The Commitment of Stickers

I've always loved stickers. Since I was little, every time I would find a sticker I had to stick it onto the closest flat surface I could find.

This resulted in my grandmother's mirror and the dinner table filled with pointless stickers.Where I would acquire so many stickers remains a mystery even to this day.

But out of all the stickers I had, I remember having more than twenty of the happy face stickers Walmart used to give out. Every time I would go to Walmart I would get a sticker from the nice lady in the entrance. Little me was always very excited to go to Walmart for the promise of increasing my growing collection of happy faces.

Walmart happy face sticker

Now that I look back I was foolish to think that those stickers would last forever. Around the age of seven those precious stickers were snatched away from my reach and stashed in the back of the store to never again see the light of day.

I am fond of those distant memories of happy face stickers but I took them for granted.

My later discovery of the scratch-and-sniff stickers would bring on a new phase and would question my commitment.

When stickers look pretty and on top of that smell delicious, it has got to make you ask the question, am I ready for this kind of commitment? If you have ever had a nice sticker, you understand that once you stick it somewhere, it will forever stay, unless you are willing to ruin it.

These scratch-and-sniff stickers were a wonderful thing and brought great popularity to me in the third grade because I owned seven full sheets of them. However, in the end it proved pointless and I lost three unused sheets because of my commitment issues.

THESE ONES

Now whenever I get my hands on stickers they tend to be very nice stickers that I purchase with my own money. It's just like buying a very nice notebook only to never use it, but we'll leave that topic for another day.

I love my money, but Christmas

(Co-written with Teresa)

We both love Christmas, but what stresses us out most about the holiday season is the prospect of shopping for gifts. The impending holiday provides a strict deadline for us to acquire the perfect presents for our friends and family.

Even though we love and are very close with the people for whom we are searching for gifts to give, we have the hardest time picking out appropriate presents that they would appreciate.

With seven friends in common, we struggle to pool together enough money to satisfy the demands of our high maintenance squad.

For everything to come out perfectly we must correctly time our online purchases so that they arrive at our homes in a timely manner for us to be able to wrap them up properly.

As we approach winter break, the desperation to get a good deal on purchases heightens, leading to the long lines of Black Friday sales. Black Friday sales tend to involve extreme amounts of glaring and shoving, and thus are not pleasant to say the least. But this is the only way to find a present to appease the disastrous crew I swing with.

our go to place to buy just about anything (form China)

Teresa’s dependency on my debit card is unbelievable. She is also the one I have the hardest time shopping for, she tends to be a very picky and overall an expensive friend. Buying her present this year absolutely drained my wallet and I almost didn't have enough for everyone else. But whatever, she’s worth it.

me

In the end, even though Christmas shopping is draining in all ways, it’s a price we’re willing to pay for the people we treasure.

Trying Not to Barf at the Grape and Banana Candy

Co-written with Teresa. It was late.

6:07 pm

We met up with four other friends at the mall area. When we arrived we saw that Yogurtland was completely empty. We wondered what was wrong, and it turned out someone had robbed the bank next to it. I talked to a security guard, who was really nice. He said some guy in a mask had gone in and tried to rob the bank. He didn't know much since they dismissed him and let the police take care of it, but he did tell us that this was only his third week working on the job. He seemed agitated by the events that had occurred and was eager to go home.

6:40 pm

Later we headed towards the residential quarter and out of the mall area. On our way there, two of our friends encountered a really close-to-death experience. They were walking a couple feet ahead of us and were crossing the street when a car went by really fast and almost hit them. The driver didn't stop at the stop sign and my two friends weren't looking so they almost got hit. It was really scary but luckily we were all able to walk away from it.

We have this friend and she always wears the same costume every year. Every year it gets smaller, while she gets taller. She’s worn the same Belle dress every Halloween for eighty-four years. Look at her, scandalous, the neighbors talk about her.

7:22 pm

This kid, he’s probably like eight, he was walking to the door of some house to get candy. While we were walking out, he told my friend with the little Belle dress, “Hey, it’s Booty and the Beast.” But he was a small child and?? Why???

7:39 pm

We walked up the driveway of a house and it was dark and there was a very large and furry spider. It was a FAKE, as fake as my love for math, spider but it scared my friends in front of me, and they punched me in the face.

8:11 pm

Near the school that is being built next to Maddox Park, there was this group of guys, and they looked like they were in a gang. They were standing with a nice lady who told us not to be intimidated by the men. When Teresa was walking away, she could hear them whispering really loudly, “Ah, look at that girl with the baseball bat, she looks like she could mess someone up with it.” She says she was really flattered.

8:56 pm

I have these neighbors who ALWAYS, I don’t know why, but they like to park in front of my house even though they live five houses away. So when we walked up to their house I was very pleasantly surprised to see that they had left a bowl of candy in front of their house. It was full and it was late so we figured it’d be okay if we took all the candy since there didn't seem to be anyone else trick-or-treating. I really like Yorks, and I hadn't eaten one in eighty-four years. I took approximately seventeen Yorks, my bag got heavy. I think my neighbors redeemed themselves today.

11:49 pm

She just wanted to eat her twix.

3:37 pm (next day)

Grape tootsie pop, grape nerds, and BANANA laffy taffy. Disgusting

Bananas are Gross

For the first four years I attended elementary school my mom would feed me a banana for breakfast every morning, no exceptions.

What happened was that I had never been fond of bananas to begin with. I think they have a really weird texture and are naturally so sweet it's slightly worrisome. However what triggered my strong dislike for these fruits was that I was forced to eat them on a daily basis.

According to Dr. Oz bananas are believed to help fight cancer. This original speculation erupted from Japanese scientists Haruyo Iwasawa and Masatoshi Yamazaki. From here came the claim that a substance called TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor) which destroys cancerous tumors, can be found in ripe bananas.

Skeptical Raptor states that bananas do not make TNF, in fact the scientists never stated they did. This misinformation came from various uncited facebook memes.

The problem is that the internet lies. The author supports his evidence with science. He explains that "...bananas do not produce TNF. It is simply an evolutionary impossibility, unless through some amazing instance of evolutionary convergence, the banana plant evolved the ability to produce the TNF molecule for a completely different purpose for the banana plant. This would violate several principles of evolution, since there are reasons why the TNF molecule evolved in mammals and not in plants."

This brings us to the conclusion that it's impossible for plants to make the TNF molecule, only mammals are capable of this.

Whatever the case may be, whether bananas prevent cancer or not, is an idea yet to be fully experimented on. I on the other hand. am not taking any risks. I refuse to eat bananas and as for their claimed cancer fighting properties I might be able to acquire those from other fruits such as grapes or strawberries.

Uncited banana meme which may or may not be true

May or may not be true. We just don't know.

More uncited memes

Response To: Exposing Hidden Biases at Google to Improve Diversity

 Unconscious bias is something that is always at play.

Unconscious bias is what makes us decide not to go down the dark street, but rather the well lit one with lots of people. We see this at play on our daily lives―now let's apply the same concept to people.

The results of many researches show that even if men or women have the same things on their resumes, the men will be chosen and hired most of the time.

Now you say they may have randomized this process so that the man and woman had the same chance of getting the job, but if this is the case, then why are 70% of tech workers men?

Google say "they are undertaking a long-term effort to improve these numbers." The first step to recovery is accepting that there is a problem. This does not mean that social media companies are not sexist when choosing who to hire, they are, and at least Google acknowledges it.

Reasoning for not hiring women with the same accomplishments as men may be more discreet within the high society of tech workers, sexism may not be as overt as within lower class workers.

It would be perfectly reasonable for men to be the majority if women were not interested in these jobs, but career choice of women does not correlate to the percentage of which are actually hired. In addition, research shows that "diverse teams can be more creative than homogeneous ones."

According to Daniel Borzelleca from Forbes "the female domination of higher education prevails across all types of schools. It should also be noted that the national male-female ratio for 18-24 year olds is actually 51-49, meaning there are more (traditionally) college-aged males than females."

Nationally there was 1% more men who attend college than women in 2008, but a larger percentage of women graduate than men. Then why are 70% of the workers for Google male when there are a larger percentage of female college graduates?

Unfortunately, sexism is still a large part of our society. As much as we would simply like to wave it off and pretend like it's not there, it is, and we see it in the variation of sexes (or lack of) within companies, not just Google but all tech companies mentioned in the article.

Coincidence? I think not.