Wow, final blog huh. That’s crazy. Honestly I think this semester has really flown by and it’s crazy to think that I’m almost done with the first major stage of my life. However, on the topic of reflection, let’s take a look at what basically defined this semester for me, my classes! Against my better judgment, I will score all my classes out of 10 and just talk about my overall experience with each one. I’ll go in order of which period I have them in, and it’ll be great fun. 

 

Period 1: Linear Algebra – 9/10

Linear Algebra gets an overall 9/10. I’ve always enjoyed my math classes not so much for the content, but more the environment of stressed out coping students that really makes it feel connected. I would also like to shout out Mrs. Moore for being a very cool and fun teacher and really helping to bring the package of ELA together as a whole for a very entertaining (albeit stressful) class. In addition, the conversations that people have at 7:00 am before class starts are actually some of the funniest things I’ve heard in my life. The only caveat is that I’m bad at linear algebra so 9/10.

ELA in a nutshell

 

Period 2: Film and Video – 8/10

Film and Video gets a solid 8/10. Now why am I taking film and video? Because in order to get into any of the UC system schools I needed two credits of fine arts in the same subject, and me being a moron took acting in semester 1 of freshman year (which was a mess), so here I am. However, I would say I quite like this class overall. It’s pretty chill, the teacher is very nice, the projects can be pretty fun, and overall it’s a very solid class. The only reason that I don’t raise it higher is because none of my friends took the class with me (because they’re not bozos who didn’t read the UC system requirements).

Period 3: AP Lit – 10/10 (of course!)

Now for my first 10/10, AP Lit. I actually had a lot more fun with this class than I thought I would coming into it. I really liked watching some of the films, reading some of the books, and the overall class environment. However, I would say the reason this gets a 10 instead of a 9 is because of the blogs. I’ve really enjoyed the blogs because I can write random stuff and have fun with things, and I really appreciate that.

Period 4: Physics C – 7.5/10

Physics C gets a 7.5/10 because it reflects my physics grade. I actually don’t think the class is too bad. Mr. Farrell, while albeit a bit inconsistent in terms of teaching quality, gets the majority of stuff done pretty quick and can be pretty funny. I have quite a few friends in the class that make it enjoyable(it’s the Linear Algebra situation of many stressed out coping students fighting for their lives). However, the reason why I don’t like the class as much is because I can’t understand electricity and magnetism for the life of me and I’m actually going to bomb my AP tests in a few weeks.

Me reading the first page of every physics exam (I couldn’t do a single question)

 

Period 5: Strength and Performance – 9/10

I give S&P a strong 9/10. I think having strength before lunch is really nice because once I’m done working out, I can go eat. It’s also a really nice break in my day and I get to hang out with Mohammad and Matthew Ru who are my favorite lifting partners. The only issue with the class is that it’s after physics and it’s pretty hard to resist the urge to drop the bar on my face after failing an exam (physics can end the pain of physics).

Period 6: Lunch – 9.5/10

I rated lunch a 9.5/10 because I actually have a lot of fun during my lunch periods. I’m a peer tutor so 3 days a week I head up to the Lit center, and I actually look forward to it a lot because we have some of the most ratchet conversations in that room when the days are slow so it’s great fun. I like normal lunch periods too, but the only issue is that I always have chem lunch so I don’t get as much time to chill and eat my food, but overall, a pretty good period.

Period 7: AP Chem – 9/10

I gave Chem a 9/10 because I actually really like the vibes. Despite chem being lowkey kinda hard this semester, I really like the people in my class and Mrs. Brucker is a great teacher who gets stuff done and has a good sense of humor to make the class quite enjoyable. I have nothing bad to say about chem this semester besides the fact that I have a skill issue in doing chemistry, but overall, really good.

Me on my way to turn in my lab with 472% error

 

Period 8: Blended AP Macroeconomics – 10/10

I really liked Macro this semester. The vibes are great, the people (mostly) are good, and the class isn’t that hard while also being pretty interesting, so all major pluses. Mrs. Barbino is a great teacher who manages to tame the very hectic 8th period nature of the class while also teaching well. Finally, this class is blended so like 20% of time, I get to go home early so major W’s there. Very good class that I would recommend everyone going through high school to take.

 

Overall, I had a pretty good time this semester. Definitely some rough bits where my grades didn’t look so pretty, and looking at my finals and AP schedule, I think I better buckle in for one last rodeo unless I want to fall flat on my face in the final moments which would be super embarrassing. Other than that, I would like to thank everyone for reading all my wonky blogs across a whole year, and I wish everyone the best!

Hi. So I was brainstorming ideas in the middle of math class when I came up with an ingenious idea to do a tierlist of how much I liked (or disliked) writing all of my college essays. I wrote essays for about 13 different schools (I’m counting all the UC’s as one big school) in addition to the common app, and like many others, I did not have that much fun with them at the time. But now that decisions are back and the journey is over, I thought this would be a good way to reflect on a frankly awful experience. 

 

The criteria for ranking high is based on my a.) difficulty of the prompt(s) b.) the amount of essays I had to write c.) how fun/unfun the prompts were d.) how well I think I did with the essay e.) how much I spited the process of writing the particular essay. Whether or not I got admitted will not be considered (because then the salt factor would take over). The tiers will be ranked from A tier being the best to “Punch Me” tier being self explanatory. Contrary to most traditional lettered tier lists, there is no S tier because, in a vacuum, all of these essays were horrible and I never want to do them again. 

POV: Me going to sleep on 12/31 after hitting submit for my final college

A Tier:

This tier basically consists of all the schools whose essays were really easy. Wisconsin and Michigan both had very long form essays, and the content was very similar, so in reality I only had to write one then reuse it for the other. I thought that the actual content of the essay was also pretty good thanks to the increased amount of space. Then, I used the exact same format and content in my Cornell, UIUC, and Northwestern essays so that’s why they are in A tier as well. Finally, Emory was also really simple and short and I quite enjoyed the second essay asking about witnessing a historical event so I also put it in A. 

 

B Tier:

I only have one school in the B tier and that is Yale. Now did I get into Yale? No. But I did think Yale’s essays were pretty good overall. Many of the short answer questions were pretty fun and I managed to pump them out in a day. The long essay for Yale was also pretty easy because it was a “change the community” type essay of which I wrote like a bajillion times. Now the reason why Yale is not in A tier is because of their really awful “Why Us” essay. Now “Why Us” is pretty common, so why couldn’t I just copy and paste? Because the limit was 125 words. So while it may seem easy considering it’s short, I actually very much disliked this limit. I think that it’s such a pointless limitation because what am I supposed to express in 125 words that adds any sort of substance to my application. So I thought really hard, didn’t come up with anything meaningful, and eventually just wrote something down because the deadline was coming up. Thus, B tier.

C Tier:

This tier are essays I thought of as “mid”. I did not enjoy these essays, but when looking at some of the other ones I had to write, these honestly weren’t too bad. The major issues with these essays were either length or difficulty. The UC applications were 4 separate 350 word essays which in my opinion, was a lot, and their weird deadline meant that I spent most of November grinding out these essays. So while I think my essays turned out alright, I did not enjoy having to spend a whole month writing those essays (also really didn’t like having to fill out an entirely different application). UPENN was my ED school, so maybe it’s in C out of spite, but honestly, the essays were pretty short and honestly not that complex. However the amount of stress that these essays caused me because it was my ED school was so immense. In addition, I was pressured by my parents to change these essays drastically in the last hours before I turned them in, so honestly I didn’t feel very confident about them, so UPENN gets a C. Finally, UChicago. UChicago was the first essay that I wrote because I initially was going to ED there, but then I saw their “special prompt” question, and I immediately switched up. Overall, once I actually sat down to write the essays, they weren’t too bad, but the bogus factor puts UChicago in C.

Me staring at the UChicago prompts having no idea what to write for 2 months.

D Tier:

These essays I have bone to pick with. The first and most problematic was the Common app. I started my Common App in July and I didn’t finish until November because I was switching things up so much. I had to do so much for this awful essay that I think I would literally bleed from my eyes if I had to read it now, so D. University of Washington is also there because I applied last minute (I was very scared I was just not going to go to college so I just threw it in). Considering the time crunch in addition to the fact that I chose to write the Honors Program essays which were absolutely awful in a day definitely puts it in D (definitely not my fault). Finally Stanford. Now I would have really liked to go to Stanford, but my essays were so booty. My parents (a common theme), also really wanted me to go, so they put a lot of pressure on me to make these good, and just like Penn, I changed a lot of them up last second and the stress and the pure amount of writing I had to do for Stanford was not fun at all so D.

Punch Me:

Harvard was so bad. Of all the essays that I chose to write, I regret picking to apply to Harvard the most. Now some of the questions were ok, but I really didn’t like how they hid them in different sections of the common app when they should have just been listed all together, and I didn’t even notice some until the last couple days so that was not fun. My biggest bone to pick is the fact that they just have a completely open ended question. Maybe Harvard thought they were being so clever with their decision to make a long open ended question, but this stressed me out so much. I remember being in total shambles for weeks on end, eventually just writing something down, then reading it again then going back into a vegetative state because of the absolute atrocity that was my essay. So a month passed and eventually I had no choice but to hammer the essay out, and it was the very last essay that I chose to finish, so overall a very bad experience with Harvard all for me just to get rejected. I would rather have Mike Tyson sock me in the face than do that all over again. 

Final Comments:

So despite all my hatred for all of my college essays, I’m happy that I’m done. I’m happy with where I ended up, and honestly, I quite appreciate the time to take a look back at all that I did (even though it felt hopelessly inadequate at the time), and I will most definitely use this awful experience to make sure that I enjoy the next couple years of my life so when I look back, it isn’t as hopeless as it was this time around.

Final List

Link if you wanna try

Recently, I wrapped up my time doing speech at North, and with few other blog topics in mind, I’m going to take the chance to talk about my speech experience this year.

 

Now I wrote a whole summary for my first three years of speech, and only after like 800 words did I realize it was way too long, so I’m gonna do a TL:DR. Freshman year: I was bad. Sophomore year: It was COVID and I did really bad. Junior year: I became a sweaty tryhard and I still did bad. 

 

So with that flawless contextualization of my speech career established, let us move into my senior year. This year, I was a bum.  I was focusing more on college apps, and frankly, I didn’t have any motivation to do speech given my past history of results (or lack thereof). I just stuck with impromptu, my primary event, and I didn’t even have anything ready until a week or two out from the first tournament. However, while I would have been ok with just performing at my usual level and doing badly, I started to absolutely toss my preliminary rounds in the early season. I would forget and freeze and lose to people that, even if I was washed, I should not have been ranking below. So that lit the fire back up in me to prove that I wasn’t complete trash and to put all my years of experience into play to at least achieve something in the twilight of my career. But of course, that just set me up for more disappointment when I kept falling short again and again, and thus I reverted straight back to my bum senior mindset.

POV: You get Frozen like Elsa in your prelims

 

 Eventually, the end of the season came once more. I was tired of the whole speech process in general: waking up too early on a Saturday, competing, getting disappointed when I didn’t make finals, going home tired, a little depressed, and with a lot of homework to catch up on. While I did still enjoy the company of all my speech friends this year, I was ready to be done by the time January hit, but I couldn’t rest just yet. Now, at the end of every regular season comes the state series for speech, which you can think of as the post season of the NFL. Additionally each school can only send one person per event to compete at state series, and given that I was the most senior member in impromptu, it was back to waking up early again for me.

 

State is split in 3 parts: regionals, sectionals, and state, one tournament a week, each progressing in difficulty. The past two years, I  had been eliminated at regionals (the earliest stage of course), and this year, I wasn’t expecting anything different. However, during the actual regional tournament, I felt that I could definitely move to the next stage given the level of competition, and that confidence carried me to the final round. Yet, tragedy struck as in that final round, I had one of the worst performances of my life, and I walked out so angry with myself. I was completely unable to accept that my final speech would be utter garbage and that my whole journey, a never ending story of failure, would end in complete shambles. But thankfully, that would not be my fate. Somehow, I managed to tie for 4th in finals, and because the ranks 1-4 from regionals moved onto sectionals. So, with the power of straight dumb luck, I moved on.

The judges watching me fumble my speech

 

 Going into Sectionals, I needed to clean up my act and make sure that I took full advantage of the chance that managed to fall onto my lap. This was greatly aided by Bill (the guy who won state last year in impromptu and who graduated from North just last year) calling me up and handing me his super secret recipe for victory which I can’t explain because this post is getting too long, and into sectionals I went. For more context, the sectional that North is part of (most likely) the most competitive sectional in the entire state, and people who advance from the sectional generally make it into the finals for state. Thus, I went in with the mindset that I would be ok not even making it into the final round because chances were that I wouldn’t. I just wanted to give good speeches and retire proud of my performance. Strangely, I didn’t feel very nervous either. I was just happy to be there and compete, and after my last preliminary round, I had made peace with being done with speech. Yet, by some mythical force, I made it into the final round, and I definitely thought I would not do well considering how stacked the competition was. So once again, I just decided to enjoy myself. I spun around in the chairs in the waiting room that the tournament had us wait in before going to speak, and being last, I had plenty of time to be trapped with my thoughts. After being called in to speak, I walked into that final round with no expectations, spewed what I thought would definitely be my final speech, and went to go wait for awards. 

 

Now the people running the tournament definitely planned for awards to be the most nerve racking thing ever, because they went so slowly and announced every finalist’s rank name, and school, literally exposing everyone for how close/far they were from making it to state. So when impromptu 6th and 5th place came up (only 6 people make it to finals), and miraculously, I didn’t hear myself at all, my relief was short lived when the all important 4th place. 4th place is super scary for everyone, because only top 3 from each sectional makes it to state. So when I heard the announcer say “In 4th place, from Naperville” and I thought that my journey was finally over. But as it turns out, the announcer said Naperville Central and not North, and so up I went to the stage, completely bamboozled as to how I had managed to make it to state.

 

State was a much different and more anti-climatic experience. I got on the bus, I hung out with the people from Naperville Central, competed, failed (of course), and went home. However, I will note that in the second (and final) preliminary round, I felt a very odd sense of calmness. It wasn’t like other rounds in my career or even in sectionals, I just felt very grounded and in control. Now, while I didn’t make it into the finals (apparently I was 7th and state only takes top 6 for finals so that’s fun), I managed to go home happy that I performed well in my final speech, and even more happy that I was finally done.

 

Now, if I were to go back in time and tell freshmen year me whether I thought speech was worth it, I would immediately think of all the early mornings I had to wake up on, the salty taste of failure that I became too familiar with, the amount of time and effort I sunk into speech and the pitiful amount of rewards that speech yielded out for me. But then, I would remember all the people who I met along the way, the fun conversations and relationships I made because of speech, how tough I have become and how much I’ve grown as a person all because of speech. Then I would turn to little freshmen me, and give the most definitive answer of my life.

No.

“To One in Paradise” by Edgar Allan Poe

On the first read of “To One in Paradise”, I felt like I had just read a lot of nothing. However, upon further reading and looking up some words, I began to understand and feel more confident in my interpretation of what happened in the poem. I started by looking up the word “pine” in the first stanza and found it refers to the idea that one has suffered due to a broken heart. I also looked up fairy fruits and flowers, which refers to an object that makes one “suggestible”. The next line in the stanza then claims that the thing wrapped in flowers was once the speakers, allowing me to put the pieces together to understand that the object of “love” which was found in “a green isle in the sea” (the paradise mentioned in the title) was something that the speaker was dearly fond of. 

Following the establishment of that fact, I found the next stanza to focus on the idea that the dream of holding onto this subject of affection was “too bright to last”. Yet, the way it was presented interested me. The entire stanza is riddled with exclamation points, and with the usage of quotation marks giving the “Future” a voice, it seems as if the speaker and the past are both having a conversation about how the future beckons the speaker to move forward but the speaker cannot. Another interesting note I made is that both Past and Future are mentioned with capital letters, making them seem like actual names for people, furthering my hypothesis of the speaker having a conversation with these entities. The only thing I wasn’t quite sure of was the words in parentheses (one of only two times parentheses are used in the poem), “Dim gulf”, which confused me, as while I suppose that dim refers to the darkness the speaker feels, I do not know what the gulf the speaker mentions is. So aftering looking it up, I found that gulf could also mean a deep ravine, allowing me to interpret this very small line as perhaps a capsule of the speaker’s mental state of being in a very dark place.

Regardless, the speaker continues the conversation in the third stanza, but only with himself and with less intensity. The speaker argues that with the “light of Life” over, and I noticed a heavy emphasis on the idea of “no more” peppered with the usage of consecutive dashes. The issue in my understanding then comes with the next few lines. The speaker mentions that “such language” is the type that “holds the solemn sea to the sands”, but this line is inside a parentheses, making me believe that this line isn’t as important or even a throw-away idea. This, of course, was not the case, as I also found the rhyme scheme of ABAB to continue in the parentheses, as well as the following sentence not flowing with the “no more” that happens before the parentheses. So the purpose of this line still befuddles me as to what purpose it serves. Moving past this line, I also felt the next lines seem loosely connected to the “light of Life”, as the light illuminates the thunder blasted tree. I thought this alluded to the fact that the tree has been hit by lightning or a light of life before (I also thought that the tree could potentially symbolize the speaker). The eagle that rises could rise as a result also could symbolize the speaker, so perhaps the speaker considers it a possibility that he could rise up stronger after being stricken.

After I thought of this idea, I noticed the speaker shifts the poem away from a conversation back to a descriptive stanza of the current state of his life. The speaker places a heavy emphasis on the ABAB rhyme scheme which describes the speaker’s life of “trances” and “dreams” which glance and gleam in a dance that eternally streams. To me, this stanza was used by the speaker to describe how meaningless his life feels after losing the object of love he found in paradise. He allows himself to get taken by the flow of life as he can only think about the past movements of the “grey eye” and footsteps of his adored but now lost love. This stanza popped out to me for the repetition in the way it was structured, as the lines come in pairs that start off exactly the same and bring contrasting images together. The last two lines also were similar but in a different way. With the mention of “ethereal” and “eternal”, both words of which visually look similar and contain the idea of long winding obscurity which I interpreted to give the poem a somber note to end on.

Overall, despite areas lacking clarity, I came to the conclusion that the speaker is expressing how his love found in paradise was only fleeting in nature. The idea that the speaker was trying to spread to his audience was not to take the good times of paradise lightly, as there will never be such a thing as an eternal paradise. Perhaps there is even more nuance that I missed, as I always do, but I feel like my process with this poem and the things I have managed to notice and derive from it have been a great improvement from when I first started.

As an initial disclaimer, this blog has some mentions of sexual harassment, so if this makes you uncomfortable, then be wary. 

 

This story starts in 2020, just a few months after the pandemic started. Being as bored as I was, I started to do what I normally do when I’m incredibly bored – doom scrolling through a list of manga to read. Eventually, I landed on a manga with a shiny cover by the name of Act-Age, and with minimal expectations and lots of time to kill, I opened the first chapter. 

 

4 hours later, I closed my computer and reflected upon the life changing story that I had read. 

 

Act-Age, a story of a girl trying to get into professional acting, was an incredible tale exploring the nature of human emotion and how to express it through action. The story, while pretty rough in its inception, lulled me into its pace and cadence. The artstyle, initially jarring, developed with time and became something hauntingly beautiful. The world of theater and the methods of acting was expressed in such a raw human way. The main character, Kei, used her especially honed method acting to be the perfect mirror to whatever expressions and emotions the author wanted to portray through the page (not to mention the art was absolutely insane). TL;DR, I was very very high on this manga, and I was backing it to be the next big thing in a few years.

Call me down bad but I screamed a little when I saw this for the first time.

 

Now before I continue my story, I want to take a detour that is needed to set up the next bit. While running, Act-Age was published in Weekly Shonen Jump, and as the name suggests, was published virtually every week. However, trying to develop a story in weekly increments with both text and art is very difficult and often times doesn’t turn out too well, which is why weekly magazines tend to end manga very quickly if they start falling off in popularity. So as one can imagine, it sucks to see something end when it still has a lot more to tell.

 

The next part of this detour takes place in the world of video games. During 2019-2020, I was a humongous Smash Bros fan. Every weekend, I would watch tournaments of this children’s party game, my YouTube feed was filled with Smash Bros, I followed an ungodly amount of professional players on twitter, etc. I was a superfan in every sense of the word. That was all until the summer of 2020, when everything came crashing down. One very brave member of the smash bros community posted a twitlonger explaining that a very famous established member of the smash bros community had been sexually harassing them, and the famous person in question was quickly banned (wiki page on the issue). This then led to more twitlongers exposing sexual abuse and harassment, and not a few days later, people I had been fans of and watched behind a screen for hours upon hours, had been outed as predators and just really awful people. Even worse was that not every story was black and white, people lied for attention, stories were made up, lawsuits went into play, twitter became the most toxic I’ve ever seen it been, and it was just a big mess that little freshmen year me was not mentally equipped to handle. Thus I just unfollowed everything related to smash and went back to my origins of being a manga enthusiast with Act-Age being the forefront of my attention.

Me after reading all the twitlongers

However, the worst part was yet to come. Not even a month after everything went down with the smash bros community, I was sitting on the floor and I had the idea to open up Twitter (I have a bit of an addiction btw). Strangely, on the trending tab, I saw the name Act-Age. Initially, I was excited. The small time manga that I was rooting for was on the trending page of twitter, and so I thought something incredibly good must have happened to land it there. 

 

It was not good. At all.

 

Because what I saw was that Act-Age had just been axed and not because it was underperforming in the rankings. No. It was because the author had been arrested for molesting teenagers (he didn’t even go straight to prison which is really concerning but I digress). 

 

I didn’t even process what I was reading for a solid 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe that two communities that I had followed so intently had both been hiding the same ugly reality. I scrolled through as many news articles and comments to see what had happened – to really and truly check if what I was reading wasn’t just some sick joke. But no. It was reality. Now looking back, maybe I overreacted, and for this to be the lowest moment for me during the pandemic is honestly quite fortunate as it didn’t involve any actual death of a family member, but I felt a bit of my soul fade away in that moment. 

 

Now, with my two main sources of joy during the pandemic ruined, I did some serious self reflection. And the conclusion that I came to was this: there are no angels on this earth. 

 

Pretty edgy I know, but I learned this lesson the hard way. I spent so much of my time praising and looking up to these people and stories that weren’t even real. I failed to recognize that what I was seeing through the screen was only a the work of someone and not their actual character. I realized that I, some 14 year old from Illinois, didn’t know these people, and that by putting them on a pedestal, I had only set myself up for suffering. 

 

Now, when I look back at Act-Age, I still see an absolute diamond in the rough of a story, but I also see a stark reminder that images that I have in my head of something could very well not allude to reality, and to be able to separate myself from things that I have not ascertained for myself with my own eyes is a very important skill. 

 

I also still want to deck the author with a chair.

Senior year. I went into this year knowing full well that this semester would probably be the hardest semester of school of my entire life, and I am proud (but in pain) to say that I was very, very spot on for my prediction. For some unknown reason, junior year me decided it was a good idea to load up on as many difficult courses as I could possibly muster in despite having the knowledge in my head that I would also have to write out all my college applications in addition to still managing through all of my (now slightly reduced) amounts of extracurriculars. But regardless of the hours I spent worrying and stressing over my academics and future, I’m here, almost at the end of this awful semester, and I can’t wait to just go home and pass out after these finals are over.

How I’m looking after every MVC test.

However, even through the difficulty and the stress, I think this semester has also been the most fun I’ve had in high school. I wouldn’t say the competition is particularly fierce considering all the COVID years, but regardless, I think that having all of my friends around me also be incredibly stressed out is at least one silver lining (suffering together is better than suffering alone). Regardless, I have learned a lot from the (few) successes and (many) mistakes I have made this semester, and I would like to share them here with you so that you can either relate with my pain or hopefully share it with a younger sibling as a forewarning for what is to come (because that is my plan).

 

1. Plan out your courses well

One of the biggest regrets that I’ve had about this semester is that I took way too many difficult courses. Doing three STEM courses at once, especially with MVC first period, is not fun. Whenever my teachers would “somehow” have their tests on the same day, I knew I was in for a rough night of studying, and my test results certainly showed. This issue was also further compounded by the need to write my college essays because all the time I was spending to study triple integrals was time I wasn’t spending on fixing my horrid essays (the cost to reward ratio of MVC is very high). I did have at least a few saving graces. The first was that I had very poorly planned out my art credits because the University of California system, as it turns out, needs two semesters of arts in  the same category which I didn’t realize until I was picking courses for senior year, so definitely research all the potential universities you want to go to so that you don’t make the same blunder I did. The other saving grace was that I didn’t take AP Spanish. From all of my friends’ experiences, AP Spanish has been one of the worst classes they’ve ever taken, and if I had to go from MVC to AP Spanish to AP Lit to two more STEM courses all before lunch, I just don’t want to imagine that reality. So be smart, try and have an idea of what you want and need to do, and definitely learn which classes to avoid so that you don’t end up suffering as much during senior year.

2. Start your college applications early

So I started in July, and I definitely thanked myself for doing so. As I elaborated earlier, I was already pretty stressed out from my course load, so at least having something started for my college applications going into the school year was very helpful and definitely took a load off of the anxiety levels. That isn’t to say that even with starting early that applications weren’t still super stressful, but seeing some of my friends having to cram in their entire Common application the weekend before the deadline gave me second hand anxiety. I would also say as a final tidbit for college applications that if you can, try and get an experienced third party to look at your essays. Having my parents constantly badgering me about what they read from my essays has been one of the worst things I have ever let happen to myself, so as much as I love my parents, I definitely wanted them to just stay away from my essays and to just let someone else that wasn’t them look at my essays instead.

3. Have fun

This one is pretty cliche, but it’s still 100% true. I did my best to just say yes to different things this year and it has been a lot of fun, especially after COVID. I went to my first (and last homecoming), and screwed around with my friends a lot more after school and just lived life a lot more, so if you’re like me and have been a total bum, go out and have some fun, you deserve it.

 

That’s all I really have in terms of my thoughts on senior year. It’s been a ride so far, and I really hope that I can just cruise through the rest because I think I lost ten years of my life just from stress thanks to this semester.

So as a quick introduction, Xenoblade Chronicles has basically taken over my life for the past 18 months for so. My life essentially consists of surviving to the weekend so that I can play Xenoblade for an unholy amount of time, but my love of the series as a whole will have to wait for another blog because I want to talk about the most memorable part of each Xenoblade game, the music. Specifically the music from the most recent game, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 because it’s the freshest in my mind. Now the full OST is eleven hours long, so I’ll just be highlighting the three tracks that have stood out to me the most and why I like them so much. As a final disclaimer, I have essentially zero technical knowledge of music, so all of this is just me fanboying like the nerd I am.

 

The Banger

The song that goes the hardest to me is called “The Weight of Life”. To me, the emotional baggage that this song carries brings tears to my eyes everytime I listen to it. It’s a song that plays during major cutscenes of the game, and it only plays twice out of the 50+ hrs of cutscenes. Essentially, it means that it’s tailor made to go hard in the paint when it matters most, and it delivers 120%. The initial “chorus” (I guess) is typical Xenoblade composed of violins, brass, and an electric guitar. However, once the bridge starts from the first chorus to the next chorus, the main motif of the entire game, both plot and sound track kicks in: the flute. Now the flute is super interesting. In the plot, the flute is played during “offseeing rituals”, a way of sending the dead to the next life. It is meant to hold major emotional weight, and so when the flute kicks in during the bridge, before a triumphant final chorus with the flute interjecting into the medley of guitars and violins, it actually hits different. Again, this song plays during a pretty important cutscene (here it is out of context), and when the climax matched the song, that’s when I knew that I was playing the greatest series of all time.

Me after the song starts hitting

The Vibes

Now for the most creative song on this list, “Brilliant Wings”. This song is an absolute bop. The story behind it is that it’s a remix of an older song from a previous game brought back better than ever. Meant to be played when roaming around in the game fighting various enemies, whenever it starts to kick in, it’s very much a deal of me pausing the game just to vibe out. In the previous version, the main star of the song was the flute and the violins, but because the flute is now saved for important songs as a homage to the main characters, the main instrument used in the song is the sax, and personally, I find it to be so much better. Overall, the song is jazzy, light hearted, and compared to more tense and structured battle themes used throughout the series, it feels like a great new venture and experiment in styles for the overall soundtrack. I 100% listen to this song just moving through my day because it’s a great pick me up, and with vibes that hard, how could I not.

How I visualize the Sax player going hard in the recording studio

 

The Pain

Finally, I would like to talk about the song that absolutely sold me on the series. Having played and thoroughly enjoyed the past two games, I wasn’t sure about how this new game would hold up. The trailers looked good, the reviews looked good, but I wasn’t sure whether or not the story would hold up to be as great as past entries. However, the moment this song played in the cutscene that it did, I knew that this would probably be my new favorite game of all time. The song is “A Life Sent On”, a very emotional duet using the flute (I told you it was important), and it plays at the end of the first chapter. Two “off-seers” (the ritual players) from two warring countries come together to send off the departed, and the way the two flutes play with each other hits different. I’m sure there are plenty of fancy musical terms to describe what the players are doing, but I don’t know what they are, I just know it sounds awesome and it makes me cry. Some additional background to the song is that the composers had two custom made flutes which matched the ones used in game made for the recording of the OST, and it really pays off in songs like A Life Sent On because the care taken helps to elevate the music so much, truly solidifying Xenoblade as peak fiction.

What the flutes look like in real life

Conclusion (because I wanna go play Xenoblade)

For now, those are my current top 3 OST’s from Xenoblade 3. I have yet to finish the game because I keep getting sidetracked and I know that there are some powerful songs yet to be played, so if you ask me in a few weeks what my top 3 were, I would probably give you a different answer than what I’ve written here. Other than that, this has been a complete nerd out session for me with probably very wrong information, so if you made it through and even listened to any of the songs, then I hope you liked them and that your opinion of me and my taste in music hasn’t degraded too much. If anyone wants to actually tell me what’s happening in more detail than “the sound makes my ears happy”, please do so.

At this point, my blog is turning into me ranting about my hobbies, likes, and dislikes, but when I’m running out of ideas on only the 5th blog, this is the result. 

 

So anyway, MMA. I love it. I never practiced it, and even though I kinda want to,  I know I would get absolutely rolled, so I’m not going to talk about me practicing it, I’m gonna talk about how I found myself deep into the rabbithole of MMA, watching fights every single Saturday that they’re on.

 

Back in 2018, the most exposure I ever had to MMA were some glimpses on a TV while eating a restaurant, watching two people “clinch” each other and not doing much, so I had never really thought much about it, until my YouTube feed all of a sudden filled to the brim with UFC promotions of Conor McGregor v Khabib Nurmagomedov(not a promotion, but basically all I would see). All I knew before going down the rabbithole of promotion videos was that Conor McGregor was some famous Irish dude who boxed Floyd Mayweather and got absolutely destroyed, and so with not so baited breath, I clicked on the video, and I was instantly hooked. 

An example of a clinch.

 

Conor McGregor, the UFC’s biggest star and the first simultaneous champion of two divisions, was coming back from a lay off and was looking to reclaim his championship in the lightweight division against the current undefeated champion, Khabib Nurmagomedov. Conor, the notoriously accurate and destructive striker, would have to find a way around Khabib’s equally notorious wrestling and ground game in order to reclaim his championship. Now while this is pretty standard in terms of MMA match ups, there was an additional element of personal beef. A few months prior, Khabib had an altercation with one of Conor’s training partners, and Conor flew all the way from Dublin, Ireland to New York to get back at Khabib, and did so by throwing a dolly at a bus that Khabib was in, leading him to get arrested. The entire fight week was filled with trash talk, questions of how Conor’s time away from the Octagon would affect his ability to compete in MMA, and whether Conor, who had made history time and time again, could steal away Khabib’s unbeaten record. 

 

The entire week, all I could think about were the answers to these questions. With my very limited knowledge of MMA, I debated to myself how would a strong boxer like Conor stave off the pressure of a wrestler like Khabib. Would Khabib be able to take a shot if he got hit clear? Would Khabib be able to handle the pressure of the spotlight? The night of the fight, I tried so hard to find a way to watch the fight (I didn’t have the money nor the will to try and convince my parents to pay to watch the fight) and eventually, at around 11pm, I gave up and went to sleep, tossing and turning, debating the fight even in my dreams. So when I woke up in the morning and saw the news that Khabib had defeated Conor, I was satisfied to have learned the answers to my questions, but I was heavily disappointed because I didn’t get to see the answer play out in front of me live on a TV screen. 

The end of Conor v Khabib, I wish I could have seen this.

 

After the fight, I never thought about MMA very much at all. A few fight promotions made their way to my YouTube recommendation feed, but none got me as excited as Khabib v Conor. That was until one fateful day during the pandemic, bored as could be, when a highlights video popped up in my feed. As expected with the YouTube recommendation cycle, I went down the rabbit hole again, but this time I would not claw my way out. Because something about the beauty in brutality and the freedom of tactics that were expressed through all the promotion videos that I watched stuck in my head. Also it just looked so cool.

 

As I ventured a bit further than whatever highlights videos popped up, I really started to get pulled in by the narratives surrounding major fights. Fighters looking to make history by dominating in another performance, fighters looking to rematch each other to truly prove who was the best, fighters looking to just scap like they were in their backyards. All the narratives being built would eventually come together and clash on a single night the octagon in ways that no one can predict. The solving of questions, the conclusion of the narratives, the potential of future narratives, that pushed me to go out of my way to stay up until midnight to watch fights after waking up at 5 am to go to speech tournaments.

End of Leon Edwards v Kamaru Usman II, I almost woke up my whole family when this happened

Now that isn’t to say MMA isn’t without its faults. Fights can be pretty boring, they can end anticlimactically, or just never materialize due to injuries and such. However, when MMA peaks, it is the best sport in the world. Nothing matches the feeling of my heart pumping a thousand times per second as a fight starts, screaming when watching an explosive KO, or the sense of wonder after an absolute dog fight. because while it may look barbaric on the outside, what MMA truly is is a contest of heart, courage, and skill. It is the culmination of what makes people great and what makes people horrible at the same time. There is no other sport in the world that can give like MMA can give, and for that, I will always be a fan.

If you’ve ever spent some time with me that isn’t in the middle of class, chances are more likely than not you’ve seen something on my phone looking like this. 

What we see here is a screen that has become all too familiar to me over the past 7 years. Many people have asked me what game I’m playing or what it is, so what better place to answer every question possible (and more) then right now. 

 

This screen is a gameplay screenshot of Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle. Now, as you may have established already, this is a complete nerd game (it’s based off of anime). I have linked an hour long video explaining the mechanics of the game if you’re really that curious, but I will also break it down for those who don’t have an hour to spare. There are two phases of the game, the gameplay phase, and the “summoning” phase. The gameplay phase is relatively simple: you click the little orbs and you try and kill the enemy characters before they kill you. The “summoning” phase might be a bit more familiar. The overall structure of the “summoning” phase is one called “gacha”, which essentially entails using in game currency (that can also be purchased in mass amounts for actual money) to roll a chance to get certain characters (think Clash Royale or loot boxes as an example). You use the characters that you get in the summoning phase to beat bosses in the gameplay phase in exchange for in game currency that you can use to continuously summon new characters in the summon phase and so on. 

 

So, why in the world would I decide to spend 7 years of my life (and an unholy amount of time) playing what seems like a very simple, predatory, money grubbing game.

 

The answer to that question is pretty simple: I was an addict. A gambling addict.

 

As a 10 year old, the adrenaline rush I would get when I pulled a rare character gave me an unmatched sense of euphoria. I would put hours and hours into Dokkan, grinding out the raw materials to summon again and again, each and every time looking for that same feeling. The issue was that I never had the time to truly invest into the game, so that meant that the amount of chances I would get to even try to summon a character would become even more sparse, thus making each successful summon all the more greater.

 

However, the main issue with basing my personal happiness and satisfaction off of a black box spitting out probabilities is that sometimes, probabilities just don’t work out great. While perhaps it is true that the law of large numbers exists, that is completely contingent on me doing lots and lots of samples in order to activate the low (5%) chance of pulling a rare character, and as I have already established, I had very few chances to do so. I also had zero money to spend, so forcibly buying in game resources was also not an option. The final nail in the coffin to these two facts are that I have the worst game luck ever known to man. So, just like that, after a few years of sweating super hard, trying my best to keep chasing the feeling and joy of pulling rare characters, I gave up. I determined that it was no longer worth it to keep playing, as I could enjoy other games which did not require the time sink that Dokkan did.

So how did I go from giving up the game to playing it today? The answer is high school, specifically COVID. At the beginning of high school, my parents got me my first phone. Prior to this, I had a tiny old little iPad in which my parents, in typical asian parenting fashion, would not let me have on the weekends, but a phone, that they wouldn’t take away. So armed with this newfound power, and inspired by some dude I saw in the hallway playing Dokkan, I determined it was the perfect time to start playing again. What I have not explained yet is the system of “dailies” in Dokkan. Dokkan, as with most mobile games, heavily rewards daily logins and playtime, meaning that me not being able to log in and play daily before receiving a phone was a primary reason as to why I could summon so little, but now that had all changed. After a year and a half of not playing, I had so much more to do, and so many more resources to summon with. My addiction came back harder than the 2016 Cavaliers. 

 

Then came COVID. 

 

Being stuck at home all day meant there was zero reason to not play every single day. Don’t tell my sophomore year teachers, but I would straight up ignore class and play Dokkan instead. I would watch tons of YouTube content on the game while simultaneously logging in thousands of hours over the course of the 18 month COVID period. I think the first time I left my house after the restrictions died down for a reason that wasn’t athletics was to go to my friend’s house all the way by Nequa so I could play Dokkan with him in person. Even now, I think my login streak is the 900s, and honestly, I think I will probably play this game all throughout university.

(me playing Dokkan during Hoco)

 

The only main thing that is different now than from 7 years ago is the fact that I now hate summoning. As I said before, probabilities can be brutal, and nowadays, I am much more addicted to the novelty of new characters than the actual act of summoning, so at least there’s proof that I’m not a total gambling addict.

Very ominous title, I know. But I promise, this isn’t anything bad, it’s just really embarrassing on my part, but this blog is due and I might as well put this out into the world. 

 

Back in middle school, around the end of 6th grade and the start of 7th grade, all of my classmates were obsessed with this one website, Quora. I had never heard of this website before, but I was curious to find out, and so after a quick google search in the middle of class, I was logged into Quora.

 

For those of you who don’t know, Quora is basically just an online question and answer site, only really used by the vast majority of people when looking something very obscure up. However, a bored, kind of sheltered asian child in 7th grade does not belong in the same cohort as the vast majority of people, and so I went in deep. 

 

7th grade me had never used social media before, and so the dopamine hit that I got seeing numbers like upvote and follower count go up (even though it was just my friends giving me support) was unmatched. So, me being the muppet that I was, decided to keep chasing that high. I kept answering questions, trying to rack up social media points only to be disappointed when I would get 1 upvote (from myself) on an answer after an entire week. So I decided to go study the Quora meta. 

 

All the popular answers I saw on the for you page were long, they told interesting stories, they had pictures and humor and creativity. Again, I was a sheltered 12 year old so I didn’t exactly have a lot of stories to tell, much less the writing capability to make my meager stories interesting. What made this even more frustrating was that my classmates, who were also all over Quora, did have the rhetoric and wealth of stories to tell that garnered lots of attention. A friend of mine had an absurdly viral post (I’m talking like a hundred thousand upvotes), another classmate got followed by huge personalities on Quora at the time, others would only use Quora once or twice a month but gain huge numbers regardless. 

 

I was jealous.

 

I wanted the same clout as my classmates. I wanted to prove that I could write just as good as them. I didn’t want to feel inferior, and so I decided to change up my approach. 

The issue with what I was writing was that I was writing two or three sentence answers with awful grammar and zero pictures(I wrote an answer about this, you don’t need to read it). If you look at any popular Quora answer, all of those things that I mentioned are nonexistent traits unless the person writing the answer already has a big following. So once I implemented those changes, 1 or 2 upvotes turned to 10 or 12, but 10 or 12 wasn’t the hundred or even thousand that I was looking for. So I made an even more fundamental change: what I was writing about.

 

Instead of trying to come up with a story or attempt to make a funny response, I decided to instead focus in on what I knew a lot about at the time: anime, specifically Naruto. Essentially, I dedicated myself and my account into answering as many Naruto questions as I could in hope of monopolizing the Naruto question and answer market.

I would write at least one or two answers a day, some being easily 1000+ words filled with pictures and hyperlinks and everything else that I could think of. The opportunity cost of this time was a pretty significant slide in my grades, which my parents were very unhappy about but I didn’t care. I needed that clout.

 

Thankfully, my time wasn’t completely wasted. My numbers would slowly go up, a dozen followers turned into a hundred. A thousand views turned into a hundred thousand, which turned into millions. My average upvote count went from 10 to twenty to thirty and so on. I even had a couple of answers break out of the usual anime sphere and go on to gain a couple thousand upvotes. I was on the leaderboards for most viewed anime writers. The cherry on top of it all was when I received a random DM on Quora, only for me to open it up and find out that I had been designated a top writer for Quora in 2018.

I had achieved everything I had set out to do and more. The only issue was that it came at the cost of a lot of time. As I said before my grades slipped, but there was also more than that. I was forsaking going out and doing other (probably more important) activities. Extracurriculars, hanging out with my friends, studying, etc. So by the end of 7th grade, I decided that in the best interests of myself, I would stop writing on Quora. I deactivated my account, and moved on with my life. But looking back (past my very cringy answers), I had a lot of fun. I experimented with my writing styles and learned a lot about how to actually write something decently coherent. I haven’t gone back to write anything on Quora at all, but I have used it to do some research on colleges, so I guess that’s useful.

 

Also, I’m realizing right now that these blog posts are awfully similar to Quora answers, so there’s food for thought.