Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/page/47/)
Part 1:
“Heh, Sam!?”
I bounded up the staircase on all fours, caught the baluster at the top and swung into my parent’s bedroom, gliding on the furnished wood floor Risky Business style. A small pair of brown eyes just barely peaked out over the king-sized bed from the other side of the room. “What’s up?” I asked. “Uh. I got lost…”
I looked at him, puzzled for a few moments, before shrugging and clambering back down the stairs.
Dear Seniors,
This is an incredibly stressful time. We’re applying to jobs, we’re applying to grad school, we’re planning out the next chapter of our lives. Suddenly we’re confronted with the fact that a few months from now we will no longer be students of this institution and will no longer have a tailored answer for relatives and friends that ask what we are doing with our lives. For many of us, this is an incredibly uncertain time. For the first time in my life, I have no idea where I’ll be 6 months from now.
Hello, world! I am the iPhone 7.* You might have heard about me. Apple—my divine maker, God of contemporary consumer electronics as ordained by the capitalist super-state—released me into the free market a few days ago. I am here to converse with you about—that’s right!—the dreaded “us.”
You and me. We need to talk.
I was in New York City for the sole purpose of visiting some indie second-hand bookstores so I could get some best deal in town to justify spending a hundred dollars traveling here from Ithaca. I got a tote that says “If you go home with somebody & they don’t have books, don’t f**k ‘em” and loaded it with as many books as it would fit. L let out a loud breath and asked if I wanted a photo of myself since I looked ridiculous with all these books and I probably would want this on my Instagram; hence I handed over my brand new camera and smiled hysterically at the ground to follow the rubrics of a candid photo—I also defended that I was currently on a spiritual journey of searching for inspirations. L proposed that inspirations would come through if we could go eat sashimi right now. The sashimi were aligned according to their color schemes and the mystical glow diffused by their texture had transformed them into iridescent exotic gems. L started explaining which ones are so highly regarded in Japan that they used to be served only to the royals, and which ones have to be prepared at a certain temperature to preserve texture—perfectly-pronounced Japanese words and gastronomic terms flowed from his lips.
When the cart rolled into the classroom, several of the students immediately left their seats and walked over. I followed suit. It was a steel double-sided cart, the kind that librarians use for shelving books. A few titles caught my eye: a complete encyclopedia of African American culture, Drown by Junot Díaz, and Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The students and I shuffled about the cart to get a closer look at the selection.
Toward the end of last semester, and leading into the summer, I began to dabble in the hobby of poetry writing. The works I produced, while some of them are so atrocious that they will never see the light of publishing, were often very cathartic to write. I’ve found that poetry is a form of relaxation and internal note-taking. With it, I can spew out my conscience, feelings, thoughts and queries. I can then bend these rudimentary words in interesting ways: playing with sentence structures, grammar or even language itself, until I have made something that captures the essence of the subject matter at hand.
So if you’ve read my bio or just know me personally, I absolutely adore the party, fighting-game Super Smash Bros. So much so, that winning or losing in a game of four player free-for-all or one-on-one I will physically transform this angry, volatile beast that has me taking my shirt off and foaming at the mouth to play again and again and again. And if I can’t do that, I will train alone in my room for a few hours the next morning until my nails chip and the skin on my thumbs peel. Silently, I savor every moment.
Sounds unhealthy? You bet.
As an Asian male, it’s quite safe to say that my peers and I get the shortest end of the recruitment stick. It’s no secret that we’re perceived as the meek and subservient types that belong in the professional friend-zone. I’m not complaining — simply framing. What I mean by this, is that based on what I face when it comes to finding jobs, I should be incredibly angry at the world of diversity programs. When thinking of white males getting the inherent recruitment benefits stemming back from the pilgrimage days and women and underrepresented minorities getting the recruitment benefits of decades worth of guilt, I was formerly angry. Amidst my mound of salt, I never really stopped to empathize and examine the other side of things.
I know how to commit the perfect crime. Or at least I should, given the countless nights I spent watching Court TV (which has since been renamed truTV) and Lifetime with my mom. The true crime documentaries buzzed in the background as I did my homework and my mom ironed every miscellaneous piece of clothing in each of my family member’s wardrobes, but there was no denying that we were hooked. We spoke at length about Lyle and Erik Menendez, the two young brothers who shot and killed their wealthy parents for reducing their allowances. How spoiled they were to kill the people that gave them everything and – even more incredulous – how idiotic they were to go on a shopping spree a mere few days after they “found” their parents dead.
Earlier this week, an article was published in JAMA Internal Medicine providing evidence that in the 1960s the sugar industry supplied funding for scientific research that identified fat and cholesterol as the main culprits of coronary heart disease, and downplayed the evidence that sugar consumption can also be linked to CHD. It is likely that this literature, sponsored by the Sugar Research Foundation and originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contributed to the rise of low-fat diet in the mid to late 1900s. Today, the American public consumes 25% more carbohydrates than we did in the 1970s, as we have turned away from fatty foods like nuts, meat, and cheese, and began to consume more grains, potatoes, and ‘low-fat’ versions of food. These ‘low-fat’ foods, marketed as the healthier option, are actually packed with salt and sugar to make them taste as good as the original option containing fat. The American Heart Association and the U.S. government, based on misleading information and studies that could not be replicated, perpetuated the idea that a low-fat diet would help reduce weight and risk of heart failure.