As a cultural experience, I took a trip to Chinatown. Both my sister and I were adopted from China, and because of that, I have not grown up in an environment where I am surrounded by Chinese culture. Despite my parents’ best efforts to provide an awareness of our heritage (which I strongly appreciate), I still feel a large disconnect with my racial identity. I enjoyed going to all the little shops, eating Chinese food, and practicing my Chinese by reading any label, sign, or store name I saw. I loved going to Chinatown because even though it’s not actually China, I feel like it’s the closest I can get for the time being.
For a culinary experience, My sister, her roommate, and I went to the restaurant Ramen House. My mom had heard about the restaurant through a newspaper review and Teagan, my sister’s roommate, had already eaten there and had highly recommended it. I ordered the “Best Condition Ramen”, which consisted of egg noodles and spicy stir-fry vegetables in chicken broth. The food was incredibly delicious, a huge difference from the instant ramen noodles I was used to. My favorite part of the dish was the broth because it was so flavorful and savory.
I learned too late, however, that the broth is only meant to flavor the ramen and you are not actually supposed to drink all of it because it is so unhealthy. Towards the end of the meal, my stomach started hurting really bad because I drank so much of the rich broth. The stomach ache was totally worth the experience, however, because I got to learn a little bit about Japanese cuisine while eating delicious food that was different from anything I have ever tasted. As an artistic experience, I finally painted and redecorated my room. This has been a work in progress since the beginning of 8th grade.
My walls used to be covered in white and navy blue striped wallpaper until my mom and I ripped the wallpaper down with the intention of painting my walls right after. The entire project, however, was pushed aside during my 8th grade year because we never found time to complete it. Eventually, I became used to the ugly yellowish tint of glue on the walls. This winter break, I decided that I needed to stop putting the project aside and I needed to finish what I started. For an entire week, my dad and I focused on cleaning, priming, and finally painting the walls and ceiling.
Now my walls are a soft light blue color that I absolutely love, much more aesthetically pleasing to the eye than the previous splattered yellow tint. After painting the walls, my mom helped me hang up pictures and artwork all around my room, along with an old map that we placed above my bed. I love how my room turned out and I am glad that, with the help of my parents, I was finally able to complete the project that I started so long ago and had almost given up on. As an ecological experience, I woke up early one day to watch the sunrise during a weekend in September.
I’m not typically a morning person, so I try to avoid getting up early at all costs. Due to that fact, I usually never see sunrises because I wake up too late, or, if it’s winter, I’m already at school by the time the sun comes up. Despite not being a morning person, I figured that it would be a good chance for me to try something I would normally never do. I live in a neighborhood that has a lake at the center of it, with pavement surrounding the front of the lake. At 6:00 in the morning, I woke up, drove to the lake and sat on a bench waiting for the sun to come up. When the sun came up, I was surprised by the beauty of it.
I have seen sunrises before, but it has always been limited to just a quick glance. It was a different experience altogether to sit outside and just focus on the sunrise because I was able to fully appreciate the natural beauty of it without getting distracted. The beautiful amalgamation of yellows, oranges, and reds, was truly a sight to behold. After watching the sunrise, I was able to gain a new appreciation for the beauty of nature, something that I have never really focused on before despite being surrounded by it. For a communal experience, I volunteered at a community meal at Greencastle.
I helped to serve food, pick up trash, pour drinks, etc. The majority of the people who came did not speak very much English, which made communicating sometimes difficult. Despite the language barrier, everyone was incredibly nice and grateful for all the food and people volunteering. I thought that the experience was very rewarding and even though it wasn’t a huge contribution to society, I think that it was a worthwhile event to spend my time on in order to help the community. As a spiritual experience, I have started to really focus on what I believe about religion and spirituality.
My mom is a devout Christian Scientist, so every Sunday for the past 13 years of my life, I have gone to the First Church of Christ Scientists to learn about Christian Science. Truthfully, I have never really cared about religion or have taken it seriously. This year however, I have made a conscious effort to pay attention during Sunday School class and to question and learn all that I can about Christianity, God, the Bible, the Science and Health, as well as how all of the other religions compare to each other, in order to better discern what I truly believe, and to form my own opinions about religion.
My Sunday School teachers have been incredibly helpful in helping me answer all of my religious questions and reflect on how religion fits into my life and the world around me. It has been an interesting, revealing, and confusing endeavor that I am still in the process of trying to figure out. I think that it will be a long time before I can confidently declare my religious beliefs without any doubts, but in the meantime, I am content with just studying, questioning, and discovering all I can about religion.
Recently, I have helped to support my sister in her efforts to participate in a study abroad program in China. My sister, Claire, is an international business major and wants to go to China for a semester of her junior year of college. In order to do so, she had to send in an application that included multiple essays. Claire face timed me the day of the application deadline because she was panicked about getting everything done and edited in time. I spent my entire night editing her papers and helping her create a strong application.
Despite my lack of sleep that night, Claire’s gratitude for my help and support made me feel really good. We are patiently waiting to hear back about her application which will be announced next week. For an ascetic experience, I stopped watching TV for a week during winter break. Instead of watching TV, I read books. In total I read seven books: Before | go to Sleep, The Templar Legacy, A Long Way Gone, Their Eyes were Watching God, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Secret of Bees and The Kite Runner.
My favorite out of all of those books was A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. It was the touching and emotional true story of how Ishmael Beah grew up in Sierra Leone during the middle of a civil war, and his journey of losing his family, surviving all on his own, becoming a child soldier, going through rehabilitation, and finally coming to live in America. I am honestly really glad that I stopped watching TV and decided to read instead because, during the school year, it’s really easy for me to forget how much I love to read and how amazing books can be.
For a physical experience, I have focused on being more aware of my physical health, focusing on the kind of food leat, how much exercise I get every day, and the amount of time I sleep every night. I realized how unhealthy of a life I was leading, with going to bed past midnight every night, eating junk food every day, and preferring to stay cooped up in my room instead of getting some exercise. For the past couple of months, I have made sure to eat a nutritious breakfast every morning and to eat healthy snacks between meals, as well as go outside to walk my dog more often, and going to bed around 10:00 every night.
Once I starting taking care of my body by reversing my bad habits, I felt a lot better about myself, have had a lot more energy, and I have mentally become a happier person. My favorite experience that I have done this year was for the category playful. I play the flute in band, which means that I have to participate in marching and pep band. For the majority of the time we are at football and basketball games, we just sit in the stands without playing our instruments. Typically, these games can get very boring because everyone just looks at their phones the whole time, waiting for the drum majors to tell us what song to play.
This year, however, was a lot more fun because my friends and I came up with games to play every marching and pep band event. We played card games, including BS, Egyptian Rat Screw, and Spoons, as well as word games such as Psych and Contact. One of my favorite games to pay was Mafia. In the game, a person acts as the fairy godmother and assigns everyone a role: mafia, detective, nurse, or civilian. The goal for the mafia is to kill everyone before they discover who the mafia is. Everyone else tries to figure out who the mafia is by using psychological reasoning.
Once they agree that someone is the Mafia, they kill them by a majority vote. When each person dies, the fairy godmother has to make up the story of how they died. The reason why this game was so fun was because of the amount of creativity involved. The stories of how people died were hilarious and the reasoning people used to accuse each other of being the mafia were equally outrageous. Each band event was a couple of hours long, so we always had plenty of time to play these games and more. The entire time, we would all be laughing and cracking jokes.
It was a lot more entertaining to use these band events as opportunities to have fun and hang out with other band members instead of just staring at my phone. In fact, I actually began to look forward to going to these sporting events, something I thought I would never like, because it was so much fun to play games together and just spend time together. During my freshman and sophomore years of high school, despite still sitting with my friends, we never really talked much with each other, instead opting to watch Netflix or go on social media.
I have noticed that this problem is not limited to just this situation. It seems as if almost any situation I find myself in, technology is always present. Whether hanging out with friends, family, or even when Tam by myself, there is usually at least one phone out. Despite their convenience and usefulness, technology, especially smartphones, have proven to be too invasive at times, often acting as a distraction from things that are much more meaningful in life, such as spending quality time with friends.
Everyone, including myself, seems to be so focused on staring at the little screen in their hands that it’s hard to stop and fully hat’s beyond those screens. It was extremely refreshing to be able to spend quality time with people without the influence of technology. Through the games that we played during band, I have not only experienced genuinely good times at events I originally thought of as boring, but have also become much closer to my band friends while also forming new friendships too.
These experiences have been very rewarding and have changed my perspective on a lot of aspects of life, such as religion and physical health. Each experience in itself was not especially monumental and were in fact quite simple activities. Because I was forced to focus on just the activities I was doing and living in the moment, I was able to truly enjoy the experiences despite their simplicity. What made them so impactful, however, was what I was able to take away from each experience and apply to my life moving on.
