Decisively led and decisively fought
He galumphed well ahead
The war won
The battles overthought
To his werriwinkle eyes
In their bleary sockets
Victory had begun to melt into rose gold tapestry
The ride home was as merry as it was raucous
The steel by his waist sweltered with pride
Gold in his face beamed gaily wide
But on his arrival
The earth that had been trodden
By his gate
Since his adolescence
Was sown with salt
And marred with pestilence
the various moments i experienced in the valley:
“an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Horseman69 said to me today.
“ow about bananas?” I asked.
“too much work peeling them.” Lazy ass.
“but you also need to peel the apples.”
“no, you don’t.”
“fine.”
“and they get gross quickly, if you have left a banana in your bag, it will smell fantastic.”
“so does an apple.”
“no, apples rot slowly, they wouldn’t smell like someone has died in my bag after a day.”
“fine.”
I like bananas as much as the Minions do. I always have a banana in my hand when I walk out from the cafeteria after breakfast.
Bananas can make people happy, at least they make me happier. In fact, they do possess tryptophan, and it will convert into serotonin, which is the happy-mood brain neurotransmitter.
Happiness is prominent to our health, so why not eat bananas? A banana a day can also keep the doctor away.
Btw, the Minions love apples as well, they call them “bapples.”
So maybe we shouldn’t be picky between apples and bananas… a bapple a day keeps the doctor away.
It’s finally Winter Season. I never had Soccer in winter season, and I can’t imagine playing Soccer while it is freezing outside. I’m still happy that fall season is over, meaning that I can participate in sports that I actually enjoy. Soccer was the first sport that I was involved in Since I was young, and one of my favorite sports to watch. I’m not a crazy athlete who wants to go to college for Soccer, but I always try hard and try to test my limit, when I’m Involved. Soccer is all about teamwork, which I love the most. For sure it would be great to have crazy talented players on the team, but discordance among teammates would eventually lead to failure. To have a successful Soccer Season, harmony between teammates is crucial, and I hope in this Soccer season the team could communicate and support each other for better results.
Like two concentric circles
I feel the dawns and risings
Falling into time
Orbiting and cycling like rings of some grand design
Winds blow me where the water runs in time
To keep my eyes above the ribbons parched and frozen
Like an ocean master’s finger hold
Her careless calloused caress
It screams of devotion
Of a calm
Of a sailor’s test
Her arms are ragged and fearless
Her toes are soaked and furled
She holds it all together
Like god holds our world
She chews upon ideas
Like a mouthful of wonder
Like cheeks full of zeal
And I am left on the deck like a blubberless seal
Wondering where along my path will I learn such sacred songs
I feel like I can hear them
Like leaves
The lessons
thrust to the ground from their canopy homes
and dragged
Like billions of fingernails on a world sized chalkboard
I like your tattoo, and your smile.
You like my height and my humor.
You’re goofy, and a wanderer, and a music lover, and insecure. Me too.
I’m affectionate, and outgoing, and silly, and awkward at times. You too.
I think together we’re perfectly imperfect.
I know I always get my hopes up after a good first date, but I hope this will be different; I hope you will remain the amazing guy you were.
I really like who I think you are. I really hope you’re as amazing as I think you are.
I really hope you like me too. I really hope you think I’m as great as I think you are.
I really hope this will workout.
There are some issues though, but why focus on the negative.
I don’t know how this is turn out, but I’ll see day by day.
So I’ll keep listening to Sunflower Seeds and admire snake tattoos.
Everyone on my mom’s side suffers from depression. Some members on my dad’s side are alcoholics and suicidal.
Addiction is 50% genetic and 50% due to poor coping skills.
Depression is 40% genetic and 60% environmental.
Due to this, I am 90% screwed.
Mental health is something that has affected my life for years and will continue to.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and OCD.
By fourteen I was engulfed in an eating disorder that controlled and altered my life. My eating disorder was a blend of all evils, a coping skill for all my problems.
I hated my body, felt out of control in many aspects of my life, experienced great anxiety around food, and believed people would love me if I was skinny.
Starving myself fixed my problems, or at least I thought it did. I lost weight rapidly. I felt in control when I refused to eat. I got hooked in my ways.
But like for all things, the high only lasted so long… Even after losing sixty pounds, being underweight, and having every rib and bone in my spine visible, I still looked in the mirror and thought I was fat. My anxiety began to get worse, the panic attacks were hourly occurrences, and my heart began to fail due to the lack of calories and nutrients. I felt out of control once again, so I restricted even more.
It was a vicious cycle, and it continued… leaving me falling deeper into darkness, insanity, and sadness.
By the summer of that same school year, I was in the hospital. My struggles with mental health were close to taking my life.
Years have gone by now, and much has changed.
I no longer cope with anxiety and depression by restricting my food intake, I no longer weigh 80 pounds. I’m back in school, back in sports, and am much more emotionally stable.
But some things haven’t.
I still have anxiety attacks weekly, I still hate my body and worry about weight, and I am still extremely insecure and it affects how I act (making me seem full of myself when in reality I just need someone to reassure me that I’m not absolute shit). And lastly, I still feel out of control around food. I am unable to stop myself around certain types of food and it scares me. I feel like my previous ability to say no to food has disappeared, and it scares me. I feel like I have gone from starving my self to binging. It scares me a lot.
I need to find balance and balance is hard to find.
Due to statistics and my past, mental health is something I am going to have to deal with for the entirety of my life.
I don’t like this, but I can’t change this. So every day I strive to find healthy ways to cope with the way my brain thinks, the emotions I feel, and my general outlook on life because I believe, with effort and dedication, everyone has the opportunity to be happy, no matter how hard it may be.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
From the smell of fresh baked goods always circulating the house to the comfort of a warm bed, the idea of home sparks warmth and happiness, and I have been so lucky to consider my home in that way.
The white door that creeks and the roof that leaks is where I find home currently, but I have a vision of where I want to be or see myself once I have finished growing up.
Being a mix of all cultures, the Philippines in itself represents me. Living in a higaonon hut on one of the several islands, I would devour salty chicken adobo and lumpia.
Settling into my home, I would write in my journal about the culture that I experienced that day while looking out from my hut into the orange sunset reflecting off the ocean.
With beams of warm colors bouncing off the water, I would feel my late grandmother and her mother, wrapping their arms around me with their soft, delicate arms. Eventually, I will feel a sense of comfort and understanding of my surrounding culture.
Living the simple life and knowing my roots, I would sense closure and be able to flee to my new home in San Fransisco, California.
Even though I was not born there, my roots are in California and more specifically, San Francisco. Like my little Filipino grandmother, I would come from the Philippines and go to the Golden City.
My fate would bring me to the perfect two bedrooms and bathroom apartment on the seventh floor having an auburn red door. Decorated with poems written by my father, my apartment would have the smell of essential oils embedded into the walls, specifically lavender representing my mother’s spirituality.
This would be my sanctuary where tears would be shed, laughs would explode, and love would be felt.
The Mission district, where my brother was born, would give light to the art forward theme that I created in all the rooms but made sure that every area had its own distinctive flair.
Wanting to explore more about my culture and ancestors, I would travel to the plains of Africa. Settling down in Nairobi, Kenya, where the lifestyle is filled with the history of the Bantu people and the Swahili language, my home would be in a Kikuyu house with no rooms.
Compared to my other homes, I would be connected with the earth where elephants and antelopes have carried their children on their migratory voyage.
This home would give me insight to my African heritage before Europeans came into their territory, before slavery, and before segregation. Instead of learning about the hardships of my culture, I will learn about the rich tradition that the country brings.
I have always been a homebody. I find extreme comfort with the idea of my home and enjoy its atmosphere. I am excited to see where my future home may be.
Worried about the potential health damages cigarettes might do to him, my father quit smoking a couple years ago. Before his abstinence, he had been smoking for over a decade. Cigarettes were a major category of his life for all those years, but he still abandoned it steadfastly. Why? Because smoking kills.
Many are unaware of the damages that come with smoking, whereas the others are unable to stop smoking. As a hobby, people don’t see the harm; as an addiction, people find it hard to abstain from. How is cigarette-smoking such a bad thing? To begin with, smoking jeopardizes your health, the health of the people around you, and the health of the planet.
If you were a smoker, smoking cigarettes can induce lung diseases by damaging the airways and the alveoli located in your lungs. The regeneration in your lungs is slow and according to the studies of stem cells in the past few years, there is little to no effective way to regenerate lost bronchioles or alveoli in humans. Smoking damages your lungs while you have little chance to regrow.
Nicotine is a major part in the making of cigarettes. The nicotine-intake from cigarettes decreases the amount of oxygen your heart gets and elevates your heart rate. More stress is put on your heart because of smoking. That’s how smoking induces heart diseases. However, that’s not all cigarettes bring you, they also bring death.
The statistics speak volume. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), more than 1 in 10 deaths worldwide from Cardiovascular Diseases in 2000 were attributed to smoking. “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,” the CDC stated.
In total, diseases that can be caused by cigarette-smoking are: lung cancer, heart diseases, strokes, aortic aneurysm, oropharyngeal cancer, esophageal cancer, diabetes… There are many other symptoms triggered by smoking. However, it’s not just the smoker that’s affected by smoking, secondhand smoke kills as well.
According to the CDC, More than 41,000 people die in a year because of secondhand smoke exposure. All these people are going to be gone because there is a smoker in the office, in the hallway, or in the family. You are slowly killing your family if you smoke next to them!
Cigarette smoking also leads to environmental pollution as it releases pollutants into the atmosphere. The cigarette butts are littered everywhere—you would often see them on the ground. The leftover chemicals in cigarettes would also seep into the ground or waterways, inducing further pollutions. By the way, cigarettes can also be an environmental hazard as smokers often fail to put out cigarette thoroughly. When they dump the still lit cigarette butts on the ground, it’s a dangerous fire hazard. In a report from the Los Angles Times, on Nov. 8, 2018, a wild fire in California killed 85 people when it ripped the Butte County apart.
In my eyes, smokers are reapers. They come not with a sickle, but with the smoke that chokes, with a fire that burns. If you are one of them, listen to me: the one that’s eventually get reaped is yourself.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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