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.