Scattered excerpts from my old college essays that I enjoy.

"The world outside is in the falling, quiet days of autumn. The leaves are ablaze in red and gold, singing their swan song before they fade into the brown emptiness of winter. Those same shades of red and gold trail across a festooned banner celebrating my grandfather's ninety-fifth birthday. He too, is in autumn, and his tanned skin moves patch by sunburnt patch towards an end he regards with an immense serenity. The calmness in which he lives his days is only punctuated by his steadfast belief in carpe diem and his repeated lectures on the power of education. “Knowledge is power,” he says, and the wrinkles on his face crinkle with unsaid thoughts and laughter. I listen, and in his stories I find the motivation to know. Those words have sent me on a search for the same comfortable understanding of the world that would give my voice the same kind of tranquility and wisdom that radiates from his words as he speaks his quiet murmur."

"Most afternoons, I'm on stage. Not as an actor – as a creator. One of the many that create the otherworld of drama productions. As chief of lighting crew, it's my job to accentuate the painted conglomeration known as the set and the makeup-hardened faces of the actors. It's simple in theory – design, set up, and run the lights. That doesn't cover how absorbing it is, especially on performance nights. It's thrilling to watch the audience respond subconsciously to the variations in light. But it's not just what I've done – it's what I've learned. How to take and create an aesthetically appealing reality out of our director's ideas, effectively manage my crew's time, solve problems related to our 40year-old decaying electrical system, prepare effective backup plans due to said problems...those lessons (better categorized as learning how to be extremely flexible and responsible, grow lots of white hairs, and meet a horde of interesting people) have made all the rehearsals – even the ones until 10 pm – worth it. To tell the truth, though - the main reason I love working with lights is because I used to be (and possibly still am) afraid of the dark . The little girl in me gets a bit giddy at having the power to control it."

“Mass pandemonium! Mass chaos! Sign up right here!" My Chinese painting teacher should have said that instead of innocently asking whether I'd like to help her teach the elementary school class. I love the kids I help teach, I really do – they’re annoying, mischievous, charming, and weasel their way into your heart – maybe with a smile, or a joke, or some ludicrous antic that makes trying to teach them how to hold a brush, paint a flower or bird entirely worth it. At least I think I love them. But some days, it's just bad. Take five Sundays ago. There's Amy, the shy, youngest child in the class, who decides to pair up with the devil incarnate, better known as Justin in this life. And by the time I manage to shoo the intermediate students toward the teacher and finish the demonstration of chrysanthemums for the beginners, it sounds like it's raining inside. Something keeps splattering against the floor, and someone's foot keeps on squelching against whatever substance that is. And at that moment, slightly horrified, I realize that Amy and Justin's masterpiece isn't on the rice paper. It's on the floor. The Jackson Pollock-esque splatters of black ink on the grey linoleum make a handsome piece of modern art in both abstraction and size. The MoMa would probably want to take it - if they could pry it off the floor. But this is Chinese painting, and the style is still stuck in the 13th century, and away the ink must go, along with the tiger stripes Justin painted on my arm while I was standing there gawking. Of course, by now the entire roll of paper towels has transported itself into the nether realms, the younger children have managed to seize the miniature tubes of watercolors and squeeze ostrich-egg sized globs of paint out of them, Chris has Godzilla duking it out with flowers on his paper, and to top it all off, there are still four more late kids to teach chrysanthemums to. But other days, something clicks. The students watch. They learn. And they feel. Those days, it's as if they try to make the brush an extension of themselves, feeling themselves dip into the ink dish, onto the paper, and dragging their wrist, arms up and over, into a perfect rendition of a panda head and body, without any black splatters of ink over their papers or the floor. And the younger students only have dabs of watercolors in their color dishes. And as they sweep the colors onto the paper, the moss green, orange, and crimson mix perfectly to capture the beauty of autumnal leaves. And the leaves seem to sprout perfectly from the brown branch - which for once, seems tangible enough to support the elegantly plumed redbird sitting on it. Maybe the bird's beak is a bit misshapen, and the panda slightly plumper than normal, but it doesn't matter. It looks like pure, unprocessed beauty, and in my mind, and their minds, it must be one of the most amazing things that we've ever seen."

Oh, the memories. It's been a while since I wrote for the heck of it.