This Will Probably Work

Dear Langston Hughes, I think you wrote the first or one of the first poems I ever read. If I’m being honest, I can’t say I enjoyed reading your poetry when I was first exposed to it because of the essays that came with reading, but I think I’ve learned to better understand and appreciate your work. Your poem “Mother to Son” has a similar, yet different meaning to me since the first time I read it. I remember only seeing the metaphor of a stairway that had “tacks in it” throughn a lens of when it was written (during a period of heavy racism), but the poem really is applicable to more than just that. Since it never explicitly mentions racism, these “tacks” on the staircase could be any obstacle that one should come across in life such as failure, loss of a loved one, financial harship, ect. Something else I found strange when I reread the poem was a slight aggressive tone in the mother’s voice. While she uses her own life as motivation for her son to persevere, there seems to be a hint ...

  Original The night is filled with my confusion, uncertainty,  and doubt. Maybe this? No, it didn’t work. That? Another failed test. I scrap it all, Stuck in an endless loop. Back to square one. Is this really how I have the most fun? This poem was pretty negative since it reflects the experience I had debugging my team’s robot code for about twenty hours this past weekend. I’ve been doing robotics for a bit over eight years now, and the word “break” has a very poor image in my head. Seeing your robot break after working tirelessly on it for months (usually in only a few seconds) is one of the most demoralizing things. Here’s a funny (wasn’t funny in the moment, though) GIF of what I mean.  As much as I hate seeing things fail, I dont think I’d love the activity as much as I do without it. Just like Rosal says a break in some things like dancing is not always a bad thing, there’s so much to learn from each break in the robot. Maybe you have to strengthen this part of the...

The first thing I thought of when I read prompt four was college application season for me. I see a lot of parallels between Siddhartha’s quest for enlightenment and my goal of writing the best essays (except I still don’t know if my essays worked yet). I don’t have enough time to go over how all of my essays changed, so I’ll focus on the personal statement for this blog post. I initially spent hours upon hours reading example essays, seeking inspiration and guidance on how to write my own.  Similar to how people like Gautama couldn’t teach Siddhartha what enlightenment was, the hundreds of essays on essaysthatworked.com and collegeessayguy.com couldn’t teach me to write an essay that I was satisfied with. The best example of this is probably my two documents for my personal statement for early action apps and regular decision apps. Early Action Regular Decision Now, I could just be lazy and not want to write 24 drafts again, but I think the most significant reason why the number ...

If you’ve ever interacted with another person (I hope you have), I can confidently say that you’ve dealt with some kind of conflict. Maybe you argued with your sibling over who gets the seemingly larger piece of cookie, got upset over something that another person said about you, or had a heated argument with you friends after the test about if the answer was 2.5 or 1.25. All of these conflicts have one thing in common: they stem from our differences and need to defend our beliefs. Even though they lead to conflicts, society still values our differences because they make us unique. The more unique our beliefs are, however, the slower things get done. If there were five people on the board of an organization with distinct perspectives of an issue, nothing would get done. One person would have a belief, and another one would have a wildly different approach to the issue. If they weren’t unique, they could make a more decisive decision instead of arguing until the end of the world about h...

     In our discussion about “The Stranger”, Fadi brought up an interesting question: what gave us the right to judge Meursault for being apathetic? My initial thought was What’s gonna happen to me if I do it anyway? Other people probably agree that someone who helps with the assault of a woman isn’t a great guy, but then I realized: What’s gonna happen to HIM if I do it anyway?      Imagine Meursault is this real apathetic person. A lot of people would probably judge him for going on a date the day after his mom’s funeral, but so what if a couple people think you’re weird? It wasn’t like the past where your community was so small that enough people could think you’re weird to banish you      If you went back in history and lived in a village that spoke a unique language and held grudges with surrounding tribes, being exiled is a death sentence. A lot of the time, these villages were small enough for leadership to know and care about what you...

     Before I began writing this blog post, I spent some time trying to think about what I think is “funny”. My initial thought was when something unexpected happens. The first few jokes I’ve heard were structured as questions such as “What do you call a…?” or had me asking the question (knock knock jokes). I quickly realized the flaws in this because lots of unexpected things can happen without being funny (an athlete breaking a world record, a jump scare, finding out you have a quiz when you didn’t study, and more). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that humor, something I’ve taken for granted my entire life, is an intricate concept to define. Since I don’t think I can define my humor, I’ll use this blog to explain why I find a specific thing funny.  I’ve been seeing a lot of song parodies while I doom scroll, and I think I laugh at them because of two main things: absurdness and cleverness. There is no doubt that many of the people making these paro...