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Former Cal basketball players Jaylen Brown and Jaylon Tyson have shown different levels of success in the NBA. While Brown has had a successful career, going into his 10th season with the Boston Celtics, his injuries are starting to slow him down, questioning his upcoming role. Comparatively, Tyson has had limited opportunity in playing time with the Cleveland Cavaliers, unable to showcase putting up numbers on the scoreboard.

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I think when you are surrounded by people who don’t look like you — and you constantly see them being complimented, pursued and desired — you start to associate desirability and beauty with their appearance instead of your own.

How fast does a fish disappear? How long does it take to erase all evidence of its life, to turn it into a fillet? What about a human? How to fillet a body and serve it without memory? If a fish can lose its fishness, do we ever lose our humanness? 

As the sliding glass doors parted, I made direct eye contact with an old classmate. During junior year, we sat side by side in AP Language and Composition and used to talk daily. But now, just a couple of years later, we passed each other without so much as a nod, a smile, a wave — nothing.

This summer, there are more high schoolers in my class, other students like me doing dual enrollment. We talk before lectures, sit in little clusters during labs and complain together when a question makes no sense. It’s little things: laughing over bad diagrams, helping each other guess through a multiple choice problem, joking about how we totally didn’t study enough for a quiz, but those little things made me feel like I belonged.

Life can be unpredictable and full of setbacks, but you just have to accept it and go with the flow. And sometimes that means being stranded overnight in an airport in Rome.

Some days “getting ready” simply meant putting on a pair of jeans, and other days it meant a full face of makeup. Either way, we both found a correlation between feeling confident in how we looked and our actual performance in day-to-day life.