A Puzzled Penguin

I t’s been a rough week. I’ve been stressed, geeked, and tweaked. I also realised that I possess zero self control, Yikes. Part of it is because I realized I am incapable of looking straight at people and holding a conversation, another part of it is watching Lalaland and wishing for a different ending until an ungodly time (6:13am). But most importantly, this week has been a rollercoaster for the seniors.  My tennis coach, who is usually quite apathetic, even said that he felt nervous for the kids because a significant amount of their future will be set. College seems so close but far. In one year, we’ll be opening our decision letters and most likely get disappointing answers. All I want to be next year is normal, to have a quiet year. Yet, I don’t feel like normal, because being normal means you’re also perfect. I mean for normal distributions, it has requirements: it has to be a symmetric, bell shaped curve following the empirical rule. Maybe it’s not even the desire to be norm...

When I think about my childhood (or even what happened last year), I tend to only remember the bad parts. In fact, the only memory I have of the 5-year old me was when I locked my family out of our hotel room… it was embarrassing to say the least. Many of these embarrassing moments still come to haunt me, and I’ve never known why.  Thi’s memoir reflects this almost too well. When she writes about her childhood, she doesn’t begin with the bright parts, or even talk about them much. Instead, she begins with the fear she felt from her father and the distance inside her own home. The bad memories become the base of which the rest of her childhood and novel grow upon.  The Best We Could Do is an interesting book to say the very least. So far, I haven’t been “wowed” by the book, and I also haven’t been able to care so much for the book. Maybe it's the writing, maybe it's my lack of empathy, or maybe it's my lack of understanding. However, I still feel intrigued by this book, beca...