RAYS OF SUNSHINE.

In so many ways, I have reached an impasse in my life. It is an easy thing to be frank or honest with your friends, even easier to tear up a family member because they can take what you have dealt them all these years in fits and identity crises, but it is an entirely different challenge to be true, just, fair, open, trusting, and HONEST with your own self. When Aesop and the Bible and Hammurabi said those things about the Golden Rule, and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", they did not factor into account that oftentimes we treat others with much more kindness and generosity than we ever treat ourselves. I know that in every hard and stressful situation, I put my blinders on not unlike the horses in Montreal. I can only go charging full speed ahead, eating from my trough and occasionally taking a break to take inventory of my hardware and my bodily functions. It becomes hard to not only see the light and smell the roses, but I am so consumed by the apparen

Oftentimes, by virtue of being an internet-junkie, I pick up sayings and isms and things without really realizing where they originated. My brain is like Nicholas Allen's from Andrew Clements' brilliant book Frindle , I make up neologisms because they are fun, and use them often because I love and value cultural soupage of verbage. (See? Can't help it!)  So here are a few of my favorite more recent etymological anomalies  that I tend to drop every other word. #SariNOTsorry ;)  #LOWKEY I say this a lot. It's intended usage, according to urbandictionary, is to indicate that something is meant to be kept quiet or secret, or on the down-low .  Whate'er, I use it as a like or um or when I'm tryna talk quieter, but fail miserably.  #swaggher (& by extension,  #swoopswoop)   this has a very clear origin story. I re-watched the video above with new friends in chicago, and realized that the term "swaggher" and "swoopswoop" had the

This is  Time’s   100 Best Books of All Time .   italics = to be read read and enjoyed The Adventures of Augie March All the King’s Men American Pastoral An American Tragedy Animal Farm Appointment in Samarra Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret  The Assistant At Swim-Two-Birds Atonement Beloved The Berlin Stories The Big Sleep The Blind Assassin Blood Meridian Brideshead Revisited The Bridge of San Luis Rey  Call It Sleep Catch-22 The Catcher in the Rye A Clockwork Orange The Confessions of Nat Turner The Corrections The Crying of Lot 49 A Dance to the Music of Time The Day of the Locust Death Comes for the Archbishop A Death in the Family The Death of the Heart Deliverance Dog Soldiers Falconer The French Lieutenant’s Woman The Golden Notebook Go Tell it on the Mountain Gone with the Wind The Grapes of Wrath Gravity’s Rainbow The Great Gatsby A Handful of Dust The Heart is a Lonely Hunter The Heart of the Matter Herzog Housekeeping A House for Mr. Biswas I, Claudius Infinite Jest

i love notebooks. too much. i love how they somehow whisper you can do better tomorrow. its a fresh new page. i love how you can rack em up to either tell a chronological story or an illogical one. the simultaneously represent all the tenses: have been, will be, am currently. i love straddling that line--telling stories that are not quite one way. i love melding my unique experiences and stories, marrying them with what could have been. where my expectations far surpassed my realities or where living in the moment far superseded anything in my wildest imaginings.  notebooks live in that moment before that moment. you buy them when you know you're going somewhere, starting something, making big plans. they encompass that crisp apple crunch on a fall day; that satisfying slurp of a milkshake while the sun bakes the back of your neck, sickly sweet, laughing next to the one of your dreams. they are the fulcrum of the balance between a spoon of maple walnut and that spicy chaider,

so it's september 11th. a day that now is recognized in history books. a date that is older than all elementary school children. a date filled with dread for those capable of remembering, and a date forever filled with guarded urgency, felt alongside utter patriotism and gratitude for humanity. i remember reflecting on 9/11, as it is now called, and thinking that no other date in human history is filled with so many different projected emotions. for south asians, it is the day where we took the place of our japanese brethren and had finally experienced that rite of passage that is true blue collar hatred and racism. the problematic nature of classist society--the lack of education-- causing our families to be targeted in any and every capacity. temples and gatherings were secretly or openly watched. students couldn't engage in cultural discussions for fear of being thought of as extremists. and to this day, a gathering of brown students is often seen as having a radi

maithreyi 'ray' shankar : 21. studying human development and psychology @ Harvard   USC Trojan '13 striving to become a hurricane of eloquence & social change. but how did i get here? i was born to a simple tech/tamil brahmin family in mumbai, maharashtra. INDIA. the hospital was the same one used for mine, my brother's, my cousins' births except for one glaring exception. that hospital represents our lives--journeys. facing a train that always was ephemeral. a fashion store on one side. life buzzing. ghatkopar. my birth was linked to my aunt's engagement party. the night before i came to the world, my aunt and uncle became my aunt and uncle. that idea was born. the family was born. just as the cars left town, my mom had to turn around. i was en route, and eager! this theme of waiting for the right moment to EXPLODE onto the stage is something so natural to me, i cannot explain. i do it again and again to the point where most do not realiz

from my instagram, my first day working at widener library :)  So I am here again. The day before the first day of school. For me, this day is a lot more significant and heavy and loaded than the actual first day because of this thing called anticipation. I keep putting ideas in my head about how things are going to be. I keep envisioning scenarios, thinking through situations, always putting myself at the bottom so I know how far I need to climb. It's nice to know that in a lot of ways, the climb is over. I have "made it". I have been given the opportunity, the privilege to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But in a lot of ways, I'm still climbing. I have reached the end of one goal, just to find myself making 10 others. Goals which I may or may not ever reach. Goals that need to be reinvented to fit my life, not the other way around. I have finally learned that planning your life to fit a goal is not what a goal is meant for-- goals are sup