I’m learning that being human means living with contradiction. There’s this ache, this relentless hunger to be seen, but also a fierce need to protect the most fragile parts of myself. I want to be wholly here, yet untethered, free. And somehow, I keep finding pieces of myself in the spaces I thought I’d left behind—in the people I’ve almost forgotten, in the smoke of long-ago nights, and in the words I try to wrap around it all. I’m a shape in motion, a story that refuses to end, endlessly shifting, season by season.

I wrote this paper in college with a really good friend of mine during the Spring of 2022. Shout out to that guy. Let me know if you want your name on this.

Tomb Raider, a late-90s video game featuring the iconic character Lara Croft, presents players with the adventurous pursuits of an athletic British archaeologist navigating treacherous environments with mortal health and breath. Having been reimagined and remastered a total of three times, the gameplay has always encompassed exploration, platforming, combat, and puzzle-solving. The game, when stripped of its exploration and combat, can be articulated as gadgets, described by Jayson Lynch[1], leading to the classification of Tomb Raider as PSPACE-complete.

I enjoy people-watching. I’m jaded right now and feel bored just because I’ve realized (or maybe remembered) that every story seems the same when you look at it from a distance. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Stepping back far enough from anything at all, the details become fuzzy. But even though we’re clearly not that special or interesting, we’re still so obsessed with ourselves. When I watch people go by, I’ve seen far too many of them be absolutely captivated by every opportunity to stare at their own image. Walking past the slightest reflective surface, they can’t help but stare. At least it’s not as bad as walking down the street taking pouty selfies… I mean, I’m not against taking selfies because I do see the value in capturing the memories you experience even when you’re alone, but— and maybe this is just my boredom and jaded heart speaking— but your face shouldn’t be as interesting as your soul and mind.

Nikolai Muchegian died in November 2022. I didn’t know he had died until five months after it had happened, actually. I just thought he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. He and I don’t have any pictures of us together, but he was an important part of my life and my growth since the moment I met him. I guess I’m writing this essay as a recording of my memories, to supplement the missing photos. His death was a shock to me, and I suppose that this essay is some sort of eulogy. I’ve never lost somebody like this before, and it is… uncomfortable at best, and terrifying at worst. I wish I could’ve gone to the funeral or even knew where he was buried. But I don’t, and so I cope.

There’s a distinction between complicated and complex in the context of the English language; complicated things carry the heavy implication of difficulty, while complex things do not. Interestingly, the opposite seems to be implied in the world of engineering. Complicated systems with complicated problems are predictable, while complex systems with complex problems are not. Understanding romantic relationships and how they form is both complicated and complex, in every sense of the word. I think this process can be likened to creating a topic model– extract latent themes and connections between individuals, and uncover the underlying structure of our interactions and emotions.

I’ve never been to a place where it’s warm all the time. I’ve also never been on a vacation by choice, up until now. It had always been family vacations where I had no control over where we went and what we did; typically, we either ended up in Bumblefuck, Poland or somewhere in upstate New York. I didn’t really think I could afford a tropical vacation by myself but then I realized that my workaholic self actually made money during that internship I did last summer, and I remembered that money is earned to be spent. I’m glad I had a friend with whom I could go— if it wasn’t for her nudging, I doubt that I would’ve found the bravery to ever leave my basement. Spring break is such a major milestone of every college experience, and as a senior, it’s about time I literally choose to broaden my horizons.

I like Nancy from Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). She’s sweet and yet strong; she’s characterized by bravery. Her character arc resonates with mine, I think. Freddy Kruger haunting the dreams of her and her friends makes me think of how I’ve been struggling with sleep recently, mostly just because of the day-to-day anxieties of being a college student and the typical wandering thoughts of a young woman who spends too much time alone.

Sometimes my thoughts are crisp and clear like certain, beautiful autumn mornings. I’ve been so busy recently, everything around me is shrouded in fog. And yet, these moments exist when my internal narrative begins to sound so clearly all of a sudden once again; and since people only do what they want, I find a moment to record these thoughts.

I really like iZombie. I watch it the way most people watch some show like The Office, probably. I like that it’s geeky and funny and dark: it resonates with me, the way most things liked by somebody have a tendency to do so. It’s not really a work of art or anything, but it’s functional and serves its purpose. I enjoy it, at least. You can find it on Netflix, just in case you were wondering.

Y’know, Silence of the Lambs is a weird movie. It’s cool, but weird. According to one blog, the moral of the movie is that “it so courageous to peer into our psyches and dare to share our authentic selves. Our truths don’t kill us, our secrets do.” I don’t think I have many secrets. I’m technically an open book. Or, at least, an open website. And it has made me vulnerable. That’s scary. I’m not sure if I really like this.

My journal entries are like letters to nobody: I mean, they’re on the internet, though, so who knows; somebody might end up reading this nonsense. I’d like to think that reading this might be relieving for somebody– the mere fact that somebody else is also experiencing purely emotional suffering and strife with no sense of denial about it. I mean, who ever admits they’re sad on a public platform? I mean, I’m fine, really, but I think we all get terribly sad sometimes, right? Life would be good, I just wish the outside wasn’t so cold and that I had someplace to go.

While men may be the head of the family, in most situations, women are the neck. Men are rather simple creatures, motivated by a nut. If the nut’s good enough, they’ll stick around and hover. Through this, a woman can find herself in a very powerful position, getting to nag and help the man improve himself. Maybe she isn’t always actually helping, but people only do what they want. But now technology has enabled us alternatives: when you give men the opportunity to buy that nut, giving them the rush similar to the one they get from a real woman, it can lead to poor results.

I think life’s about addiction: we’re addicted to the vices and the copes that give us a reason to wake up in the morning. I’m hungry right now, but nothing seems appetizing. I might be a little depressed, but when it feels like the outside world is closed off to everybody and everything, and when it feels like even the ones closest to us to are closed off, it just gets really hard to want anything at all. I think I’m first and foremost addicted to The Real: the things that trigger our senses uniquely, and provoke emotions like no other.

We spend our lives looking for The One. Or maybe we don’t: some people just want to spin on the carousel for the rest of their lives, hopping from pony to pony. But after a while, I can’t imagine how slow you’d have to be to not realize that riding most ponies is pretty similar to riding every other pony: like the saying goes, “You’re unique, just like everybody else.” I’d say your own kids are different, though, fundamentally, just because they’re partially you, down to their very DNA. You’re tied to them the way your parents are tied to you.

I always thought that carrying around sadness is like walking around with a lot of change in your pockets, jangling around as you move: sometimes you just have to dump all the change out, count it, organize it, and deposit or something. You can’t keep walking around sounding like a tambourine forever.

In most majority-Democrat states, when you break down the voting results by county, you’ll see that each state carries a conservative presence geographically. This is a widely recorded phenomenon, and the relationship between urban areas and Leftist thought is an interesting one: perhaps it’s the increased presence of mixed cultural traditions in urban areas that often contain a greater immigrant population and a high population density. As you look at the areas approaching cities, the voting trends become bluer and bluer.

I’ve broken out of a lot paradigms that the mainstream media seems to push nowadays, or at least I’d like to think so. I would identify as conservative, but that’d put me into a box typically associated with establishment types like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, and that just wouldn’t be accurate. I like the term right-leaning because it’s vague and yet specific enough to suggest I’m neither an establishment Democrat nor a woke Leftist, and that’s good enough for me. I think there are many more varied groups with a right-leaning bias than the seemingly uniform political conglomerate of the Left. I mean, that’s an issue with the Left’s fixation on cancel culture, if you ask me. If there’s a possibility that you’ll be cancelled, lose your job and all of your friends if you say the wrong thing, then why even try? Why ever have a unique thought?

Courtsey of SecretNYC, initially taken from DNAInfo, which is now broken.

Today, I was walking with my female friend in the Lower East Side, and this very thin, very tan lady bumped into her very roughly. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and we had decided to go for a walk. The lady dropped the food she was carrying and then tried to pressure my friend into giving her money for more food because she was homeless and didn’t have any money to go buy another meal. It looked like some sort of sandwich with naan bread on the ground. I didn’t really like that this woman was pressuring us to give her money. She had a man with her, but I don’t really remember what he looked like.

Life is about needs, wants, and the things we conflict between the labels. Many religions make the claim that life is about suffering, and Buddhism specifies that desire is at its core. I’m relatively unreligious, but I have to agree with this claim. Life is about caving into desire, whether it be air, food, sex, or sleep— it’s just a matter of which one.

I really loved Barbie as a kid, and I’m not sure if that’s surprising. She’s beautiful, kind, and always taught that you can be anything. While I don’t think that’s a universal statement, I think it’s true a lot of the time and is a healthy message to send to young girls. You want it? You get it. Just do it. Get good! It’s a remarkably powerful but simple message, especially coming from an image of peak femininity. Even if you yourself don’t have an interest in dolls, consider that these are the toys our daughters are statistically likely to be playing with.

I talk the way I write, believe it or not. Admittedly, by nature of being written, my thoughts are more articulate and refined in writing, but the manner in which I write them mirrors my pretentious wordiness and elongated sentences. For this, I blame my multilingual upbringing, speaking exclusively Polish at home, English among my friends, and being taught Latin during all four years of high school. Sometimes the way I say words is weird too, because being as shy as I was during my childhood, I spent more time reading than speaking. Lots of my Polish-speaking friends have accents or quirky linguistic habits, even if they spent their entire lives in the United States. I do, too. Even though I don’t often talk about my ethnicity particularly often on my site, I do think there’s a lot of power in a language and an ethnic background.

Freedom of speech is dwindling. At this point, individuals who are aware of their libertarian leanings are merely waiting for the authoritarian left to admit that they simply don’t care about freedom of speech. This progressive belief finds its origins in Marcuse’s (potentially misused and misrepresented) Repressive Tolerance, functioning within the Frankfurt School, if you want to look into it. I think it’s nonsense, mostly: I’ve got far too much faith in the marketplace of ideas and my homeland’s ideological fundamentals. The 1619 Project attempts to reestablish the birth of the United States to 1619, the year the first African American slaves were brought over to the American mainland. While I can see how this honors their sacrifice, I don’t think it honors the positive, honorable endeavors inspired by Liberalism, which resulted in the Fourth of July becoming a celebration of the individual rights and freedoms that the United States was founded upon. I always thought birthdays were supposed to be happy. Gordon Wood has said enough on the subject to dispute the matter properly. It’s a matter of time until you’re “cancelled” because you ever had the audacity to challenge any progressive belief… because you ever had the audacity to verbalize an independent thought, really. I had the audacity to write for my school paper in the fall semester of my sophomore year, and my little career ended (for the time being?) in a small scandal that has, in my opinion, taken up far too much mindshare for far too long.

I loved my handheld devices as a kid. I didn’t have a smartphone until my freshman year of high school, and now, I honestly largely crave that stupid, blocky phone I had for so many years. I spent a lot of my time occupying myself with books and video games at the time: lots of Pokemon. I had this massive guidebook to the Platinum game and spend hours playing it. I even planned on including Pokemon in one of my list of my top ten favorite video games, but I was already rambling so much, I cut it short to five. I used to play a lot of Pokemon. So, here’s how to get those old games running on whatever device you have for free. I just wanted to share this with my friends if you’re bored, even if you never played any handheld games before. It’s fun, trust me. You don’t even need any cartridges.

I’m pretty unreligious. But without a religion, one is left susceptible to the temptations of nihilism, which can easily send somebody down a rabbit hole based in Bad Faith. And that sort of thought allows one’s heart to succumb to hate. That isn’t fun. So, I’ve started cultivating my own little list of values. My Catholic friend called them my Commandments. I think that name is too authoritative, though. It’s never that serious. So, I call them mottos, just something to repeat and believe as the days pass by. This list will be worked on and cultivated over the progression of this website, hopefully. Here’s what I have so far.

I like doing my nails. I’ve developed my own little gel nail kit, giving me full flexibility with what I can do, limited much less by my finances. It costs about $30 for a gel manicure where I live, and then add a tip on top of that… It’s expensive. I’ve found that it pays off to have your own stuff, especially if you buy second-hand. I like gel nails because they toughen my nails much more than acrylic, doesn’t have as long of a dry time, and lasts much longer than a typical acrylic manicure. Here’s a list of what I use.

I like the escapism of video games. Life is tough, and rather than dealing with my problems, I can put it off by immersing myself in a game. I mean, life is full of games, but here, I mean video games. From financial issues to nicotine withdrawal to problems of the heart, video games have always been there for me when I need that artificial rush of dopamine. I love games. The creation and manipulation of experience is truly an art. I love art. Here’s a list of my top five favorite video games. I do talk about video game history, if you were wondering.

Life has been cut short. We are now left with a world completely shaped by the media. Who knows what’s really going on out there if you can’t even step outside to see it? It felt like we used to maintain a certain distance within view of the real world, but now, forbidden from stepping outside, we either choose to completely cut ourselves off or to immerse ourselves in news of the outside world.

Either way, it feels like it’s disintegrating. We used to keep pushing for our lives to be extended for as long as possible, but now, barely able to live and barely able to imagine the notion of “next week,” we grow angsty, resulting in potentially deadly consequences.

For my PSCI 203 final, I was given the opportunity to write a dialogue. Here was the prompt:

“Frantz Fanon, Audra Simpson, Karl Marx, and Bill Connolly walk into a bar. You’re the bartender. Much discussion ensues, with the bartender a full-fledged participant. Write the dialogue.”

Here is the result. I think it’s mildly entertaining.

This is an unpublished op-ed. Here it is, published on my website.

We live in a society. It seems to be in a rather unfortunate state at the moment. Fortunately, I am here to propose a modest solution. The privileged elite enjoy the luxury of escaping to their summer homes when a break from normal life is needed, and perhaps, we could take inspiration from them and emulate our own break from normal life en masse. My suggestion is that we should break from the tragedy of civilization: although it has always been plagued with problems, I firmly hold the belief that now, with the interconnectedness that globalization has blessed us, it is the perfect time for all of us to agree upon returning to our natural state, throwing away all of our material possessions and moral standings, and existing as homo sapiens did before the rise of civilization.

I’m told that I’m very open about my thoughts and feelings when I write. I guess that’s true and I guess I don’t know how else I could possibly write. When a friend of mine looked through my posts on Reddit, that’s what he said about a specific comment. Here’s what I had written:

“I think people have largely forgotten the value of being truly emotionally intimate with one another. I, as a woman, enjoy casual sex and dressing as provocatively as I want, but that doesn’t mean I don’t crave and want genuine closeness. I want a man with whom I can be intimate in more than just the physical sense; I don’t want money nor the absurd, self-sacrificial devotion that the media perpetuates as a romantic relationship. Is that really that much of a risk? Don’t men crave that too? Casual sex is fun, but have you ever had sex with somebody you truly love? Shit hits different, bro.”

We’re in a pandemic right now. It seems like everybody knows that. I’m in Queens, located in New York City, believe it or not– that’s for y’all Manhattanites that love to hit me with the, “Queens isn’t New York City”. The city is nearing 1,400 deaths from the virus, with nearly 48,000 cases overall. My parents aren’t really letting me out of the house, and I’m kind of okay with it. I know I wouldn’t be very good with social distancing otherwise.

All my friends know that I’m fascinated by Tinder. It’s particularly weird right now, because we all know we’re not supposed to be meeting up, but of all possible dating apps, apparently Tinder is the most popular one at the moment. I thought Tinder was the hookup app, no?

Now that we’ve created a website for you to play around with in terms of coding, the world is your oyster! Well, it always was from the start, but now you have the opportunity to learn so much! I’ve always though a website is like a home… you step inside, and immediately you make judgements, whether conscious or subconscious. All the pretty stuff you see on a website, from the setup to the colors to the sizes of text, is all done in CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. All the text and formatting (bold, italics, underline, etc.) is done in HTML. HTML also provides additional information for the website, specifically in the <head> tag, which gives a site its title, icon, and additional metadata. Now, let’s get messy, baby…

My friend got dumped recently so I made them a list of movies that they could watch to occupy themselves. I think we all need something to occupy ourselves nowadays, considering the lockdowns, social distancing, and quarantines. Staying home is boring. Here are some movie recommendations from me. They’re mostly old movies, but I like old movies.

Most tech blogs are pretty intimidating and only give you a snippet of what you’re supposed to do. I love my handmade website, and while services using pre-built website templates and drag and drop elements have become increasingly popular, I think they’re boring and limiting. They slap their brand all over your own personal site, and if I were you, I wouldn’t be a fan of it. I think creating a website using your own CSS and HTML is a fun, expressive way to introduce somebody to coding, so here, I’m going to show you how to do it! Note that it’ll be static, so the pages won’t change between user visits, but that’s perfect for a blog or photo gallery because in most cases, you wouldn’t even want that to change! I’ll be linking websites to specific terms if you’d like to do further research. Honestly, a lot of coding is just knowing how to look up the right thing on the web to find the solution to your problem.

This is a basic introduction to creating a website using Github pages (which is what I use at the time of writing this), and while you can use their how-to, I’d like to think mine is a little bit more human.

“Do I know you?”

We all at least somewhat know of one another: not enough to greet each other and ask how we’re doing, though. But in the week after we were told that we were being kicked off of campus in fear of COVID-19’s spread, an apocalyptic feeling settled in our beloved Purple Bubble. We thought we had a full spring semester to enjoy the sun, the outside, and the colorful mountains, but that was cut short. It had become a time for practicality and succinctness, and the mere question, “Do I know you?” seemed enough to start a conversation. Yes or no? Are you familiar to me? Am I familiar to you? Familiar enough to kiss me in private? Even people with whom I wanted to be friends with later in the year, I now found the bravery to go, “How you doin’?” with a smile.

At Williams, a place that can easily allow an individual to deteriorate in the social isolation of a single dorm room, it is necessary to find a place to work (because it seems like that’s all we do here), that allows a student to have opportunities to gently and momentarily socialize, breaking out of their focused labor. We’re habitual creatures: it’s comfortable this way.

The location of choice is essential. The places you choose to be, whether you’re aware of it or not, control your social circles. The chances of me running into a friend of mine skyrockets when I loiter in the places where the friend and I usually hang out. It makes sense, considering that some of the friends I have are only friends with me because of our mutual classes. Does that imply that our friendship is purely circumstantial? Perhaps, but technically every friendship is like that, considering how the typical friendship is based on a circumstantial mutual interest, rather than on a mutual schedule. Friendship is based off of reciprocity and collaboration, even if it’s just collaborating in conversation meant to pass the time. We only have each other, you know?

Believe it or not, but people are people too.

We’re in the Purple Bubble. Typically, the mountains encompass us, nature providing us with a clear horizon and edge to our world. When it snows or when it rains, the clouds and fog obscure the mountains and only the campus buildings remain in our vision of reality. There is nothing but the human-made structures before us: bounce between the administrative buildings, dorms, and academic ones.

I’m shy. Okay, well, not shy when it comes to the simple question, “Do you want to come back to my room with me?” at midnight on Hoxsey, but when it comes to real intimacy with somebody I genuinely like, it’s a struggle. I love my best friend because she, whether I want to or not, will always push me towards embracing the inner emotional turmoil that a person can experience with a crush.

I have a crush. He’s my tutorial partner. His broad shoulders and goofy attitude rope me in, and his papers aren’t terrible either.

Wordpress.org’s initial installation readme.html file describes the process as taking approximately 5-minutes. It had taken me nearly an hour to complete because I was genuinely too nervous to make the commitment of buying a domain name for a month. It wouldn’t be too much, but I knew I’d hate myself if I didn’t capitalize on it and actually enjoy the purchase I had made.

Life is about caving. Either you give into your desires, or you don’t. We’re all just wild animals in the end. We just like to pretend we’re not.

I used to go to nude figure drawing on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8pm to 9pm every week during my freshman fall semester on campus, mostly because my art class professor encouraged it. I remember the first time I walked in, there were a couple older male townies there already, and one of them immediately turned to me and asked, “Are you the model?”. I wasn’t, although I bet he wished I was. Isn’t that funny?

I spoke with a surprising amount of clarity. We were arguing over something political, or maybe something about a family friend of ours? I can’t remember. But I do clearly recall my mother’s eyes laying on me, a small smile of amusement on her familiar face.