Christ and Cartoons #3: Pokemon

More than two years later, I return to this blog to write. I guess, just like God, that this blog is not dead.

As a short update, I graduated from Harvard in May of 2016, a year nearly to the day after my last post on this blog. I returned to Chicago for a gap year where I learned many more things about God and myself, and traveled and did interviews for medical school. I was privileged to get into the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and it is from that campus in Los Angeles, California (!!!) that I write to you today.

Of all the topics that I could have chosen to write about in two years' absence from this blog, I came back to continue my Christ and Cartoons series. Perhaps that makes me lame, but continuity is good as well. I hope to write many more of these. And now for the third installment: Pokemon.

***

My parents actually banned me and my siblings from Pokemon when I was about 7 years old, as they didn't think that the show promoted good morals. Fifteen years later, for a reason that only God knows, my brother asked my mother to lift the Pokemon ban, and to our pleasant surprise, she did. (To my parents: thanks, and I'm sorry.) Despite the ban lasting more than a decade, we never really did forget the adventures of Ash and Pikachu and their friends, and we were happy to catch up on the whole thing in our free time.

Around the same time that our Pokemon ban was lifted, I got into another habit: listening to sermons from my favorite preachers in the morning before the day started. This has really helped me grow in my faith and become more emotionally stable as changes and trials come. Whenever I listen to a sermon before starting the day, I feel like my whole day goes better; it's like spiritual breakfast in that sense. I was listening to a sermon this morning called "I Am The Plan" by Jarrod Wells. He talked about the Triumphal Entry that Jesus made into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, a week before his death, and he focused on the animal that Jesus chose to ride into the city that day:

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.

Of all the animals Jesus could have used to come into Jerusalem as king, he chose a donkey. He could have chosen any other ridable animal on earth--horse, pony, camel, anything--and it would have probably seemed better or more fitting for a king than a donkey. I can only imagine what the first Palm Sunday looked like as crowds stood on the streets of Jerusalem laying palm branches in front of a carpenter from Nazareth riding both a donkey and her colt. It would have been an interesting sight. But Jesus said that he needed that donkey and her colt. He had committed himself to that animal, and no other one would do.

As I was watching the pastor preach about how the donkey was central to Jesus' plan at this point in time, it reminded me of the first episode of Pokemon Indigo League. (I know what you're thinking...where is this girl's mind!? Stay with me.) The first episode begins with an excited Ash Ketchum heading straight to his mentor Professor Oak's house on his tenth birthday. Ash is finally old enough to get his first Pokemon partner and to start competing in Pokemon tournaments. Sadly, he wakes up late, so even though he heads to Professor Oak's house as fast as he can, he finds that all the other young trainers have come and taken all the other Pokemon except for a small, yellow, mouselike Pokemon by the name of Pikachu.

Cheerful as ever, Ash adopts Pikachu as his partner and starts going out into the world of Kanto to train. But as soon as he starts, he quickly finds out why Pikachu was everyone else's last choice. Pikachu is very rebellious; he won't listen to a word Ash says, and he and Ash are constantly at loggerheads. Pikachu will not get in its PokeBall (a ball where Pokemon are usually supposed to stay for transport), doesn't follow Ash's battle commands and continually uses its electric powers to shock Ash. Despite the pain and frustration, Ash doesn't give up on Pikachu and continually tries to get it to like him. Towards the end of the episode, Ash and Pikachu accidentally draw the wrath of a group of bird Pokemon, and these birds chase them and end up injuring Pikachu. As these bird Pokemon are relentlessly attacking them both, Ash begs Pikachu to get into its PokeBall so that he can protect Pikachu from any further hits.

Pikachu is overly aggressive, rebellious and lazy; there is seemingly no good reason for Ash to keep him. Ash's choice of Pokemon seems just as wrong as Jesus's choice of royal procession animal. Pikachu and the donkey were both stubborn, small, and not ideal for what they were about to do. And yet Jesus chose that donkey. Small as it was, the donkey ended up being integral for revealing Jesus as the promised Messiah, the one who would save the world. Many, many years before, the prophet Zechariah had predicted that the Messiah (Hebrew for "the anointed one") would come in exactly like Jesus did that day:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 
(Zechariah 9:9 NIV)

When Jesus came into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, he showed himself to be not just any king, but a king who would meet his people at their need and who would choose the marginalized to become part of his plan. He had been doing this his entire ministry: eating with tax collectors and prostitutes, reaching out to people across gender and racial boundaries, healing blind and lame people he found on the street. The crowds flocked to him not just because he had claimed to be King, but because they knew that he was a king for the people, that he would help them. Within the week, he would be sentenced to death, crucified, and resurrected from the grave as our risen Savior. Everything he did that week was of utmost significance for revealing God to the world, and it all started with that donkey.

Have you ever felt like Pikachu, or that donkey? Have you ever felt insignificant, forgotten or thrown by the wayside? Let me ask another question: have you gotten used to being thrown by the wayside? I'm not asking if you like it, I'm asking if you've ever felt resigned to being marginalized, like it's all the world has to offer you. You've been in that corner so long that it's become part of your identity. You're scared to leave that corner because you're afraid of getting hurt. I think this was Pikachu's problem in the episode. We don't know how long he was in Professor Oak's house; he could have been there for years getting passed up by every single trainer. By the time Ash came and actually chose him, he was probably so resigned to the fact that he would never get to fight like the other Pokemon that by the time the chance came for him to fight, he was ready to forfeit. He believed he was made for that corner of Professor Oak's house!

Okay, you're really passionate about Pokemon, you might say to me at this point. This doesn't just apply to Pokemon. I heard a story one time of a doctor who moved into an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago to work at a clinic. This doctor was white, and his neighbor was a 64-year-old black man. They got to know each other over the next few years, and like any good neighbor, the white doctor eventually invited his neighbor over to his house. The man looked at him like he had been asked to blow someone's brains out with a gun. This scenario was repeated over the next couple of years with the same response, until finally the older man accepted. The day the older man finally came to the doctor's house, he made it into the doctor's foyer. He stood, frozen, for several minutes, visibly scared until finally he burst into tears, he said, "I'm not supposed to be here", turned, and walked out.

It is an incredibly scary, yet sadly common thing, where people get beat down for so long, pushed into a corner for so long that they no longer can envision a life for themselves outside of that scenario.

Love can pull you out of that corner. Love (not puppy love or erotic love, but sustained, real love; the love that is not a feeling, but a choice made every day to be patient with people, kind to people, not envious, not boastful, not seeking their own benefit but looking out for someone else as well) will free you from the prison of low self-esteem and empower you to have a vision for your life. Love will enable you to give yourself a chance, and it will bring out things in you that you never even thought possible before.

I know this to be true for myself. Four years ago, I was a sophomore in college who had lost all hope for herself. I wasn't doing well in school at all, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I was intractably lazy. I contemplated leaving college probably on a daily basis. Sometimes, I thought of giving up on life itself. My parents prayed and prayed and prayed and refused to believe they had lost their daughter. At one point that fall I realized that they would not let me give up college or life because they loved me too much to let go. A couple months later, I went on a medical missions trip to Senegal, and that entire week, I was surrounded by the presence of God and the love of that entire team. In that atmosphere, I became a person I thought I'd lost forever, a person who really loved people and countries and whose dream was to travel the world and empower people. I came back from Senegal a totally different person. I realized that I was a child of God with many, many dreams and purposes that he would help me carry out. Four years later, I have a college degree from Harvard and I'm now in medical school! I am living proof of what love can do!

If you get anything from reading this post, I want you to get that God loves you, and (at the expense of being corny) God chooses you. He has wonderful plans for you, and they're good plans, not bad ones. He can take your mess and make your life beautiful. You just have to ask if he can help you. If you don't know how to ask, here's a template:

"God, I recognize that I have not lived my life for You up until now. I have been living for myself and that is wrong. I need You in my life; I want You in my life. I acknowledge the completed work of Your Son Jesus Christ in giving His life for me on the cross at Calvary, and I long to receive the forgiveness you have made freely available to me through this sacrifice. Come into my life now, Lord. Take up residence in my heart and be my king, my Lord, and my Savior. From this day forward, I will no longer be controlled by sin, or the desire to please myself, but I will follow You all the days of my life. Those days are in Your hands. I ask this in Jesus' precious and holy name. Amen."


(from allaboutgod.com)

If you do end up doing this tell me! Comment here, or message me on Facebook (my name).

(This blogpost is too long already...I didn't tell you how the episode ends! I guess I won't give you spoilers. Several seasons of Pokemon are available on Netflix, and since it's the very first episode of one of the most iconic children's animes of the '90s, I'm sure YouTube has it too. Enjoy it!)

Thoughts on a middle school graduation

Yesterday, I went back to my middle school to watch a close family friend graduate from eighth grade. Other than a cursory tour that I'd given my cousin a couple of years back, it was my first time stepping into my middle school since I myself had graduated seven years ago. The whole experience gave me so much to think about that I had to write a blog about it.

I arrived about ten minutes late and to my chagrin, I missed the processional. I came in through the back of the gym where the graduation was taking place, and I saw that the bleachers, which are small to begin with, were almost empty. There were chairs set up on the gym floor and almost all the attendees as well as the band were in the chairs. It was the smallest graduation I'd been to in a while. I'd forgotten just how small my middle school was. As I came in by the bleachers, some of the sixth and seventh graders looked at me (naturally), and I suddenly felt very awkward. Thank God, my friend's dad showed up around the same time as me, and I found him and a seat almost immediately after that.

I arrived just in time for the student speeches. A couple of students spoke about all the good memories they had of elementary and middle school (since everyone in the middle school went to the same elementary school). As expected, they sounded very fond of their time there. As I recounted my own memories of middle school, I felt awkward again. The students spoke of a strong community, of having good friends for life, while I remembered feeling excluded almost all the time and wondering if I would ever have any friends. What made it worse was knowing that my poor friend hadn't fared much better than me. Not much had changed in seven years.

It certainly wasn't all bad, though. I loved elementary school, so it made me happy when the students talked about memories from there. I happened to sit behind a couple of teachers from elementary school who still remembered me and were eager to hear about how my life had been going. It was really nice to see them. Also, one of the student speakers talked about the various achievements of my middle school's sports and academic teams over the past year, and it was funny to listen to because again, nothing had really changed in seven years. The basketball teams were still terrible. Cross country, volleyball and wrestling were decent, and an eighth grader had to miss graduation because he was competing at the National Spelling Bee. Same academics and athletics.

They presented a couple of awards, and then they called up all 48 students to get their diplomas. I was so proud of my friend. Many of the girls impressed me by wearing fashionable short dresses and extremely high heels that I can't even wear now at age 20, but my friend wore a silver-grey floor length dress with gold jewelry and her hair up in a bun. She looked so unique and elegant and classy. When I took pictures with her, she looked a lot better than I did.

After the graduation ceremony, we went to a nearby hotel for the after party. When I'd graduated, I hadn't even gone to my after party, so it was all new to me. As it happened, my friend's family and I ended up next to the new principal and the new superintendent, both of whom were very nice. After dinner, we watched a special movie that some students or the PTA had made, showing memories and the students answering various questions about their experiences. One of the questions they asked, naturally, was what the kids wanted to do with their future. Everyone had pretty high goals, which was good, but my friend made me proud again when she said she wanted to do something that made her happy and helped people.

After the movie, the dancing began. At first it was awkward to even watch the middle schoolers dance, let alone get on the dance floor. But as time went on and they played songs that the adults and I liked (namely the Cuban Shuffle), I got onto the floor to dance, though I generally kept my distance from the graduates as it was their night. Around this time I met a former classmate whose sister had graduated that night. I believe we were the only twenty-somethings who stayed for the dancing, so I was happy that neither of us would have to be alone. We got kiddie cocktails at the bar (she doesn't drink much and I'm not 21 yet) and had fun together.

The graduates danced in a very tight circle which didn't even take up the entire dance floor. My friend alternated between dancing in the circle and coming out to dance with her mom or me and my classmate. At one point, she was with me and she was looking at the circle but she wasn't sure if she could enter in. On the outside of the circle, I saw another girl in a beige dress and shorter heels who had won three big awards during the ceremony and had given the first student speech. I recognized her immediately. The girl looked back, and when she saw my friend hesitating, she took my friend's hand and pulled her into the circle to dance with the others. You don't forget people like that. The girl was quite the big shot, and she could have easily blended in with the popular group, yet she was still nice to people who weren't as popular as her. There was a girl like that in my graduating class who always at least tried to make me feel included. Her name was Katherine, but everyone called her K.K. I haven't forgotten her to this day, and I don't think I ever will.

I drove my friend home that night, and after I got home I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was quite the bag of mixed feelings. Memories flooded my head throughout the ceremony and even the dance, and it was interesting how that same themes of awkwardness and loneliness that had defined my middle school experience came back to see me again, as if they were old friends. I'm certainly not nostalgic for middle school at all, but I'm not angry about my experience either; I think it gave me a lot of compassion and made me stronger, and I can see that in my friend too. Also, I made friends in high school and college, so that awkwardness phase was definitely past for me. Coming back, it just felt like looking through a scrapbook and thinking through all the memories, good and not so good. My biggest hope now is that my friend has a wonderful high school experience so that if she ever comes back for a graduation ceremony, she'll feel the same way as I do.

Lessons from cartoons and video games #2/?: Digimon

My brother and I watched a lot of cartoons and played a lot of video games as children...and that hasn't changed as we've grown up. We still watch cartoons and play video games, and every so often, I find something within a cartoon or video game which I think is insightful and should be written down somewhere. Thus, this series. This is the second post, and it's all about Digimon!

UPDATE: You can now read a slightly edited version of this on the Harvard Ichthus!!!! This is the link to that: http://harvardichthus.org/2015/04/christ-and-cartoons-how-a-digimon-imitated-jesus/. What you're reading below is the original version.
***
Over winter break last year, my brother and I found the second season of Digimon on Netflix, and we decided to watch that season all the way through. Note: for those who haven't seen the second season of Digimon, this blogpost will have spoilers. So if you want to watch it without spoilers, go watch it on Netflix and then come back here. It was fun to relive those Saturday mornings when we would wake up early to watch shows like Digimon as kids, and it was fun to see how we reacted as adults to some of the stuff we watched thirteen (!!!) years ago.
One thing that didn't change much was of the six main characters, my favorite character was Ken. I couldn't really explain why when I was a kid, but as an adult I figured it out. In the first part of the season, Ken was the Digimon Emperor, an evil genius who took over the Digital World (the place where all the Digimon live) and ruled it with an iron fist. He was a very cruel Emperor, making the Digimon work for him as slaves, making them evil by taking over their minds with Dark Rings, and punishing those who didn't obey. For most of the first part of the season, the five other main characters were trying to stop Ken, and everyone knew he was a jerk...except his Digimon partner, Wormmon. (People who have never watched Digimon must be finding this very weird to read! I hope you all get this.)
Wormmon had been assigned to Ken as a Digimon partner before he became the Emperor, and he remembered that before Ken became the Emperor, he was a very kind boy. However, a series of events including his brother's death and being infected with a "dark spore" made Ken very spiteful and evil. Ken even treated Wormmon like a slave, and at one point, he rejected Wormmon as his Digimon partner and tried to create a new Digimon partner for himself, one that was bigger and stronger than Wormmon. This new partner was a monster, and he eventually went mad and started destroying everything. When Wormmon realized that Ken's new partner was going to destroy everything, he finally told Ken everything he thought about him, but despite Ken's treatment of him and all the other Digimon, Wormmon told Ken that he still remembered the kind boy that Ken used to be, and that he hoped that Ken would become that person again. He then gave all of his life energy to defeat the monster, saving Ken and the other main characters. That event made Ken realize the error of his ways, and he stopped being the Digimon Emperor after that. Eventually, he joined up with the other main characters to save the Digital World. It took time for the other main characters, but eventually they were able to see Ken like Wormmon saw him: as a kind and noble person, and a hero.
I just retold a major subplot of a kids' TV show from fifteen years ago, but there are themes in that subplot that are for people of all ages in real life now. Figuratively speaking, we have all met a Digimon Emperor. Perhaps that person doesn't go around killing people and controlling their minds, but the person does have fundamental flaws that end up hurting them and the people around them. And if I'm speaking that way, about people who have missed the mark and hurt other people and have flaws and scars that they can't handle very well, then I can say with certainty that we have all been the Digimon Emperor at some point.
But I can also say, daring to hope, that there's a Ken in all of us too, someone who is kind to other people, ingenuous and has something good to share with the world. Not everyone sees it, and it may be buried beneath all the flaws. But it is there, in all of us. And we need someone, kind of like Wormmon in this plot, to see that person and never stop believing that the good kid is there somewhere. We need someone who can deal with all of our flaws and help us find the inner kindness. We need someone to take on our burdens so that we can be helped. And if we can find that person--that exceedingly rare person--they will usually succeed in bringing the good out of us, not because we were good enough to find the good, but because we know how much it cost them and we want to repay them.
People like those are hard--nay, nearly impossible to find. There's no greater sacrifice for a person than to give his or her time, energy, and even his or her own life to see a friend gain life. I dare say that there's nothing that messes with your head or your heart more than realizing that someone believed in you so much that they were willing to give your life to see you find your dreams. That's why Christianity still continues to grow today, though people's actions throughout history have sullied its name--because in Christianity, Jesus is that person. If you find a person who believes in you so much that they can bet their life on it, it might take a while, but eventually, you start believing in yourself and wanting to do better for yourself, and you don't want to go back to the way you were, because if someone gave their life for you, then your life must be worth it.

Lessons from cartoons and video games #1/?: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

As I mentioned in a previous post, when my brother and I were young kids, we watched a lot of cartoons and we played a lot of video games. To be honest, this hasn't changed. We have more work now, but when my brother and I are free, we usually spend time watching cartoons and/or superhero movies and playing video games. Lame? Maybe. But it's pretty fun. And occasionally in those video games and cartoons I find bits of insight that I think is worth sharing. So I'm making these insights into an unofficial series, creatively called "lessons from cartoons and video games". I don't know how regularly these posts will appear, but I can pretty much assure you that there will be more than one.

This is the first of two that I have for now. Yes, I wrote it a long time ago...but I still think it's good enough to post again. I wrote it in 2011 about a game that every Sonic the Hedgehog fan will remember in infamy: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). There was a litany of things that were wrong about that game, from the gameplay to some of the plot elements and much more, but in general we get more insight from our mistakes then we do from our prouder moments, and for Sega, it's no different...

***

Before reading this, you must know...I am a geek. According to a facebook quiz, I am seven different types of geek. So you should not be surprised by what I refer to here.


I was watching some of the cutscenes from a recent Sonic the Hedgehog game which someone had compiled into a movie, and the end really made me think. To explain the situation, the main villain of the game and the final boss is a fire-type thing named Solaris who ends up devastating everyone in the game. Solaris was originally kept as a little flame in a castle belonging to the duke of Soleanna (where the whole game takes place). At the end of the game, Sonic (our main hero) and the duke's daughter Elise go back in time to find this flame so they can blow out Solaris and save the future.


They find the flame and Elise is supposed to blow it out. Elise realizes, however, that if she blows out the flame, she and Sonic will never have met. She almost refuses to blow out the flame because she doesn't want to lose her friendship with Sonic.


Watching this happen, it's pretty hard not to scold Elise for nearly choosing Sonic over the world. And yet sometimes, we do the same thing. We forsake the mission, the life that God has planned out for us, because of something that we love that we don't want to give up. We think that thing is big, but in relation to the plan God has to (basically) save the world, it really is not.


Sometimes we may think that what we have to give up is so big and too hard to give up. However, considering that God is in control, we should know that when we give up that habit, we are helping with the great commission, the plan to get as many souls saved as possible before the end of the world.

It's been a while...

And a lot of things have happened during my time here--a lot of things to learn from. I've changed...and yet at the same time I haven't. Some things about me have definitely changed; I've matured a bit, definitely. I've had some rough experiences and come out to tell the tale to people. But at the same time, I feel like the same old person I was when I was 15 and a half. It's very weird to think that I was a sophomore in high school five years ago. When I was a sophomore, it was easy to note the differences between 11-year-old me and 16-year-old me. I grew a couple of inches, I gained a figure, and I gained confidence and (some) maturity. But now, as I'm nearing the age of 21, I feel essentially the same as a person as I was when I was 16, but with less confidence (ha!). And I've been berating myself for a while now about that. Isn't college where I'm supposed to change, find new ideals and become a much more sophisticated person? Isn't it where I'm supposed to find my identity in some type of "-ist" and let the liberal in me come alive from the conservative prison I was raised in? Isn't that what's supposed to happen to me? A lot of people have had that experience in college, and for a long time I wondered why I didn't fit into that category. People would share their experiences of this and that and others would applaud them and I would wonder if I was wrong for not having any of those experiences to share. I wondered if I was wrong, or even deficient in something (yikes) because none of the new contemporary labels really fit me.
And then it hit me, slowly and then all at once (pop culture hehe): if I am a unique person, created by God with my own personality and experiences and other things, then why am I trying to let the world define me?
I realized that the world in all of its forms can try and put me in a couple of boxes, but none of them will completely fit me. I'm a sum of several parts. I have my own DNA, my own personality, and my own destiny. Some people really identified with the things we've heard and seen in college, and they made several changes, and that's awesome. I'm happy for them. But just because I haven't changed that much or made myself fit in the mold this new society has for me, doesn't mean I'm any less than any of them.
So here I am! I have a lot of new experiences and ideas to share. But to be honest, I'm basically the same as when I was 16. And I'm pretty okay with that.

Stuff that I have learned from the events this week

This week. THIS WEEK! I did not come to Cambridge expecting this week. I came into the week expecting to be stressed out by all the work I had to do...but not by the threat of terrorists. There were definitely moments where I was like, "God, YEESH! I could barely deal with my own little student problems. What is THIS?"

But I guess no one comes into this experience as a prepared person. It just happens and it scars you and your town for life. It doesn't make your town cease to exist, as I found out today. Even as there were people the next town over chasing the suspect, and Massachusetts law had put us all on lockdown for the first time in nearly 12 years, after a while, people did start going outside again. It was eerie for me to go out into the Yard and watch people play and eat at Au Bon Pain. This place is supposed to be deserted, I thought, but it isn't! There was playtime and laughter, but there was still this awkward fear looming over everything like a cloud. It was always possible to get over it by doing work or by distracting oneself from it, but a trigger would come and you'd be scared again.*

How incredibly relieving it is to have that blanket of fear lifted off of you.

Many people at my school made the great point this week that many people aren't getting the happiness and relief that I have now. They still have to live in that blanket of fear. For people in the war zones like in Syria, what we have just been freed from experiencing is life. My solution? Prayer. Keep praying for those warzones, applying the feelings that you felt this week to those prayers.

*That is, unless you were my friend Terrance. Thursday night when the MIT shooting occurred, I was in Lamont Library with a group of friends and this dude. We were all scared out of our minds and hunkered down to the basement...all except Terrance. Dude put some gospel music in his ears and kept on studying right next to the windows of Lamont Library. We all asked him why he wasn't fearing. He kept on saying, "God is with me. I don't have anything to fear!"
I knew that, but the difference between me and Terrance was that the guy had been meditating on it, so once a situation came around he just had his Psalm 91 handy, and he just chilled. I ought to get to that level of faith!

That snow day!

I grew up in a place where it is supposed to snow regularly between January and March, and sometimes even in April. I grew up making snowmen and snow angels in elementary school, and always hearing about snowball fights, even if I hadn't been in that many.

Last winter, while it was quite nice, was unexpected for me. There were warm days, cold days, and NOT ENOUGH SNOW. Winter to me is snow--so much snow that I get sick of it. Last winter, I could count not only the amount of times it had snowed, but also the amount of inches of snow we'd gotten, on my fingers. It was disgraceful.

This winter, it seemed like it was going to be more of the same...and then Nemo came along.

Nemo, of course, couldn't have been good for everyone, but for me, it was very good. It started with my classes getting cancelled for the day, and having the due date for a problem set pushed back. That alone made me quite content.

Then, I went out for some meetings that I still had, and I saw what I'd been missing for some time--the whole yard, roads and all, in a blanket of white. I slugged my feet through the snow and tried to avert my eyes from it as the wind blew the snow directly at my eyes, but even then, the six-year-old in me leaped around, and I was happy as a lark. Finally, some snow!

I went to my meetings, hung out with some people, and then went back to my dorm and worked for a while, assuming that we were to hunker down for the night much like we did when Hurricane Sandy came along. I resolved to do my work, but as I looked on Facebook and saw pictures of my friends playing in the snow already, my heart pined. Then, someone invited me to an event--a snowball fight at midnight. There was my goal--work until that snowball fight.

When the time came, I put on my rain boots, coat, gloves and hat and went outside. I was a bit early, and only a handful of people were in the yard playing football and stuff, so a couple of friends and I went over to the steps of our colossal library, which should be a government building instead of a library. This library happens to have a ton of steps, which combined with a good foot of snow, makes for great sledding. We came when most of the snow had been scraped off the stairs, so my first sledding experience was a very bumpy ride, and I fell off the tray I was using. After a bit of sledding, I headed to the yard, and the snowball fight had begun! People were running about having snowball battles with each other. Others ran past me chasing their friends, and there was even one guy with a crutch who joined the party. I saw quite a few friends...and threw snow at almost all of them.

At one point, a lot of people decided to assault a fort that had been made. Everyone advanced towards the fort, including a guy with a yellow flag, and charged at the people in the fort with snowballs. Unfortunately, that fort got reduced to smithereens.

I eventually went back to the library, where people were still sledding, despite the fact that some of the stairs were iced over. I marveled at the fact that the snow was still falling. It was as if the weather wanted to make up for all of those missed days in January. I accept its apology.

I eventually went in feeling extremely happy that everyone had come out for a snowball fight. It was definitely one of the best nights I've had in college so far. My college is pretty intense, and the stereotype goes that the college is full of prudes who spend all their time studying and overachieving. But this night reminded me why I was attracted to this college--Harvard--in the first place; because the people here are not prudes. We study and overachieve, yes, but it isn't beyond us to loosen up and be kids for a night.

I don't normally do recaps of events here, but I felt this deserved one. This is one of those "thank God it happened" days for me. Aaaah, so fabulous.

My friend Peter recorded part of it, so here's the link to his video; the charge is at 0:50!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDOeaicu7F8&feature=youtube_gdata_player