Slice of Life

Random Cool Stuff

This is the crux, the cornerstone, the pinnacle, the whatever else of this site: tha blog. This is the day-2-day one, where I guess what: Talk about my everyday random stuff. In addition to stuff from my real life, I'll also post cool stuff I find out, my opinions on things, etc.
Enjoy (>ᴗ•)

College Essays

Happy Halloween! I applied to my 3 first colleges yesterday (1/4 of the way done loll). I wanted to share my common app essay here, since I guess this is technically a writing blog. Also my UVA supplemental, because I thought it was pretty ok. (I overall don't really like these LOL the actual subject is so lame; I hate writing about myself. The word limit also totally crimped my writing style. Wtv)

Common App:

Nesnesitelna lehkost byti
- Milan Kundera

“So, are you like, Russian or something?”

My classmate’s question is innocent, but it holds a weight she can’t understand. I laugh and politely explain—”No, my name and I are from the Czech Republic, not Russia.”

She still looks confused. I helpfully describe that it’s “East of Germany, above Austria, and below Poland.”

Feigning understanding, she nods, but I can tell she still has no idea what I’m talking about.

I sigh, and pull out the old line that makes it click:

“We used to be Communist.”

She gets it, finally, but at what cost? I know that in her mind, she’s filling me alongside images of matchbox apartment blocks and red stars.

I wonder how many people realize that in order for me to walk over asphalt to my concrete school early every morning and dissect study guides in a commune over mochas and yogurt bowls and matchas, my family gave up everything. We had to reshape our existence by scratch, with our generational grit. Where my classmates were allowed to grow up, I had to learn.

I still spiral every time I tackle a new stage of life. My classmates all go to their veteran parents for advice; I have to learn everything on my own. These moments overwhelm me, as I’m reminded how out of my depth I am, and how little I come from.

Here, on the frontlines marching off to American higher education, I am quite lonely. I’m a lab rat in this venture. My mother dropped out of agricultural secondary school, and my father had only a brief stint in vinification secondary school in wine-country, Moravia. Upon returning to my grandmother's village this past summer, on a sleepy evening spent sitting on her steps peeling potatoes together, I asked for her counsel.

“I wanted to be a teacher,” She frowned, gesticulating with her potato peeler, “but they really didn’t agree with that.”

‘They’ were the committee of dedicated Party men presiding over her entrance exam, who knew everything about her and her father. The trouble was that her father was quite anti-Russian, so when the tanks rolled in, he and his family were quasi-blacklisted. When his daughter sat in front of the committee that was deciding her future, she was asked one single question: “How do you feel about the advance of Russian troops?” Unable to lie, she was barred from nearly every institution of higher education in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Her prospects died that day—but her determination didn’t, and she passed that fire down to me.

It naturally followed that in this environment, raised under the heel of Communism, my parents were not particularly pushed towards higher education. Back home, college is for the Kafkas, Čapeks, Masaryks, and Kunderas they learned about in state mandated textbooks. When I, their first and only daughter, began to show unprecedented academic inclination, they must have been very uncertain about what to do with me.

That didn’t matter to me. It’s like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince; “Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.” I learned early that I would be my own biggest source of strength. If my parents could not understand my passions and my dreams, that was okay. They had already given me everything I needed to succeed. My family, whether they meant to, or whether they even wanted to, raised me to clench my jaw and never stop moving. I owe them a great deal for that.

At least I have my grandmother, putting a warm wind in my sails from across the sea. Though she couldn’t follow her own dreams, she stoked the matrilineal fire that fuels me forward.

She asks me, “Will you visit when you’re grown up?”

I promise her, “Yes.”

I will return, carrying all I’ve achieved, honoring the country, family, and sacrifices that made it possible.

UVA Supplemental:

The female prefix is one that overwhelms my interests, whether I am a “Woman in STEM” or a “Girl Gamer.” It’s strange, though– when I dressed up as Marie Curie for Famous People Day in second grade, I wasn’t thinking about how she was a trailblazing girlboss; when I was eight and learned how to download games on my second-hand laptop, I wasn’t thinking about defying stereotypes. Even now, as I help sophomores with their Chemistry 1 homework, I’m not doing it out of spite for the patriarchy, but for fulfillment. Similarly, in middle school, I had gotten an idea for the perfect blog, with catalogs for my photos and gifs of pixel cats. So, I taught myself some basic code and crafted this website from scratch. If Twitter wouldn’t let me do it, I would find a way to do it myself. I have immersed myself in a great sea of hobbies and fields of study, simply because they were interesting. I created a YouTube channel, learned Python, and worked on video games of my own. I have spent many late nights and early mornings carving out progress on my hobbies and schoolwork in tandem. This is because in everything I do, I am driven by a desire to make things I’m proud of, rather than the condition of my birth. I will continue to lean on this philosophy while at UVA. I was born a woman, and I was born passionate. Why should one negate the other?

Neuropsychiatric Evaluation Reflection

Hello, it's been a while. Senior year, what can I say. And homecoming is this week:p
I've had some other completely unrelated stuff going on in my life; Chiefly that I was finally able to get a neuropsych evalutaion (basically a broadspectrum screening for mental illnesses and disorders [stuff like depression, anxiety, but also OCD, ADHD and Autism]).
I want to review to actual eval, because it was definetly very interesting:

To start off, I'm still 17, so still a pediatric patient. This is fine most of the time, like during physicals and whatever else because those are age appropriate usually. However, psychology seems to be an outdated field or something; tell me why the first thing we did was play with blocks... I mean, I get for younger kids these are important milestones that can indicate deficiencies in regular cognitive development or whatever, but if someone my age were struggling with basic motor skills and identifying fucking shapes, I don't think you'd need to test that with blocks. Who knows, I'm just a stupid pediatric patient. I got super flustered throughout the whole thing, I think I forgot a lot of basic math and language, which definetly made me seem more retarded than I actually (potentially) am.

She asked why I cut myself, checked yes for every single OCD behavior, didn't listen when I said that "yes, I have these thoughts and these compulsions, but I control them or keep them out of sight". She just marked down a fucking single number somewhere on her endless paperwork. How bad is this girl's OCD? A solid 3, I think. I can't imagine in my head how someone who has known me for an insignificant fraction of my life can determine such empirical truths about me. And I have to wait 6-8 weeks for results? What the fuck is she analyzing? The 1/2 page of notes she took? Not to be a schizo or anything, but that place was almost 100% bugged. There is simply no way that the narrow volume of information they collected on me would even take a week to get through. The fucking 500 question Myers-Briggs clone exam I took probably spits out percentages of illnesses (10% Autistic, 50% Delusional, 40% Anxious, or something like that), and then they sit on the info for a month or two to make it look official. Waste of money, waste of time, waste of resources. I was so humiliated and uncomfortable. I hope something comes out of this.

I'm just very frustrated. I remember how troubled I was as a kid; One of my earliest memories of real social distress was during recess in kindergarten, where I was running through a crowd of kids, begging them to look at me or talk to me because I fully believed I was invisible. This never reached my teachers or my parents, because it quickly clicked for me that screaming and crying wouldn't make me stop being invisible-it just made people avoid me more. Who wants to deal with a deluded mess of a child? All this to say, I;ve been compartmentalizing a lot of dread for a very long time, and I've gotten pretty good. Now it feels like I'm being punished for not being honest with society. So I started off terrified, then played a white lie, and now I'm afraid I;ve lied too well. I still feel my skin splitting hot, won't anyone help me?

Results will be emailed to me in 6-8 weeks.

!! SUMMER MOODBOARDS !!

As the very subtle title implies, I made a few moodboards for my super epic awesome summer. I have a lott of travelling ahead of me, supplemented by a healthy amount of stay at home computer action. Elden Ring DLC......... Thx FromSoftware. But anyways, away from the loser stuff, I'm going to Japan on a trip with classmates for around a week, and then the Czech Republic to visit family. Get #hyped. So, of course, I did what I do best, and made moodboards. Voila:

I really like this one. In case it's not obvious, this is the one for the Czech Republic. A lot of this stuff is pretty personal, like the flower crown for example. When I was younger, my mom would make these dandelion crowns. I'm going to try to get her to teach me how this summer when we visit. We also do a lot of berry picking at my grandma's house, which is why there are all of the berries are from. Below the poppy, which grow nest to my other grandma's old house by some train tracks, while it's kind of covered, I'm pretty sure the food in the dish are livance (Kind of like thicker flour pancakes). I made them last time I visited with my cousin, and all I'll say is that if I gain 10kgs on my trip they are why. I miss that country.

日本 ! ! ! ! ! I'll admit this one is pretty impersonal since I've, uh, never been there, but I included some stuff I'm super excited for : Kamakura, the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, and of course, the Konbini's and Gachapons. I'm also making it my life's mission to get an omamori while I'm visiting a shrine, but I have to find out which one accepts mail, since you're supposed to return them to the shrine once they're "used up". If I'm going to buy some as a gift, I am nottt intending on bringing misfortune on the retard who throws it away when they break their gift. You're welcome, whoever you are.

Ah yes. The best one of all. I actually do have hobbies at home, but most of them make me want to take a nap. Hence the coffee. I've also been biking a lottt, and I think a lot of that has to do with the rising-senior restlessness thing. No offense, mom, dad, but I cannot wait to get tf out of the house.

© Seisuiseki by Katherine. All rights reserved.