1. PBJs 2025

I was only four years old when I had the extreme pleasure to visit Italy for the first time. I don't remember every detail, but I do remember how it felt. The first time setting foot in the Milan Malpensa Airport, seeing my family there waiting for us, arms wide, and the smiles, made the airport "scene" such a lovely one.  This trip also gave me something I will never forget, my first ever soccer game. An AC Milan game. And luckily for me, this was the time I actually used to play soccer. I used to be called "little Messi" for my extreme skills, actually I think only my family called me that, but that's ok. I remember the excitement, all the flags waving, the fans all wearing red and white. I was small, sitting on my dad's shoulders, seeing the whole stadium erupt when there was a goal. The first jersey for soccer I ever bought was also there. Actually, it's still framed in my room, and there's always a smile when I stare at that jersey. I'll...

 Photo Credit:  https://www.lambdasolutions.net/en/blog/hindsight-insight-foresight-reporting-maturity-curve-part-1                Do you guys remember cruising through school last year? Because if I am totally honest, last year felt hard when we were sophomores. Like now that I look back I realize how little work I had to do, and obviously how little work I actually did. Last year was a vacation compared to junior year. One AP test which I barely had to study for. The rest of my regular classes, which also required the bare minimum work for credit. And my careless attitude, ready to waste all my time. Productivity was not present in my life at all, and there was no pressure to make me productive. Still the only way I remember sophomore life was with late nights finishing up assignments last minute or studying for tests I knew about months ahead in time. Looking back I do not know exactly what happened last year.  I do remember...

  photo credit: https://siskiyou.sou.edu/2022/05/12/senioritis-what-it-is-and-what-to-do/ We've all heard of senioritis: the loss of motivation and lack of energy from dreading the final weeks of high school, or for some, the desire to just fast-forward and jump ahead to summer. But as of recently, a different feeling has emerged: junioritis. No one really warns you about the mix of burnout exhaustion, post-AP relief, and creeping awareness that your childhood is slowly being boxed up and labeled “past.” I’m tired. Not just from the endless amount of homework or countless hours of sleep lost from late nights studying. I’m tired of doing everything right, of being told repeatedly that this is “the most important year.” I’m tired of the pressure to know where I’m going, what I want to do, when I barely understand where I stand now. And with only a few days left, there’s another feeling creeping in: fear. Fear of becoming a senior. Fear that I won’t be ready; that I won’t be abl...

If You Could Choose to Erase a Memory, Would You?   Credit: https://www.livescience.com/44160-erasing-unconscious-bad-memories.html If you could choose to erase a memory, would you? Memories are marks of successes, failures, and everything in between. Ranging from small everyday habits, to life changing moments, memories are a safe of self-understanding we can pull from to learn and improve as humans. However, like recalling happy memories makes us feel good, remembering sad or painful memories can create unpleasant emotions and remind us of things we would rather forget. Even though I have many unhappy memories of my own, I would not choose to erase them because of the lessons I learned from them. Each bad thing that we go through is a step toward something better; regardless of whether or not an experience is positive or negative, there is always something to gain from them. Hard experiences, and painful memories are often what distinguish individuals from each other. They p...

Once, I remember her sitting on a chair not too long ago, her eyes greeting the heavens, hands tucked on top of one another, and an undefinable smile that let those around her know that she very well knew who she was. To be quite frank, if you ask anyone at all, she didn't remember much; the only exception for her memory were the years cradled away on the chair—rocking away signatures of her past, unwilling to accept that she was burdened by the deceit of time. Those, like myself, who knew her, had also come to the conclusion that she, who never left the chair, remained speechless for the eternity that we had known her. She might have slurred a few words here and there, thrown out an unacquainted greeting at the average passerby, but her words never said much—perhaps because the voice itself, after all these years, had forgotten its origin.  I tried my best at first: reiterating our vows, lighting a bonfire between a pail of sand to commemorate our last dance, hugging her tightly ...

Then and Now      Now that we are almost to our senior year of high school, I am prone to thinking about freshman year and often wishing I could go back. Yes, I am excited to grow up, but I also want to return to the simplicity and comforts of a time when stress and pressure weren’t my everyday companions.       Back then, I almost never worried about my grades; I was more focused on what I would wear the next day and when my friends and I could go to the mall next. Obviously, I still think about those things, but they have taken a backseat to GPA calculations and figuring out my future.      I remember walking into school the first day of freshman year with my schedule and a map of the school in hand. I remember the super awkward icebreakers and waiting till lunch to debrief with my friends. I remember my biggest problem being running the mile in P.E. (to be fair, if I were still in P.E., that would be my biggest problem ).   ...

 Darshan Dhaduk  Mrs. Smith English 11 AP 7 May 2025 Image Credits:https://images.app.goo.gl/e2dzuHCePsfaUyuq9 Time does really fly by. One day we are stepping into our first ever day of school, and the next we are graduating. One day we are celebrating our 5th birthday, and the next we are celebrating our sweet sixteen. One day we have thoughts of driving a car, and the next we have our permit. Childhood is really one of the best era’s of my life. My parents used to always tell me, take advantage of the time I had as a kid, because it will never come back again. Now being a kid and hearing this from my parents just meant another set of words that my parents were trying to tell me. It had no meaning to me back then, but as I look back at it now, I should have really listened to what my parents said. Every time I come home and complain about not being able to go outside and hangout with my friends, I always thought about the free time I had as a kid. Coming home from school, ba...

  Photo Credit:  https://abc7.com/disney-day-cars-on-the-road-lightning-mcqueen-mater/12213387/      “Speed. I’m speed.” Those were the first words I remember hearing when I was little. The first ever real movie I ever watched. Cars . Lightning McQueen came rushing around the race track, and I was hooked. The wonderful animated story of a car learning that friendship and humility trump pride in every challenge we face. But it was more than that. It was the story of a racer achieving his potential. It was about a car going “quicker than quick, faster than fast.” Now, there are a few reasons why this movie is so amazing. First of all, the movie is literally about cars. They all look so cool and having personalities just made them even cooler. Secondly, the friendship between Mater and McQueen was any child’s dream. They contrasted so well when they had to, and the rest of the time they were a duo to be reckoned with. And of course, the racing. The Piston Cup. ...

Lollipop moments. I believe that’s the word for it. It’s strange how some memories just stick. Not the fantastic, beautiful, and grand ones—like a special birthday or a family trip to Hawaii—but the tiny, insignificant instances that, for some reason, never budge and leave an indelible mark. These tiny things echo in our heads, nesting in little burrows of our mind that they never really deserved.  Remembrance. I can pick on a million different things to think about, but for whatever reason, some things—things that I shouldn’t care about—take the spotlight and become the only memories I distinctly remember. So I’ll decide to remember some things, the fleeting moments that outlast their expiration. For some weird reason I can specifically recall the feeling of sitting alone a week after posting a blog here, refreshing the page one too many times, and being overcome with an unsettling feeling that I’d never thought would bother me. No comments, minimal views, and a blog sitting all a...

This is the beautiful LA skyline. https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=los+angeles+night+skyline Now, I'm sure you all have heard enough of nostalgia, especially from me :), but I felt Los Angeles, yes the city, deserves to be the closing, the last time I speak of this. LA holds a super special place in my heart, and I like to call it "second home". Practically, one weekend in a month, I would take a day off from school on Friday, and fly out to Irvine. Now, seriously, people have a problem with me saying Irvine is in LA, when a 10 minute drive away. But anyways, my family lives there, and since our Grandma lives with us, we end up making the trip down there so my Grandma can see her daughter. And obviously, the amazing time we spend with family. I think, the main reason for going there so often is, I've never been to India! And yes, as shocking as that might be, I just don't have any family there. One of my dad's sister lives in Hong Kong, and since that's ne...

Muscle Memory? A beach I visited last summer As summer approaches, memories of past vacations and summer breaks are resurfacing in my memory more and more often. The pool parties with my friends, fun trips to the beach, and lazy weekends with my family and friends are vivid in my mind, and make me grow excited for the upcoming months.  Memories can be recalled like a muscle. As summer comes, I remember memories of summer, same as before winter break, I might recall previous winter breaks. It becomes a habitual cycle of recollection. Due to nostalgia, anticipation for future experiences are often more exciting than the experiences themselves. Daydreaming and recalling memories get intertwined, and start going hand in hand as the past merges with what we hope to be in the future. For example, when I am studying for my AP Biology exam, I often think about evenings lounging in my pool for motivation. This is a daydream, but it emerged from past memories of actually lounging in my pool ...

 Image Credit: https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/vietnam-street It has been almost 10 years since I last visited Vietnam, but I can still vividly recall the thick humidity the moment I stepped off the cool, air-conditioned plane. The air was warm and humid and seemed to cling to my skin, heavy with the assorted scents of motorbike exhaust, fragrant flowers, and even a tang of fish sauce. I remember walking through the busy, labyrinth-esque streets and alleys, comparing it to Subway Surfers but on steroids. Yet my parents still managed to navigate through the streets with ease, effortlessly switching between Vietnamese and English while I just tagged along, overwhelmed yet in awe.  When we came back to the US, I noticed Vietnam never really left us. It clings to my parents, grandparents, and relatives, sometimes in obvious ways: their mannerisms, the food we share, and the shows we watch on the TV. But it also shows up in subtler things, like in their pronunciation or the...

Darshan Dhaduk Mrs. Smith English 11 AP 15 April 2025 Image Credits:https://images.app.goo.gl/3VtnY3fSEFRTPqKy8 Every time my family would get a big cardboard box from an amazon delivery, I would always be the first one to open the box up, not for what was inside the box, but cutting up the box so I could make a box fort. I remember the first time my friends and I made a fort together. It was the summer of third grade and this was one of the hottest summers in my opinion. Going outside and playing for more than thirty minutes made me sweat so much that I felt like I lost at least five pound of weight. During this summer my friends came up with the idea of making a cardboard box fort together. We gathered boxes and after some tape and cutting up cardboard, we had our fort. This was still not enough for us, so we decided to make two forts and we started to have a water fight. Now making these forts had already drained our energy. We still decided to go on, and later we had a water fight ...

  The Slime Empire That Almost Was Every time I find myself making slime, which is actually quite often, I get a very specific memory. Not to YouTube tutorials or the stress of cleaning slime off my carpet before my parents (although these did happen), but back to fifth grade. Back when my friend (whose name I will not reveal because she would kill me) and I were co-founders of a highly unlicensed yet semi-successful slime business.  It started as a simple idea that two 10-year-olds dreamed up. Slime was all the craze at the time, so why not profit from it? We convinced our parents to take us to Target and buy supplies: glue, food coloring, baking powder, saline solution, shaving cream, glitter…the list goes on. They were confused and suspicious but decided to let us be.  We began with advertising to our friends. $5 for a regular-sized container of slime of any color. $7 for a glitter or foam beads addition. Surprisingly, we got some orders—around six if memory serv...

  For as long as I can remember, my family’s idea of family time was tabletop games. Not TV, or going out, but board games. There’ve been countless weekend nights spent playing The Game of Life, or inviting family friends and cousins over for rounds of Uno, or just casual rounds of Jenga while catching up with each other. Regardless of what game we played, the memories that came along with them are what made each week memorable.  Now if I had to rank my favorite game, foosball is a hundred percent on the top of my list. I first discovered foosball while at a friend’s house, where they had this huge, 4-player table. Immediately, I was hooked, and so my dad agreed to buy a smaller, miniature set. From then on, I would practice and play for hours on end, trying every possible trickshot from every angle possible, destroying my sister in endless rounds of foosball after school. Once, I tried challenging my mom, not knowing she was a former champion of a foosball club back in her h...

  Photo Credit:  https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2018/08/16/this-is-your-brain-on-roller-coasters/           Roller coasters have to be some sort of canon event in everyone’s lives. I must have gone on over a hundred rides in my life so far, yet everytime I sit down into one of those carts and the bar comes down, my heart starts to race. Every dip, sharp turn, and flip make my stomach lurch just the right amount where the discomfort is enjoyable. I try to go to Great America, with my friends every year, to keep my thrill-seeker side happy. Now that Great America might be closing in a few years, there are only going to be a few chances for me to spend my summers waiting in the lines and having fun on those rides. Of course, there are other amusement parks, which I do plan to go to, but Great America was such a vital part of my development. Those flying red chairs as soon as you enter the park, or even the 90 degree dip of RailBlazer, make Great Am...

Image source: https://lifehacker.com/the-best-technique-for-using-a-playground-swing-accord-1850355533 Occasionally, I get this sudden urge to stop whatever I’m doing and dig through my things in search of childhood memories. Being a messy person, this can take either a minute or turn into a really long time, but once I do find something, I just sit there and remember.  When I was younger, my parents would put together photo albums filled with pictures of me,—shots of birthdays, vacations, and everyday moments—all carefully slipped into laminated pages. So I usually try to find the photo albums first, and flipping through them almost feels like stepping back into those moments.  Of all the childhood things I held on to, my most treasured possession is this worn-out stuffed dog with a ripped up hat stitched onto its head that is barely hanging on. My parents gifted it to me on my second—or maybe third?— birthday, which I grew really attached to and took it everywhere I went. If...

Darshan Dhaduk Mrs. Smtih English 11 AP 2 April 2025 Image credits:https://images.app.goo.gl/T46ioAHV57gAYzsR7 My love for basketball started when I was around two years old. Now being this young and loving basketball made my parents realize that this sport was going to stick with me forever. I remember the first time I played a game in elementary school and it did not turn out great. I scored 2 points, for the opposite team. I was so confused at the time because I started jumping around yelling I finally did it, I scored my first ever points in basketball, while everyone else was either laughing or had a straight face the entire time. I knew that if I practiced playing basketball again and again, then I would be able to have a chance at playing at a higher level. Now being around four three tall in elementary school I was no were near to playing basketball at a higher level. I told my parents that everyday I would come back from school, do my homework then I would go to the park to pl...