After watching Spiderman Homecoming, like many people, I realized that Tom Holland is a really fun actor. While he is no Mathew McConaughay or Aamir Khan, he has definitely become one of my favorites. All of his Spiderman movies follow his fun teenage humor and tone that make him relatable and interesting to watch at the same time. I honestly couldn’t get enough of his content, so I decided to watch his movie Cherry this weekend. The Movie follows the main character Cherry, starting off in a very similar tone to the Spiderman movies. Tom Holland plays his character in a naive, unassuming, and slightly awkward personality that instantly connects to you. One of my favorite parts of the movie is how it puts things into perspective. The gritty reality of life is in context for the normal things that happen everyday to Cherry. As the movie follows him from high school to college, you almost get a zoomed out view of how life isn’t that complicated or stressful as we make it out to be. Especially since the worst case scenarios of what we imagine aren’t that bad. 

One of the best parts of the movie is the way it shows how beautiful Cherry’s simple life is. He savors the same familiar roads and people.  I’m pretty sure that 2 years ago, I would not have enjoyed the movie at all. However, something about the crisp images of the suburbs in the fall makes you want to just go on a walk through town. In our own lives, it gives you this feeling of wanting to take things slower from day to day. It is honestly baffling to me that half of the school year has already gone by. It makes me want to do as much as I can with the time left. 

A big piece of this school year for me has been learning the importance of balance. At this point, I feel there are probably around 10,000 things I want/have to do. Critically, however, there is only so much time in a day, week, month. There has been many a time where I have desired an ice cold root beer, an extra large papa john’s pizza, and an entire day to indulge in Minecraft and Kingdom Rush. Maybe even read a book? I recently got Solaris by Stanislaw Lem for my birthday. However, between sports, college essays, homework, family, and friends there is hardly a drop of free time. Even more than distributing time, I’ve learned the importance of making decisions about what you want to do. Even if you don’t count ‘productive’ things you have to do, at the end of the day you have to make decisions about wanting to go sledding, fly kites, or watch a movie. In line with this, I’m looking forward to having as much fun as possible this next semester. Another thing I want to think about is how I spend a lot of time planning and not a lot doing. There are a lot of things I plan to do later. The problem is that my future self is notoriously unreliable at getting off the couch. This semester many big ideas will be executed upon. Now that college applications are receding in the distance and grades (for the most part) are not not as critical, I will usher in a golden era of hedonism. 

My advice for everyone 16 and below is to work hard, play hard. The most important thing is not spending time on things that aren’t important to you. This doesn’t necessarily mean doing things that are good for you. Things like video games are important to me while watching rom-coms is not. Therefore, I spend more time playing video games. Here are the keys to success in this area: Identify areas where you don’t want to spend time. Eliminate wastage and increase productivity.