Essence Objects

In English, for the Reflections unit, we focused on writing our personal essays for college applications. To do so, we read through College Essay Essentials by Ethan Sawyer. The first step in our brainstorming process was to come up with a list of 20 or more “essence objects”— objects, either physical or non-physical, that defined who we were. Here’s mine.

On top of the list, I’ll also be adding a brief description for each item to explain its significance to me and how it affects me.

CD copy of “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”
1. 1. 1. This is my favorite album of all time, and it’s helped me through the lightest and darkest of times alike.
DVD copy of “The World’s End”
1. 1. 1. This is my favorite movie, and it’s one that’s given me a deeper understanding of storytelling, both visually and verbally.
Vivid yet faded green hoodie, beaten by the years and bleached by age
1. 1. 1. I wear a bright green hoodie from the November 2016 PYT production of The Wizard of Oz that I was in. I wear it almost every day, and became kind of known for doing so. Richard Fukuda gave me the nickname of “The Big Green Man” because of it. I’ll take it.
Green manual transmission Honda CR-V, rattling and rusting with 21 years but maneuvering like a mechanical eagle
1. 1. 1. This is the car I drive: a 1998 manual transmission Honda CR-V. It may still technically belong to my parents, but I’ve grown rather attached to that car.
Long expired train ticket, ripped at the sides and falling apart
1. 1. 1. I’m a train enthusiast, so there you go. I suspect there’s always one of these deep in my backpack, having never been cleaned out from trips over the summer.
      Essence Object #3.
Map of the United States, covered with red and black lines wrapping every which direction, beaming with energy and enthusiasm and cluttered with words and phrases
1. 1. 1. I’m too lazy to actually make a map like this, but it’s intended to show that I love to move— to a fault, actually, where I want to move at all times and always be somewhere else. I rather enjoy traveling, and I’d love to go just about everywhere I can.
Ice cold can of soda, coated with condensation
1. 1. 1. I like soda. Next.
Amateur handheld video camera on an ancient and disfigured tripod
1. 1. 1. This is one I’d have to kind of disagree with now. It refers to my waterproof LUMIX camera from 2012, one that I’ve used to film various recordings, and an old tripod I’ve found in a closet, dating back to the Dark Ages. But I wouldn’t really say this embodies me so much.
1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of a train crossing over a bridge
1. 1. 1. I like trains, and I also have an obsession with doing jigsaw puzzles. I’ve completed many different 1000 piece puzzles within the span of 24 hours. Yes, ladies, I’m still available.
A literal bolt of lightning inside of a glass bottle
1. 1. 1. I love weather— especially thunderstorms. Lightning is gorgeous, and thunder is eerie and beautiful. Oh yeah, and I’m also deathly afraid of both. I have astraphobia, a common phobia but still a word that no autocorrect has been able to understand actually exists in the English language. Essentially, I love thunderstorms, but only if I (and everyone else I care about) is inside and safe.
      Essence Object #11.
A high quality image of a gray, cool, textured, and comforting overcast morning
1. 1. 1. I like cloudy days. Go check out my Perspective Piece video over in the Digital Media section.
An expired and dissipated fastpass for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye
1. 1. 1. My family’s a little bit Disneyland crazy. Or more than that. I’ll never admit how many days I’ve spent in that park, and I don’t want to sound like a braggart so I won’t tell you. But “Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye” is an attraction that I highly respect for its amazing pacing, wonderful soundtrack, and absolutely mind-boggling theming. I could also rant for days about how much that ride needs a touch-up in the theming department. And I’m pretty sure my wallet perpetually contains an old expired Fastpass that I’ve never bothered to recycle.
      Essence Object #13.
A flattened, rusty, smooth and thin sheet of what once was copper currency, sacrificed to memory
1. 1. 1. My friends Richard Fukuda and Jacques”Haquis” Kaweski went out to a restaurant in downtown Mountain View, followed by the Mountain View Caltrain station, after school on a minimum day back in sophomore year. The exact date was actually October 19, 2017. Something about that day was just so carefree and fun, and it’s a sort of magical memory that I can’t explain. But on that day, my friends took spare change and placed three pennies on the rails to crush them into flattened pieces. I didn’t put any of them on the rails because I had a stick up my ass, but I still have my own one and I carry it with me in my wallet everywhere I go.
An orange feline, yellow-green eyes piercing through the helpless world
1. 1. 1. Cats are awesome. I have 3, and I’ve had 5 total in my life. That’s all, really.
A Key West powerboat, providing a skillful bridge between the wilderness and the town
1. 1. 1. I got my boating license in August 2019 after learning how to drive a boat on Lake Winnipesaukee. The two weeks I spent there over the summer were some of the best of my entire life. They feel so far away now… but it meant a lot to me.
      Essence Object #14.
A middle finger, defiantly pointed towards the heavens, implicitly accompanied by a multifaceted grin
1. 1. 1. In other words, despite every time I feel like I screw up or I’m screwed over by the world, I try my best to just keep my head up and go onward. I especially like the “multifaceted” part.
A crisp, clean, and smooth deck of vibrant Bicycle Rider Back playing cards
1. 1. 1. I must have been getting desperate at this point. Back in 8th grade and 9th grade, I obsessed over cardistry and collected playing cards. A pretty impressive collection, too.
A jar containing the fresh water of a lake
1. 1. 1. Lake Winnipesaukee and Lake Tahoe are two of my favorite places in the world. And lakes are far superior to oceans as well. Fresh water is incomparable to salt water… blech.
      Essence Object #15.
A smooth and chunky crystal, lit from within by a colored light, alternating between red and green
1. 1. 1. Okay, so, I’ve spent a while trying to break this one down. If I remember correctly, this is where I got very, very desperate and just squeezed in a blatant metaphor. It reflects the two sides of me, ever-changing between happiness and sadness, very much out of my control.
A jar of mayonnaise with one of the N’s crossed out
1. 1. 1. I don’t like mayonnaise. But I LOVE “Mayonaise”! In fact, it’s my favorite song ever written. And, spoiler alert, its lyrics contain my yearbook quote…
An organized list of highly specific personal experiences
1. 1. 1. I love organizing things. Dumb things that don’t matter, that is. Not actual school assignments or responsibilities. I also love telling stories about my past, so, yeah.

Personal Museum Curation

We went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as is Freestyle tradition. It actually happened to be on my half birthday when we went, so it was a real treat for me, since I… don’t like modern art. Too much. At all.

I was actually somewhat ecstatic to do this Personal Museum Curation project, as I had quite a bit to say about what I saw there. Unfortunately I didn’t include my favorite photo, which was taken of a red rectangular mirror on the wall, in which you can see Michael Tucker in the reflection looking confused and me flipping off the camera shamelessly. I didn’t include that photo for obvious reasons. And I won’t include it here for the same obvious reasons.

So the idea of this project was that we chose from art pieces we saw there and wrote about ones we would include in our own hypothetical museum, as well as ones we would not include in that museum, and explanations for our choices. Here’s my museum, lovingly named after the town in The World’s End (because I guess I ran out of creativity when making this).

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I won’t take back anything I said there. While politically I’d say I’m liberal, I’m certainly not when it comes to art. It feels so often that the worse the art gets, the better it is for its innovative style and structure. You can try to explain to me all you want how that blood red mirror actually represents communism or how we all view ourselves in a darkened manner through reflections or something, but at the end of the day, it’s a red mirror. Meh.

Personal Essay

Oh no. Don’t make me think about this one again…

The personal essay was an English assignment, but on top of that, an essay to write for college applications. It set out to answer the same questions as everything else in the Reflections unit about who we are… except this one actually mattered.

Okay, so, I’m going to be real here for a minute. I applaud you for having made it this far into these walls of text I’ve typed out with hours of my life that I could have spent doing other things, and I’m grateful if somebody is actually enjoying it. Most of the things I write on this site are very tongue-in-cheek. I’m very sarcastic when it comes to portraying myself, because I don’t want to sound too pretentious or egocentric. But I’m going to have to be vulnerable for a bit here.

High school has been far from easy. I couldn’t elaborate fully just how uniquely difficult it’s been for me, but it’s been a ride. Depression, anxiety, and inattentive ADHD have made it a tricky one to go through, and I’ve dealt with certain strangely intense feelings that I didn’t feel like I could actually relate to anyone about. I wasn’t sure exactly where to start with my personal essay, but I knew it would relate to those topics.

I considered writing about the traumatic spawn of my insecurities regarding relationships, but ultimately decided to leave freshman year aside for another day and looked back to events in the latter half of junior year— the same ones that inspired my Reflections film project. I wrote my first draft about the feelings that originated from that time, but I had it take place in the present day when I was writing it. It surrounded my introversion and how hard it was to transition between locations, exemplified by returning from Lake Winnipesaukee for senior year.

I liked it, but a month after initially writing it, I didn’t feel the same kind of connection. It didn’t feel honest enough, and felt more like a projection outward onto the world and less of a reflection of myself. So on a whim, I completely scrapped it and started anew.

My new draft followed a structure as if it were one day of my life— something I tried to parallel by working in references to songs on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I was hell-bent on finding a way to show how much I cared about that album, and how much it feels to me like it follows a single day in one’s life. I originally set out to write a story off a 7-point structure that fluctuated between 4 energized and positive moods and 3 depressed and negative ones. I ended up scrapping it in favor of a 5-point structure going between 3 highs and 2 lows. I made sure to highlight my experience in theatre and how much it means to me, since it’s something I often fail to address in my real life.

I can’t say too much on what I really love about this essay and what I really hate, considering I quite literally have one round of revisions left to do in the morning as of typing this out right now. It’s too close to judge it myself— but hey, maybe you can do that for me!

The essay is a highly personal piece and I’m proud to have that part of me written into a paper, regardless of how good the final product may be.

My final draft for the personal essay was completed on 10/31/19 to just barely skim the early action deadline. Here is a PDF of it.

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This is a PDF of the original draft I wrote in September.

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