Glossy fusion of an educational center and dog treat store (made and sold by the folks at Inclusion Connections!). Precise, white light and faux stone floor. Curly cursive and signs and generous smiles and laughs and compliments doled out.
I help Alex out with our rocket workshop. I sit in the back and I nod—I don’t really provide reassurance. Alex knows how to teach, but it is his first time teaching this specific workshop. So, I try to show that I too am listening. One of the students has made a bottle rocket before in high school; others giggle when looking at their construction paper fins and cone (which we endearingly call a hat). It feels like a 3D Picasso work, with corners and shapes and brilliant colors sticking out. As we launch, the heat is sweltering, as if we have entered a human-sized oven, and we are the pizza rolls or Costco taquitos that some other-worldly giant is preparing. “Hot! Hot! Hot!” someone exclaims.
Vrrrrrm! The rocket ascends with great speed. Moments later, it ricochets on the concrete slab outside the building. We all cheer and high five and wait for the next. Bottle rockets are great—they are “canonical” and classic curriculum. When I was younger and teaching and trying to design a program, I insisted on novelty, something that would transcend traditional STEM instruction. (The first lesson plan I created was about Lindor Chocolates and food engineering: why are the centers more cold? And more broadly, what does engineering have to do with the way we bring people together? I think the kids ended up liking the chocolate more than the actual learning goal, but I guess I liked it, which is why I created it). And so, sometimes I wonder, in my pursuit of interestingness, how often I lose what’s real and what works, and how often my ideas succumb to implementation.
I leave feeling energy and with a promise to myself that I will become like the staff someday.
—
Bold blues—not the peacocking kind. A rich, muted tone dying the sky. Streaks of feathery white breaking the (beautiful) monotony. Also precise white (street) lights. Like, the ones at a a high school football game you and your friends begrudgingly attended. This moment could be a vintage postcard, but you only have an iPhone. So, you take a dimmed photo.
I leave in the middle of the baseball game. I have retreated into my thoughts so much so that I don’t even see the game happening below me. We are high up, and my skin feels soggy. It’s not really, but it feels like I am in a jacuzzi without the water. My legs stick to the seat, and my thoughts intertwine with intensity. I call my mom, and the conversation escalates. My voice sharpens, with a hurrah of force that I don’t even particularly recognize. I speak in Chinese and then English, and I notice a couple of stolen glances. Our conversation is familiar—we lull into the same patterns, the same fractures and fissures.
I don’t leave the call frustrated, though I feel it fleetingly during the actual call. I leave slightly indignant and determined. I have made up my mind, at least in this moment, about the person I will be, the work I hope to do, and the life I hope to build. There is no clear vision: who I do this with and how I do it are untouched. But I feel a pulse of familiarity and finality, just as I did in high school. Except this time, I know this is me—it is not a blip of circumstance or chance. Yet I still write with vagueness and abstractions. Maybe I still fear that my life will not unfold this way, and that I will be blown around in winds that have no regard for any of these sentiments.
But even winds have direction, and the least I can do is to continue moving orward in that way. —
Victoria