During my senior year of college, I attended a number of job interviews on campus. At one of them, I was interviewed by three separate people. The first person asked most of the questions I had been prepared for. We talked “a little about me” and went over my accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses. I robotically told her that I am a quick learner, but also gave some examples to back it up.

+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you turn an elephant into bite sized pieces? Cut it up. How do you cut it up? Use a tool. A pair of scissors. It’s natural. We do it with our teeth when we eat because even bite-sized food still requires multiple bites, incisions, and chews. It’s how we cook, cutting the food up to more efficiently brown the vegetables.

I learned a fundamental truth about myself around Christmas in 1996. That was the year that I convinced my dad to let me get a PlayStation for Christmas. The video game console had been out for a while, so I was late to the party. But it was fine because the most up-to-date system I owned was a Super Nintendo, which was outdated. It worked. He agreed. We went to the video game store the weekend before Christmas and he bought me the PlayStation, along with a couple of games.

+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ On my first day of kindergarten, I remember mindlessly singing Under the Sea from the little mermaid and getting destroyed by my table mates about it. I cried, the teacher intervened, and eventually those boys became my best friends growing up. But a feature of our relationship was them teasing me incessantly. And as I grew up, it kept happening. My cousins, slightly older than me, made fun of me to the point at which I’d dread them coming to visit and would also at once be excited.

+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ I’ve been writing songs since I was 7. A family friend had given birth to a baby boy, and for whatever reason, I decided to write a song about it on piano. I don’t remember the process, though I do remember playing the song at recitals. My piano teacher even let me make sheet music for the song using Midi. Then, when I was 13, I wrote a poem that an older friend turned into a song.