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...

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 where my expectations far surpassed my realities or where living in the moment far superseded anything in my wildest imaginings.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, ...

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...

An ode to home, real November, and the friends who don't need to know everything to know what I want and need: I miss it. I miss being more than these polite souls, who say hello in public, and are like sisters in shadows. I miss being in the cold air, crisp, with my voice puffing out laughs with the last of my breath in the freezing winter's night, running like our youth, our time together, out like a match. I miss the house I had lived in for fifteen "carefree" years, unaware of its fleeting glory, it's ineffable beauty of simplicity. I want nothing more than one more night on your moth-eaten, lumpy, comfy old sofa. With old movies and new, echoes of our childhood and our future playing alongside the soundtracks. I need one more silly spontaneous dessert date, if only to reaffirm that you will never waver, and will always be there. Even if you change your clothes, or your style, you'll be my homes. I wish for one day more: to make a change. To t...

I say this yearly now, but my heart can't take it. Every year people honor the victims and heroes of NYC, and while I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment, it ignores an aching sore in the American hear-- what about Balbir Singh Sodhi, an elderly Sikh-American racially targeted the next days after 9/11? What about the thousands of hate crimes and racially charged incidents all over the United States, United Kingdom, and the world over? What about the communalism and divisiveness that has only grown more pointed since 9/11? Last year was the 10th anniversary. One decade. The mayor Antonio Villaraigosa came to USC to make a speech. There were initiatives made, promises whispered, the resounding response seemed like it had a reasonable chance for success. One year later, and we have already grown complacent. We have barely integrated our new charges into those established initiatives. We have barely brought up this national tragedy, relegating it to a generic Facebook post ...

So, first there was Aurora. A small mountain town in the middle of Colorado. 12 people dead. The killer apprehended and under trial. A Phd student in Neuroscience who secured a National Institutes of Health grant-- a very prestigious opportunity. A lonely man, distraught about being alone in an isolating environment, heralded by the media as a " poor boy who lost his way". There is much more to this story than simply a boy who lost his way back to sanity and reality. The truth of the matter is that we track all Arab-Americans and South Asians in this country due to a xenophobic fear, but we cease to regulate those who seem harmless: i.e. white males. Our inability to seek them out as a threat, married with their penchant for feeling privilege and ownership over public spaces causes an epidemic of sad white male trigger-happy enemies. In Aurora, his personal become most political. The theatrics of his modes operandi only further isolated this incident. People began t...

When trying to figure out what to write about next, I thought about the current state of the world. I thought about how one can feel so happy yet so unhappy all at the same time. I thought about the neverending flux of time, and how in any moment, a person can be dying while another is being born. One person going through utter agony while the other shines in triumph. I thought about how my family could enjoy a meal and a road trip to Maine, while the 24 hour news cycle was bringing the nation live coverage of the unfolding massacre in Wisconsin. This dichotomy along with the continual broadcast of the 30th Olympic Games in London made me think about how little I appreciated this meme and how much this above graphic says about humanity.  Though these exact words do not exist in English, these experiences are universal. That bond the world over is seen day in and day out in the Olympics. Not only is the majority of the world competing in some form, but in that friendly compe...

Where would you like to end up in a few years time?                    Funnily enough, when thinking up places to attend grad school or what programs to apply to for my coming years, geography was one of my main criteria. Though by nature I am very homely, (cooking, cleaning, and reading a book snuggled on a couch are by FAR my favorite pastimes), I have a restlessness that yearns to find spaces that are want for repair, looking for a kind soul. My love of the cold exteriors of the forgotten shop fronts in Downtown Los Angeles, alongside the newly bustling faux-posh neighborhood of Little Tokyo or the seedier Toy District that looks beaten up, but is just a community that prefers to conduct business a little looser, a little less constricted by the confines of what we call society, stem from this restlessness. I long to find a home in what others may deem lost. So I thought this would be a good moment to define the top 6 places (in no ...