SCRAPS!

For the last time in 2025, I thought that I would hop on here and give a quick update on where life has been. In general, December has been a chaotic month where it’s been difficult to sit down and do this type of writing justice. Part of it is scheduling conflicts, but it’s also that I’ve dedicated a lot of free time to backlogging my annual entries for my Snapshot series. What I’ve found is that I’m generally overzealous and may write more than I should in those essays, but I need to get them out. There must be some way to convey my feelings on the year that will be there for research purposes further down the line. Will they be my best writing? I hope so, but I’m nervous about a handful of entries. However, they capture where I was at in 2025, and that’s what I feel is more important.  To start breaking down what’s been going down since I last updated, I will say that this has been both a hectic month but also a fun one. I got to see Ben Platt at his residency at The Ahmanson Th...

Over the past few nights, my attention has turned to one news story. Among the endless array of controversies and disasters, something which has caused me to question the direction America is going in regards a university essay that went viral for receiving a 0%.  From afar, the situation sounds like the familiar half-hearted attempt to get credit. In my lifetime, there have been papers from classes I’ve been in that reek of last-minute attempts to cheat the system. I have written some of those papers, and, when I have, willingly accepted the ‘F’ despite initial animosity towards the teacher and the belief that the whole system was out of order. There is nothing like being a frustrating student, though that’s also something you tend to feel when you’re in middle school and not at the university level. By that point, you’re there for personal reasons taking classes that appeal to some larger interests in your life. I get some are probably forced to take courses they don’t want for t...

Once again, the updates feel few and far between in this column. While I recognize that I came out of the gate swinging initially, the past few months have been met with more of mixed results. I apologize and cannot guarantee that this will change anytime soon. However, I do think there’s still some part of me that’s self-conscious about publishing any significant writing when there isn’t much to say. For whatever reason, I’ve felt that way about November and, whatever fodder I had lined up for different essays on here, I lumped into How I Live Now over on The Memory Tourist. It’s the unfortunate irony of feeling like it’s the final encapsulation of ideas that I haven’t covered elsewhere. Something to consider at the moment is that I am working on my final entries for 2025, specifically what I have designated, “The Snapshot Series.” For the past few years, I’ve chosen different topics to explore at length by mixing personal anecdotes with what I felt they symbolically represented to me...