Potatoes, Cancer, and Lena Dunham

Sue me I wanna be sushi. Sorry, I had to get that out. Audrey Hobert is my new favorite artist. Yes I only know 2/2 of her songs, but my obsession with each is truly record breaking on my end. I think my Alexa is annoyed with the amount of times I’ve yelled “Alexa, play bowling alley.”

Is it bad that I’m watching Girls again? I know I can’t relate to any of it, but watching Hannah say she’s the voice of her generation is a revolutionary experience for a young writer. I know how it feels to tell your parents that you want to be a writer. They look at you as if you just told them that you want to be broke and homeless, but obviously they haven’t read The Obsession, my new favorite book (got it for free on my kindle, so its a win). I never said I was gonna be a struggling actress, although if broadway wants me I wouldn’t say no.

Last week I did a non-credit bearing pre-college program over at Stony Brook University. My mentality when I applied was I have to do a pre-college program this summer because I have nothing else lined up. At least last year I had a weeks long program that I volunteered at. It was a summer program with children with autism. I wish I had more passion when it comes to children and teaching, but sadly I don’t. Teachers truly are godsends, devoting there lives to helping the future generations. Anyways, when I had gotten in I was ecstatic. I knew these programs were highly selective because you can only fit about 20 kids per course. I was very proud to be one of them. But then I got the bad news, the creative writing course was canceled for my session. I thought about switching to session two because I feared if I didn’t do what i liked I would pull my hair out. But sacrificing a Greece trip to stay at the Stony Brook campus didn’t exactly sound appealing. The admissions ambassador that communicated with me let me know that I had first choice in any of the programs. The programs for the week consisted of Cancer Biology, Computational linguistics, and Diving into dental sciences. Immediately when I saw that I said, “no, no, and no.” But time was ticking and I felt bad to keep the girl waiting so I chose Cancer Biology.

Fast forward about 5 weeks and there I was on the goose poop covered land that is the Stony Brook campus (I have a very real and uncontrollable fear of birds). Not gonna lie watching my parents leave was so hard. Not because I was gonna miss them so much, it was more so that I was jealous that they got to eat at home because the dining haul there is definitely a lottery. The only thing I could rely on was the potato’s, I looked like a teen mom most of my days there because absolutely nothing was gonna come out of my body. The freshman 15 is very real you guys.

To prefix this, I have no interest in science, unless it comes with a grade. I know it sounds bad but try talking to me about cells and you will see my eyes wondering. My first day sitting in that lab was very hard. I thought I could handle conversations about cancer and its effects, but boy was I wrong. It felt insensitive almost. But it overall made me very uncomfortable. I wanted the professor, a literal doctor of science, to stop talking to me about his life’s work because I was about to start crying. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but hearing they were giving zebra fish cancer to test them made me even worse. I don’t even understand how I thought I was going to be ok when my literal grandfather died from pancreatic cancer.

I wouldn’t have survived this without my suite mates and the dining hall’s french fries. Every night we made sure to watch love island together. This had to be the least climactic season yet, everything was so predictable. But everything ended and now I see them posing on TikTok, kinda different from watching them shack it up in bed, but I’m ok with the alternative.

Thank god I’m home now. My body couldn’t handle the potato’s or the bathroom situation. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see my dad smoking in a parking lot.