Tagged: high school
My sister’s last first day of high school
Dear Vicky,
One of the drawbacks of such a small class size is that you have a limited pool of peers to be influenced by, to draw inspiration from and to compare yourself with. Continue reading
18 Truths I Learned By 18 Years Old
1. You don’t understand someone’s struggle until it has happened to you.
Even then, all you have is one personal account. One page of writing, a roll of film, a 7:21 video, even a blog post isn’t sufficient to explain the experience. You could fill a book with thoughts.
2. Some life pursuits are stumps.
They don’t grow, they just get soggy with all of the water you sprinkle.
As long as I live, I will never find meaning in drawing. I can draw, but that’s about it, it will never be anything but an activity to me. We don’t rip the stump out of the ground, but we don’t contribute anything meaningful to it.
3. Peer pressure operates in small ways.
To My Sister, On Her First Day of Sophomore Year
soph·o·mor·ic: adjective: having or showing a lack of emotional maturity: foolish and immature
What a hopeful outlook society has adopted for a high school student’s second year of high school!
Before year 9 you won’t take this advice very seriously because you won’t really know what I’m talking about. Every year you’ll read this letter again and understand it a little better than you did before. And you’ll find out that what I’m saying is true (in some respects, at least). And you will look back when you graduate and regret a little bit but we’re not all perfect, are we?
Last year, around this time, I wrote a letter to my sister, Victoria, addressing the topic of freshman year…since then it’s become one of the most popular and constantly visited posts on this whole blog.
So I’m here to shed a little knowledge about your second year, and I hope my experience might help you along.
My dearest Vicky,
You’re not hot shit. You’re still an underclassman. You will undoubtedly exhibit behavior seen as unjustifiable, unwarranted by the upperclassmen, and next year, you will also see it as such. Continue reading
Get Cultured With Me: Summer Reading 2.0
I’m going to read a bunch of books this summer, and I intend to blog about as many as I possibly can. Think not so much full-length literary reviews, but rather, reflections and personal revelations that arrive as actions progress, characters develop, and plots thicken.
It’s like summer reading, but I’m in charge of the list. Continue reading
Guest Post: Departure
It feels like just days ago I was a timid little kid,
fresh, green, young, inexperienced,
taking my first steps through these unfamiliar halls,
cowering in the shadows of the seasoned veterans.
These gates seemed so high and imposing,
walls like a prison, thick, sturdy, inescapable.
The faces I saw and voices I heard as I trudged along
grew dull and monotonous, blurred together
like raindrops running down the smooth glass
of the great window that was my life:
fragile, bland, unblemished, clear.
Simple.
Continue reading
Guest Post: A Little Too Much
Being the horribly nosy person that I am, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation the other day in my school hallway. Two girls were standing in the middle of the hallway, making everything suck for everyone else. They were loudly discussing the pointlessness of the classes we had to take and the triviality of life in general:
“I can’t stand this school anymore. I hate it and I hate my life. Literally nothing matters.” Continue reading
Seven Final Thoughts about Senior Year (Graduation Edition)
One final blog post about senior year and graduating, I promise.
1) I think I have finally figured out why the college process can induce so much stress. The essence of college admissions is comparison, the root of all unhappiness.
Without comparing students to one another, colleges wouldn’t be able to coherently choose candidates for admission, and we know that.
We would never be dissatisfied with our own accomplishments if we didn’t look around and see what others have done with their lives.
I think my college is fantastic, but when I remember that I have friends going to Harvard, I can’t help but feel a bit petty compared to others.
Guest Posts Rock, and You Should Consider Submitting One
Guest posts are magical, and if you check out the ones that I have already posted on this blog under “Other Voices,” you might understand why.
Never Stationary is just my tiny slice of the huge internet pie; the gathering of people sharing their opinions is replicated constantly, and all over this terrain.
New blogs can emerge because someone wrote for another blog and decided that they wanted their own slice of pie.
Frozen is Proof of Disney’s Emergence into the 21st Century
So many reviews have been written on Disney’s Frozen that I don’t think an ordinary movie review by myself would contribute much of significance, especially since said reviews touch on movie-related concepts of which I only have a rudimentary understanding.
I’ll talk about this movie from the point of view of a normal high school student who simply watches the movie, and does not further research the background.
The plot, the music, and most anything else I could fathom from a single viewing are proof of Disney’s emergence into the 21st century.
First, Olaf has some innate obsession with summer, which is understandable, considering that sun and heat only exist in his daydreams. All throughout the movie he seems to recognize that something bad will happen to him in the presence of heat, but the denial of its threatening existence is something that we can recognize in ourselves. Continue reading
My Race Is a Tattoo
This is a guest post written for Afro Girl Talks. Read the original here.
Your race is a permanent tattoo that people can see from far away, and before they’ve seen the whites of your eyes, they’ve started to identify you.
When though, do they start to make something of it?
When I was in pre-school, I knew that my classmates didn’t have the same skin colors, but it didn’t affect the way I saw them. They didn’t really acknowledge my race as something that could divide us; we just played around in the sand together, wet carpets together.
In elementary school, I started to realize that our skin colors mean that some of us came from different countries; we ate different foods at home and we were out of school for certain holidays. But still, no one seemed to actively judge me based on my race; it was just a side issue that no one even so much as gave a glance.
By junior high, I’d started going to private school, and while I’m thankful for the opportunities that I never would have otherwise found, race had become a very, very pertinent issue. Continue reading
Catherine Zhang 