1

As soon as I got home, I went to the grocery store and got two boxes of cereal: Waffle Crisp and Quaker Oatmeal Squares. The previous time I was home and got Oatmeal Squares my dad ate all of them, so I made sure to get Waffle Crisp too—it’s one of those shiny sugar cereals and my dad would never touch it. However, I found that late at night my munchies always directed me toward Waffle Crisp, so I worked on that steadily and finished it in about four days. In my next session, I discovered that the Oatmeal Squares were already all gone; I had totally neglected my two-cereal strategy, and my dad had been working on the Squares just as steadily in the mornings while I was catching up on sleep. It’s okay, though; now that both cereals are done I get back at him by eating all his Kashi Autumn Harvest, and I think we’re even by now.

2

Today, I was eating a dinner of two veggie burgers, each with tomatoes onions pickles and cheese, and when I finished I felt a huge weight drop to the very bottom of my colon. I went to the bathroom and let go, and what must have been two or three bowls’ worth of fecal soup just poured out instantly, like I overturned a bucket. Isn’t the body an amazing thing that you can hold that all in you without really trying and wait to let it go until you find a receptacle that will contain its mess and odor? Our anuses are literally watertight, and that is a fact to marvel at just as one would marvel at anything else so finely engineered. When someone drops a computer or expensive phone, we all gasp, but when someone trips and falls we laugh; this is not because the computer or phone is a more beautiful or fantastic object that is more upsetting to see destroyed, but because we already take for granted a level of hardiness the body has that most fine technologies do not. We are elegant and sturdy beings.

3

I want to take every class in history and art, but I also secretly want to become a scientist, though I’m confident that in the whole course of my life I never will.

4

When you play a sport, your body and your mind move in sync; you strategize in your mind and sometimes your mind leads your body, but, sometimes, your body leads your mind. I access this when I play ping-pong, and I am not even an excellent player. I sometimes feel the same when producing artwork. You plan beforehand, but the creative process moves faster than you can anticipate; it swells bigger than you and you capture what you can; you photograph an internal moment of genius, and your artwork is whatever is cropped within the frame of your camera, e.g. the words that you use in your essay necessarily exclude other ways you may have thought to write the same idea, but all you can do is write it once and only once. When you play a sport, you may move in any number of directions, but the time pressure to react, to hit the ball back, means you must choose a stroke before thinking fully about what is best or even possible. Genius is when you move faster than you can describe, and then describe it anyways.