RAYS OF SUNSHINE.

You know that first-day-clean-slate-feeling every new school year as a kid? That feeling that no matter what is going to happen, you will have your friends, you will have lunch to look forward to, and new teachers and new adventures to be had during recess. The familiar routine, revived and renewed. I feel that when I see this empty page on my screen. Waiting for my thoughts. Waiting for my meandering views on whatever comes my way. I can't really explain the calm that envelopes me as I first dip my fingers in, checking the temperature of the water before diving deep. Deep into the terrifying abyss that sometimes is my mind. It feels so good to want to write again. These past few months, I had been feeling the absence of sense. That apathy is more crippling than anything. Instead of every sensory feeling translated into swarths of words, like birds that yearn for release, they beat against me like a rock-- I was unwavering, unrelenting. Paralyzed. Suddenly, I felt passive rath...

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...

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...