Category: Fall 2016

Life is a Highway

Growing up, my family regularly took road trips-mostly to visit relatives. The average trip was ten hours, if you didn’t like long trips that was too bad. For most of my life, it has been my job to stay up with the driver. I’ve spent a lot of time staring through windshields, both front and […]

Much More Alive

I originally wrote a blog post about my “Vibes” playlists. Roughly 1100 words in, I concluded that I did not want to sum up my year that way. Each playlist was about a different summer Orientation session or week during the summer, or a month of school during the semester. Each five-song playlist contained songs […]

Stories

“A true war story, when truly told, makes the stomach believe.” I read this sentence in Tim O’Brien’s fictional novel The Things They Carried when I was a sophomore in high school. The chapter that this line came from, “How to Tell a True War Story,” recounts how one of his fellow soldiers died during the Vietnam war. […]

The Colors of Music

On May 13, 2016 hip-hop recording artist Chance the Rapper released his third mixtape entitled Coloring Book. The mixtape features collaborations from musicians such as Kanye West, Francis and the Lights, Justin Beiber, Kurt Franklin, and the Chicago Children’s Choir. The album received widespread acclaim for its fusion of hip-hop and gospel sounds. For many, […]

Silence

When friends ask me how my Thanksgiving was this year, my answer can be summed up in one word: “quiet.” There are a couple of reasons for this, not the least of which being that I lost my voice as soon as Thanksgiving break began. To be fair, it did return within several hours, only […]

Rest

I have always loved Thanksgiving. It is time for rest, reflection, appreciation, football, being with family and friends and green bean casserole. But this year in particular, Thanksgiving came at an important moment. November was a hard. The mountain of work and effort of processing was draining. By Thanksgiving break, I was physically and emotionally […]

Hardest Battles.

Last week was much needed. I buried the anxiety that the papers I have, created and the impending exams coming in the next few weeks, and focused on family. I surrounded myself with love and laughter and family I had not seen in what felt like so long ago, and nothing felt more natural. We […]

Grieving Heartbreak

This week was very long – and yet, I do not recall doing very much this week. I had one midterm. It took a lot of energy to motivate myself to study for it. It took a lot of energy to sit down and work through the notes and the practice problems. It took a […]

What do you really want?

I’ve been thinking about what I really want lately, asking the big questions of what do I want to do next, and what do I want to do before I leave. Those questions feel huge and unanswerable. Despite, being busy 24/7 theses days, I can’t help but stop and I think about the future. I […]

Solitude

When I first came to Marsh Chapel during my freshman year, I became known by the staff for consistently cleaning the dishes after Monday night community dinner. At the time, I didn’t think anything remarkable of this. Cleaning serves as a meditative practice that I find enjoyable most of the time, ever since my mother […]