Rants and Rambles (The Nonfiction Edition)

I don't make a lot of sandwiches. I tend to take the laziest route possible when making my lunch for school, and it's a lot easier to take some leftovers to school than go through the laborious process of making an entire sandwich. But sometimes I get in the mood to make a sandwich, which nearly always ends up being a much harder task to accomplish than you'd think. You see, my parents don't eat a lot of carbs, so we don't often have the sandwich base of sliced bread at home. Instead, I have to repurpose some other kind of bread to make my sandwich, which doesn't create a sandwich nearly satisfactory enough. Nothing works nearly as well as sliced bread to make a sandwich. You can slice your own loaf of bread to create slices, but unless you have magically perfect eyeballing skills, your slices will be noticeably uneven. Or, if you suck at slicing things like I do, you'll underestimate how thick a slice of bread needs to be and end up cutting it so thin you...

Central Illinois is objectively a pretty boring place. There's not a lot to do. Towns are separated by miles of corn and soybeans, and the only cities are Chicago and Peoria. Even the landscape is dull -- it's flat. The largest hills around here are manmade. But it's all I've ever known, so I suppose I do like it to an extent. Although, no one from outside of Illinois seems to understand why I like Illinois. I suppose it does sound like a flat wasteland, but Illinois still has its positive aspects. 1. You'll never get lost. The one pro of the extreme flatness of Illinois is that there's no reason to create winding streets. Champaign was (mostly) constructed with a massive mile by mile grid system of main streets with extra smaller streets within each box of the grid. When you travel outside of Champaign into Central Illinois farmland, the grid system is even more pronounced since all that's left are the mile by mile squares without any smaller streets w...

For my entire life, I've gone by Elizabeth. Not Liz, not Beth, not Eliza, not Liza, but Elizabeth. Nicknames weren't (and aren't) my thing. People always ask me if I go by anything else, and I'm very quick to answer, no, I don't. What's wrong with going by a long name? My name is pretty long. Including my middle name, it's 26 letters. Without my middle name, it's 17 letters. But I don't mind the length. The only gripe I've ever had with it has been bubbling it in on the SAT. I suppose shortening it for simplicity's sake might be nice, but all the diminutives of Elizabeth have never felt like me. As far as I can tell, there's a general expectation that all Elizabeths go by something else, hence why I'm always asked if I go by Elizabeth or not. So while there are plenty of people out there who share my name, most of them don't go by Elizabeth. In a weird way, I almost try to make myself an individual by going by the legal name I...

When I was eight years old, we adopted a dog named Rocky. He's a schnauzer-poodle mix, so he's about the size of a miniature schnauzer but he's white. We cut him like a schnauzer, so he basically looks like a white schnauzer, but if you let his fur grow out it gets super curly. We got Rocky from a shelter near Chicago when he was four years old. Before he lived in the shelter, he was with a different family. They had to give him up because they couldn't afford to pay the treatment for his heartworm. He went through the treatment at the shelter, but stayed there for a while. No one wanted to adopt him. But then my family came into the picture. We had to visit the shelter to make sure we were a good fit for him, but we had nothing to fear. He loved us immediately -- he ran to and fro between us, jumping up and licking our faces. We left with him that same day, and the shelter owner apparently announced that Rocky was getting adopted on social media because it was a ca...

My mom has always liked flowers. At our first house, we had a yard so massive that it felt like an endless sea of grass to my smaller-than-an-adult body -- and it had a garden. The garden wrapped around two entire sides of the backyard, ending in our play structure and massive, custom-built sandbox. On the west side, rows of plants I nestled toy dinosaurs within tumbled over each other leading to the black chainlink fence separating our backyard from our neighbors' strikingly barren yard. On the north side, towering pine trees climbed to the sky, heaps of daffodils surrounding their bases. A magnolia tree was placed perfectly at the corner of the west and north side of the garden, joining the two sides in a perfect transition. Running along the house were simple flower bushes and a hydrangea my mom dumped aluminum sulfate under every year to turn the flowers blue in vain. On the south side of the house grew lilacs, and a forsythia clambered up the brick chimney. Wrapped ar...