I’m not a very confident person, but I can say I’m pretty humble. I started to realize that the people around me always show off something they feel so proud of. There is nothing wrong to show others your success, but how they show their success will affect me looking at this person’s personality. I always don’t like the person who always thinks they are so cool or they just think how good they are at some area. I always feel so disgusted. For example, one of my friends from Taiwan he keep doing some gang signs because he watched some people doing it on TikTok. He just keeps doing it even he doesn’t know what that means. He just thinks he is so cool doing that, and keep doing the same thing over and over again. I mean I also do gang signs as a joke with my friends sometimes but I don’t know how he can do that every day. Speaking of being humble, I’m good at swimming and I also do it for my previous school team. At the swim races in Taiwan, I also broke the record, and be the fastest swimmer in the race. However, I never tell others how good I am at swimming or do some actions to get the attention of others just to get respect or admiration. I still respect those people who are overconfident, but I just don’t like it that’s all. What do you think?
This is my second time going to Catalina Island for a camping trip at the little harbor, the first time was two years ago before the pandemic really affect the travel policy. It was a little stressful before I went on the trip because I will be miss a lot of class. After I come back from the trip there will be two days of school and then Winter breaks will begin. In this case, every teacher decided to give a student test before the break started. I just took the AP Statistics test in class today, and I barely study. I mean I am already done applying to colleges, so I don’t think the rest of my grades will affect their decision.
I feel like I went back home when I went back to Catalina Island again. To be honest, there are not many fun activities can do on Catalina Island. We only do hiking and some activities at the beach. However, the place was just so quiet and beautiful which is why I love it so much. It might be boring if you go there by yourself, but going there with your best friends will be a totally different story. I love the places where I can hang out with my friends where no one is around interrupting us and we can truly be ourselves. It’s so nice I can come back again with my friends, and it probably still be one of my favorite places on Earth.
If you have no clue what I am talking about, you probably aren’t put on. It’s cool though, I’ll put you on. Last week I wrote a blog that laid out the chip challenge I orchestrated for my podcast which you can read here: ( https://ovsjournalists.com/2022/02/08/pre-chip-journal/ ).
My Pre-Chip Journal was full of joy, wonder, excitement for the journey I was about to embark on. I had a ton of ideas that were good in theory: many wheels, games, tests, goofs, and gaffes. Some worked some didn’t. We spun the first wheels and ate the chips in the order decided upon by the wheels. The problem arose when we went to play feud before our next wheel. We staggered our chip eating times, my co-host ate, 30 seconds later the editor ate, and 30 seconds later I ate. This led to my co-host being in a hiccup fit when I began playing. My tonsils and ears started burning, I felt my cartilage melting like some sort of Ear Nose Throat doctor’s office diagram-shaped candle. All concerns about the order and plans I had made went out the window. Eff the spelling bee. Eff feud. I. Am. Done.
I frantically mashed click on the computer connected to the tv behind us, spinning the wheel that decides what we get to drink. My co-host couldn’t open his chocolate milk. My editor opened a milk carton like it was a Christmas present. Milk went EVERYWHERE. I finally got to my chocolate milk and had a drink.
Sweet relief overcame my mouth, I was back to normal!
(please watch this, I am using this as a sentence)
VC: NOID
The pepper was dancing on my grave. It was back just as strong as before.
We spun the next wheel, I got lemon juice, which in my panicked state I poured into my chocolate milk, leading to a sour, coddled, sweet beverage that went down terribly. From here on out I don’t remember much. I was dying. I bit into a lemon, which actually really helped, something about the acid canceling the capsaicin.
I then went to lay on the floor. I zoned out on the floor for a few minutes, and when I came out of my pepper trance, I was feeling fine. The burning had moved down to my upper chest, which hurt far less than my mouth. I then ate roughly 7 mini muffins and the infamous wet bread. Wet bread, for those who yet again are NOT put on, is wonderbread with club soda. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.
At that point, the wheel had gone out the window. I began eating a whole onion, my co-host had the entire lemon turned inside out in his mouth, and my editor was still dying.
Our teacher, throughout this whole experience, was anxiously crossing his arms, pacing, and looked like he was about to collapse out of the fear a student’s stomach lining would rip open in front of him.
The podcast is super funny, which I am proud of. I am more pleased though, with the fact my editor had firey diarrhea the whole night, the best form of payback.
Recently, we sat down to do a Hill Talk Podcast where we partook in the One Chip Challenge. We didn’t do the real challenge of eating the whole chip because our teacher is liable for our health and safety, but I must say, that shit still hurt. I can’t even describe the chip as spicy, it was just painful. As soon as I bit into the chip, I tasted a disgusting flavor of heat and pepper. The chip was thick, crispy, and dry as hell. Thus making it very hard to chew. It resembled eating sandpaper in my mind. My first reaction to the heat was to hiccup. My diaphragm began to convulse with the power of 1,000 stampeding wildebeests. I could’ve sworn I was gonna throw up. This all happened in a blink of an eye, and as time progressed, so did the pain. The chip lit up my spice receptors like a Christmas tree, it would be safe to say that the only thoughts on my mind were the exponentially increasing pain, and the chocolate milk I was thirsting to chug. Breathing became a difficult task, and speaking became an unintelligible blabber. This one chip fucked me up. If it wasn’t for the lemon juice chemically neutralizing the capsaicin, I’d be a goner. Even with this bitter miracle of fruit juice, the chip still put me on my ass. I could’ve sworn I contacted IBS, I mean, how could a healthy intestinal circuit feel like it’s moving shattered glass all because of one chip. I will rue the day that I participated in the Paqui One Chip Challenge.
This Monday. 10 Am. Ojai Valley School. The last conference room on the right. It’s going down.
I will be orchestrating the show of the century via my video podcast. Myself, my co-host, and my newspaper’s editor will be eating the world’s spiciest chip. On camera. It WILL be the highlight of my year or the reason I get violently ill and have to leave school.
Going into the new year, I needed new ideas for my budding podcast. To be honest, my coverage and predictions about Omicron were shaky to say the least, some would even say disastrous but hey you live and you learn.
ANYWAYS, a ton of planning has gone into this. I had the idea on a crisp Thursday morning at 7:15 am on the toilet browsing Tik Tok. I saw this random old dude force feeding himself for views on tik tok when I saw him down 4 or 5 very spicy chilies, some daused in the world’s hottest hot sauce, followed up by a shot of vodka and him spraying WD-40 down his gullet. The funniest part is he starts with this cute little gag accent which slowly transitions into him moaning, whining, and crying as he forces himself to eat them (attached his so-called highlights at the bottom). Truly enthralling stuff. When I got to Journalism that day, I was instantly bombarded by my teacher and editor about not doing enough during my time between episodes (true but no way I would admit it).
“I’m gonna make my editor eat something so hot, she doesn’t have a tongue to tell me to slack off less,” I thought to myself.
It’s a pretty great plan if you factor our the fact that I will be torturing myself and my co-host for a gag/to see my editor’s face when she eats this chip.
I have created a whole show around the one spicy chip which I will outline:
First, we will chat around for a second, maybe get a cameo on the fourth mic from our teacher, get some other Journalism students to chime in and what not, setting the stage for the main event. Then, we will spin a wheel to determine the order in which we eat the chips. Then, another wheel will be spun to determine how much of the chip will be eaten: 60% for 1/3, 35% for 2/3, and 5% for 3/3. You are gonna hear “another wheel” a handful more times throughout this blog. Get used to it. After this spin, we will eat the chip, and film our reaction for 3 minutes. We will then all play Family Feud while handling the heat. The winner will get first dibs to spin two wheels that are mostly filled with things that help heat like milk and carbs, but also some negatives like tonic water and an onion. The other two will spin this wheel in the order of their points in Feud. After this, we will have a spelling bee, something my editor is impossibly terrible at. After this, we will probably wrap up, and that will be our show.
I am pretty excited, but I hope nobody gets a stomach ulcer leading to me getting sued. I’ll attach the podcast to my next blog so stay tuned.
Starting from my 9th grade, I can feel the time passing so fast. Every year passed with a blink. I kept complaining about school and life until recently I noticed that I only have a couple of years left being a student. I started to like being a student actually, the only struggle is homework every night. Otherwise, I can just have fun and do anything I want with my family and friends. With my work experience before, I imagine in the future, I will need to wake up so early and do my work until 9 pm. When I get home it’s probably 10 pm, plus, doing some stuff and taking a shower will be at 11 pm; Afterwards, I need to sleep at least before 12 am so I won’t be tired from tomorrow’s work. I also imagine that every day will feel the same. Nothing surprising will happen to me. It all just feels so complicated.
In this case, I want to give myself a goal. Although I might be busy working in the future, I still want to do something that I always wanted to do, which is to become a Youtuber. I’m not sure about when I am going to start, maybe from college or maybe after college. I love taking videos and editing them. Some of the successful jobs started from interest, and my interest is editing videos, so I give myself a goal to start the action and share those videos I made with everyone. I’m thinking the content of the video I will be posting is about a vlog or some prank video with my friends. To be honest, I haven’t started yet so I don’t know what the content will be. However, I wish I could do or even try anything I want to do before I get old and couldn’t move my body anymore.
I thought New York was such a mess all around. I thought New York has so many crimes happening every day. I thought New York only had cloudy days. I thought New York had nothing that attracted me. I thought I knew all the facts about New York.
My parents told me so much why they didn’t like New York.
I watch the news on television about how terrible New York is.
However, It’s really different from what I expected.
My parents are right about the environment. It is a little messy all around the street, plus, there are lots of homeless people who come to me asking for money. Although there is trash all around the city, New York City is still attractive to me. After all, the people, the city, and the weather make it impossible for me to not see how perfect NYC is.
The best part that I will never forget is when I went to Time Squares for the first time. That night, right after dinner, my friends took me to Time Squares. The city looked vivid with the colorful LED lights and screens shining all over the city. As I walk towards the center of the street, listening to some random people playing the song, Empire State of Mind by JAY- Z, I feel alive again for the first time. At that moment I knew I became a New Yorker and I wanted to be a New Yorker. Watching people walking pass by with smiles on their faces. Don’t tell me it’s not paradise while everyone can be whoever they want to be and enjoy the night with their loved ones. It’s difficult to describe with words as there are so many beautiful and exciting moments happening every second.
“Do you miss home?” “Do you miss your parents?” As an international student, these are the questions that I receive most often from people. My answer has always been no, and inexplicably, I’ve never missed home while I’m in a foreign country.
But that answer has changed recently.
During Christmas break, I lived near the LA area, where large Chinese community exists. There, you can find almost anything from China and other places in Asia. I never knew that there could be such a place in the US.
When I had authentic Chinese food in one of the restaurants, I suddenly realized that I do miss home. Or more precisely, the two years of my life in China before I came here. I miss my old school, my friends, and my hometown Nanking. I had a sudden urge to book a flight and go back at that moment. But after 5 seconds, I remembered that my friends are not in China either, they are in Germany, Ireland, Canada… just the same as me.
The feeling of nostalgia was something that I never experienced, and I now I finally understood how other people felt when they say they missed home.
I understand that the school gym is not perfect like the gym from other schools because of Thomas Fire. Part of our campus has been burned, therefore, our gym has to move out to the small place behind the bathroom so we have enough room for classes. The mud covers all the equipment in the gym and the smell of the rusted dumbbell makes the atmosphere in the gym more like a “real” gym. However, the maintenance is really bad, the number of people and the direct sun cause all the equipment to rust and break. Last week, one of my friends went to the gym and he literally got hurt when doing the bench press; the bracket of the bench broke. Although weightlifting is not a competitive sport like basketball and soccer, the school should be still taking the weight lifter seriously. Not many students want to become a bodybuilder, but there are a few who are serious about fitness.
The purpose of doing fitness is not only want to have a good body shape but also to build a good lifestyle; a healthy lifestyle. It’s important to have a regular routine of eating, sleeping, and working out. Eating too much protein powder and meat will only break your body, therefore, finding the balance of eating vegetables and meat is really important to become healthier and stronger. The only way to get stronger is to keep working out, and the use of having a long good sleep is to let the muscle rest and let it rebuild to a stronger muscle.
If you are curious about my workout routine here it is:
I really, really love opossums. They’re smart, unique, friendly, and adorable. Here’s some cool facts about them.
They are the only marsupial that isn’t native to Australia.
Opossums are marsupials, which means they’re a subspecies of mammal that carry their embryo out to term in a pouch on their belly. The most commonly known marsupial is probably the kangaroo. Opossums aren’t much like kangaroos, but they also carry their joeys – a litter of which can contain up to 20 babies – in a pouch and then on their back until the joeys are ready to live by themselves.
There are several species of opossums, all of which are native to the Americas. They range all the way from South America to Canada.
Much like apes, humans, raccoons, and some other species of animals, opossums have opposable thumbs. This means they have a fifth finger on the side of their paw that allows them to grasp objects and handle them in a way most that other animals can’t. Opossums usually don’t use this advantage for evil, though. Raccoons, on the other hand (pun not intended), will use their opposable thumbs to get into storage bins, to open trash cans, to unscrew lids of containers, to open doors, and other nefarious things. Opossums are much kinder than raccoons. Plus, it’s unbelievable cute when they hold things in their tiny hands.
Prehensile tails are a trademark feature of monkeys, but opossums have them too. They use their tails to hold onto thin surfaces better, to climb, to hang from branches, and to balance them as they walk. Their tails look a lot like the tails of rats, but there are muscles in their tails that allow them to use them much better than rats can. I, personally, think that their crusty, scaly tails are super cute.
They are omnivores, but don’t hunt mammals(except for mice).
Opossums are omnivores, which means they eat meat and plants. However, unlike most meat-eating animals, they don’t hunt almost any live mammals as their prey. Opossums usually scavenge food from unlocked dumpsters, left out pet food, or road kill. The only live prey that they consume are worms, bugs, mice, and sometimes smaller birds or snakes. If they are really starving, they might go after a larger target like a chicken, but this is very uncommon.
“Playing possum” is a popular expression for pretending to be dead or asleep. Opossums have an flight instinct that causes them to fall to the ground, loll their tongue, un-focus their eyes, and pretend to have died when confronted by predators that they can’t easily escape. They won’t get up even if they’re jostled around. It’s pretty cute. To humans, it just looks like the opossum is having the best nap of its life.
They like to play dress-up.
This fact isn’t scientifically verified, but look at these guys! They sure do look like they’re having fun. They look adorable, too. So stylish.
Sometimes opossums look like they just tripped and fell in front of the popular kids and the popular kids all saw their Paw Patrol lunchbox fall out of their backpack. It’s like my favorite thing. Look at this little guy.
(Photo credit to @gladysopossum on Instagram)
All in all, opossums are pretty cool little animals. If you see one near your house, don’t bother it or hurt it. They’re non-threatening creatures and it’s just living its life. If you can legally rehabilitate opossums or care for disabled ones as pets, definitely do. They’re sweet little guys. I love them so much.
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