Veeksha's Vibes

The title is bringing back some memories for people who took psych.  So basically, the nature/nurture dilemma is the argument on whether your genes predetermine you, (your actions, personality, skills, everything about you) or the environment, the way you were raised, and the memories you exclusively experienced determines you. This also includes sexuality.  There are many indications that humans are largely based on nature. For example, in a psychology study, identical triplets were separated right at birth, they never got to contact each other after birth and neither did they know they were missing their other two siblings. They later grew up to have almost identical preferences and lives - they all played the same sport in school, they had the same taste in women, and even smoked the same cigarette brand. The documentary trailer of the study if you are interested :) This happened in the 1960s though, when being LGBTQ+ wasn't prominent or great, and all triplets were straigh...

    First, I would like to apologize for posting this late. Second, we need to talk about the flowers     The book starts off with flowers, at first it just looks like Wilde was normally describing flowers, but if you look closely, there is something bad about each flower. "The rich odour of roses …  heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn ."     The definition of "odour" or "odor" (according to google) is " a distinctive smell, especially an unpleasant one. " Even though roses look beautiful, they have something unpleasant or disgusting about them. This also applies for the "heavy scent", the first thing I thought of when I read those words was that one person we all know that walks and smells so heavily of perfume that it makes a whole room smell like the scent days after they've left. Again, not positive. The thorn plant is self explanatory. Wilde almost sends the message that nothing ...

               There are a ton of people who brought me to where I am now and I can't leave this class without mentioning the reason I passed. First, I'll start with my classmates. Elizabeth, who was always willing to talk to me during class when we had to share ideas, and constantly breaking my morning when she reminded me about the in-class essays every week. You showed me how much I was forgetting to consider and made me see the simpler side of language. Because of last year, I thought it was impossible to get ideas across without using complex diction and I was insanely lost. Shambhavi, who set an example with her analysis during our discussions, you made me realize that it’s ok to express ideas that aren’t obvious to everyone else because there is not one right answer all the time.                This is going to sound weird, but watching mov...

     This was taken moments after disaster. I was about 3 and a half and me and my family took a trip to these falls everyone had been talking about. Being three years old, I had no control over my energy and used it up before we got there. While I was extremely tired, someone offered to take a group picture of us, but I didn't want my face to be seen at that time, so I kept turning away from the camera. This went on for about 15 minutes or so.       It was then that my family decided to bribe me with food so that I would actually stand still. They forgot to consider one important factor though, there were hundreds of thieves around us, small, furry, demons that we named monkeys. The sound of the packet of cookies was enough for half of them to turn at us. Nearly 3 seconds after the packet was handed to me, a strong, swift force managed to take away my happiness. I was never the same after this experience, the monkey the proceeded to jump to an inacces...

     India is home to a lot of weird food customs. I was really excited to visit and spend some time with my extended family I rarely get to see, but I was almost spending more time consuming fruit and fruit derived product. If at any time you go to a household in India, they will offer you either juice, tea, or fresh mango, and in the unfortunate situation that you refuse all, they may resort to forcing some food down your throat against your will. This culture was more prominent back when my dad was a kid, he consistently tells stories of going to his aunt’s house to just talk to his cousin for a few minutes and come back, but he wasn’t allowed to leave until he had a full meal (no matter what he had eaten before).      In my eyes that was just pure torture, but this practice is very understandable if we travel back in time. My great aunt, (the aunt that forced my dad to eat) and probably her ancestors, were told to always offer food to a guest. Not only ...

     This one is a ritual of amusement, unlike the others that take up only a few minutes of the day, this one can take hours together. The people would sit in front of magic windows that would glow in different patterns to make pictures of something else. It was almost like a drawing that could move. When the first magic window was made, it only showed things in black and white, later as the people's tools got more advanced, they could make windows that showed color. Only the nobles of the village could purchase these at first but as they became more common and affordable, more people were willing to waste their lives staring into them. Through this, many stories would be told that sometimes changed the way the people saw their world.  Sometimes these stories would be more educational than what they learned in their schools. They would also be more enjoyable too because hundreds of them would be made every year and the people would have a variety to choose from. Thr...

Firoozeh Dumas goes through the hardship she experienced when she was a new immigrant through her name. I can relate to this not because of my name but because of my accent.  Lets face it, my accent was the most cringe in the whole class. There were others with accents but they weren't nearly as bad as mine. I moved to Troy when I was 5 (still developing language and speech). Learning English during this time was especially as hard because of that, and I would refrain form socializing or playing with other kids because it all involved speaking English, something I wasn't good at yet.  I could start to tell that people didn't like spending time with me because of my accent in 2nd grade. There were a few other Indians in my class, most of them wore the same clothes and had the same backpack aesthetic as me. Everything was the same except the accent. This drove my confidence and morale down by a lot. I would play on the swings and monkey bars by myself most of the time. In thi...