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Finding Your Way Post Grad
The limbo stage of life There were so many possibilities for life after college. I ended up doing a stint in New York City and it didn’t quite pan out. Before leaving the city, I felt like I’d be going home with my tail between my legs. New York was supposed to be this symbol of success, so having to go home seemed like it would be the equivalent of failure. Not one to accept defeat, I quickly adjusted my mentality. Re-grouping, refreshing, pivoting. I looked forward to the shocking cold of Lake Tahoe, the view from my bedroom, the sweet smell of warm pine trees in the sun, and…
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An Examination of Life’s Characters in Tahoe
The Setting: The liftie life in Tahoe: It’s 7:45 a.m. and the tenured lifties (people who work as lift operators at a ski resort) just lit their second bowl of the day. This time, it’s on the gondola ride up to the top of the mountain. Olympic Valley unfurls beneath the gondola, snow capped peaks and exposed boulders edging past, pristine, untouched slopes glinting in the morning light. The lifties climb on the seats, yanking open the plastic windows to let their smoke out, and pry the doors of the gondola open to dump the burnt flower into the wind. A lot of lifties don’t immediately engage with you. You…
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Channel Islands: UCSB Senior Year Bucket List
Senior year at UCSB meant trying to check off as many experiences as I could. At the top of my bucket list was making it to the Channel Islands. So when the opportunity presented itself, I pounced, blood pounding when a signup list came out for a trip in April. There were 15 of us girls, mostly strangers until we slowly gathered in front of UCSB’s Excursion Club house, exchanging names and distributing food while the sun rose over the ocean across the street, dusting the sky a light pink color. They would be my companions for the next two days, people I hoped to share my top senior year…
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Creating a Happy City
Written for a class on happiness communication, I used Montgomery’s Happy City to explore the creation of a city with people in mind. An idyllic city should be the perfect environment to situate its residents with all the tools they need for a happy life. American cities as we know them are the case studies for books like Happy City with their “layers of imported traffic, noise, pollution, and road danger, [that] do not currently meet our needs for well-being much better than the sprawl” (Montgomery, 2014, p. 77). Cities are concrete, man-made, fabricated realities that do not serve everyone. Integrating collectivist values that benefit everyone, such as public spaces…
