My best childhood memories are a patchwork of my time spent in Otis Wood Lands, a small community exploding with my family’s history. Over forty years ago, my grandfather and his brother each bought small cabins in Otis, a tiny town in rural Massachusetts.
I’m terrified of losing my memory. Genetically, it feels almost inevitable. My mom’s family has a history of Alzheimer’s disease, while my dad’s family has a history of brain tumors. Both sides also had members who struggled with alcoholism—another indicator of poor brain health in old age.
“He felt that Boston College was a gated community for white people.” Those words, casually mentioned by the nurse to explain why her son did not attend Boston College, hit me like a brick wall. As a nursing student in my population health clinical, I was placed at an elementary school in Lower Roxbury.
I am not a chef. Not even a cook. I fall into the category of people who scrounge together meals, occasionally and eagerly resorting to Lower Live. I treat cooking as a necessary but unfortunate chore. No one is to blame but myself.
London has been a dream of mine since childhood. It was a place I saw in storybooks and movies, dotted with grand palaces and cherry red double-decker buses. Hollywood’s version convinced me that it was the pinnacle of perfection, at least in the eyes of my younger self.
Standing in Maloney Hall on that dull February day, I was overcome with excitement, knowing I would finally get to live out the life 11-year-old Makayla had always dreamed of.
The chess match between China and the U.S. is far from over, and India should be perceived as a rook in the middle of the board, undecided on its allegiance. Maybe the answer does not lie in picking a side and falling into the depths of this zero-sum game, but in building a stable economy that allows India to reclaim as much independence as possible from this chess game.
I swear that I’m a good driver. I stop at red lights. I use my turn signal. Every accident I’ve been in has never been found to be my fault. That said, there was one time I slammed into a fence post on my way home from work.
The dynamics of magnets have never captured my attention, except during one middle school science test. I can’t remember Bill Nye’s explanation of magnetic poles or electron clouds, yet one lesson from the unit stuck with me— opposites attract.
The concept seems transferable to all aspects of life. Things that, at first glance, shouldn’t go together often make the best pairs—french fries and ice cream, dresses and sneakers, even light and darkness. But in these great pairings, is there a point where opposites become too opposite? In other words, can a fry become too salty for its ice cream, or ice cream too sweet for its fry?
The first week of classes is a little like the first week of January. I’m extra nice to everyone, striving for 10,000 steps a day, and trying not to eat carbs. Then, by January 7—or the second week of the semester—I’ve given up on my utopian resolutions and succumbed to Late Night at the Rat.
Every day, middle school me spent hours practicing tennis alone against a backboard, with only my imagination to keep me company. At the time, all I focused on was perfecting my form, not realizing that I was also inadvertently training something even more important: the ability to daydream.
