Timed Milleniums
Posted: May 17, 2012 Filed under: Quick Thoughts, school | Tags: poem poetry 4 Comments »Swords dipped in pools of sweat
Forgotten stones never chiseled
A Quest for Camelot, A Quest for time
King Arthur reining
Fingers tapping across a keyboard
Cubicle smells of fresh paper and ink
Superhero costumes buried
behind the mountain of suits
Expectations always reining
—-
Above is a poem I wrote for my creative writing class. I’ve never really written poetry before, unless you count the assignments in elementary and middle school (I don’t). I have to turn in a portfolio of my writing as the final, and one of the requirements is that I publish my work and get feedback from people outside of the class. So, if you have any thoughts about the piece, tell me what they are! Besides the fact that I need to take a screenshot to prove that other people read my work, I’m also curious as to what you guys think. All opinions are welcome! (srsly)
Juice Cleanse: Days 8-10 + Final Thoughts
Posted: April 14, 2012 Filed under: Food, Life, school | Tags: cleanse, juice, juicing 2 Comments »Day 8
- carrot + avocado (doesn’t juice well) + asparagus + celery + cucumber + tomato + apple + pomegranate + berries (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries)
- 3 small bowls of fruit
- 3 bowls of salad + spriluna + sunflower seeds
- 2 bananas
- 1 avocado
Ate a bit too much for my liking today… I did a 15 minute ab workout with… Let’s call her Barry. She’s actually the uber awesome one I mentioned earlier. I went into her bedroom late at night yesterday and talked to her about my insecurities about my body image. She’s the president of the body beautiful club so I thought hey, maybe I could talk to her. An amazing thing happened. She opened up to me about her insecurities too, gave me advice, and told me some of the kindest words I’ve heard in a while. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I embraced her.
Day 9
- Same juice from day 8: carrot + avocado (doesn’t juice well) + asparagus + celery + cucumber + tomato + apple + pomegranate + berries (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries)
- My diet wasn’t recorded
I had a breakdown yesterday night. I talked to Barry, my roomates and two seniors next door. They comforted me and let me know that people do actually care about me.
Day 10
- pineapple, blueberries, strawberries, carrot, asparagus, celery, cucumber, apple, bannana… almost every basic fruit in America. We wanted to go out with a bang on the last day.
- Avocado with butter. I started adding grass-fed organic butter on the last days because I was worried that my emotional state possibly had to do with loss of critical nutrients. Don’t remember what else I ate… probably a variation of food on the other days in the fast.
Skipped my first 2 morning classes and went to the guidance counselor. A floodgate of emotion washed over me as I talked about deep rooted family issues and insecurities. I realized that my beliefs stemming from these traumatic events were still overriding my life. They colored my every move, every moment without me even aware. I hadn’t talked to my family that week or done anything related to them in particular. The emotions about them just whipped out of me.
I didn’t update this fast for a while afterwards because I was extremely busy at the time with my classes, extra schoolwork from the missed clases, and activities while trying to deal with the tsunami of deep-rooted emotional trauma that burst out from the gates of hell. I needed time to figure things out… and try to somewhat hold my composure because, sadly, I couldn’t just drop everything and leave to deal with my emotions. After talking to my counselor, I went to take a much needed nap. When you sleep, your body heals and repairs itself… I could definitely feel that during my rest, my cells had started healing and restored themselves when I woke up.
As for my partner in juice cleansing… from what I know she definitely didn’t have as hard of a time as me. She enjoyed it very much so, but broke the fast on day 9 after being offered free, quality err cheese and stuff.
So theories:
I’m someone who’s very in touch with my emotions and much more sensitive to them because I try to bring them out as much as I can and love them for what they are instead of continually repressing them deep down inside. In the process of clearing my body of waste and debris floating around, the juice cleanse also tried to clean out my cells of the emotional toxicity weighing them down. I became utterly flabbergasted as my whole demeanor became so emotionally touchy, sad, and depressed. Perhaps my reactions to the events that took place during that time is how I actually still feel deep, deep down inside, I just tend to feel them as surface emotions because my body has to protect me from reacting with extreme emotions as I need to function in everyday life.
But, this event brought to my attention an extremely painful emotional hotspot I’ve haven’t completely cleared out. So, another opportunity to grow.
For the first time, I tackled my emotional problems with the people around me. My friends, my guidance counselor. As hard as it was for me, my counselor kept pounding me with questions until we got to the emotional backbone of it all. All of those irrational beliefs picked up as a child, she completely dismantled them. She told me it wasn’t my fault. The night before, my friends told me how much I meant to them, how much they loved me, and that I wasn’t worthless. It’s amazing how much love and support you can receive if you only reach out to the people around you. It is scary though. Trusting them and letting them into your world, your most vulnerable state. But maybe, it can be worth it.
Asian Fest of Sorts
Posted: April 13, 2012 Filed under: Life, Randomness, school | Tags: Asian Leave a comment »Back in January my school had something called AjiaFest*. Besides AjiaFest, there’s also AfricanFest, Latin America Fest, and most recently EuroFest. EuroFest was just started this year so I wonder what kind of acts will be in it… They are cultural shows that the student body put on.
I took part in AjiaFest with 2 acts, tinikling and breakdance. Tiniking is a Traditional Filipino dance that involves hopping to and fro inbetween 2 bamboo sticks.
No, breakdance isn’t really asian but it’s always in AjiaFest and contains a good number of asian members. After I got back from Christmas break, my life got taken over and swallowed by AjiaFest. For 2 weeks I had no life. I had barely any time for eating, homework. I would practice for my 2 acts immediately after school for maybe 6 hours or so. My tiniking captains also finished the choreography during the very week of the show, giving me very limited time to practice -.- The choreography for the modern section was baller though and ‘meant to look impossible’.
If you want to see me, I start at 1:22 in the all purple outfit. If you’re bored would recommend to start watching at 3:14 for pure amazingness. It’s the shit!!! No, seriously and really, you have to see the ending. The part through the sticks had my friends messing up every practice. If you do one wrong move, everyone is thrown off. They successfully went through the end only a couple of times right before our performance. My captains are brilliant geniuses (and good senior friends who both happen to live on my hall). Me, along with the girl I was dancing with in the blue, are going to be the captains together next year.
Here’s the Breakdance video. I’m in the beginning, boy/girl pairing, and very end.
*spelled incorrectly purposefully
Social Change in the School Cafeteria
Posted: April 8, 2012 Filed under: Food, school Leave a comment »Hey y’all!
So, I just wanted to tell you guys that I freakin’ got LOCAL, ORGANIC food in the cafeteria. ME. We had a health and wellness picnic where the bulk of the the food was fresh from the local farmer’s market. The pasta was from Whole Foods. I got called into the back of the cafeteria kitchen where I was asked to make up the menu off the top of my head.
Menu
- Grilled Chicken w/Peaches and Chipotle
- Vegetarian Pasta
- Green Beans with Sautéed Fried Beef
- Sweet potato Fries w/Cheese
- Butternut Squash
- Assorted Breads
- Strawberry Medley Mix of Fruit
It was a part of a Mini-term project. What’s mini-term? A 10 day period where we had no classes and got the chance to pick an “educational” project on campus or travel abroad. I decided to stay on campus this year and I picked the project “Farm to Fork.” It was all about eating local foods (yum yum in my tum tum) and learning about sustainable agriculture by taking field trips to an urban homestad, local farms, the local farmer’s marker, and listening to guest speakers.
We were required to work on a project that helps provide greater access to local foods for our students who don’t have a lot of time, don’t have cars, and not allowed much more than a microwave. On a whim, I suggested we incorporate a main local food ingredient in vegetarian and meat entrees in the cafeteria once a month. Then, I got assigned that as my project. I talked it over with the symbolic, overbearing authority figure whom no one likes, known as Mrs.B and quickly got it approved with a date and everything… That was easy.
The food was amazing and I realized how much of a difference you can taste with fresh food grown with love in nutritionally dense soil compared to chemically over processed vegetables.
The advertising for the event was poor, with most students unaware that the delicious food was locally grown. After spring break, I’ll be speaking with the Mrs.B even more, finding the most cost effective ways to incorporate local foods into the cafeteria. I choose initiating change there because that’s where it’s most effective, even if we were to only to tweak little things. Purchasing local foods would cost about the same as conventionally grown ones if they are in season. If it works out well, who knows? It could happen more than once a month.
So, yeah, I did that.
Simple, Nutritious Recipes for College Students
Posted: April 8, 2012 Filed under: Food, school 1 Comment »Or boarding school students…. take your pick. Also, I actually did make them up!
Avocado Wonderland
Ingredients
- 1 avocado
- Sea salt
- Turmeric
- Rosemary
- Thyme
- Cayenne pepper
- Spriluna
Mix all of the spices together. Eyeball it, and taste test until desired result. Cut the avocado in half, sprinkle the spices and spriluna on and dig in with a spoon!
I ate this every morning for breakfast back at home. I haven’t eaten it at school since I ran out of spices… After bringing turmeric and cayenne pepper back after spring break, I’ll surely be eating this again.
The avocado is such an easy, convenient, erm, fruit… vegetable. I’m going to go with vegetable just because it seems more like a veggie than a fruit.
Anyways, it’s loaded with fiber, potassium, and vitamins C, and K. One whole avocado contains more than 1/3 of our daily value of vitamin C. Yes, I just googled that because I didn’t actually know what exactly is so healthy about an avocado other than the fact that it contains loads of healthy fats.
People, don’t be scared of fats! Big pharma has conned people into believing we should be avoiding fats like the plague. So what have we loaded up on instead? Refined sugar and loads of carbs mixed with artificial flavors and advertised low amounts of hydrogenated fats. Whoo! As you can clearly see, it’s really been working out for Americans.
Sea salt is so much more flavorful than iodized salt and less processed, with trace some minerals. It may be more expensive, but you’ll need less because it is more potent (and better tasting!). Iodized salt is dried sodium chloride with anti-caking agents such as aluminum (mined using toxic chemicals like sulfuric acid and strongly linked to a cause of Alzheimer’s)
Tumeric is used in many Indian recipes and great for your blood. It is aids in liver detoxification and aids with metabolism.
Cayenne pepper stimulates digestion.
Spriluna is an edible algae and green superfood that provides lots of easily digestible protein, iron, vitamin B-12, beta carotene, and amino acids.
I buy mine from the RawFoodWorld.com in the largest size and sprinkle it on almost everything I eat. It’s one of those foods that I use as a “backup” for a bundle of nutrients because my cafeteria definitely cooks all of the nutrients from its already overprocessed, conventional factory farmed foods.
Since I ran out of spices, I’ve been eating avocados with the recipe below instead.
Ingredients
- 1 avocado
- Spriluna
Dressing/sauce:
- Local honey
- Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
- Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- Crushed garlic
- Optional: Oyster Sauce, Honey+Kimchi
3/5 parts oil, 2/5 part Vinegar and Sauce, add garlic and enough honey to coat the bottom of the glass container you’re storing it in. Mix all together. Again, just eyeball this.
Cut the avocado in half and fill in the dips with the dressing. Add spriluna.
Opt: Add honey drizzled-kimchi on the side
My hallmates always know I’m around when they can smell a distinct, vinegary dressing. You can always put this concoction atop a bed of lettuce for a salad instead.
Feel free to substitute any of the ingredient for say, sesame seed oil, white vinegar. Whatever you can scrounge. The kimchi and honey is pretty adventurous, I like the combination of the sugary, spicy taste. Definitely not for the weak hearted.
We’ve got healthy fats from the avocado and oil, some vinegar for the stomach, garlic with it’s anti-aging, anti-fungal properties, honey with it’s amazing nutrients brought to you by bees truly, and kimchi, a fermented wonderfood.
Exam Week
Posted: February 15, 2012 Filed under: Life, Randomness, school 2 Comments »Hey everyone! So, it’s exam week over at my little bubble of science & mathery and I’m done with Chemistry! Woot woot! *hands up in the air like I just don’t care* A Computer Science final project also down, so 3 more exams to go. American Studies, Precalculus (which is incidentally much harder that Calculus), and Japanese. Precalculus isn’t really an intro to Calculus. It’s where all of the random math subject matter gets thrown in. I studied pretty intensely for Chemistry and I’m glad it was my first exam because I got to get the most challenging subject out of the way. Today was also Valentine’s Day. The best part of it was all of the candy, baked goods and food that was thrown around <3. *insert sigh about highschool boys*
So, how have I been doing lately? how have I been?
I don’t even know what to say. This school has been the most intense experience I have ever taken under my wing. I practically live in a bubble. There’s this culture here that you can’t really find anywhere else which is why it’s difficult to explain to people. There aren’t any methods of comparison. Whenever I go out to the “real world”, it feels so weird. That there are these other living breathing people who aren’t enrolled in my classes, who have very different lives of their own. When you try to explain things about the school you make so many references to SSM specific things that you have to stop and explain the little parts. I almost forget that the world isn’t made up of very weird, interesting, hardworking, and good looking teenagers.
The best thing about the school is definitely the abundant amount of opportunities. Relationships, classes, language seminars, clubs, etc. It’s interesting to see what you end up manifesting in the school.
So yeah, I just felt like writing a random update. Maybe I’ll do it more often. maybe.
Haunted Farm
Posted: October 22, 2011 Filed under: Life, school Leave a comment »I can’t even begin to describe how this school has changed me. It’s a bit of a push/pull relationship. Sometimes i love it, other times not so much. There have been moments where I’ve seriously considered leaving but I don’t think I’d actually go through with it. Tonight, I went to a haunted farm complete with a corn maze, tractor, and haunted house. It was nice. It was nice getting off campus, seeing real, live people. That sounds weird but all of my friends could oddly agree to the sentiment. We live in zombie-town, land of the sleep deprived. When students leave campus, it’s referred to as “popping the bubble” because, we effectively live in bubble.
Not that I paid much attention to the news before, but I hear even less about the world now. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the world doesn’t consist of 4 large buildings, teenagers, and a few supervising adults because that’s all I see on a daily basis. There are people who don’t understand the school/campus/teacher oriented references or use the fad words. So, yes it was nice hitting up the haunted farm full of their local middle school kids. Breaking routine. We all made an agreement not to talk about schoolwork while we were there.
Pokemon
A couple of days ago I dressed up as Pikachu, and ran around the school during happy half while my friend was dressed as Ash, throwing pokeballs at me. There was also the theme song playing in the background. I kept my hood on the whole time so I couldn’t see, but apparently there was a crowd of people chasing me at some point. People kept grabbing me and I’d run into some random dude’s arms because they were trying to catch me.
Ahhh, now it’s the weekend. I’ll study, relax, and grab some chai tea off campus with my friends later. How are you guys doing? I hope you’re having a fabulous weekend!
School: Life at Math and Science
Posted: October 2, 2011 Filed under: Life, school Leave a comment »General Life Update
I’ve been having a lot of fun at my new school. It really is a very different experience living with your best friends. I go outside of my hallway and there are all of my classmates, just chillin’. At the same time, I’m working on completely eliminating, or at least lowering, my stress levels. The courses are rigorous and really require you to think and study. At my old school I barely ever studied and got straight A’s. Different story at SSM.
My Favorite Class
Japanese. Because I can just make up creative/weird stories in my head all day and it counts as work or something.
Example: The adjective dangerous in Japanese is ‘abunai.’
I picture Aladdin and Abu during the night in the sandy and egyptian-esque background. Abu running to go into a pyramid while Aladdin shouts “Abu! Abu! It’s dangerous at night!”
Plus, I’m interested in moving to Japan one day so that helps. At first I was failing the class, hardcore. I probably had a like a 7%. Suwa sensei, my teacher, teaches the class in entirely japanese. Eh, me no comphrende. So, erm, that means I didn’t understand directions and I didn’t know when there were tests. Err, what was homework again? After a couple of weeks I got over the learning curve, caught up with the class, and learned the common phrases and vocabulary my teacher uses. Now, I’m doing really well in the course. The grade is an ‘A’ though I feel like Japanese is a living, breathing thing, not something to grade. Who cares if you ace a language course if you can’t actually apply it? Someone may be able to conjugate verbs on paper but forget what they’ve learned and sound like an unnatural robot in front of a native speaker. But I think most of my classmates don’t plan on applying it anyway…
Dorms
Unlike some halls, mine is super close. I love everybody on greynolds. I visited my old highschool yesterday and it didn’t evoke a good emotional response. I kinda just started thinking about all of the people and somewhat traumatizing memories there. I also realized that I didn’t joke around nearly as much as I do at my new school. There are many less social inhibitions at my new school so I’m perpetually acting like a spazz. And the great thing is, people join me there! And accept me. I just got weird looks at my old highschool. It’s wonderful being a part of a close knit community.
Food
I’m much less picky about what I eat, now that I live in a dormitory. But, I do generally eat as healthily as I can. I snack and eat conventional junky foods when I bum off of my friends. We all share food on my hall. I’m the type of student who eats organic ramen with kimchi and seaweed… I also eat a lot of fruit if I’ve stocked up. For lunch and dinner I’ll usually go to the PFM (cafeteria). Their food is usually a hit or a miss, it’s not too bad, especially for free food.
Skin
About a month in I realized that the lack of sleep and stress was really taking a toll on my skin. At home I could get away with just splashing my face with lukewarm water in the morning. I ordered an organic facial scrub and moisturizer. I also make sure to cleanse my face with a towel and hot water in the morning to get off any oil and dirt that accumulated during the night. Just adding these couple of things made a huge difference.
Time
It’s very valuable. My days can sometimes be filled to the brim with activities and homework. In my free time I often take naps, or release. My school is also known as zombieland because of how little people sleep there. I’ve heard that some people regularly pull all nighters… icky. I haven’t done that yet… I’ve already had trouble keeping up and I have easy schedule if you were compare mine to a genius senior’s. They always go easy on juniors during the first trimester… Oh, and yes, my school goes by trimesters, not semesters. Just another way for us to complete more intense work in a shorter time period.
But I also feel like the school expects us to stay up really late and doesn’t make it any easier for us to go to sleep earlier. You can’t sleep any earlier than 10:30 pm unless you go to the lobby and sign early check. Check is when students sign a sheet on hall to basically tell the school hey I’m here.
Only 1/3 of applicants get in… I know some former classmates of mine who were really crushed when they weren’t accepted. I’ve read accounts of hopefuls who list all of their accomplishments and ask people what their chances are of getting in. The school is not all butterflies, rainbows, and unicorns as it may seem. People drop out at the beginning and throughout the year because they don’t feel it’s for them. Sometimes students are downright miserable from the workload. The school also does expel a good number of students… in my opinion, sometimes unfairly.
All in all, I’m glad I’ve had this opportunity and I love my friends. The adults aren’t watching us like hawks and I have a lot of fun adventures.
Oh yeah, and radical turtle will look the same for a while actually..
Regenerate
Posted: September 23, 2011 Filed under: Life, Randomness, school Leave a comment »I’m moving. On the web-asphere, that is. When you go onto radicalturtle.com in a couple of days it’ll look a bit different.
Changes
I no longer have the time nor the energy to churn out blog posts… Okay, the time-thing is an excuse, it always is. What I mean is, radicalturtle is no longer one of my top priorities… I’m trying to balance the three S’s of SSM (school of science and math).
- Sleeping
- Socializing
- Studying
So, my posts will be much more casual, maybe just a musing from the day, or whatever I feel like. I might start writing about different aspects about the school, my day, my grades, whatevs you know.
School
I got my grades back yesterday… Somehow, I don’t care about numbers as much as I used to. It’s probably because barely anyone in this school actually gets straight A’s even when we did in our home highschool. This school doesn’t rank students, or have a valedictorian either.
Somewhere along the line I forgot that education is actually supposed to educate and teach us. We can make connections between subjects to better understand the world as a whole. If you’re just cramming, not enjoying yourself, and doing everything for the sake of grades, when you look back, what was the point?
Boarding School: Down and Dirty Recap
Posted: September 16, 2011 Filed under: Life, school Leave a comment »Here’s a brief recap of my time spent at my new school thus far. Enjoy ~
Week 1:
It’s time to PARRRTAYYY!
Then, classes start.
What the hell are people saying? Where is everything?
Our school has a special language of TLAs – three letter acronyms. It’s not a cafeteria, no, it’s the PFM (professional food management). Let’s go down to the PEC (physical education center).
Argh argh argh I’m so lost. Argh argh argh, I slept through a class. Hur hur hur (cry-i noises) so many classes at so many different times everyday. HOW DO I DISPENSE SOAP?
Dawwww, thank you senior brother for the gift.
Fun Fact: My school was an abandoned hospital. What does that mean? The school is built a little oddly and we have lots of spooky ghost stories. Plus, I live in the morgue. The most infamous of the ghost stories? A nurse went through the underground Hill tunnel and was never seen again. Apparently, you can still hear her heels clicking at night. It was featured on some ghost stories type tv show.
Week 2:
EARTHQUAKE
Then FIRE – (lol, my roommate set a toaster oven on fire in the mini kitchen of a hall above us. we were all chillin, just making omelets…)
HURRICANNNE
All the teachers are actually giving us work now… Bonding with my hallmates. Man, I love my hallmates.
Fun Fact: Every Sunday – Thursday night we have “Happy Half.” A good chunk of students congregate in the middle of the school, near the swings (which 2 of my hallmates got it to stop squeaking! so appreciative) to talk and have fun from 10 pm- 10:25 pm. At 10:30 we have ‘check’ where we have to be on hall and sign in.
Week 3:
TORNADO
MORE SCHOOL WORK
I turn my bed, a bottom bunk, into a cozy enclave since my roommate stays up studying. Man, I so… tired… Look! I have free time. Must take…. a nap…. zzz….
I have no food left! I must rely on the PFM for my nutritional needs.
Extended weekend – time to visit home! Eh, I sleep and do practically nothing with my time. I buy lots of food too.
Fun Fact: My school mascot is a unicorn.
Week 4:
Picture day! More hall activities. More fun with all of my friends. More work. More Chemistry, Intermediate Japanese, American Studies, and Precalculus. College Eve, wherein I sign up for the airforce with a ‘pen name’ for a snowcone. My senior convinces me to leave campus without signing out.
Fun Fact: My school is composed of only juniors and seniors. That means that each class only knows each other for one year. This makes it harder to keep up certain SSM culture/clubs and make long term changes.
Me, a junior, would call someone who has just graduated the past school year a “grand senior.” The “grand senior” was my senior’s senior (while they were a junior). Get it? Some who graduated 2 years ago would be a “grand grand senior.” This is how we refer to past generations.
Junior (me) –> Senior –> Grand Senior –> Grand Grand Senior –> etc…
Week 5 (current):
I go on a carb free diet with 3 of my hallmates. I feel much cleaner and lighter. Good BMs. There’s a cookout tonight! for my building. Not to mention, it’s friday friday gotta get down on friday….
Fun Fact: People would think my school is entirely comprised of nerds, which it is to an extent, but our school also excels in athletics. The boys soccer team is went to Nationals last year. The girls tennis team wins state championship.
Also, the people here are kind with interesting back stories. Scattered among us are some superstar geniuses.
The school is somewhat like a college yet retains some odd highschool-y points since we’re still minors. I live on a closed campus so to get into any building in the school I have to have a fob. It’s a plastic thingy majiger that you have to swipe to open doors. We call it a fob, but no, it doesn’t mean FOB. I received a plain, navy blue fob without a design from a previous student so I painted it with nail polish. If it already has a design, you just paint over it. I wear my fob as a necklace.
Generally, school is very fun and busy. When I smile at people and say hi in the hallway, a warm euphoria spreads on my face and through my chest because I’m genuinely happy to see them =)
