I had to excuse myself to the bathroom after this one. Just sat there in the stall crying, trying to be quiet. It felt embarrassing, but also, I couldn’t stop because it felt like something inside me was finally breaking open.
The sound is unmistakable. Click-clack. Click-clack. Hard plastic striking frozen asphalt. It is the music of 5:00 AM, played out in the dark parking lots of the Dolomites. I was three years old when I first learned the rhythm of it, my small, gloved hand lost inside my father’s palm.
I’m sitting here three days later, and I still can’t get it out of my head. The movie, I mean. Wicked. I went because everyone was going and I needed a break from studying for finals and maybe because I was curious about all the hype but I wasn’t expecting… this. I wasn’t expecting to leave the theater feeling like someone had reached into my chest and rearranged everything.
There will always be that strange feeling—the fear of not belonging, the sense that everything I do is so tiny, so fragile and transient that nothing will remain.
When I took over the Tech Editorship in April 2023, I only knew one thing about journalism: it was going to stop happening at Caltech unless somebody stepped up to lead it. With a dream of remedying the post-pandemic admin-student animosity but zero reporting experience, I was in for a daunting task. Then Richard Kipling emailed me and offered to buy me a coffee.
The second floor of Kerckhoff had an unusual stillness that evening. People trickled into the small library room for the Science and Faith Examined (SAFE) talk, uncertain yet curious. I sat near the back, notebook open, listening to Tara—a physics PhD student and president of GCF—unfold her reflections on quantum field theory and the Bible.
Jupiter was getting brighter than I’d ever seen it, brighter in real terms, closer to the earth, than it had been since 1963. And not only was it getting closer than ever, the online forums said it would be in “opposition”—directly opposite the sun from the earth’s perspective, like a full moon, only a full Jupiter.
