"you smell like a stinky old man" and other things my sister says to me

Isn't having a sibling amazing? A few more choice quotes:

"Dance party? Or else I'll bite your cheek."

"Feeling your face is so enjoyable!"

"Let's talk!" (cheery voice)

"Do you love me?"

"You don't love me."

I got a 520 on math on the SAT!

This is the kind of confession which is so good to get out you just have to say it in one breath--IGOTFIVETWENTYONMATHONTHESAT. And just like that, a weight is lifted. Okay, 520 isn't terrible. (I have friends who would read this and shake their heads right now saying, "Yes, Adora, yes it is." I have friends who have done that, in so many winces or raised eyebrows or sympathetic displays of lip-biting if not in words.) Well, it could've been worse! 400. Or 300. 520 is, anyway, 20 points lower than what I got the first time I took the test, and many hundreds lower than what the majority of my friends got their first time. For the record, I also took Algebra II as a junior and haven't done an AP science! The latter revelation prompted a family friend to sigh sympathetically, "Ohhh honey." I got F's on some French tests and a B overall that year.

In three years of high school, I have never gotten all A's.

As the modern-day prophet Billy Mays said, "But wait! There's more!"

When I sing, my sister, gifted with perfect pitch, asks me to "please stop." (Three cheers for not singing on key! Three cheers for not knowing what the key is!) My ability to serve successfully in badminton or tennis is sporadic at best. I have never whistled, and snapped successfully once in my life. But this is all extracurricular. Let's just reemphasize--in summary, I fail, a lot, on academic things that most of my friends don't fail on!

I say all this because of two things: comments like "oh my god you're so smart Adora" and the fact that this is the season of "WOO LOOK AT ME I GOT 800's AND 5's" for so many people.

To address the first: I feel like an impostor when people say "you're so smart" with absolutely no freaking idea how insecure I can get, feeling the need to uphold the sustainability of that compliment. I've often wondered (no joke here) if anyone would like me if they realized just how inept I am at some things.

To address the second thing: if you got a good score, congratulations!! I mean that, without resentment. I got 5's on the APs I took this year (Psych, Comp Gov, US Gov, and AP Lang, so playing to my strengths a bit...) 800 on reading and 780 on writing on the SAT! But that matters as little as my 520 and sucky transcript. I'd be a hypocrite if I picked and chose. We're defined by our good numbers as little as by our bad ones.

Sure, this 520 is probably etched into my mind the same way runners know their marathon times. It's a part of me. But it's a tiny part of me, because hopefully in my fifteen years I've learned at least that I should live a life complete enough (even as the work in progress that it is) that I have cooler failures to dwell on and better successes to treasure than 520s or 5s. Some of the smartest people I know got terrible SAT scores. Even as I get incredibly stressed out, like all soon-to-be high school seniors at this time of year, I have to remember: tests are taken, scores are given, acceptances are mailed, and life goes on!

When I was younger, speaking at the Entertainment Gathering conference in Monterey, CA, I delivered a talk about education, testing, and creativity--the kind you probably hear a lot, nowadays. Afterwards, the author Amy Tan, of Joy Luck Club fame, walked up to me. I died a little bit from fangirling. This was AMY TAN, after all, AMY TAN with her little-Chinese-lady haircut, dark red lipstick, and intimidatingly large handbag. She said that my speech had resonated with her. (Swoon.) And then she added, "I got a terrible score on my SAT!"

I could turn this into a blog post about testing culture and underlying issues in education or the like, but what I'm really trying to say is this: a lot of you have secret failures. Maybe not things like my 520, but the kinds of things you switch the topic deftly to avoid or live in dread of anyone but your closest friends knowing. You're not alone. You never have been. It gets aggravating, scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed and seeing pictures of beautiful people with their perfect scores and happy lives--the lithe runners taking all APs, the social butterflies on dance team who win medals in speech and debate, the math kids who got into Stanford and Harvard AND landed hot prom dates--but none of us have it all figured out. I have incredibly accomplished contemporaries who consistently make me feel like an underachiever, but their struggles also helped me realize that every win has its flipside.

In the end, if I love you, I love you no matter what your resume says or what you got on the SAT or how fast you run a mile or how well you write a story or any number of things at which it is entirely possible to fail at--in fact, I love you knowing those failures.

Is it too much to ask for the same?

the addictions we tolerate

"I shoot up heroin, snort lines of coke, have a gambling problem, chain-smoke, and drink."

"I watch Game of Thrones, Homeland, Newsroom, Big Bang Theory, and Dr. Who constantly, and LOVE rocks. No, seriously, I really like buying rocks."

Ideally you haven't heard either of these quotes too often, but which would you say has the more urgent problem? Undoubtedly the first person. They're addicted. With that said, isn't the second person too? "Addiction" is a word with a lot of connotations, most dramatically connotations like the first quote, and yet it's manifested in everything from "just one more episode" to "I swear this is the last time I'll buy ___." I question what separates the addictions we tolerate and the ones we don't.

If you think about things like illegal drugs, they're obviously far more damaging to health and safety than, say, a TV show, but we also think of them as primarily addicting substances. There's no warning label on a TV show, "This may keep you watching on and on and on until you actually start rejecting social opportunities because you just want to know what happens" (HOLLA, DOWNTON ABBEY!) the same way a cigarette packet or wine bottle comes with a warning.

Of course, though, if we think about it, TV shows and clothing stores and food items are designed to be addicting just as much as those street drugs are. The most effective guarantor of sustainability in a business is addiction to the product. The customers keep coming back because...well...there isn't much of a choice (or, at least, free will comes with a far greater price). Additives in fast food that make them way more tasty than naturally possible for the dehydrated refrozen items they are, continuously shifting trends that create a sense of urgency in the clothing consumer to "update" their wardrobe, plot twists that meanly sink your heart and make your eyes pop and water (THAT CAR ACCIDENT, DOWNTON ABBEY, THAT CAR ACCIDENT).

We just don't class those things in the same kind of category. These are the addictions we tolerate, because we usually delude ourselves into thinking that these aren't addictive substances at all. But they can be. As an example: what's my grandmother's heroin? Rocks. Yes, rocks. That isn't a street name for anything, I'm talking about straight-up rocks here. Once, she went shopping at an outdoor market in Seattle's International District and purchased a jade bauble and some "valuable" rocks for an untold but presumably massive amount of money that led to great regret on her part and scolding by everyone else. Why an aged and intelligent woman would spend money on rocks is kind of beyond me. There are more precious rocks that other people are addicted to--diamonds and rubies and emeralds--but the point is less about the substance and more about how we react to someone else's attraction, or addiction, to them.

Addiction isn't just drugs or alcohol or problems that wreck your life. Look up "define:addict" on Google and you'll get:

ad·dict  

/ˈadikt/

Noun A person who is addicted to a particular substance, typically an illegal drug. An enthusiastic devotee of a specified thing or activity. Enthusiastic devotee? Now that sounds awfully acceptable.   "I'm an enthusiastic devotee of skydiving." "I'm an enthusiastic devotee of the works of Richard Feynman."   Say "I'm an enthusiastic devotee of ___________" and you have something palatable, something you can bring to posh dinner parties and say while you stand in your evening gown sipping a cocktail! So next time someone says they're an enthusiastic devotee... you know what they really mean is, "I'm an addict."   I think, in the end, we judge the addiction less on whether it is an addiction or not--let's face it, we're all addicts, to shows or clothes or book series or drugs or people or LIFE--and more on the end result. We calculate the impacts in our heads and we realize that you can't win every battle, that we can't all be ascetics, and we have to let some of these addictions pass. I can only hope that we make the right judgments.   Let the right ones in.   (cough. cough. Downton Abbey.)

the ethics of serendipity

ser·en·dip·i·ty  

The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way: "a fortunate stroke of serendipity".


I've been thinking a lot about serendipitous occasions because of the role of luck in so much of my life. Relationships especially--as an example, I've met crushes because of incidents as inexplicable and random as walking faster than everyone else, being at the same event or camp or class, or asking for a ride. Okay, that may not be as crazy as seeing someone's face fleetingly through a subway window, but I still think of it as serendipity.

I suppose that everything beneficial is serendipitous, in a way, then, with a definition as broad as "development of events by chance." You don't have to be hardcore deterministic to realize that a lot of life is up to luck. All those news stories where the anchorman or woman begins with "S/he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time..." All this is in hindsight--something isn't right or wrong before events take place and make it so.

So if we don't get the blame for terrible turns of chance outside of our control (if you hurt someone in self-defense--post-Zimmerman trial, I feel the need to stress legitimately--you're someone who had to do an unfortunate thing, not a criminal; it wasn't your fault that a criminal happened to be there with aggressive intent), should we reap the rewards, including, often, a sizable amount of praise, for the good things that happen to us because of chance? We usually do.

After all, as a society, we're inclined to celebrate the end results and not the process of getting there. Who cares if you only made millions because you happened to stumble across a lithium mine while out on a walk with your dog (terrrrrrrrrrrrible example I know, but bear with me)? It's still the same millions as if you'd spent years of your life methodically surveying the land.

Indeed, it's the serendipitous occasions, like that terrible example, that make the headlines. Perhaps it's because there's an implicit equality to serendipity--luck can happen to anyone, hard work has to be, well, worked on. Still, though, is it really right to treat the things that come to us by luck the same way we treat the things that come to us by work? Or, of course, you could justify it by saying that everything is driven by luck and that there's really no difference in the end at all.

crazy taxi remembrance

It's strange, how the images that evoke "childhood" for us aren't always the quintessential ones--stuffed animals, baby shoes, Legos. For me, the arcade game Crazy Taxi always makes me think of being little, of trips to the local "Asian store" (the Ranch 99 Market in Kent, a veritable mecca for Chinese people and a few bemused Westerners who had wandered there looking for exotic fruits, or, like my dad, went out of obligation).

Ranch 99 Market is located inside the Great Wall Shopping Mall. Fittingly for its name, it seemed palatial to me at four or five years old. Sometimes my sister Adrianna and I went inside Ranch 99 itself, with our mom, but most of the time my dad would take us around the mall to kill time window shopping. We pointed at teapots in fancily decorated tea shops, sniffed the air in the hopes of picking up the scent of the chestnuts roasting outside, gazed through gleaming glass cases at deep purple amethyst geodes with price tags that kept us outside but glinting edges that kept us staring. Here, I understood my dad's quirky fascination with geology long before I saw the highway-bordering basalt towers of Eastern Washington road trip drives.

Before long, though, the entertainment of product- and people-watching became exhausting for two girls on little legs, and we would turn to the rows of arcade games wistfully. A lot of them were shoot-'em-up games dominated by prepubescent boys machine-gunning away hours of their youthful potential (or just eyesight...yeah probably just eyesight), but there were a few that didn't have any gun controllers attached. Crazy Taxi was one of them. Even my dad liked Crazy Taxi, so that made it okay (whereas the other games, that splattered gore across screens, shook with noise, and most importantly evoked Daddy's disapproval, were unacceptable).

While playing Crazy Taxi I felt simultaneously empowered and powerless. Empowered because suddenly I was the one sitting in the driver's seat, making decisions that could make or break me (usually not break, because arcade driving games seem to have an incredible tolerance for off-roading), but powerless because once our quarters were up, I'd have to slide reluctantly off the high seat and let someone else have a go. Sometimes Daddy would relent and put in some more quarters. Adrianna and I took perverse joy in seeing how many umbrella-ed tables we could crash into, seeing the wood splinter all over the screen and people scurrying before us. Who says driving games can't be violent too?

To any observer we must have made an odd group, my dad and Adrianna and me--in the almost unbroken row of Chinese boys there gaming, our trio consisted of the one white guy in Great Wall and tiny girls with pudding-bowl haircuts playing an arcade game with a seat too high for us. I'm glad that I was five--too young to notice or care if anyone was looking. And afterwards, when my mom finally emerged from Ranch 99 she brought with her the peace offerings (for taking so long!) of sticky, sweet roast duck, red bean buns, and chestnuts.

Chestnuts, amethyst, and Crazy Taxi...if young me had the foresight to make a time capsule, I would've stolen them all from the Great Wall Shopping Mall. I haven't been back there in a long while, and I think that's a good thing--I like keeping the image I have from when I was a little kid. The amethyst's glint would be duller to eyes that have seen many, many shiny things; the arcade games sillier, the building smaller, the chestnuts staler. Memory is often sweeter than the present. But if I see the telltale bright yellow of an arcade game console and "Crazy Taxi" emblazoned on the side, I'll smile and think of a little girl who loved to drive.

Cross my heart and hope to die

In my neverending capacity for masochism, I've decided to not only do precalc over the summer, show up for preseason cross country runs, and get through all the Game of Thrones books (currently on Storm of Swords!), but also write one poem, one short story, and one blog post every day. Cross my heart and hope to die...

Which brings me to my inaugural post. Where does that saying, "cross my heart and hope to die," come from anyway? A Google search on the term brings up mostly inconclusive answers from not especially trustworthy sources (my AP Lang teacher would not be proud of me relying on Ask.com and Yahoo Answers), but they'll have to do.

Yahoo Answers user Lorreign said this, "Probably the gesture and its binding nature were originally based upon the familiar Catholic sign of the cross. In my own Protestant childhood in Ohio, and my wife says the same was the case in Massachusetts, the oath was often accompanied by the irreverent doggerel: 'Cross your heart and hope to die, And hope the cat'll spit in your eye." From "2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings & Expressions from White Elephants to a Song and Dance" by Charles Earle Funk (Galahad Book, New York, 1993). Another Yahoo Answers user, who agreed with the statement that the origin lies in the Catholic cross, added this, "The British extended version (at least in South East England) is "Cross my heart and hope to die / Stick a needle in my eye."

I'm guessing that the Catholic Church never intended crosses to be used in vain by every child who has ever sworn an oath, the likes of Huck Finn's gang and solemn children who pledge themselves to death before they know what it is. After all, using God's name in vain is biblically prohibited; the rosary doesn't seem all that far off. It's interesting to me, how much we invest in symbols. That the cross itself can immediately evoke a movie's worth of images, feelings, and history--from the image of the man on the cross, to his life, to blood and sacredness and sacrifice--and all in one small piece of plastic, steel, or gold. And sometimes, we manage to invest so much in the object that we forget about the story. That, it seems, is precisely what happened with a simple childhood line called "cross my heart and hope to die."

"teach your girl" - a new poem

teach your girl

Teach your girl to jump fences and her world will know no boundaries,

teach her to sneak out in the dead of the night with no fear of the bogeymen who have never tried to hurt her, but give her the strength to kick them as hard as she can in the groin on the off chance that they do. Teach her to run until her legs can’t carry her anymore, and when that happens, to walk a little further. Teach her to walk like she owns the ground when she steps on it instead of apologizing for the air she breathes—
teach her to dance on fallen trees that make bridges in the woods as if her hiking boots were ballet shoes, because bird calls and wind-whispers make music too. Teach her that no matter what anyone says falling off cliffs isn’t the worst thing in the world, not climbing in the first place is. And if she can’t reach the final foothold lift her up on your shoulders the way you do on the Fourth of July, and teach her that shortness need never be weakness when you can stand on the shoulders of giants. Teach her to dig in the backyard for hidden treasure and make booby traps like the kid in Home Alone, take prisoners in Capture the Flag and use mud for war paint on her cheeks. Teach her to wear a seatbelt, yes, but teach her too how to do 110 on the open road, whooping as you feel up big sky country with a steering wheel and tires. Teach her that setting fires is about more than making s’mores, and when the night comes, the fire flickers, and you hear her take off for the woods without you, you’ll know you’ve taught her well—because the world is this girl’s oyster, as much as it was ever any boy’s.

"An odd sense of companionship arises along the lonely road--a solidarity of sorts with the darkened truckstop, the rare passing drivers you only know by their hazy taillights, and most of all the big sky that reminds you emptiness can be beauty, too. 

Crossing three state borders in one night's madcap ride, and there are still twenty bottles of beer left
...on the wall " I typed on my mom's iPhone screen, fumbling with the letters as we jolted along on the freeway in Middle-of-Nowhere, Northern Michigan.

From Friday till today (Monday where I am, here in Tokyo) every day has been spent traveling. On Friday, as soon as we landed in Chicago our first order of business was picking up the rental car that took us down that aforementioned "lonely road," all so that we could make Adrianna's graduation the morning following. We all sighed when the trip seemed to have suddenly gotten longer--in actuality, all that had happened was losing an hour because of the Central to Eastern time change.

When we finally pulled into a hotel in Big Rapids, MI, it was drawing close to 3 AM. The following morning we'd wake up early to make the final leg of the drive up to Interlochen...all these miles being covered by dear old Dad. No one else in the family knows how to drive (yet). (I'm on it!)

Adrianna's graduation made me feel simultaneously old and young. To see your sister in a cap and gown is to see a little bit of your own life flash before your eyes. It's also an incredibly proud and happy feeling. When the Dean of Students at Interlochen called out her name I stood up (screw decorum!) and yelled with a "WOOOOOOOOO" so loud that a lady two rows forward turned and stared.

Immediately after Adrianna had bid some all-too-brief goodbyes to friends and classmates we took off for Chicago again. That night we had the chance  to meet up with the Gevinsons--I first met/last saw Tavi three years ago when we were both speaking at the IdeaCity conference in Toronto, Canada. In fact, the entire day was filled with seeing people I haven't talked to in ages, from my sister in the morning (boarding school half across the country isn't exactly conducive to family visits), to Tavi in the evening, to friends from summer camp at Stanford last year at night! I stayed up (or as my dad put it, "slacked off way too much") talking to them till some time past midnight Chicago time...but I wouldn't have changed it for the world. And this all left me completely exhausted but FIRED UP AND READY TO GOOO (yeah, stolen from the Obama campaign a l'il bit) in the morning for the 11-hour flight to Tokyo!

Can you tell my enthusiasm is manufactured?

The first thing I said, stupidly, when my sister raised the window shade on the plane was, "Oh my god. Oh my god. It's the water. They're boats!" I dunno what I thought the spectral shapes floating in the fog-shrouded water were, but as we began the slow lurch forward (aka gradual descent to Narita) some of their names even became clear.

Getting off the plane launched us into a deluge of culture shock, from the vending machines to the hustle and bustle to the face-mask-wearing masses. It reminded me of something out of the movie "Contagion" except sans white people. (Why haven't I seen any Americans here wearing face masks?)

A few more quick thoughts/mental snapshots of Tokyo so far:
- tradition! Our hotel and the restaurant we ate at both feature tatami mats and the requirement of taking the shoes off, so we got thrown into the (relatively, for us) deep end soon! Yayyy
- shortness! I actually feel tall standing next to some doors here. My heart goes out to those poor souls taller than 5'5"
- bikes! So many people here bike, and I've been trying to stay extra observant as to not cause some horrible sidewalk collision
- poor Adrianna! That is to say, most of the restaurants we've been to have not been the most awesome for vegetarians...as in, not having anything at all.

All this travel makes me inordinately grateful for a sense of place/home. It's easy, like Ryan Bingham in one of my favorite movies, "Up in the Air," to forget where you come from, to find a place to belong. Often when I walk into airports now I get that same Bingham-esque feeling of having come home--and then I remind myself of people. Because ultimately it's not the familiar roads or flowering trees or even my house itself that speak "home" the loudest to me, but the friends I love and who, I promise, I'm reminding myself to buy souvenirs for.

There's a famous Chinese poem wherein a weary traveler sees the moonlight and thinks of his family seeing the same. Looking up and seeing the moon and the stars has always given me solace because of the comforting thought of people I know seeing the same moon and the same stars. It's probably why I had my face pressed up against the cold glass of the rental car as we drove from Chicago to Michigan, trying to stare up at the vast empty sky and memorize its outlines with all the intensity of someone trying ESP. Maybe it's why now, I've perched myself on my windowsill to look up at the night sky in Tokyo. And what with timezones and all the rest, barring the idea that we are looking at the same things at the same time, I think of this line from Up in the Air instead.

"Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight, they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over."

A love letter to my new global family

Let me preface this with a bit of exposition: something I said on Twitter was, "it's a strange thing to feel your heart tugged across continents, but that's what I've felt this week." Over the course of the Three Dot Dash summit in downtown New York City, I had the chance to learn, eat, dance, cry, laugh, and fastwalk ;) with 29 amazing teens (and our incredible adult facilitators, summit leaders, and Global Teen Leader alumni).

Three Dot Dash (that's a V, for peace, in Morse code) is a weeklong program that brings in teen leaders from all around the world (everywhere from South America to Europe to Africa to Asia to here at home) for a summit dedicated to helping us tell our stories and ensuring that the message powerfully shared by the late poet and peacemaker Mattie Stepanek, that "peace is possible," is embodied through our lives and work. We were privileged enough to learn from Mattie's mom Jeni, aka "Mama Peace," whose persistence and quiet strength inspired us all.

So without further ado, here's my big post-summit thank you. I'm still reeling from the experience, but in the best way possible. I'm blogging this because I wanted everyone to see what can happen when we declare sincerely, "we are family."

Dear 3DD family,

Repeating the refrain of post-summit days: "I miss you guys."
"You guys" means moments as well as people. There are too many moments to count, but maybe one of the first was discovering the roof view with Sudarshan and Anjali, stepping closer perhaps than I've been for a while to the feeling of being on the top of the world. In the mist, the streamers on a fence below seemed to be figures writhing on the sidewalk. Standing on that roof I was eye-level with the stain-glass Jesus in the window of the church across the street, oddly appropriate considering a conversation we had in the freezing cold about religion.
Then came the news that our fellow GTLs--most of the rest of you--were waiting for us, and so came scrambling down ladders with the glee of dancing on the brink of troublemaking. (Yeah, that's what we were doing right before I apologized for going overboard on the "Dora the Explorin'" side.) How couldn't I miss Kim and her stern expression that left no room for error except in the most cleverly sneaky ways (wink wink. Just kidding.)

I miss the nights that followed, wandering arbitrarily around New York and coming back way too late for much-beleaguered Dana (I'm sorry for being such a crappy roommate!) to be awake. I miss conspiring with Jasel on fighting Ali for control of his phone, and the crazy high-pitched sound of Rameez getting tickled. I miss the sound of all of our laughter, standing in energizer circles, executing ill-planned dance moves. I miss Anjali being perhaps the best teacher of Hindi and Tamil the average white/Asian girl-who-sucks-at-languages has ever known; now every time I say "I can count to ten in Hindi!" (over the course of just a few days, more frequently than you might think) I do it with the bittersweetly nostalgic reminiscence of how I got there in the first place.

I miss the drowsy sincerity of our last night, sitting in a circle in the hangout suite on the 21st floor, and listening to the soothing sound of Gani's ukulele, Robert's improv singing, and all of us chanting chorus lines. I could go on and on and on--but those are just the nights.

Somewhere in a binder which (woe is me!) I lost at the summit venue, there are copious badly-written notes, some hurried poems in the margins, and an action plan which I filled out with the last-minute desperate passion of a girl who's waited till the last minute to determine which project she's actually going to talk about. I want to thank you all for making me feel courageous enough to float a project which I only started conceptualizing recently, and for teaching me a huge amount over the past week.

Indeed, when it came to peace, social media, photography, speaking, and interviewing, I learned a lot--but I also grew in a less pronounced area: humility. It may not be a definable lesson or a topic we covered in a clear-cut way, but having the chance to meet all of you--with your intense passions, mindblowing eloquence, Muslim Brother-from-the-Bronx or Malcolm X accents (Faisal and Sheila, respect), beautiful singing, kindness, inclusiveness, freakingly intimidating smartness--made me really truly see how un-special I am in the grand scheme of things, no matter how exaggerated a headline or how high someone's praise may be. And yet at the same time you embodied Jeni's message, that reaffirming "You matter."
Realizing that I matter not because of whatever sets me apart but rather because of what I share with you--the desire for just peace--was one of the most valuable things I walked away with.

Under my breath I sing "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" sometimes. Toward the end of the summit the prediction of nostalgia, the logical rationale that it's the only song I can mostly hit the right notes on, and some other feelings made me do that with increasing frequency. The lyrics--"Love of mine / Someday you will die / But I'll be close behind / To follow you into the dark"--capture, in a way, how I feel; because even though none of you, fellow GTLs, are dying, we have dispersed and I want to follow you. I'll admit that maybe I forgot the "it's nothing to cry about" line of the song the afternoon of our last day. Actually, as I was crossing the street with Dana back to the hotel I started straight-up bawling like I haven't done in public ever, but at least I was laughing uncontrollably too.

Adib, Alexia, Alhassan, Ali, Anjali, Anoop, Dana, Ellen, Faisal, Francis, Hector, Jack, Jake, Jasel, Karen, Khaoula, Morgan, Natalia, Natasha, Nick, Rameez, Saajan, Sheila, Sienna, Souhail, Sudarshan, Tharon, Victoria, Yash: thank you for making me feel countless emotions more powerfully than I have before. Sometimes I'm bad at being effusive out loud, but the following words are things I would say to your faces: at Three Dot Dash I got everything from my longest hug to the best of friends, and I only hope that in some small way I might have repaid you with a percentage of the happiness I felt last week.

Love you,

Adora

wrangling with Christmas trees

There's something beautiful about the scent of pine, all those terpines and phenols, as it fills the living room. It's a scent so distinctly Northwestern, fresh, rainy, and clean, that I think I'm going to miss it when I move for college, when I go and live someplace where these trees aren't ubiquitous.

Getting our Christmas tree into the house is always a bit more of a struggle for my family than most. My dad lops it down from our front yard, since we have an abundance of trees, and then tries to cut it down to size so it'll fit through the door without mimicking a medieval battering ram in function as well as form.

As I look at our bush-like tree, twinkling merrily in its garb of lights and ornaments, I realize I wouldn't have it any other way.

smells like school spirit

It's that time of year again, for school colors to come out, pompoms to wave, dress-up days, skits...a.k.a., the decadent pageantry during Homecoming Spirit Week. It occurred to me today that school spirit isn't all that different from patriotism. We have yells and chants, rousing music, we dress up in our school colors like people wear the flag on the 4th. And like patriotism, it's something almost everyone at least pretends to have. But I wonder if, like with patriotism, there's questioning underneath.

Because the thing is, at some point you realize that you ended up in your country not because of any awesome membership in the elect chosen to reside there, not because of some predestined fate, not because of anything that makes you uniquely American or Chinese or South African or what have you, but because of luck--because of accident of birth. And luck is something that is very difficult to be proud of.

To me, it makes little sense to have pride in such accidental membership. It justifies pride based not on the actions that should evoke it but rather because self-preservation dictates that you support your own group. Is this to say that we should disavow our allegiances because of what petty cause we have for them? Not at all.

Just, instead of rah-rah'ing for our mascot or our school's name or (in the case of patriotism) our country, we should celebrate ideals. And if in the process we find that our ideals may be more universal than our school spirit cheers or our patriotic sentiments, that's a good thing. (Guess what, it's easier to get someone to agree with "freedom, justice, and equality" than "I love America!") So why be divisive when we can unite around the things that really matter? I don't know about you, but I really care more about what we stand for than our name, our colors, or (sorry!) whether our football team won at the HC game tonight.

I think we should be proud of our schools. But I think we should have better reasons than, "because I go there." I'm proud because the amazing friends and classmates who performed at the Homecoming assembly today had creativity and drive. The folks who created clubs and rallied members to raise awareness and fundraise today inspire with their leadership and dedication. These kinds of strengths provide ideals we should celebrate.

Sure, it's hard to use face paint and pompoms to cheer on something as abstract as an ideal; but if we hope to give a glimpse of who we truly are, whether as the people of a nation or the students of a school, we will always have to go far deeper than a name.