Before joining DECA, I thought of only one option for my future: to become a doctor. That changed in my sophomore year when, coaxed by my friend, I reluctantly decided to join my school’s DECA chapter. At first, writing and researching the content for thirty pages of a simulated business report seemed ridiculously impossible...
Click. That’s all it takes to travel to an alternate dimension. Rays of death shoot out of a box, rotting and tainting the minds of those who dare venture into the treacherous shows that lie within specific time slots on specific channels. As horrible as television is for my physical body, each show bombards me with lessons, stories, and new worlds to delve into...
Written works are somewhat of an obsession of mine. Books alone offer so many possibilities: the chance to enter and explore a new, fantastic world built upon the mind of an equally fantastic author (such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire), to look at the world through the view of a different person, with different views and with different experience, and see how different it can be, to explore the world through the eyes of an economist and see how one might weigh each of his or her decisions, and in the process learn a new way to view the world (I love works like Economics Without Illusions and Undercover Economist)...
The day was December 25, 2002; my eighth Christmas. As always on Christmas morning, I was sitting around the Christmas tree with my family, barely able to sip my chocolate milk for all my excitement; it was finally time to unwrap all the presents! But with each new present unwrapped, my excitement fell...
I hear the sharp, frantic clink of metal on metal: “tap-tap-tap”. This is unusual; at this point in the dive, the only sounds I usually hear are those of my own rhythmic breathing. I swivel as quickly as I can through the deep, dark water and turn to see my uncle has drifted quite a bit back from me – I can hardly see him through the limited visibility of the 120 foot depth – and is slamming his dive knife as quickly as he can against his tank, with far more bubbles streaming behind him than he could possibly spew out, no matter how fast his breathing – something is wrong...
The numb silence surrounded the neighborhood as my head collided against the truck’s front bumper. The blurred sight of worried looks, the beeping of heart monitors, and the drum of CT scans became the realities of my nine year old world, which screeched to a halt as the subdural hematoma spread across my brain...
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