6. Harbor Seals 2026

“Go back to your country.” These were the words uttered to my seven year old sister, an American citizen, as she walked into her first grade classroom and was pushed by her classmate. My sister is not only an American citizen, but was born and raised in the United States. She possessed no accent, no memory of living anywhere else except America—yet she was targeted for one reason and one reason only: the color of her skin. My parents, like many others, immigrated to America in the 1990s with the hopes of finding better opportunities for themselves and providing even better opportunities for their children. Their hard work and perseverance had paid off, and was evident in their first-born child—my sister. She was going to school in America, was fluent in English, attended piano lessons, took chess classes and swim lessons—all of the things my parents never had growing up. They were proud of this accomplishment (and rightfully so), but with just a few words from an ignorant kid, it felt ...

  Week 5: Apeirophobia Inverted  – 10/21/26 - 10/21 [9:50].   What ends the universe? How long will humanity last? What would it be like to watch the last star die ? The void after heat death These concepts used to keep me up at night, pondering, while having nothing to do thanks to the pandemic. Life never was quite the same after watching that Kurzgesagt youtube video on the future of the universe. The idea of what came after terrified me; the concept that there would be a point where it cut off, where it just ended, where it would just be,       nothing…       forever… I often couldn’t sleep because of this, staying up at night, pondering… wondering… using my imagination combined with the rules I learned in the video to try and come up with some happy ending through all of this. (Spoiler: there never was)              I never could really explain it ...

One theme in particular that stood out to me while studying In Cold Blood was the idea that the Clutter family embodied the seemingly perfect American Dream, only to be shattered by the murderers. This led me to wonder, “What would the modern day version of the American Dream be like?” The American Dream is defined as a happy life that anybody in America can achieve through hard work and becoming successful, yet how attainable is this dream, really? Image Credit: https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/gasp- nepotism-yunjin-by-gemimai/128685299/7sgk Happiness and success come from the same root: having a job. Or maybe being a nepo baby. But the key part here is money. People say money can’t buy happiness, but without money, it’s difficult to stay happy. To achieve this version of the American Dream, people begin working at a young age. At the ripe age of 5, children begin their education. At 14, the harsh academic pressure begins. You have to find a billion extracurriculars because if yo...

“Yah bahut mazedaar hai.” Just last week, I heard this Indian student speak those words to his friend. Diversity is the norm in our school, yet I whipped my head around to see the student. It was surprising to hear someone my age speak Hindi like that, as I rarely hear the language in practice. (And while I have heard my friends speak Urdu in their homes, I have heard it scarcely outside of that boundary.)  So why was I still so surprised? Indians make up the majority of our school’s population, but I was whiplashed by the use of Hindi. Maybe I am not floating around in the right places, but Indian languages and dialects are not a common occurrence for me (at least for people around my age). English is the main language used in our school—despite our students having a great variety of languages to choose from.  I understand that English is the one language that most people can understand in our school, but why should that stop us from using our own languages when we c...

I was unstoppable the moment I could wrap my little fingers around the sandy paper of a crayon; I began scribbling on every surface I could reach and covering it with vibrant colors that changed the plain, meaningless, white wall into a canvas of citric oranges, cyans, and cherry reds that perfectly reflected my imaginative mind. I felt rushes of joy weaving through my veins as I created something I truly found beautiful for the first time. I became utterly obsessed with bringing my ideas to life. Predictably, my constant scribbling on our walls did not impress my parents. All they saw was our landlord shaking his head disapprovingly and our money slipping away with each line of colored wax stuck onto the house. I was luckily a pretty good kid, so I listened when they scolded me to stop tainting the pristine and perfectly blank walls with a “vomit of random colors” and use a sheet of paper. I was devastated. For one, drawing on paper sucked; second, they couldn’t see the artistic visio...

America. The land of the free, home of the… extra large?  That doesn’t sound right, but maybe it does fit, considering how we’ve made it a habit to make everything bigger than it needs to be. From enormous pickup trucks to houses with more bathrooms than people living in them, America seems to follow a strict policy of bigger is better. But the clearest example of this is food. When I was younger, I used to watch this food comparison series called “Food Wars,” where they looked at fast food items from the same brand in two different countries. In most comparisons of sizes, a small drink from the States would be equivalent to a medium sized drink in other countries. However, this pattern wasn’t limited to drink sizes. The maximum number of items you can order is also much higher. For example, McDonald’s McNuggets have a maximum order of 20 in Great Britain, this becomes 40 McNuggets in America.  Portion sizes in the United States also became a big part of the World Cup experien...