I did not plan on what to write so what is said here is me thinking out quietly. I have to eat lunch outside now so I can feel myself getting more winded after certain activities. I always feel guilty when I eat lunch outside because I have no idea what kind of chemicals I’m putting into my body. It’s different with Chinese food though because I know I’m consuming mainly oil, soy sauce, and MSG which are not actually healthy but there is no mystery included in my order. I want to eat some cookies and cream ice cream right now.. My mom got her first iphone somewhere in the middle of the school year. She keeps asking me to add contacts for her and listening to Chinese music. It’s not enough that the volume has my relatives from China complaining but she also sings along to it.

I don’t talk much. Not talking is kind of nice for me because some days I don’t want to talk or see another human being. Sometimes I just have nothing to say. I used to go whole days without saying a sentence. Now I say one or two on average, which is my season high. There are different people at Baruch. Some are pretty and some are pretty to others. I can forget about talking to pretty girls but I’m working on that. Maybe I can drop my pencil by “mistake”, or knock her books down by “mistake” and pick them back up. Who knows.

I am really tired sometimes. I haven’t had a good sleep in months. When I say good sleep I mean the kind where you sleep for 9 hours and wake up and feel like you can dominate that ten pound dumbbell (I’m pretty skinny). No, the sleep I’ve been getting is the type with the 9 hours but waking up like I just stayed up all night. Cheez-its sound pretty good right now.. It’s a good thing that cold water and a rubbing of the eye can get rid of that groggy feeling. There are days when that doesn’t work and I’m walking around like the walking dead. You know those zombies that do a crappy job walking? how they’re stumbling and stuff (exaggerated) and they have that dead look in their eyes. Well they do that because they’re not excited about their brief presence on camera and do half-ass jobs but I do it because I am tired. On the days that the groggy feeling disappears, I’m fine that is until math class. It is boring in there. The teacher has a soft voice. I have to make an effort to keep my eyes open it takes everything not to place my book bag on the floor, lie down and count sheep. Even then I have to take little flash naps, enough to not feel totally crappy, just crappy. These flash naps are in five-second intervals then I snap back up because I don’t want to be rude.

Who’s that on the picture up there? He’s a monkey. A monkey named Wukong. I call him Wu because we’re buddies. He’s one of the champions in the internet game League Of Legends and my favorite. On the days where I don’t feel like doing homework- which are pretty common- I go on and we team up to wreck some noobs. Playing games is a good way to cope with Baruch in my opinion. There is no doubt that Baruch will take some getting use to but I think it will be a good experience. I may not be willing to do homework but once I get started, I get started, exhibit A. This piece has 621 words so far. That’s a whole 121 from the required! Now it’s 631. I’m on fire(634). I’m hoping the length can somehow compensate for how late this post is (sorry) (648).

Tony Cai

Camp Ramapo

It is the year 2008. In case you forgot, it was an era of baggy jeans, air force 1’s, and decisions to be made between getting a sidekick or blackberry. My friends and I, along with the rest of the 6^th grade class are headed to Ramapo. I handed in the list of the ten people (who were my friends) that would share a room together, weeks in advance and since then it was a whole lot of waiting now waiting is over. We were all excited and agreed to meet each other at the front of the school in the morning. I remember getting up at 6 and feeling groggy that morning but unlike the other days where I would calculate exactly how much longer I could stay in bed (down to the last second), I rubbed my eyes, sprung out of bed. The rest is a blur because I was trying to get to my school on time to board the bus. My dad who walked me to school bought me some gummy bears but unlike the gummy bears, I survived the bus ride and now I’m able to tell you my stories at camp Ramapo.

It is springtime and if you’re allergic to pollen, you’re probably aware of the three types of itches that affect the eyes. The first is the itch that is tolerable but you wouldn’t dare relief it because of the fear of making it worse. The second one is the one that you know will only itch more if you keep rubbing but can’t stop because it’s so annoying, as if someone imbedded a small rock into your eye. The third is the type that results from the discovery of a heads-up penny or anything that gives good luck because the third type is the kind that when you rub your eyes, the itch goes away.

Unfortunately, me being inside a cabin surrounded on all sides by trees and vegetation resulted in me getting the worse of the second type of itch. By nighttime I was a wreck: my eyes wouldn’t stop itching, my throat was itchy and every time I coughed it resulted in a pain that rippled through my body starting at the throat. There was nothing I could do but lie in bed and watch my friends monkeying around.

I like skittles but like many other sweets, there’s only so many you can eat at one time before you feel like throwing up the next time you see another. That was the case with the party-sized bag of skittles that Yuxiang brought with him. We (my friends and I) had barely gotten through a quarter of the bag when we really did feel like throwing up and that’s when he had the idea of throwing the skittles at the revolving ceiling fan. Pretty soon everybody was throwing skittles at the fan and watching which part of the room they would end up in. It’s too bad none of the skittles hit anybody when it reflected off the fan because we would have laughed so hard at him. They later upgraded from throwing skittles at the fan to throwing pillows. There was also a failed attempt at throwing Yuxiang’s sidekick.

During the whole skittles, pillows, and failed attempt at throwing a sidekick at the fan festival, I was in bed feeling like crap, that’s what spring allergies do to you. However, if it was not for me feeling miserable, I would not have seen the lone yellow skittle on the floor next to the bunk bed. What’s so important about this skittle? You may ask but that’s because I haven’t told you that my buddy Reishaun was standing with his back to me, just a few feet in front of the bed. I picked up the skittle, aimed and released it. The skittle hit him square in the middle of the back of his head. Immediately Reishaun spun around and said: “What the fuck?” but I had already dived back under my covers and my in my current condition, there was no one else to blame except for my friend Oscar who was on the top half of our bunk bed. It took a lot of effort to laugh quietly as Reishaun took one of my shoes that were on the floor and hit Oscar with it Oscar was so confused as to why he was getting beaten with a shoe and that was when it was especially hard to keep the laughter down.

I’ve never been hiking before but I assumed it must feel great because I’ve seen people hiking on television and they look so amazed at their surroundings, breathing in deeply to sample the scent of nature in the meantime getting great exercise. I couldn’t have been more wrong. By the time we got to the top of the hill we were hiking I was so tired. Though I may have been amazed at my surroundings at the beginning of the hike, that amazement quickly began to lessen as I got further and further up. Between the flies in my face and the quickly accumulating sweat, I was miserable all over again. As we began to walk down the hill towards flat grassy plain, I lost my steady downward pace. You may know that when you’re walking down a steep slope its best to keep your steps measured and firm as to avoid stumbling, falling your whole way down. Well as you may have guessed, I took too long of a step and the momentum sent me stumbling down the slope. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to look like an idiot stumbling my whole way down the hill so what did I do? I ran down to make it seem like I was doing it on purpose and I guessed I looked pretty normal until I finally stopped when a bush broke my fall.

When we reached the plain, one of the instructors at the camp provided us with a challenge: Whoever could find the most colors on the plain could decide for the group whether we should head back or not because by that time everyone was tired and annoyed so they were eager to set out on the quest. As you probably already know, a grassy plain contains mostly the color green and whatever color of the flowers it has so it wouldn’t be surprising if I told you everyone found the same colors. That is except for George. He was the only one that found something white and kind of grayish. It was dried up and everybody laughed at him including me. Can you guess what the dried up white and grayish thing was? It was in fact bird poop and since George won the challenge, the instructor asked what he wished to do. Of course someone so eager to pick up bird poop would be eager to continue on so we knew his answer before he said it. Sure enough he said yes and everyone began to complain and yell at him. I guess that’s what we get for laughing at him.

Subject:Question regarding Eng  2100 homework

Dear Professor Xavier,

I don’t understand what questions 1 and 2 are asking from the “From Silence to Words” reading  do I have to explain what I think about paragraph 2 or should I support the argument? Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Tony Cai

Eng 2100 MonThu 12:25-1:40

https://play.spotify.com/user/12157320122/playlist/6IzRzqTWVF2nKft7bZoEaA

I decided to do a musical playlist because I feel cameras have this thing against me. I don’t know when this conflict started because I looked cuter than a button in my baby pictures. I could go more in depth about with this troublesome issue but there is an assignment at hand. The first song I picked for the playlist was “Sad Machine” by Porter Robinson. I picked this song because it’s good music. It represents the type of music I like which is the good kind. That probably sounds a bit broad, let me elaborate. I like music that have catchy tunes it could be the happy kind  like Owl City or sad like most of One Republic’s songs. Sad Machine has both of a happy and sad ring to it so it’s a good song to start with. Nine more. The second song I picked was “Ghost” by American Authors. First let me say that their band name represents me already. I’m American and I have been an author of numerous pieces or writing throughout my life. The song is about living in the present and shaking off the dead weight. That’s what I try to do. I try to not let many things bother me I guess that’s why I seem kinda passive. I don’t care if someone says something about me and when someone says something nice about me I don’t really show it but believe me I’m beaming inside. Number three goes to “Oh, what a life” also by American Authors because “I have laughed oh, and I have cried oh, and thought oh, what a life”. Enough said. I think this song represents everyone because there are good times and bad times sometimes I try really hard sometimes but to no avail. One example of me trying really hard is when I’m trying to win a game of League Of Legends but sometimes my teammates are noobs and it’s just sigh, what a game.The fourth song is “Count on me” by Bruno Mars. This represents me because I feel you can count on me. I am trustworthy and I like to help my friends  because they would help me also. The fifth song is “Demons” by Imagine Dragons, of course. It represents me because like all of us I do have demons inside me which doesn’t mean I’m possessed but that I do have a kind of darkness inside me. I’ve been known to take the last cookie or leaving a little bit of milk in the carton so I don’t have to throw it away. The sixth song is “Marchin On” by One Republic. I’m all about marching on because I know I’m not the only one with problems.   I just have to deal with them and move on like I have to deal with this assignment and move on to my bed. Number seven is “King and Lionheart” by Of Monsters And Men. I would never worry about the petty problems one may insert into my life and my relationships like with my brother. We are the yellow on egg yolks well his skin is so light so I guess we’re an entire egg. The next song is “Mountain Sound” by Of Monsters and Men because I do feel like some problems will affect me more than they actually will, like paranoia. Like when the teacher tells me to read something in front class but since I don’t talk much my voice may seem a little rusty because I haven’t spoken yet but I’m fine. The ninth song is “Gold” by Owl City. Call me conceited but I believe I am gold. They say everyone is unique and all that lovey dovey stuff but I already know I’m awesome. The last song is the “Oreo Wonderfilled Song” featuring Owl City. This song sounded so good when I heard it on commercial. I really do love oreos I don’t know if I would share them with bad wolfs, vampires, and sharks but  I do wonder what would happen!

-Tony Cai