“This I Believe” Ideas:

I believe in sharing tea with people. Whenever I go home, my grandmother offers to make me chai, and it’s a tradition I’ve been trying to take up. Making tea for yourself and others is a way of appreciating the small things, of celebrating culture, and of showing love.

I believe in giving your loved ones handmade gifts. My younger sister used to make everyone handmade gifts for Christmas because she was little and didn’t have money to spend, while everyone else would buy things. Today, the gifts we still have are from her (I have a picture frame she made me up in my dorm). Knowing that something is personally meaningful and was created out of love just for you can be a really powerful reminder that someone cares.

I believe in impulse haircuts. Sometimes it’s a terrible idea, but sometimes your gut reaction that something needs to change should be followed because it allows you to start anew. Before I cut my hair short, I had been feeling like something was off for a long time, and indulging the impulse to cut it helped me get rid of the baggage attached to my old hairstyle. It also encouraged me to take more risks with my expression. Sometimes impulsive change can be exactly what you need.

Passion & Civic Issues Blogs:

In a kind of continuation of last semester’s passion blog, I want to highlight banned/challenged books by diverse authors and discuss why they are valuable. This would be paired with a civic examination of censorship in education. I would look at why it has grown in recent years, what justifications people use to advocate for censorship, and how these practices may align or conflict with the goals and intentions of the public education system.

My second idea would be two separate blogs. The passion blog would be reviewing classic and more modern movies with LGBTQ+ themes for how much I personally enjoyed them, how they handle representation, and the strength of their themes and cinematography. The civic issue blog would focus on affirmative action and look into its precedent, arguments for or against it, and what underlying assumptions it makes about historically marginalized groups.

This became a really long first post! If you managed to read to the end, please let me know what you’d be interested in seeing. Here’s to a great start of the semester!