Ball Knowledge

  A little while ago I was at a MUN conference when someone randomly came up to me. He started making small talk, but I could instantly feel the fake energy radiating off of him. Obviously, I had to match it,  as one of the biggest aspects of Model UN deals with having to suppress your real personality and appear friendly and connected to everyone. This fake conversation, which I thought would end normally, had an ending that was a first for me. He pulled out his phone, and I expected maybe what's your Instagram or let's make a group chat with people from the committee . Instead, he opened up the LinkedIn app, stuck his phone at me, and asked me to type in my LinkedIn. I couldn't help but break character and make a face when he asked. Regardless, he persisted, so I had to. My facial reaction From there, I watched him gallivant around to the rest of the committee and repeat the same process, collecting each person's LinkedIn like Pokémon. As Pinker states, language has ...

  My name means 'unparalleled' in Sanskrit. However, every single time I've met someone, the first time they try to type my name, it always goes the exact same way. 'Hey Advil  *Advik' My name, rather than its definition of unparalleled, became a parallel to a corporate pain relief medicine. Rather than staying unique, it became auto-corrected for most of my life as a headache cure. My parents chose the name for two reasons: first, to rhyme with my brother's name, Rishik, but also to keep ties to our roots through culture and language. Growing up, it often became a joke among my friends and me rather than something that was deep. Whenever someone saw a bottle of Advil at the store they would send a picture and go haha that's you. As a child of immigrants, the difficulties I've had with my name are much easier than most. Mine are comedic and short-term mistakes with the occasional struggling sub butchering my name. The very technology that is able to scan...

 Located between four enclosed walls from 7am to 2pm, students in the United States of America wake up every morning and fuel themselves with a mysterious potion, sknird ygrene . They come in all sorts of brightly colored metal cylinders painted with the most unnatural colors to be found in nature. Once poured out, they resemble the color of urine, yet students constantly keep drinking them with no remorse. Each potion is filled to the brim with chemicals that the drinkers themselves don't even know the names of. Mystical ingredients such as guarana and taurine comprise this drink of poisons, which is continued to be consumed all for a wake-up call — 200 mg of stimulants to keep the consumer awake, especially during the seasons of trials and terrors that plague the school year. At one point, the student will jitter from the sheer intensity of the potion's wake-up call, lose sleep, and feel uncontrollable. As consumption increases each day, so does the necessity of the daily p...