6. Caspian Seals 2026

  “She exclaims, ‘It’s fruitcake weather!’” is how the beginning of a supposedly unpopular English 9 Honors text goes. I say that because the day we came into class after having to read it for homework, our teacher asked us to raise our hands if we liked it. Only one kid did. That was me! Truman Capote’s 1956 “A Christmas Memory” is different from most Christmastime literature and media in that instead of focusing on magic reindeer and presents under the tree, it tells the story of a boy, Buddy, who doesn’t have much in terms of comfort except for his elderly friend with whom his Christmases revolve around and who is the gift that makes them magical.  Even though it comes in cute little hardcovers and has watercolor pictures on every page, Capote’s story was not written with young children in mind. It doesn’t shy away from less innocent topics like the purchasing of spirits during Prohibition and, for me mostly touchingly, the passing of Buddy’s friend after years of penpal e...

  Lots of people know who Batman is, but what is the first image that comes to mind when you think about him? Is it a man who dresses up in a costume alone at night, or a nicely dressed billionaire surrounded by women? Batman’s secret identity is Bruce Wayne, but that’s a small part of his identity to an onlooker. Even Batman wants to disassociate himself from who he is during the day. In his head, he calls himself Batman and never Bruce Wayne. But what does calling himself Batman have to do with his identity?  Everything.  By refusing to call himself Bruce Wayne, the comic character envelops himself in a persona that he can’t leave until he’s done fighting crime, and this helps him perfect his identity as the Caped Crusader. He does this not only to detect whenever his mental state is slipping, but to also make sure that he truly believes that he is a force to be reckoned with. If Batman could not truly see himself as a symbol of fear for those who commit evil in Gotham,...

Repetition is widely considered dull and pointless. And I get that, as doing the same thing again and again can be tedious, especially given that you already know what is about to happen, which can often sound like a broken clock’s incessant ticking. I, however, for one, absolutely love repetition in my daily life! I find it oddly comforting to do the same things over and over again. I choose to eat the same food every time I go to a restaurant. I replay songs when I already know every lyric word for word. I read the same books when I’ve already read them 20 times and can blindly recite lines straight from the text. I repeat the same inside jokes with my friends constantly. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love trying new things; I do! Sometimes, I just prefer to stick with the things I already know I love. I’ve been this way since I was a little girl. I can still remember reading my favorite series at the time, The Land of Stories , again and again, seemingly never getting tired of it. I...

Every day, people use different slang words to describe their day. For example, when one wants to attain a better physique, they might say they’re on a “looksmaxxing arc.” Other times, when someone is perceived to be more attractive than them, the latter may say that they are being “mogged” by the other person. Initially, I took this lingo for granted, thinking that they were but parts of the modern language with no inherent harm associated with them. So, I was surprised, almost appalled when I realized that most of the above slang originated from the incel community, a community dedicated to hating on and wishing to subjugate women. The question then becomes, when did incels have so much influence on our popular culture? To answer that question, we have to go to the late 90s, during which a majority of people started having access to the internet. The term “incel” originated in 1997, ironically, from a website made by a woman. “ Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Program ” was initially cre...

  Riddhi Charan Week #3: Before I forget— 9/23 [9:20 PM] I don’t remember most of my childhood. When my parents were scrolling through their camera roll and showing me pictures of the places we visited when I was a kid, I couldn’t remember anything at all. My mom was trying to remind me, telling me about the things we did and the people we met. However, it genuinely wasn’t clicking for me, and I felt like I had missed out on so much.                                                   Image source: animalia-life.club You see, I have always been scared of not living my life to the fullest. However, if I am doing all these crazy things, meeting new people, and trying new things just to forget it all, is it even worth it? Is it worth becoming attached and making bonds with people who feel like family, just to eventually go through the pain of losing them? To know ...

Image courtesy of The Wall Street Journal After two really formal blogs, I’m deciding to do something a bit lighter (partly because I do not want to redo a bunch of analysis I would have to do with something like critical theory). So for this blog post, I’m going to talk about the em dash—a key part of writing that has largely disappeared in human-produced texts (I know I was a bit hypocritical by using it just now). So to get to the crux of the disappearance of the em dash, we need to kind of travel back into evolutionary biology and this concept of accusation anxiety. We as humans naturally want to be in a safe spot if we have a choice. Thus, we would avoid anything that might get us accused of something, e.g., stealing from someone. But what does stealing from someone have anything to do with the em dash, you may ask? Well it has to do with the emergence of Large Language Models—or text-based Artificial Intelligence, and how they tend to write. LLMs are often trained on high-Lexile,...

Many of you have probably never heard of lace code, which is totally fine because it’s actually a dying practice that tells people your beliefs through (guess what!) shoe laces. Lucky for all of you, I will be sharing this very necessary and life changing information in case you’re asked about it!  Lace code, found in the punk and skinhead scene, is a system where certain colors represent your ideologies. Since this is in the punk area, this applies specifically to Doc Martens , or any sort of black combat boot for the working class. The actual lacing is called “ladder lacing”, a tedious looking technique that symbolizes that it’s a part of the code, so even if you’re wearing a color you don’t actually identify with, as long as it’s not ladder lacing it’s fine! It developed in 1970s London from skinheads and eventually died out, but some people are trying to repopularize and use it again today.  Okay, that’s enough explaining so here’s the general, as there are usually no uni...

I spend a good portion of my childhood being very confused. You see, my bà would pick me up on the weekends and take me to various gatherings, church, festivals, or whatever other fun little recreational activity was happening at the time. This, of course, wasn’t the issue, I actually tended to have fun! My main problem was that I never had any idea what anyone was saying. Eventually I picked up a phrase on my own, something I heard so much growing up that it’s practically ingrained in my head.  Em tiếng Việt không? Do you speak Vietnamese? You’ve probably picked up by now that the answer to this question is, unfortunatly, no. My dad doesn’t speak it, so it was never really used in my house while I was growing up. To top this off, most people, when just looking at me, can’t really tell that I’m half Vietnamese. However, I did grow up pretty deeply immersed in Vietnamese culture, which created sort of a weird situation regarding other people’s perception of me. What I wanted to talk...

  Riddhi Charan, Week #2; One of us got to be adopted – 9/17 [11:44 AM] Image source: Verstock.com Growing up in the same family, with the same environment and the same lectures, my little sister Prishaa and I are completely different. While my sister Prishaa completely stresses about something that is due in three days, I stress out about something when it is due in three hours. While Prishaa loves math and hates English, I absolutely despise math and love English. While she hates horror movies, I love horror movies. Yet somehow, everyone says we are so similar. Sometimes I genuinely wonder how people see the similarities between us. We have completely different interests, different ways of dealing with things, different personalities, and even different beliefs.  I think this shows how much our identity is shaped by more than just our environment. Even though Prishaa and I grew up in the same house, we have had our own experiences that have...

There’s a lot of little kids’ fables and stuff out there that tell people to count their blessings and be more thankful. Sure, that’s a great thing to do (and half of what I advocate for). But first, we always need to maintain equilibrium. This has been drilled into us during bio and chemistry. If we increase one thing, something else has to decrease. So when people are being more thankful, they’ve got to do less of something else. That something else is saying sorry !  In my daily life, I limit the times I say the word “sorry.” It’s like a game of finding some other word that’s suitable for the situation. Of course, there are times of such short notice or of an urgent nature that there is no other word we can use as a replacement. Times like accidentally running into someone while rushing out the door right after the bell rings or messing up a crucially important aspect of someone’s plan - oops!  But outside of those unfortunate circumstances, I like to apologize less (which...

I was scrolling through my [horrible Elon Musk app] feed one day, when I came across this post: To be honest, I agreed with the first two statements. For some reason, people who barely know me are the ones that seemingly distance themselves from me whenever I enter a room. Also, I get incredibly stressed and jittery right around the transition from break to school, leaving me paralyzed about my assignments for the first two weeks or so. However, after seeing the third observation I had to think about myself for a while. I think since my childhood, I have been called or signaled to be “slow” or “stupid” to some extent. Always chided for doing something slower, for forgetting something, for not finding the easiest ways to do things. I was always the odd one out in any situation, a catalyst for others’ mistakes and a source of awkwardness in the room. In conversations, I wouldn’t be the conversation starter in social situations; rather, I would be the conversation ender, because I would b...

When I think of BuzzFeed quizzes, what immediately comes to mind is younger me and my cousins huddling up, taking turns doing quizzes together on my cousin’s laptop. Though we played all sorts of quizzes, such as trivia and personality, my favorites were always the food ones. I deeply cherish these memories, especially because they are what introduced me to the world of BuzzFeed. I take a few quizzes here and there, carefully selecting the ones that excite me the most. One may tell me where my next travel destination should be, another describing what season I am, or even one comparing my personality to a food! Sometimes the result is accurate, though oftentimes it is wrong. However, that doesn’t matter to me, as the thorough thought process when carefully choosing my answer and the anticipation of what my result will be is why I love BuzzFeed quizzes. Clearly, I take them very seriously. Image Credit: BuzzFeed In fact, these quizzes actually allow me to think deeper about who I am. Fo...

The words we use reflect our identity. They help us communicate with each other, express our opinions, and allow others to gain insight into our interests. If someone overhears me using scientific jargon, they can reasonably assume that I know at least a little about science. If I use a word that was coined in a certain book or television series, they can assume that I am a fan or know people who are fans of that series. Words are a pretty normal part of our lives, and it’s easy to not think much about why someone uses a word, but how do we actually acquire and learn how to use them?  The obvious answer is hearing other people say a word and then repeating it. The thing is that we don’t repeat every word we hear. If we did, we’d all sound the same. I like to think that our brains place us in a group and then we slowly start adopting the language of the group or adjacent groups. For example, if someone lectures you on a boring subject and uses unfamiliar words, you probably wouldn’t...

Image credit: Rusi , “ Misogyny .” I have strong opinions on my femininity. Sure, I dress as a boy sometimes, but I still have a firm identity and sense of pride around being a woman. But society does not. At practically every corner and every step, there is something inherently more difficult about being a woman. Basically, every modern society has some sort of underlying sexism. Some of it is pretty obvious like women not being able to have credit cards (essentially financial freedom) until 1974 with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, but other times it’s not.  There are small things like how the law of Coverture made women have no legal identity at all, even being called “legally dead”. The tradition of marriage creating one simply meant that the husband was the “one”, which isn’t nearly as romantic sounding as it is today. BBC adds that the male being the default gender–called generic masculine–creates a bias, which embeds itself into our psyche so much so that a gender neu...

Once upon a time there was a little girl who had just finished reading The BFG by Roald Dahl. She loved the book so much that she decided her first daughter (and she was incredibly adamant on the fact that she would have daughters specifically) would be named after its main character, Sophie.  Photo Credit: betweenthecovers.com While my mom mostly followed through on this promise to herself, she made one minor change once I was born. She decided that my legal name would be Sophia, but she would call me Sophie. This was just to “give me more options,” as she always says. I do appreciate the flexibility she offered me, but I cannot count the number of times people have been (sometimes overly) confused about what to call me. Whenever people ask, my answer has always been the same—you pick! I’ve been called both my whole life, and in my mind they’re both me so it doesn’t really matter. It also became a fun sort of game for me, seeing which name people decide on. What all of this does ...

Image credit: Ninjago Wiki (Fandom), “ Zane’s Relationships .” “Normality” is one of those ideas which we tend to interpret as objective. For example, an elephant herd migrating through the savannah is normal, while a penguin walking behind them is not. Yet we also use it to impose seemingly measurable standards of human behavior—something so multifaceted—even though most of the time what’s “normal” is just what the person doing the judging is familiar with. This phenomenon of social “othering” and the imposition of supposedly objective “normativities” is a deeply explored and essential part of literature, as seen in the pioneering work of Michael Warner, who, in his text “ Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet ,” coined a specific form of normativity: “heteronormativity.” In my blog, I want to expand this and apply it to the experience of neurodivergence. A clear example of this comes from a really surprising source: Ninjago —as seen through the character Zane. Before being revealed ...