more than yesterday, less than tomorrow

At a school as competitive as ours, countless students load up their days with hour after hour of extremely difficult and occasionally pointless classes. Maybe after school someone will go to a club that they hate participating in and only attend because their parents forced them. The real party doesn't even start until once you get home, ready to spend your youth sat at a desk doing homework for the rest of the night. Maybe some super students can't relate, and to them I have respect with lowkey hatred. But for the majority of kids like me, it sucks, and we all hate it. Throughout my educational career I've noticed a very continuous theme of students doing educational activities that make them lose all passion for life, just to get that spicy college acceptance letter and then bathe in student debt for the rest of their lives. Literally... why. The culture we've adopted as students, the mindset that we can't achieve anything worth respect or honor unless we c

Believe it or not, I wasn't always this glamorous. Every day I thank theoretical god that I somehow equipped myself with an interest in self presentation. Some of my Boulan comrades may remember my emo days. For me, sixth grade style was my horribly neglected poofy hair cut very short and clipped back. I chose to wear badly designed My Chemical Romance shirts from Hot Topic, paired with some old black jeans that were 4 sizes too big for me, and a DOLLAR STORE Fall Out Boy belt that I wore RELIGIOUSLY, despite the fact that it gave me a RASH??? It's something that I don't like to reminisce on. (As a lover of personal style and expression, I like to think that I have a pretty "you do you" mindset. So I'd like to clarify real quick that this is a self roast, and not an attack on any 2019 emos out there.) My mother is a very glamorous woman. I grew up watching her doing her makeup, red lipstick applied so flawlessly and matching so well with her leather ou

This week I noticed a continuous theme throughout our readings: all of the pieces we read largely referenced freedom and the author's perspective on the concept, and all of those authors were Americans. Despite this, the writings of Douglass, Vowell, and Wallace all defined freedom in a different way.. Douglass' definition was physical freedom. The ability to be your own person, not the property of another person. At first glance, I thought that this concept was irrelevant to the modern American, because we're all here and free anyway, right? Then I thought deeper about the undocumented immigrants in overcrowded "accommodations", and the people who have to suffer through the deeply flawed U.S. prison system. You can probably think of even more examples of this here in our country.  Vowell defined freedom as the ability to have an expression of self and opinion. As long as you're not doing anything illegal or inherently wrong/harmful-- yolo, right?

On Thursday night while researching memorials, my first idea was to search for memorial sites for Native American people who have been killed due to America's grand history of genocide. Maybe it was naive of me to believe that surely someone would've created at least ONE memorial for the lives we stole from, but to my disbelief there was not a single one. Upon further research, I learned that there was a memorial being planned, but it only specifically honors " American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian veterans and symbolize the country’s respect for Native Americans’ service and patriotism." This made me a little mad. Do the indigenous people of America only become something to be recognized if they do something to serve this country? What about the people who fought to preserve the land that was theirs before?  Who deserves to be remembered? The answer to this question may vary by person, background, environment, or country. You may disagree