The Best Boy

Appa came home when he was a forty day old ball of love and shit. I had never had a real responsibility before, now I was responsible for his life: a love story. It was going to be harder than I thought but definitely worth it. Because when someone trusts you on that level, you want to live up to it. You want to deserve that love; maybe you never can, but at least you try.

As Appa spends his final days by my side, maybe the only thing that gives me hope is how happy he's going to be with his new family. They have kids and dogs and Appa's so brave and loving he'll love anyone who loves him back. I just hope he's happy. 

20 Day Challenge

Alright so in less than three weeks I'll be leaving for college so I thought this is my final chance to complete some things that have been on my bucket list for a long time. I'm gonna call it my 20 Day Challenge™wherein I'll set goals to be achieved by the end of the 20 days as well as certain daily goals. I will try to post daily about the stuff I did (not that my nonexistent viewers care) and if things are going according to plan.

This meta post will tell you/me about these long term goals:

#1: GETTING TONED. I'm not skinny but not fat either; my body is just awfully untoned and flabby in certain places. I'm gonna gym daily, eat healthy food and do my own personal workout apart from the gymming so that I at least get on the track to achieving my fitness goals.

#2: READING. I hate to read any books that are not prescribed on the syllabus. In college, I am sure there will be a lot of classes where I'll be required to read a lot and I won't be able to cope unless I get into the habit of reading fast right now.

#3: TYPING. All my homework and most assignments will involve me typing on my laptop. So a very wise move (thank you, thank you) would be to learn how to type fast without making mistakes and without looking at the keyboard. You know, big boy style.

#4: GET RID OF MY MOTHERFUCKING ACNE/PIMPLES/DAAG DHABBE IN GENERAL. Holy shit I'm really just tired of spots on my pretty (oily) face. Can puberty please just call it quits? Thank you? I don't know what I can really do but I think seeing a good dermatologist would be a great start. The problem is my mom, being a doctor herself, will not take my seeing one of her colleagues--and not her--too kindly. But oh well :/

If there is time left, I'll brush up on my single variable calculus and improve the level of my Russian skills, which at are limited to knowing its alphabet.

It's 1:25 am right now so I think I'll call it a night and hopefully start my Twenty Day Challenge™ successfully tomorrow.

Pro at Procrastinating

I'm starting something new as part of my new productivity surge. I'm gonna be documenting my life few times each day to record what I did or did not do.


Finished Westworld.
I have a lot of thoughts about artificial intelligence and consciousness. Also, the background score was brilliant.

Started Parks and Rec
You might remember it from Chris Pratt's best performance or those Ron Swanson bacon gifs

Had some (12) Happy Dent White mints
I went to Spencer's yesterday after I had some money left from after watching the new Star Wars movie. Got some candies and mint. My chemistry teacher told me chewing gum/mint is a waste of precious saliva that your body spends a lot of effort to manufacture. Meh.

Listened to top Eurovision performances.
First time I listened to was with some drunken Slavs (I was abstaining till the end). All time favourites include Verka Serduchka and Marija Šerifović. While listening to Molitva, I noticed some similarities with Russian. Later found out about 50% of all Serbian words are same in Russian.

Thought about stuff I really should be doing:
-Writing my 7 supplemental college essays
-Writing my long due Inwords article (I'm safe as long as levipoosa doesn't write it, too)
-Making plans for Chrisman and/or New Year's. I plan on rewatching the Harry Potter movies and playing a cool drinking game based on them (like, Malfoy mentions his father or Voldemort's name is avoided).

I think I will go on a run tomorrow to compensate for all this procrastination and feel better about myself. Parks and Rec for now

Blogpost to self

In 24 hours I get rejected from the college of my dreams.

It's not like I never knew this was going to happen, but I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to love college applications. So when the final week leading to decisions dawned, I was devastated. I binge-watched, binge-ate, binge-everything-unhealthy. In case you're wondering how I know I'm rejected, it's because I was supposed to get a call for an interview (which all successful applicants do at the latest till a week before the decision is out) but I didn't. So, yeah.

Even as I write this I can't help but think about the remote possibility that it's actually not a rejection, but that is precisely what my advice to my very-near-future-self is: don't harp on the microscopic chance, it will only amplify the heartbreak if when it does come. This was just my Early Decision college. I have almost twenty days to apply to other top-notch colleges across the United States. I feel like I've spent too much time thinking about it. There's Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth and Duke, among many, many others. And maybe one of them needs an applicant who does not play three musical instruments or speaks six foreign languages. Meh, we'll see. But for now, it's being real, not hopeful.

There's only so much one can do to chase one's dreams. I did my best. And yes, maybe attending a big-shot school in Delhi or Mumbai could've made a difference, and maybe I could've been filthy rich and not required financial aid, but as great as it is to think about could-haves, I want myself to know I wouldn't change a thing about myself, because I have no earthly idea what that would be like. There's wisdom in popular sayings (as cringy as they might be) and one such saying is we should all try to be happy with who we are and make the best out of situations. And that's what I'll do.

Good writing

So Trump is officially the GOP's Presidential nominee. Listening to the awful speech he made, I can't help but remember the time when the Republican party used to make sense. Here is a video I found of President Reagan's speech in light of the Challenger disaster of '86.

In his speech, he quoted a line from a poem called "High Flight" written by John Magee, an American pilot in the Second World War. I have reproduced it below:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew --

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

This is what good writing does; it has the power to lift you, to punch you in the face and make you feel things.

Rejected at PEA

I was so disheartened last spring when I got to know that our school's Principal would be leaving us and that I would suddenly find myself in an environment detrimental to my development as a person, that I started my search for private schools in the US and being the naïve romantic that I am decided to apply to just one single school: the big, bad Phillips Exeter Academy.

Well, two months ago I received an email stating I had been waitlisted at Exeter which is a nice way to say: GTFO. Needless to say, I was shattered because this had been a huge part of where I saw myself in the future, and even though I had this feeling in the back of my mind that Exeter was a really long shot, I guess you can never consider the reality of not getting in until it actually hits you. And it did.

My interview went pretty well. The guy was an alum from the Class of 2004 I guess whose grandparents were actually from the same town as me, and he was very friendly and told me that he'd give me a "very good recommendation". The essays were nice, too as were my teacher recommendations. But in hindsight, what I did not do was exploit the tragedy of my situation. I did not harp on the fact that mine is a single mother putting her daughter through college, that the financial difficulties at home were getting the better of us and the huge amount of personal stuff that I was and still am going through, but I decided I did not want to be the sob story of the year and wanted my application to stand out on its merit, not the tragic background. In hindsight, yes, I should've highlighted how crucially important it was that I get in.

I recently returned from Ghent, Belgium for an Olympiad (more on it later) and thought that I should mention my new achievement to the Admissions Committee since I had only been waitlisted, not rejected and that it might help them reconsider my case. And then I got this email:

"In your search for a new school". Ouch. It's March 10 all over again, except being sad now is a really shitty thing to do. I wish I could somehow just go back a few months earlier and tell myself "yes! bare yourself out on that application because that's what they wanna see; your tragedy" but I guess I had too much pride in me to give in to that. Anyway, PEA can have its peace. I'm done.

The God of Small Things

This is an excerpt from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, her first and only work in fiction. Roy creates a new language of expression, the kind that norms of writing usually don't afford us. She wouldn't care she's writing in English; if there is a thought in Malayalam, she will express it as such. Anyway, this and much more makes it my favourite book of all time. This excerpt is about a character called Estha which is particularly close to my heart. Hope you can appreciate despite the absence of all context.

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an “exactly when.” It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of aestivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha’s case the dry season looked as though it would last forever. 

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all. 

Estha occupied very little space in the world."