Once again, another month has come and gone. September seems like it lasted for 4 days. Somehow, we as the entire human race, managed to be productive under the pressure of a life-threatening virus. I had a thought the other day that this year will be a major point in history. It’s so hard to imagine that this moment in time would be immortalized in a textbook. You get caught up in your own personal life and it’s hard to imagine that you’re a part of a collective experience that is important enough to make it into the books.

It was a slow start to the semester. I spent the entire summer and half of the last semester burnt out from the past two years of tumultuous events furling out one after another. I moved to Brooklyn, NY in August of last year from Boston, MA. I lived about a year in Boston working for my OPT (just international student things). I hated living there. I wished I never moved there in the first place. I wish I didn’t do a lot of things. But now, I’m in NY and I wish I can live here forever.

Currently, I’m living with two other international students from Honduras and Mauritius. We moved into an apartment together in Bedstuy back in April. We had to strategically move out from our previous apartments. I was living in this toxic environment with three other people I knew nothing about before I moved in. When moving from Boston to New York, I had to find a place fast with a help of a friend. I would check Facebook groups to find a place and he would check it out for me. As an international student, it was hard to find a place that didn’t require a credit score or a guarantor. I was desperate and quickly signed the lease so it was one less thing to worry about. I’m so grateful to have found my friends who have similar interests, values and lifestyles.

I spent much of the lockdown rediscovering sides of myself that I forgot over the years. I spent more time talking on the phone with my family and friends. I watched documentaries about serial killers, read manga, watched anime and researching about the occult (tarot cards, astrology, witchcraft, esoteric practices, etc.). I thought about projects that I want to work on this semester, not for academic purposes but for fun. One of my biggest weaknesses is that ideas stay ideas in my head. My perfectionist tendencies make it difficult for them to come to fruition. I’d tell myself, I should just start thinking less and doing more. Easier said than done. Luckily, this Peer Leader program is what I needed to start on my projects. Some ideas I had were a YouTube channel where I’d play out lore, myths and legends in different cultures using handmade puppets, conducting social experiments with dating apps and talk about the findings on a podcast (with the help of my friends), and vlogging about different things people can do in quarantine. All in all, I entered the semester with exciting new prospects and I am determined to do what I set out to do.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.