My project!

One of the most interesting parts of my research was watching the TED Talk, “How do the poor see life? Uneducated, not stupid” by Rahin Makhijani. For a “you” living on one side of education, certain systemic privileges, and economic security, he asks “you” to envision another “you” who is living on the other side, who sees and approaches life very differently. It takes time commitment, difficult realizations, and compassion to reach an understanding of the other side, but it is ultimately worth it. “When you put together the money that the slum dweller pays for the authorities to look away… [for every] monsoon to avert a threatened demolition… for the illegal electricity point per bulk connection… for a bucket of water… the slum is the most expensive place to live. And the poor are paying it today, but we still call them illegitimate, because it is we, from this side of the world, who define what legitimate is.” His words act as a bridge between the two worlds that raises awareness of how the socioeconomically better-off have defined themselves as the normal, humane side, an idea that is contested and turned on its head in my chosen novel, The White Tiger. 

I also loved the article titled “India Schools Stay Closed, and Hopes Fade for a Lost Generation,” published in The New York Times. We’ve discussed how poverty and trauma are passed down generationally, like in Beloved and As I Lay Dying, but this article brought the real, practical mechanisms hampered by corruption and lack of accountability, to life. When education is a privilege, as it is for tens of millions in India’s lower classes, and not a right, social mobility is unimaginably difficult. When there are conflicts of interests in the bureaucracies of education, when school administrators pocket funding for themselves, when there is no sufficient food, and especially when a pandemic makes in-person learning impossible, economic inequality worsens. 

I hope people will learn the fundamentals of how caste is created and upheld by societies. The complex storytelling, violence, and segregation that goes into making another group of people the “other” can teach us a lot about social division. Books like The White Tiger personalize and humanize one “other” in society, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, and I hope people will think about how books in general can do this for all different kinds of “other”s. 

Some of the most important learning I did at my time here at NNHS occurred in Mrs. Parato’s online AP Language class. She put together three slide presentations for us bursting with poems, essays, short stories, speeches, and videos from American history and modern times. I read/watched every source in those presentations, and it gave me an insatiable curiosity about the stories and experiences of others, which I discovered through books. The best way I have heard it put so far (and this is also included in the last slide of my voices project) is in the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. 

“This is the gift of a novel. No other art form allows us to enter and thereby dignify the inner life of another human being so thoroughly; allows us to experience the inner life of another human being – the secret inner life. What it is that person feels. Not their opinions. Not their social conditions. But what does it feel like to be that person?”

I’ve always viewed high school as a stepping stone, a period of painful growth and instability, to the really great thing, the “time of my life,” college. To future NNHS seniors, I would say that there is so much more ahead of you, whatever you choose to pursue after high school. The world is your oyster; this is just one page of your story, and you get to write the rest. There are so many experiences to be gained and fun to be had during your last year of high school, but if things are ever looking a little bleak or second semester suddenly isn’t feeling like the haven it was promised to be, there is something more beyond, and you will make it through. As I wrote in my last blog last semester, I would argue that AP Literature is as much about life as it is about language; the novels that we study in this class span a wide range of voices from different times and places, and it’s such a privilege to have the resources provided by Mrs. Hitzeman and Mrs. Trowbridge, and the thoughts of your classmates, with you as you journey through this year. Ponder the deeper meaning of a novel, and you may find that it changes the way you see your world. 

I’ve tried to maintain the quality and length of my blogs so far this year, and so far, I’ve managed to muster the sufficient willpower to, even when this means sitting in front of my computer for an hour and agonizing about different subjects and brain childs, a panel of voices going back and forth in my head like that one TikTok trend: 

• I’ll have to censor it so much it’ll barely be recognizable. 
• If people wanted to read about that I might as well post the link to the well-written article / podcast I got the idea from.
• That’s far too personal.
• I don’t have the emotional capacity to write about that right now. 
• Why can I literally not think of anything to write about.
• That’s just… depressing.

Fighting the urge to write a sequel to “Finding My Voice” (basically a blog about struggling to blog), and knowing that I have two physics tests tomorrow and a 4-minute memorized Spanish presentation which I haven’t even hit the “create new slide deck” button for in Google Drive and that I’ll be gone for college admit weekend Wednesday-Saturday which is great but which also means that I’ll have to finish studying for two AP exams and make up three days’ worth of schoolwork on Sunday in what feels like an endless game of catch-up that is mostly my own fault, and having sat here for the past hour and a half trying to censor various different pieces of my writing from the past few months or create something new from a headache-y brain that at once feels overstretched like taffy and dense like a block of lead or write an appropriate, PG reflection of my high school career, I’ve finally decided to cave and exploit, I mean share, a poem that is really just prose broken up into lines that I wrote a week ago after being re-inspired by the protagonist in I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and move on, the assignment a day late, an hour behind my daily schedule, and having produced nothing new, to creating my presentation about the Catalan dialect which I, as of now, know nothing about. An oddly fitting theme for my last blog, chucking perfectionism out of the window doesn’t feel as grand and liberating as it should, but maybe that’s something which comes tomorrow, when I pray to feel the enlightening effects of those extra, precious minutes of sleep. 

no title
which is not a literary device

beams of stadium lights cross-crossing with the glow of a distant sun
in a liquid dust clinging to the first breath of summer that seems to me
the stairway to heaven

sit with me behind the bleachers and share your mind with me
what makes you who you are?
why do you live that way?
what have you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into,
how do you rage against the naturally rising entropy of the universe?
how do you see the people around you?
and,
what sets your heart on fire?
i want to know what it feels like to be you
not just your surface politics and your obligations and what happened yesterday in chemistry
but what your story is
where your humanity is
who are you?
show me, in bits and pieces, and i’ll use it to paint your portrait in technicolor in my mind
so that you might see your likeness reflected in my eyes
our eyes, that are windows to our souls

i know we’re on borrowed time
that as the leaves change and sigh one last time and flutter, lining the sidewalks as inevitably as they do every year, unfeeling
and the coming summer that now beckons us with such promise recedes, imperceptibly at first, and then with crushing certainty
the railroad tracks of our lives will diverge

and yet.
and yet, a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts
if this is borrowed time, lend it to me
there are things the future doesn’t have to take from us, and among those is the present, you and i
if you can’t be my last, won’t you be my first?
won’t you be with me, here, in the marred paradise of youth
where there is yet time, where the world is our oyster

and oh, to be seen
to be seen and touched and heard and felt and understood
and to do the same unto another
i have spent my life observing the world, learning of it from the windows on my bookshelves
but now i want to be a part of it, to taste the love and heartbreak and the closeness of
souls of which i have read
and find the humanity in my pages in a real life before me
and be a part of something greater than myself 

so, won’t you be with me?
be a friend of my mind,
and share this tiny piece of yourself, this avenue of your life, with me.

Quotes/Inspirations:

• The whole idea of getting to know someone on borrowed time is inspired by Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.
• “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” –Vision, Avengers: Age of Ultron
• “… a friend of my mind” –Toni Morrison, Beloved
• “the railroad tracks of our lives” –Mr. Horner, my 5th grade teacher

Since becoming a second semester senior (woohoo!), my weekends have slowly emptied and I’ve had more and more free time on my hands. Saturdays have become my favorite day of the week because they are a mixture of the things I enjoy that I often don’t have time for during the school week; I’m often thinking about what I did last Saturday and looking forward to the coming one. 

In order to fit everything in, Saturdays usually begin pretty early for me, at around 6:30am (always somewhat of a struggle, especially if I was out on Friday night). After breakfast and packing my computer and the book of the week, I’m out of the house by 7:00am. On the drive to downtown Naperville, I usually play a podcast to wake myself up and warm up my mind (see blog, “A Potpourri of Podcasts”). However, if my mind can’t focus on anything but the promise of caffeine, I play a “designated morning playlist,” which in practice means skipping every song in the playlist until I get to MGK’s “Bad Things,” the song I apparently streamed 700 times in 2021. 

Nichols parking lot in the morning

Downtown, I usually park at Nichols, though, if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll park at the five-story Van Buren parking garage and lug myself up to the top floor to see the sleepy city before most businesses open. Placebo or not, the air quality feels better on the fifth floor, more crisp and awakening. The silence (save the wind) and the dark blue skies are refreshing and meditative – would recommend at dawn or dusk!

If I park at Nichols, I get to see a rare sight: the library parking lot empty before it starts teeming with cars in the afternoon. The walk to the Starbucks reserve is about two minutes, and sometimes, I’ll get coffee, but if I’m feeling especially scandalized by the prices (which, naturally, is most of the time), I won’t. 

Another image of Nichols parking lot in the morning 🙂

From when I arrive to about 11:00am, I take notes on lectures and read supplemental materials offered by free classes on Coursera. Throughout high school, I’ve compiled a list of subjects I want to explore further, always thinking that after the next big thing, I’d have time. Alas, it wasn’t until after college applications, that I truly had time to explore these classes – so far this year, I’ve taken a course on C and C++ specialization, and “An Introduction to American Law.” It’s wonderful to be able to ignore all the suggested deadlines and explore these subjects thoroughly at my own pace, sometimes skipping through and ignoring the readings, sometimes spending weeks on a single week’s worth of materials, sometimes checking out books inspired by the course material. I’m very undecided on what to study in college, vacillating between applied mathematics, computer science, political science, US history, and wondering if I want to go to law school or try to dive into the technology industry right after undergraduate school. Coursera is an invaluable resource to help me explore these interests in this gap of time before college, and the 3-4 hours on Saturday morning fly by faster than any other hours in the week.

Classes & Coffee

Currently, I’m enjoying “Moral Foundations of Politics,” offered by Professor Ian Shapiro. I debated taking this class, since it contains a lot of theoretical lessons; the first half especially deals with questions from the Enlightenment period of thought, many of which, like the question of natural law, have been deemed unanswerable or moot. However, I decided to value enjoyment and curiosity over practicability, and I’m thankful I did; Professor Shapiro is the most engaging lecturer I’ve listened to in a pre-recorded online class. I’m about halfway through the course, and my favorite week by far has been the week on Marxism. Marxism seems a relic of the past – it is a defunct 19th century ideology – but it is the single most historically compelling alternative to the liberal tradition, that is to say, the democratic, social contract, free-market traditions. It is also terribly misunderstood; the dogma of the communist revolutions of the 20th century that took place across Europe was very different from Marx’s original ideology. Despite the flaws in his economic vision of how capitalism would inevitably collapse and give way to communism (which doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon), Marx left behind the important idea that government exists not to maximize happiness (utilitarianism) or to facilitate consent between the people (social contract theory), but rather to prevent exploitation; his enduring insight is that putting people in the position of being in the mercy of others is wrong. His Communist Manifesto holds many fascinating ideas and insights into social thought during his time.  

After “Moral Foundations of Politics,” I want to look at other classes, including “Machine Learning,” “Intellectual Property Law,” “A Law Student’s Toolkit,” “International Women’s Health and Human Rights,” “Understanding the Brain,” and many more. I will never be able to devote as much time as I would like to them all, but I hope to see and learn as much as I can before college. 

At about 11:00am, I walk to Nichols and nab a huddle room, where I prepare to talk with my cousin over FaceTime. He is six years younger than me, and our mothers arranged for us to speak every week. We talk about books and what’s going on in the world, and I often give him writing and reading prompts that we discuss and edit at length. I try to be a role model for him, trying to emulate my ice dance coach, who was an invaluable role model in curiosity, hard work, and intellectual vitality for me in my tweens and beyond. 

At 1:00pm, after I finish talking to my cousin (though we often go overtime), I set out from Nichols library in search of that wonderful thing: food! After the morning, my stomach is often growling, and I always try to go to a new restaurant; I’ve explored most of the ones on Jefferson Ave and a good number on Washington St. If I got coffee that morning, I balance my budget so that I still have some room for the rest of the week. Even after sampling a variety, however, my all-time favorite and guilty pleasure remains good ol’ Chipotle 🙂

Reading Covering America & conspicuously positioning my empty coffee cup from the morning to assuage slight guilt about taking up space in the Reserve for several hours in one day :,D

After lunch comes a flexible time: most of the time, I read at Nichols or Starbucks until 5pm, but if there’s something special to be done – applying for an internship, writing a speech, scheduling appointments with teachers or alumni of my college, sending emails (or, when that doesn’t work, making phone calls) – this is the time. There is only one rule: that, like everything else I do on Saturday, I must enjoy it. If I don’t, it gets lumped in with homework and pushed to Sunday.

This week, I’m reading Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, a memoir recommended a couple weeks ago by Mrs. Parato, my junior year AP Language teacher. In 2015, Miller was sexually assaulted on the Stanford University campus, and her attacker, Brock Turner, was sentenced to just six months in county jail. Her letter, signed Emily Doe, was “viewed by almost eleven million people within four days… translated and read globally on the floor of Congress… [and] inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case.” With this memoir, I’m most looking forward to hearing her story, told in her own voice. 

Driving home

At 5pm, I drive back home, and the day winds down. I do some maintenance cleaning and organizing in the house and my car. To get in my daily exercise after a day largely composed of sitting, I run 3-4 miles on the treadmill while watching Netflix. I also play an hour or so of piano, a recreational pursuit for me; after taking music theory, technical, and performance exams throughout my childhood and enrolling in music theory in freshman year, I decided to drop the professional education and focus more on what I wanted to play and hear. Mozart has emerged as my favorite classical composer, and I’m currently playing my way through a book of his Sonatas, in addition to a mixture of pop song transcriptions taken off the internet and simple ones arranged by myself. I try to get to bed by 10pm, though I often have an inconvenient burst of energy around 9pm, so that sometimes by midnight, I’m still up conversing with my friend from Austria, who has just gotten up, or my parents.

Some midnight indulging in my dad’s scrumptious, self-proclaimed greek salad

After many weeks of this ritual, Saturdays have slowly come to represent something more to me. During my high school career, I often wished I had a time turner, Harry Potter-style, to do all the things I wanted to. Especially as an upperclassman, I aggressively scheduled all of the hours I had outside of school, and I constantly had a list of things I wanted to get to that ranged from understandable to totally esoteric: read these 50+ books on my reading list, do more research into criminal justice (and perhaps write a report on it), read this list of Revolutionary War-era documents including Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Federalist Papers (still have to get to the latter), learn how to prove (mathematically) that the greatest number of moves needed to solve the Rubik’s cube from any given configuration is 20, check out the AMSCO textbook for AP European history and give it a cursory read… I also yearned for non-academic pursuits: ice dancing more, learning to play the drums and the ukulele, and trying my hand at growing orchids… the list goes on. 

I love asking questions of people and places, and once, while discussing his hobby of collecting rare K-pop albums, my friend (from Austria) joked, “I feel like I’m being interrogated.” I write down lists of things I find interesting or touching in the Notes app on my phone, ranging from a man in a motorized wheelchair with his dog trailing dutifully behind him I saw on the drive to school to the Korean logo on the back of someone’s shirt at a party, and through these lists, I relive that memory and marvel at everything in my world that is unfamiliar. Thus, for me, Saturdays have come to represent a quiet, individual form of learning, of curiosity and seizing the day, of discovering corners of the world, and along the way, discovering who I am as a young person when the world feels like my oyster. They also represent what I hope to find in college: an environment where behind almost every element  – be it building, class, club, peer, extra-curricular, professor, or honored tradition – there are questions to be asked and pondered and endless possibilities for me to explore, until I feel like I could use the help of a hundred time turners.

“Why did you let it go?” asked Coach Tutberidze, glaring sternly, her golden curls trembling in frustration. “Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.” 

Her words, broadcast on live television, were directed towards her student, a 15-year-old girl named Kamila Valieva, immediately after what may well have been the most damaging four minutes of the teenager’s life – four minutes during which her legs had betrayed her in jump after jump, minutes during which the crowd had cheered in support and sympathy while her coach shook her head and stared at the ceiling, an unmitigated catastrophe that had ended with a prolonged moment of disbelief as the teenager skated around, dazed and alone and lost, on the wide expanse of ice. 

Valieva did not respond to her coach; she would end in fourth, a brutal disappointment. Later, when teammate Anna Shcherbakova, 17, won the Olympics, the cameras cut to her, sitting alone on a couch holding a stuffed animal; later, she would say she felt “emptiness.” Nearby, a third Russian skater, 17-year-old Alexandra Trusova, who had won silver but believed she deserved first place, weeped in front of the cameras: “I hate it! I don’t want to do anything in figure skating ever in my life! Everyone has a gold medal, and I don’t!” Eyes red from tears, she later told reporters, “I am not happy with the result. There is no happiness.” The cool facade had shattered, the kettle exploded, the mounting pressure of the last week broken wide open on the world stage. 

Valieva had dreamed of her Olympic moment since she was a little girl in Kazan, 450 miles east of Moscow. Even before her teen years, she was a natural, becoming one with the ice, one with the music, as though it was written into her DNA. During her meteoric rise, sports commentators began calling her the greatest womens’ figure skater of all time. She smashed world record after world record – nine of them in all – and quickly emerged as the heavy favorite to win gold in the womens’ individual event at the 2022 Olympics Games. And as Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” began to play, she carefully poised on the ice she called home, wearing a star-studded black costume with glowing red highlights that blurred when she spun. Everything was in place; on the surface, everything was perfect. 

–

52 days prior to the womens’ individual event at the 2022 Olympic Games, Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned drug, at the Russian Figure Skating Championships in St. Petersburg, Russia. Trimetazidine, which allows better blood flow to the heart, was one of three drugs that Valieva tested positive for; together, they made up a sophisticated cocktail that improved overall heart performance. It took 45 days for the results of this test to become known, during which time Valieva was cleared to skate at the Games during an elaborate process necessitated by the regulatory consequences of Russia’s 2014 state-sponsored doping scheme. A day before the news broke, she helped lead the ROC to gold in the team figure skating event. 

The medal ceremony for the team event was hastily canceled after the news became public, and the Russian gold, and Valieva’s ability to skate in the individual event, were immediately uncertain. Questions arose: had Valieva known she was taking a banned drug? Was this an accident of taking her grandfather’s heart medication that included trimetazidine, as she contended, or part of a larger doping scheme? And most urgently, why had it taken 45 days for the drug test results to come to light? Valieva had tested negative twice in those 45 days – on January 13th and February 7th – and both results were timely. The IOC balked. “This was a complete and catastrophic failure to athletes and public confidence,” said Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, “[It] didn’t need to happen, and shouldn’t have happened.”

Despite precedent, under which several top athletes, including swimmer Sun Yang of China and bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva of Russia, had served bans after testing positive for trimetazidine, a three-person panel from the The Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) ruled on February 14th that Valieva would be allowed to skate in the womens’ individual event the next Thursday, February 17th while the investigation into her positive test continued. The leniency of their decision hinged on the fact that Valieva was a “Protected Person” (a minor) and that the test results were so delayed that they “impinged upon the Athlete’s ability to establish certain legal requirements for her benefit.” “None of this is the fault of the athlete,” their report continued, “and it has put her in a remarkably difficult position where she faces a lifetime of work being taken from her within days of the biggest event of her short career.” The report danced around the question of whether the drug had entered her system by mistake or was part of a doping scheme. 

While several of her Russian teammates defended her, the backlash across the figure skating world against the decision was immediate. Johnny Weir, three-time US national champion and NBC commentator, condemned the decision as a “slap in the face to the Olympics Games, to our sport, and to every athlete that’s ever competed in the Olympics clean.” As the Kremlin continued to dismiss the situation as a “misunderstanding,” the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency launched investigations into Coach Eteri Tutberidze and Russian team doctor Filipp Shvetsky. Rachel Denhollander, the first survivor to come forward publicly in the Nassar case, ridiculed the idea that Valieva could have concocted the cocktail of drugs on her own. “A child does not make a choice to take those kinds of medications unless they’re given to her by somebody who’s in authority,” she said. 

–

Amid the firestorm of speculation and mounting criticism, Kamila Valieva continued to train for the individual event. Her job in Beijing was to win gold: for coach, for team, for country – to win gold as 15-year-old Julia Lipnitskaya (Olympics 2014), 16-year-old Elena Radionova (Worlds 2015), 17-year-old Anna Pogorilaya (Worlds 2016), and 15-year-old Alina Zagitova (Olympics 2018) had done before her. She was the most recent in a long line of young teenage girls who had risen to dizzying heights and then faltered almost immediately following their greatest success, to be replaced, as if by magic, by another generation of young skaters churned out by the Russian sports machine. 

This machine revolves around one school, Sambo 70 in Moscow, and in particular, a coach named Eteri Tutberidze. Tutberidze was well-known as a coach long before the 2022 Olympics; as a 10-year-old myself, I watched her on my TV screen conversing with a beaming 15-year-old Julia Lipnitskaya in the kiss-and-cry at the 2014 Winter Olympics, right after Lipnitskaya had carried the Russian team to gold. Although no one knew it at the time, at just 15 years old, with such a seemingly promising career, Lipnitskaya would never again win a medal of any kind at an international competition. She would retire in 2017 after complications with injuries and anorexia. 

Tutberidze was among a generation of enterprising young coaches who saw an opportunity in the early 1990s in the crumbling of the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored system that had trained young children for specific sports. A hierarchical system which consisted of a star coach, coaches below the star, and layers of smaller coaches and schools, this infrastructure shut out young coaches who wanted to start their own schools. 

During this period of tumult in Russian figure skating, Tutberidze, a former competitive skater herself from the US, “rocket[ed] past the rules,” Johnny Weir explained after a rare interview with Tutberidze. “[She] did it by herself… She had her own philosophy about training.” Talented young skaters flocked to her school, where they took on a harsh regime of training, running their quadruple jump-packed programs, often for over 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Questions and rumors about Tutberidze, her staff, and the skating entourage swirled long before 2022: could the athletes’ grueling training schedule be reliant on performance-enhancing drugs? But Tutberidze’s methods worked – she coached the first and second place medal winners in the womens’ event at PyeongChang 2018 and Beijing 2022 – and in the dazzle of victory after victory, the questions stayed in the shadows, while the champions, all in their mid-to-late teens, kept coming.

“It’s not really women’s figure skating anymore,” Gracie Gold, two-time US national champion, quipped in her article on The Cut. “It’s girls’ figure skating.” Due to inconsistency and lack of nuance, the old 6.0 judging system was thrown out in 2004, and the current one, according to Gold, “doesn’t allow girls to ever grow up because their womanly curves make the triple combinations and quads difficult to complete.” Taking advantage of their prepubescent light frame to jump to greater heights and spin faster, skaters who hit their peaks early do not learn the technique necessary for a prolonged career on the ice. The female teenager is uniquely revolutionary at four-rotation jumps precisely because puberty has not yet brought the development of breasts and hips. Thus, Lipnitskaya is not unique in finding her career petering out in a few short years: Radionova, Pogorilaya, and Zagitova would all struggle to get onto the podium in international competitions after their moment of fame and eventually retire in their late teens or early 20s after a succession of disappointing seasons. “You’ve got this window and there is an expiration date,” explained Dorian Lambelet Coleman, a Duke law professor who is also an expert on sex and gender in sports and a former athlete herself. “There is this point around 16 or 17 when it’s over. And at that point they are disposable.” 

–

In sports where young female athletes are considered disposable, doping has had a long and inevitable history. At the 2014 Winter Olympics, dozens of Russian athletes, including at least 15 medal-winners, willingly or unwillingly partook in a state-run doping program. In a scheme that only came to light two years after the fact, Russian intelligence service and anti doping experts replaced tainted urine samples with month-old clean urine samples in the dead of night through a hand-sized hole in the wall – a scandal that shook the foundations of the most prestigious sporting event in the world. 

Long before Russia, from the 1960s until the 1980s East Germany gave the steroid Oral-Turinabol to young female athletes without their knowledge or consent as “vitamins.” These drugs have been linked to long-term health problems such as birth defects in the children of those athletes. East Germany’s authoritarian regime, swept up in nationalistic furor, needed to win at all costs – and at the end of the day, minors paid the price. 

At its core, Valieva’s case is yet another in which a young athlete, a minor, bears the consequences for the actions of adults who do not value her for anything more than the medals she can win for them. In a sport where the rules are designed so that the inevitable result is that athletes hit their peak before they hit puberty, is it surprising that somebody has exploited the system by exploiting the innocence, the dreams, the unquestioning deference to authority of children? The culture of winning at all costs that produced the coaches and doctors of Valieva’s entourage, is the same one that produced and shielded Larry Nassar and other abusers. 

In this case, the horror of it all came to us in the form of a heaving, crying, broken 15-year-old girl on international television. A 15-year-old girl with dreams had become the caution story, the poster girl for doping and Russian moral bankruptcy. A girl who would be a sophomore in high school carried all of this on the global stage because of the adults around her who had exploited her or stood back and let it happen. The chaos that followed her performance is emblematic of the price in humanity we are paying for the young stars on our TV screens, and by the time the IOC, the news networks, and the sponsors have cashed their checks and shrugged it off, the Russian skating machine will have found its next supernova from Samara or Yekaterinburg. 

The sport, the Olympics, has to rethink its approach to women’s figure skating. They can start by banning the individual perpetrators of Valieva’s positive test from the sport for life. Raising the minimum age from 15 to 18 might help since at that age, women will be more emotionally and physically developed to withstand the rigors of training and make their own decisions with coaching and medical input. But ultimately, the problem is culturally entrenched: as long as gold medals and glory remain the sole standard of excellence and value – whether for nationalistic reasons, the personal ambitions of a coach, or the guiding motto of an institution – real change will be slow and perfunctory. 

Sources:

• The facts
  • Kamila Valieva (Wikipedia)
  • ‘None of this is the fault of the athlete,’ CAS panel writes in Valieva report.
  • Star Russian Figure Skater Tested Positive for Banned Drug
  • A Russian Star Falls and Another Rises in a Blur of Jumps, Tumbles and Tears
  • The Russian School at the Center of the Controversial Beijing Olympics Womens’ Figure Skating Event
• History of doping at the Olympics
  • In the Kamila Valieva Story, Echoes of a Dark Era of Doping (NYT)
  • Two young athletes, two very different outcomes in an Olympic doping scandal.
  • Lest We Forget, the U.S., Too, Spent Time in the Doping Wilderness
  • Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic Gold
• Womens’ figure skating and young girls (exploitation in sports)
  • Eteri Tutberidze
  • Stop Asking Why America Doesn’t Win Olympic Medals in Women’s-Singles Skating (Gracie Gold)
  • Figure skating-Nassar whistleblower says Valieva case highlights vulnerability of young athletes

To me, reading is second to breathing. Sometimes, I hold my books in my hand instead of putting them in my backpack, so that I feel closer to the stories they hold; I’m a flip away from falling into their worlds. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a lot of time to read during this past year, and I’ve taken advantage of it, to the point where my mom has taken to shaking her head across from me at the dinner table and saying, “You read too much. Why don’t you go out more?”

Writing, however, especially writing about current events and politics, comes much less naturally to me. I once spent three hours reading about a current event that intrigued me in the New York Times and listened to a few podcasts about it (The Daily, The Economist). I wanted to write a short opinion piece on what I had learned and what I believed should be done next, but it never materialized. The cursor blinked at me from the top left corner of my Google Doc, blipping in and out like the ideas I was trying desperately to tie down and organize. I planned, gathered evidence, and fretted; nothing. Questions arose: Who gave me the right? I’m a high schooler gathering scraps of evidence on the internet; there is so much I don’t know, and I can only capture the broad strokes, parrot what the experts are already saying. Wouldn’t it be best to wait for time to offer some perspective on the situation? I didn’t want to write something overly emotional or cringingly didactic, caught up in the fiery rhetoric that often drives the present moment but is lost upon history. And there was also an element of laziness and perhaps one of perfectionism. I wanted the hypothetical article to have the perfect balance of reason, emotion, historical perspective, and present nuance. I wanted every sentence, every word, to be chosen correctly to serve the purpose of my article with dignity. And with these lofty goals, I never got off the ground. 

After this happened a few times with a handful of current events, I realized that shooting for the stars is not the best strategy if you never actually shoot. I didn’t start out reading Morrison, and I won’t start out writing like Ross Douthat or Caitlin Flanagan. I’ll handle some subjects clumsily and go too far (or not far enough) on others, just as I read Louis Sachar’s Holes and failed to understand, as a simple plot detail, why the spell had been broken at the end. If, in two years, I regret or cringe at or want to expunge forever from the face of the earth something I wrote now, that’s growth. I think regret is a tricky thing, because often the consequences of the mistake that you regret is what gave you, in the present, wisdom to regret it. (Note: excessive moralizing.)

I’m the same in conversation; I love listening to my parents talk about work and the stock market, and I send a news story to one of my friends every other day to ask them what they know and what they think about it. Listening and reading is like an immersion in someone else’s world, so much so that my opinions and political beliefs sometimes sway towards whoever I last had exposure to, whether in conversation or in a book. But I want to find my own voice, however imperfect; I want to keep an open mind, but also to stake out a position and stand up for it; I want to be able to organize and contribute my thoughts to the ongoing discourse, and have faith that even if no one reads or learns from what I say, I will improve so that one day, my writing may prove worth reading. 

In this spirit, I’ve committed myself to writing my next blog about something that happened a couple weeks ago in the world and will continue to have ramifications in the future. This commitment will require for me, first and foremost, to not procrastinate; one of the reasons why I did not write the blog this week is because it’s due 24 hours from this writing. I’ve laid out a general plan for the blog, and I hope that over the next two weeks, I’ll be able to execute it. 

One of the quotes from William Strunk’s Elements of Style that stood out to me was, “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” Although I’m not sure if I agree with this in its absolute tone, especially in journalism, a profession that has, at times in our history, driven social change*, I like to remind myself of this quote. I am also my audience. My voice, materialized by my will, shaped by my experiences, and added to the chorus, is enough in itself. 

*For more info, and for those interested in journalism, I’d recommend Christopher Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation’s Journalism. It’s a long read, but its narrative format and preponderance of primary sources and anecdotes made it a page-turner for me. 

Exemplary of the French form of poetry rondeau redoublé, Dorothy Parker’s “Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble, at That)” portrays how one’s perception of the world is wholly subject to one’s emotional state. Written in the first person perspective that focuses upon one individual, the poem nevertheless retains universal appeal through commonly held emotions and imagery. Through the simple, ubiquitous feeling of missing someone dear, Parker explores how a heart in despair closes itself to all beauty and joy beyond that which it desires. 

In the first quatrain, Parker employs the imagery of a passing day to contrast the freshness of the world and the darkness of her emotions. The stanza is filled with colorful words that juxtapose each other in tone. First, the first four words – “The same to me” – establish an indifference to the narrator’s external environment; thus, the tonal juxtaposition later on serves to emphasize the unconnectedness between the narrator’s environment and their emotions. Further, words and phrases of opposite moods are placed either near each other or in parallel positions in the poem, hinting at how the narrator’s mood should rise and fall parallel to the beauty and joy of the world around her, but does not; on the contrary, it completely juxtaposes it. This juxtaposition begins with “sombre” and “gay,” placed just three words apart in the first line. Further, the second and fourth lines mirror each other as exact tonal opposites: an uplifting “joyous” is replaced with the slow, resigned “melancholy,” and “rosy morn” with “night.” The two lines hold a similar position in the body of the stanza, as their last words rhyme under the rules a rondeau redoublé,  but they describe two opposite times of day that inspire starkly different emotions. Thus, within the first stanza, Parker uses words that are tonal opposites to establish the disconnect between the beauty of the world around the narrator and their own sentiments, a disconnect that will grow more pervasive throughout her poem. Parker also provides the reason for this disconnect – “Because my dearest love is gone away” – a vague and short description that does not limit the poem’s applicability and may refer to any “love,” be it person, thing, activity. Through the brevity and ambiguity of this line, Parker allows her poem to function as a broader, more universal meditation on the distortive effects of despair and loss. 

The structure of the second quatrain is similar to the first; here, parallel structure of rhyming lines arises once more. While the first stanza used the different times of day to evoke different emotions, the second stanza contrasts the stages of life with active and passive verbs and nouns. For example, “Summer” is capitalized in the second line, suggesting that it is a metaphor for the productivity of midlife, just as farmers are busy monitoring and ploughing their crops during the summer. The activity around the narrator is so great that the world “sway[s],” suggesting a surplus of motion. Yet, in the first and third lines, the narrator is resigned; his spirit is cloaked in “cerements” for a funeral, and his heart is filled with “loneliness.” These metaphors for the spirit’s appearance suggest a helpless, mute resignation to the death of any new possibilities. This juxtaposition of tone, which shifts dramatically with each line, again vividly portrays the phenomenon of when one’s inner life is harshly divorced from one’s environment. 

Throughout the third and fourth quatrains, Parker continues to employ natural imagery. She personifies nature in the first two lines of the third quatrain – breezes “play” and waves “dash… in glorious might” – serving to emphasize the liveliness of the outside world in contrast to what has been written about the narrator’s emotional state. Breezes and waves are free, intangible elements of nature; they are ubiquitous, uncontainable, and always on the move. Thus, they may serve as symbols for freedom and unlimited potential, things that the narrator is obstructed from. However, in the third line of the third quatrain, Parker does something different from the second and third quatrains: instead of describing separately the conditions of her narrator’s soul and those of the world around them, she describes her narrator’s active reaction to the world, writing, “I thrill no longer to the sparkling day.” This subtle shift is the pivot in the poem that gives its central theme of loss its compelling nature: the despair that had haunted the narrator’s soul in the second and third quatrains begins to affect how they perceive and react to the world around them. It is no longer simply juxtaposed to their environment; now, it becomes active, projecting itself onto the narrator’s world and inhibiting them from appreciating beauty. This shift continues into the fourth stanza, where tonally opposite words in the first two lines of the fourth quatrain – “ungraceful” and “swallow’s flight,” “blue” and “sullen gray” – describe not the narrator’s soul and the world, but rather the split between the reality of the world and the narrator’s perception of it. Parker makes this change explicitly clear in the third line of the fourth stanza, writing, “My soul discerns no beauty in their sight.” Thus, through a subtle shift in subject throughout the third and fourth stanzas, Parker considerably expands the power of her poem’s central phenomenon: not only that loss of one great love can plunge the spirit into hopelessness, but that this hopelessness can precipitate the loss of the ability to love and appreciate other things in life. 

In the fifth quatrain, Parker’s tone undergoes a shift with the word “Let,” which begins the first and third lines. In the first three lines the intensity of the activity of the world is once again personified to the effect of contrasting what comes later in the quatrain; roses “fling afar” their “crimson” – not the duller “red,” but “crimson” – spray, daisies “splash,” and poppies bloom “hotly as [they] may.” All three lines describe the activities of different kinds of flowers, and with the description “virgin daisies” in the second line, these flowers may symbolize the innocence and passion of youth. With the last line, however, the narrator turns away from all of this beauty, both physical and symbolic, and returns to the “melancholy night” in their heart. Although “Let” has many different possible connotations, it nearly always implies the occurrence of events that one allows to pass, implicitly suggesting that one has the power to prevent them. Here, the conclusive line of this quatrain imbues “let” with permissiveness and even spitefulness: let the world “sway” and “sparkle” and “bloom”; one’s soul will remain melancholy. In contrast with previous quatrains, in which the narrator simply states, or even appears to lament, their inability to appreciate the beauty of the world, here, “let” gives this inability a sense of choice on the narrator’s part, implying that the narrator may be choosing to ignore the lively world. By creating this sense of autonomy, Parker suggests that despair can also strip one’s world of its beauty by influencing one to renounce the enjoyment of beauty in things other than that which one misses. With a simple word, “let,” she hints at yet another dimension the message of this poem takes on, namely that despair can not only deprive one of the ability to love and wonder at the world, but make one lose the desire to have that ability. 

At the end of the fifth quatrain, one of the hallmarks of a rondeau redoublé poem becomes clear; the last lines of the second through fifth quatrains are an exact repeat of the first through fourth lines, respectively, of the first quatrain. This structure underlines the stagnance of the narrator’s condition. As each quatrain returns inevitably to the sentiments expressed at the beginning of the poem, there is no significant change in the narrator’s perspective, situation, or feelings. The quatrains are limited severely by this rule, as it pre-determines a quarter of their content, just as the “riotous,” “rippling” world is limited by the narrator’s inability, voluntary or involuntary, to allow the radiance of the world to permeate the desolate confines of his soul. Thus, the form the poem itself takes is reflective of the despairing, limited feeling it embodies. 

Finally, in the sixth quatrain, Parker’s audience shifts. Her narrator begins to converse with the thing or person that they long for, instead of addressing a bystander, as they have been throughout the poem; what they had described as “my dearest love” in the fourth quatrain, they now address as “you,” “oh love,” and “my dear.” The vivid imagery and words of contrasting tone of the first five quatrains is also absent in the sixth, which retains a despairing tone throughout – “pitiable plight,” “lost its light.” These differences mark the sixth quatrain as fundamentally different from the others. It functions both as an addendum and a conclusion: an address to the object of desire and a conclusion in the third line that succinctly summarizes the gist of the poem: “This little world of mine has lost its light.” Yet the feeling of contrast persists more subtly in the fourth line, where the narrator implores, “I hope to God, my dear…” Having been stagnant, resigned, and indifferent to the world around them for the entire poem until this point, the narrator now reveals the one wish they have with a burst of unprecedented passion, an entreatment of a higher being. This idea of opposing sentiments, emotional states, and appearances pervades the poem through Parker’s choice of words (as seen) and demonstrates the profound impact that loss has: the narrator yearns for and finds beauty in nothing but that one thing or person which they love, and while the world is beautiful, their spirit is helplessly locked in despair. Finally, faithful to the rondeau redoublé structure, Parker ends the poem with “The same to me,” the same words that began the poem. As described above, she returns to the sentiments expressed in the beginning of the poem, reinforcing the idea that because of their loss, the narrator is caught in a circular, unchanging moment of emotional and spiritual stagnance. Thus, through using conflicting diction, a unique poetic structure, and natural imagery, Parker builds a compelling and universal image of how loss deeply transforms one’s inner life. 

As a child, I kept a stack of fresh composition notebooks in the drawer of my kiddie-desk. Above them, I lined up the books I checked out from the library every week: everything from The Dork Diaries to Pride and Prejudice. Whenever I ran into an unfamiliar word while reading, I would write down the word in a composition notebook, along with its meaning and the sentence I had found it in. More often than not, I got lazy and just searched the word up in an Oxford English dictionary (or skimmed past it entirely), neglecting to write it down. The thicker the plot, the more difficult it became to tear my eyes away from it and pick up my pencil. 

Despite months-long hiatuses, my words books piled up, and soon I had “Words Books #1” through “Words Book #6” in my drawer. The words were often hastily written, sentences abbreviated, definitions abridged. When reviewing the books, I could sometimes barely read my own handwriting. I also often forgot the meanings of the words right after I wrote them down; flipping through, I would guiltily realize that I could only say for certain what about a quarter of the words I had hastily scrawled down meant. However, I continued to collect words in this way because I loved saying them out loud, reciting them and feeling them roll off of my tongue and into the air, like music, like art. I associated many words inextricably with the context in which I had found them, and I found this to be a much easier, more natural way to memorize their definitions. Surplus of supplies, token of my love, tranquil seas, gratify her curiosity. 

In fourth grade, I took the WordMasters contest for the first time, a 20-question multiple choice test composed entirely of fill-in-the-blank analogies. For each of three tests that took place in a given school year, students were given 25 vocabulary words that would appear on the test. I took the contest every year until eighth grade, and despite its limited format as an exam, WordMasters unlocked a new dimension to words for me. I spent hours reading examples of the given words being used in literature and studying their definitions and and origins. Soon, I came to imagine the words as people. Husky was confident, brooding, suave, and wore a black suit with silver cufflinks. Cryptically wore horn-rimmed glasses, red lipstick, and a beige trench coat. She sat perfectly still at a typewriter, shrouded in smoke. Subdue shuffled along, shoulders rounded forward; all I could see of their face was that it was red as a tomato as they stared at the floor, from shame or anger, I couldn’t tell. Irk, well, he looked just like my older brother (just kidding ;D). Each word evoked a feeling, a situation, a connotation. Reflex was a good friend of alertness, but propriety talked smack about swagger behind their back (in reality, though, they were just secretly jealous). Sleek was my favorite for several days; I repeated it to myself over and over again until it didn’t sound like a word anymore, all the while imagining myself running my fingers over a black cat’s polished fur. Each word I’ve just mentioned likely brings somewhat different images to someone else’s mind, just as we all have different impressions of the same person. 

Translating words for my grandpa from English to Chinese and back in my head, I realized that swapping one word out for another could drastically change the meaning of the sentence. For example, a direct translation of “不错” is “not wrong” or “not bad,” but while these phrases (particularly the former, which is more accurate) might have a disappointed-but-being-nice-about-it connotation in English, my family actually uses it as a compliment in Chinese; a better translation would be, “wow, pretty good!” With this realization, I was barely scratching the surface of the bright and colorful world of linguistics, but I still felt awed by the different meanings and feelings that words and phrases could take on in different languages. 

While reading The Great Gatsby last year, I ran into a number of words that were unfamiliar to me, and I decided to continue my habit of writing words down, which I had abandoned upon entering high school. I trusted myself to memorize the definitions, and copied down only the sentence I had found them in and the source. Sometimes, debating whether or not to write down a word, I wondered if I’d be able to use that word myself in a sentence; if the answer was no, in it went. While the collection is incomplete (more often than not, I’m too enthralled by a book to pull out my phone or laptop to record an unfamiliar word), I’m glad I came back to this hobby. The words come to life as I scroll through and read the sentences in which I first encountered them.

Below, I’ve listed six of my favorite words from that document, which is faithfully titled “Words Book #7.” I love these words, but I also think that their context does a great job of demonstrating their meaning; it infuses them with a lot of what I colloquially like to call “literary oomph,” or a strong connotation or feeling. 

AGGRANDIZE
“In these rare subtypes, the psychopath is driven less by a greed for material gain than by a desire for his own aggrandizement and the brutal punishment of inferiors” (Columbine, 294). 

ANCILLARY
After he’s arrested, everyone who’s had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? Suddenly, no one really knew him. Suddenly, ‘Oh, well, we really weren’t friends. I knew him in an ancillary way’” (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, Ep. 4).

EPICUREAN
“A civilization ‘is born stoic and dies epicurean,’ wrote historian Will Durant about the Babylonians” (Another Failed Presidency).

ERUDITION
“Rehnquist was a more forceful Chief Justice than Burger had been, and Scalia brought a new level of erudition and passion to the conservative bloc” (Supreme Inequality, 72).

“He is an erudite, collegial justice who usually votes with his liberal colleagues” (Justice Breyer’s Legacy-Defining Decision). 

ICONOCLAST
“The most liberal justice, Douglas was an iconoclast in law and life. He was married to his fourth wife, Cathy, a 25-year-old law student—a union that attracted attention in legal circles and beyond” (Supreme Inequality, 50).

“Their capacity for impromptu organization, for secrecy and loyalty, their iconoclastic disregard for class and established order were a revelation to all concerned, but especially themselves…” (The Feminine Mystique, 83). 

INTREPID
“In the annals of literature, no character is as renowned for his powers of ‘deduction’ as the intrepid Sherlock Holmes, but the way Holmes operates is not generally by using deductive logic at all” (Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, ?). 

“Worn in some of the most iconic scenes in film history – Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair, Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer – the trench became synonymous with intrepid men and smart women” (Vogue encyclopaedia: The history of the trench coat). 

Note: This blog was inspired by our discussion of metaphors in class, by James Geary’s Ted Talk, “Metaphorically Speaking,” and by Cash’s and Addie’s ideas on words in As I Lay Dying. 

This has been quite the semester – there are three main things that I’ve learned that I will carry forward into next semester and the rest of my life. 

Slow down and balance. During high school, I was a control freak about time, scheduling every minute of every day. When I skated, when I did homework, when I read, when I wrote, were all laid out in google doc where I planned ahead for days. If I didn’t finish something in time, I sacrificed sleep. But this semester, I started college apps early and took early dismissal, and loosened my grip. During this “time off,” I learned that I’m not and never will be cut out for 16-hour days, and no one should be expected to. I also learned that I was sacrificing my health and quality of life to get work done that I was scheduling for myself – and that doesn’t make me better or more capable; it just means I’ve gotten tunnel vision, and my priorities are off. Getting a text asking to hang out the next day and feeling stressed because I had wanted to finish a book that day and then immediately wondering if I could stay up to do both and how little sleep was enough so that I could still get up early the next day to skate – that isn’t normal. I love studying and reading and discovering new worlds through documentaries and podcasts, but there’s so much more to life than what I can do on my own and the tangible things I can squeeze out of every second. There are times when I just need to sit down and get it done, but there is also infinite value in slowing down and regaining perspective and balance. Life demands both mindsets. To my fellow seniors, give yourself a break. Especially after this semester. 

Find your people. As someone who consistently scored about 90% introverted on 16personalities since 8th grade, I never had many friends in high school, and until this semester, a part of me was never really okay with that. I had a number of romantic endeavors that failed before they ever got off the ground and a number of friendships that seemed promising at first but then sizzled because one of us never texted back. This semester though, I’ve come to terms with that. I learned to see every “failed” endeavor at a (romantic or platonic) relationship as another experience, a chance to see how the other person handled the relationship and to see what their life is like for the brief time that I’m on its fringes. I’ve spent more time hanging out with my closest friends, and made a lot of online friends from summer camps that I can bond with over shared interests. I learned that not every relationship has to work out – most won’t. I shouldn’t force anything, and if it’s not working, it’s probably not me, and it’s probably not them either. It’s just both of us together, and it’s too bad, but there are people for almost everyone, so I shouldn’t stop trying to meet new people from different backgrounds and interests, and I shouldn’t be scared it won’t work out – it doesn’t need to in order for it to mean something.

Books are more than their plots. It was difficult to put this idea into words, but AP Literature made the shift from analyzing the characters within the context of the plot (as we’ve been doing throughout high school) to trying to extract a larger meaning from the plot that the author was trying to convey. I liked to consider historical context and the author’s life/intent whenever I read a book, but this went way deeper. I realized that the question we were answering was, what was the author trying to say about the world using the plot, the characters, and the events? Connecting fictional events in a book with an author’s larger meaning totally outside of the plot was a new concept for me, and my difficulty with this concept returned to me in the form of an unfortunate grade on the Summer Reading Timed Writing. As I looked over my rubric, I thought: I clearly misunderstood the assignment. I am still working on writing a better analytical essay and connecting the plot with a larger meaning. This ongoing effort provoked thought and opened doors for me in my independent reading and in the two books we read this semester; it’s helped me view fictional writing in a different light. 

As for advice for incoming seniors, I would recommend starting college applications early for those who are applying. Just start. Starting is always the hardest. Set aside an hour or two on a weekend to get a feel for which colleges you want to apply to, how much time it will take you, and when you’ll do what you have to do. Having a plan offers a lot of peace of mind. Sometimes, it can get harder to start the later it gets in the semester as excuses become normalized, so just gather up your willpower and do it. 

Also, I would advise incoming seniors to really sit down and read these two assigned books (As I Lay Dying and Beloved), word for word, twice or three times if they are inclined. I would argue that AP Literature is as much about life as it is about literature, and about how the two intersect. These two books come from very different corners of America and each say different things about life; there’s so much to learn from them about history and human nature. It’s an amazing opportunity to have the resources provided by Mrs. Trowbridge and the thoughts/ideas of your peers with you as you discuss and explore these wonderful books.

This week, I’m jumping back into reflecting on some of the books I’ve had the chance to read this year. Again, these tidbits are by no means critical viewpoints, summaries, or book reviews; mostly, they are just a conglomerate of the feelings and thoughts that come to mind when I think of each book. Here are the last six books on my list, in no order of preference. 

Erik Larson: The Splendid and the Vile

I picked up this book from the library after stumbling upon the Mass Observation archive of the letters and diaries of those who lived through the London Blitz in World War II. A story of Churchill and his family during World War II, this book promised an intimate telling of what it was like to be under the spotlight of history — to feel the splendid and the vile parts of humanity that were just as overwhelming and inexplicable when it concerned one family as when it concerned millions. It delivered on this expectation, and also turned out to be something I never anticipated: a page-turner. By telling stories, from Churchill’s sudden outbursts of boyish joy, to his long days of brooding, to his unshakeable, contagious resolve to resist Nazi Germany, Larson captured Churchill’s contradictions and complexities: the man of a moment like no other. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My Own Words

As both a feminist and a follower of the Supreme Court myself, Ginsburg’s life and career fascinate me. From litigating for gender equality before the law in the 1970s, to penning concise and pithy dissents from the bench during the 2010s, Ginsburg displayed a deep respect and understanding of her colleagues and the justice system that they served. Her life spanned decades of efforts towards equity and inclusion that transformed the fabric of US society. When she graduated first in her class at law school in 1959, she struggled to find a job at a law firm because she was a woman; six decades later, three women serve on our Supreme Court. When she was appealing to a 1970s Supreme Court consisting of nine men, she cleverly focused on how assumptions about gender roles in society negatively affected men as well as women; she often argued cases, such as Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld and Frontiero v. Richardson, where the law prevented men from obtaining certain protections or benefits because they were seen as the breadwinners of society. I believe that this idea – that gender inequality is about both men and women – continues to be relevant today.
(Fun fact: Ginsburg was one of Vladimir Nabokov’s students at Cornell University, and she cites him as one who changed the way she reads and writes.) 

9/11 Commission Report

This book caught my eye while perusing through the library a few days after 9/11. Although I will never fully understand what it was like to live through 9/11, I wanted to gain insight into an event that is so deeply ingrained into the American psyche and is a shared experience for so many of my fellow citizens. Exploring the information “wall” between the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of our government and trying to juggle the names of an endless list of organizations in my mind, I began to understand how large, complicated, and interwoven our government agencies and the problems they face are. Among countless fascinating ideas within the pages of this book, one is how globalization, which deeply changed the world from culture to trade to information, also transformed terrorism. How do we go after a terrorist agency that has no expensive equipment, no vulnerable attack locations, has hierarchies upon hierarchies of members who vary in the degree of their loyalty in every corner of the world, and cannot even be considered a nation under international law? Traditional warfare between great armies and powerful heads of state is no longer the only norm; the FBI estimated that the entire 9/11 operation cost Al Qaeda $400,000-500,000. How do we protect ourselves in an age where it takes so little resources by so few people bound by nothing but belief to cause so much damage? 

Erika Sanchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

The spunk and ambition of the main character in this book, a girl on the verge of going to college, resonated with me deeply. Julia reaches for books to travel beyond her home. She refuses to adhere to her parents’ conception of womanhood and is determined to go after life loudly, flamboyantly, and unapologetically. “I want to see the world. I want so many things sometimes I can’t even stand it. I feel like I’m going to explode.” Through her, I also met someone who, were she real, would have lived an hour away from me with her undocumented parents in a low-income Chicago neighborhood filled with gangs. I had spent so much time reading about the racial inequality and gun violence in neighborhoods of Chicago just over an hour’s drive away from me; but Sánchez brought that world to life and defined it in a way that we rarely see on the news. 

Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, All the Light We Cannot See tells the story of World War II from the perspective of a German boy who became a Nazi and a blind French girl who lives with her great-uncle during the occupation of France. Slowly, ubiquitously, Doerr lets the reader into the inner life of his characters. Their social circumstances and their opinions shrink in importance as we learn what it feels like to be Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who loves natural history and her father and books and the world around her; we learn what it feels like to be Werner Pfennig, who loves radios and science and has dreams of greatness and state-of-the-art technology. For me, their stories are a reminder that heroes and villains are more complicated than they seem. One of my favorite quotes from this book is, “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever,” because it speaks to the ephemerality of life that is ever more acutely evident during wartime. 

Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In

What is feminism? What is gender equality? What is the right way to work towards them? These questions have inspired considerable debate and thought for centuries, and in Lean In, Sandberg, as the COO of Facebook, tells her story and explains her view on how women can claim their agency and achieve satisfaction in the workplace and in the home. I questioned her ideas on certain things, such as the complex, often theoretical, question of whether it is better to use methods that pander to traditional stereotypes to make it to the top yourself and then affect change for others, or to band together with your peers and make your voice heard (as part of a grassroots movement, if you will). Her advice given along the former lines contrasted with Charles Yu’s stance on how to dismantle oppression: “Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends on.” Nevertheless, as a girl who aspires to go into a STEM-related field where the gender gap persists, more so the higher you look on the corporate ladder, I felt inspired by Sandberg’s story.
(Fun fact: After reading this book, I wrote a column as a guest on the North Star called “Gender Inequality in the Workplace.” Check it out! ;D)

“What is that?” 

I casually unrolled my sleeves, smoothing over the wrinkles. “What is what?” I asked, feigning oblivion. 

“Those things on your arm.” He was staring now, as if he could see through the  white fabric to the pink dots scattered on my forearm. 

I didn’t know what to say; the buzz of conversation in the classroom dimmed in my ears, as if someone had turned down a radio. I felt the color rush into my cheeks, partly from embarrassment, partly from anger – he didn’t even know me, so who was he to ask? “It’s none of your business,” I managed.

He stared a little longer, and then shrugged. “Whatever.”

I turned to face the front of the room again, my other hand protectively clenched over my sleeve, as if somebody might tear it off. This moment is one of many of the strongest memories I’ll have from high school. The dots were the symptoms of an autoimmune disease called psoriasis, which I had likely inherited from my mother. They first appeared in May 2018, just before my freshman year. My pediatrician had misdiagnosed them as a yeast infection, but the condition worsened over the course of a three-week trip out of town that summer despite applying what I thought was the right treatment. Eventually, nearly my entire body was covered with angry red spots of varying size. Finally, in July, my mother brought me to her dermatologist, who prescribed me with fluocinonide (a medication for psoriasis), to be applied daily to affected areas. 

A quick breakdown of the condition: psoriasis is a common condition – 2-3% of the global population has it – though it is slightly more prevalent among women. It is a chronic autoimmune condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy skin cells, causing it to go into overdrive to fight the “infection.” Mine, like most others, tends to go through cycles of flaring and remission. It is not contagious; however, there is no cure. My mother, my aunt, and my grandmother all had the condition at some stage in their lives (though it first appeared anywhere from childhood to after giving birth). We all have the most common type of psoriasis, which is plaque psoriasis; symptoms are dry, raised, red, itchy skin patches covered with dead skin. This is generally the most bearable version of the condition in terms of appearance and discomfort. Factors that cause the disease to flare are different for everyone, but for my mother and I and others, the number one thing that precedes a flare seems to be high stress levels and sleep deprivation.

As a freshman, I did not deal with psoriasis very well. Even in eighty degree weather, I started to wear long pants and sweatshirts, constantly aware of where every lesion on my skin was and whether it was at risk of slipping out into the open. The psoriasis spread to my scalp not long after, and I would sit still, my scalp burning, resisting the urge to scratch, hoping that no one would think that I had dandruff or lice.

Each night, I spent an hour rubbing coconut oil into my scalp, carefully massaging off the dead skin so I could soften the hard shell. I’d wake up early to wash the oil out, but still it clung to my hair, making my hair look oily and unhygienic; I worried endlessly that other people would notice. Eventually, I would cut off my long hair to my ears to make the process less painful, and I couldn’t help thinking thoughts that I know to be ridiculous now, such as: no one likes girls with short hair.  

One day, I was talking to my friend from out-of-state when she mentioned off-handedly that she had psoriasis. I was sure I hadn’t heard correctly, and she repeated herself. I suddenly realized that I could see signs of her condition on her forearms, the same red splotches that I took so much time to cover up. At the same time, I realized that I had always seen them, but in years being her friend, I had never given them a second thought, because they had never registered as remotely important. 

As we kept talking, she shared her story – diagnosed as a child, also got it from her mother, flared every 2-3 years. She showed me tips for treating it: don’t leave the coconut oil in overnight, it might irritate the skin; you also don’t have to do it every day; try spreading it on the rest of your body and combining it with other prescription treatments. But she also gave me mental tips; “It’s clinically linked to depression,” she said, “so I struggled a bit with that. But in the end, I think it’s a question of self-worth. You are more than your condition.” 

I began to follow her advice, particularly those last words: “You are more than your condition.” While I combined coconut oil with prescription medicine, I started to wear shorts outside, the splotches on my skin absorbing the sunlight like my doctor had advised long ago. You are more than your condition. I explained to anyone who asked that I had an autoimmune disease, and that it was not contagious, and politely moved on with the conversation. You are more than your condition. I read empowering stories of people who had psoriasis, realizing that I was part of a much larger community of people, bonded by a shared experience. You are more than your condition. 

My psoriasis didn’t significantly improve until the lockdown in March 2020. I started getting nine hours of sleep each night, my stress levels went down, and my psoriasis entered a recession that no medication or coconut oil had ever been able to induce before. In a way, the condition has forced me to manage my time better; I started college applications in July, not out of an abundance of enthusiasm for the process or out of diligence, but out of fear that a particularly stressful senior year would cause the condition to flare again. It seems to have worked; today, my psoriasis seems to have gone into near-total remission, with only light, non-textured patches on my kneecaps and elbows. The psoriasis on my scalp has disappeared. The condition has also brought me closer to my mom; through sharing our experiences and preferred methods of treating it, we get to spend time together over something we have in common.

At the end of the day, I think psoriasis has made me more grateful for what I have. For me, the true emotional burden of the condition lay in how it altered my physical appearance, but there are a world of conditions with much more difficult, long-lasting effects. It is hard to measure people’s pain, but on the critical metric of how much physical pain and discomfort diseases can cause people, plaque psoriasis is on the low end of the list. However, mental health is too often hidden and stigmatized, despite being essential to happiness and life satisfaction. Thus, here is a list of organizations and support groups for psoriasis; my personal favorite is Kopa. It has informational articles about psoriasis, posts from other people with psoriasis about their appointments, experiences, and questions, advice for doing daily activities with psoriasis, and a daily stress tracker to keep track of your mental health.

It’s important to know that you’re not alone, and that’s what my friend did for me; her frankness, her confidence, and her conviction that I should have that same confidence, helped me understand that we cannot possibly be defined by one aspect of our person, especially one that is out of our control. I began to see psoriasis as something unique, something that I had the opportunity to treat and experience; a part of me, yes; but I decided to what extent. I am more than my condition, and people are more than their struggles, their failures, and their flaws.