape. Whether or not my eyes are closed or open, they’re always in my field of vision. Sometimes, the pixels even come together and form something, whether that be streaks of disconnected horizontal lines, or even an image that seems to resemble a molten face, kind of like an inkblot test . Perhaps th...