Kai's NO FICTION blog!!!!

For anyone who does not know me, I am a huge Hamilton fan. I have the whole 2.5 hour show memorized and can quote just about any line from the show. I love the quality of the music plus the characters and plot Lin-Manuel Miranda (writer and lead composer of Hamilton) made out of Hamilton’s biography.  But now that I’ve begun opening my eyes to other music (I know I’m impressed too) I’ve found my love for “Weird Al” Yankovic. My dad introduced me to “Weird Al” in elementary school or so, playing one of his earlier albums “Alapalooza”. My dad played “Bohemian Polka”, “Harvey the Wonder Hamster”, and “Jurassic Park” for me and my younger sibling. I loved the music and spin “Weird Al” put on his parodies and songs.  I have imagined a music video collaboration between Miranda and Al to combine my love for both artists.  For a bit more context, “Weird Al’s” writes mostly parodies and polkas of mainstream songs, creating hilarious and sometimes absurd songs. He writes about gian...

This is a picture of me after me and my sibling Alex finished the groundwork for the shelter we made over quarantine. Behind our house was a frisbee golf course where we spent hours exploring and whiling away the hours of lockdown. After climbing trees for weeks, we found a spot of trees pictured here, which we named “the grove”. The grove is clearly man-made, but that didn’t prevent me from imagining I was in the wilderness. I tried to imagine the mulch ground was a lush soil. I saw the small, slender plants as saplings. I saw the small trees as powerful trunks with a thick canopy of leaves. Not that I was pretending I was in a jungle. But subconsciously I wanted to see the grove as more than it was. I wanted to escape to the wilderness and the grove let me escape.  During quarantine I looked into wilderness survival. I read “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen, a story where the protagonist was stranded in the Canadian wilderness and forced to survive. The story intrigued me and I wanted to...