Drawing is an activity I’ve always enjoyed. It’s fun and relaxing and helps take my mind off of things that I’m anxious about. I started when I was young, scribbling with a marker or pencil on paper. Currently, I mainly do digital art with my iPad, and it’s so much more efficient than pencil and paper. Not only is drawing faster and easier, but working with a digital device allows for other features like video editing and animation.

I won’t believe you if you’ve never thought of what it takes to make a person happy in life. We each have our own depiction of happiness, and you may already think you have yours.  Our lives are built around a very specific yet broad variety of concepts: the things we need to do in order to sustain ourselves, the things we enjoy doing, and the people surrounding us.

As you grow up, one way of finding out who you are is discovering what you like to read.  On this journey, you may get many recommendations, ones that may include poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Sylvia Plath.

To all Sequoyah high school students who wonder about the options you have for lunch at school, I’ll stop you right there. You have two (occasionally three if a food truck decides to make an appearance): the lunch you pack the night before, whether it consists of leftovers or frozen Trader Joe’s food, or the Choicelunch Sequoyah provides. No more, no less. And that’s where I went wrong.

The monarch butterfly is an iconic Californian symbol, critical to our ecosystems, food, landscapes, and public recreational spaces. Over the past few years, a troubling trend has emerged in the conservation of this beautiful insect. Milkweed, a staple of the monarch butterfly diet, has been used in many settings to save the species; however, in this attempted revitalization we have only inflicted more damage. Milkweed sold in most stores today is most likely the tropical variant, which is extremely disruptive to the migration and mating patterns of the monarchs.

I was prescribed glasses when I was nine years old, due to my family’s genetic predisposition for terrible eyesight and my proclivity for reading extremely long fantasy novels in semidarkness. I was dismayed when the optometrist gave me The Diagnosis: I would never again take in the world through my unmediated corneas.

The thing I get judged for most frequently in my day to day life (besides the fact that I am a semi-shameful bearer of an Android phone) is being an only child. Oddly, as soon as someone learns of this seemingly irrelevant (at least to me) detail, their opinions about me seem to change, creating a picture in their heads of a spoiled brat.

The rise of microtrends in the fashion industry is affecting the economy and the history of fashion. With microtrends rapidly fluctuating, the industry produces excessive amounts of clothing, much of which shoppers eventually end up dropping off at the thrift store or throwing away.

When I think about humor, it’s generally because I’m trying to come up with something clever for The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest. Barring these frequent instances, however, I’ll generally mull over the astonishing diversity of humor encountered in everyday life – dad jokes, physical comedy, one-liners.