At the start of the pandemic, students all around the world were forced to adapt to online learning and every one of them had a unique and interesting first-day story. Mine started one morning with a deafening sound. Beep! Beep! Beep! “Shut up!” I shouted with all the energy I had, which wasn't much because it was still very early in the morning. Beep! Beep! Beep! I tried to figure out how to stop my alarm but it was a new clock and my sleepy head didn't help me. I banged the alarm clock. I didn't care if it broke; I just wanted it to stop making that high-pitched, annoying noise. Beep! Beep! Beep! After a few minutes, I gave up and said, “You win, you win!” Beep! Beep! Beep! I got out of bed and stretched my stiff body. After some morning stretches, I went downstairs to have breakfast. I had some delicious cereal with milk. After finishing my breakfast, I went back upstairs, just to find out that my stupid alarm was still ringing. Beep! Beep! Beep! “Dude! I'm awake! Your job is done for the day! Now, can you please shut up?” I yelled at my alarm clock which didn't seem to help. Beep! Beep! Beep! Luckily, my brain was more awake by now and found that there was an off switch at the bottom of the alarm. “Who hides the off switch at the bottom?” I complained, “No one's going to see it!” I was nagging about the location of the switch when I suddenly took note of the time. Fifteen past seven. “Oh no! I'm going to be late!” I exclaimed as I ran to my shower. I took the quickest shower in the history of showers but I was too panicked to even care. Then I changed into my school uniform and brushed my teeth. I ran back to my room and opened my laptop. I checked the time. Twenty past seven. “Phew,” I sighed. I went downstairs to my study room and tried to figure out how to get to the meeting. I wanted to enter earlier to make a good first impression. “Ok, so they said to go to Google Classroom and look for the class called Meeting Room,” I said to myself while following the instructions. After scrolling through Google Classroom for several seconds, I finally found the Meeting Room class. I saw that there was a ‘Join' button so I took a guess and pressed it. I was right! It led me to the Google Meet tab. I sighed in relief. Oh no! I said it too soon. The website won't load properly. I tried to reload it but it won't work. I started to panic. I didn't know what to do. I began hitting my laptop and shouting at it. “Work, laptop, work!” I yelled. My heart began to beat rapidly. My body was shaking. “What should I do? What should I do?” I asked myself. Wifi! I ran out the door and to my wifi router. I began kicking it and hitting it. “WORK!” I got so mad at it. It must've been scared because when I gave up and went back to my study room, I saw that the Google Meet had loaded. I could finally join and I wasn't even late. “One minute early. I guess it's better than being late,” I sighed as I entered the meeting. The rest of the day was the start of a new journey that I have yet to explore. I couldn't wait for what was going to come next.

Hello. I greet you without any physical approach whatsoever. With this COVID-19 situation, people don't really greet each other at all in public places. Eye contact is fleeting and hesitant. The only interaction is a team-work effort to keep away and make space. Friends who see each other give a brief acknowledgement and say "Stay safe!" It's hard to give this COVID environment a one-word description. "Strange" is close, but anything associated with "strange" before is different from the "strange" that COVID-19 has brought us. The world has seen a lot, but this seems new. There are bits and pieces from history that can be sort-of related to now, like the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl, maybe World War II, but all of those were longer in time, less abstract, and definitely more American feeling. American as in patriotic. This... this is different. This is a world on hold. Never has the world been on hold; the major population voluntarily frozen, in place, waiting. In a movie about surfing, an expert surfer said to his pupil, "One thing you gotta know: Fear and panic are two separate emotions. Fear is healthy, panic is deadly." But his pupil responded, "If you're scared to death, how do you not panic?" The surf expert answered, "By identifying the fear, and what it is that you're afraid of." With the COVID-19 upthrust, there is probably panic in more people than the virus has physically affected. Panic, because in a hasty attempt to identify their fear and where it is coming from, they found something hard to identify. Something that seemed new under the sun. But is it? Those who are not panicking must have identified the source of fear. They must have recognized COVID-19 as something simple. Something that is not new under the sun. Something more or less as a part of a cycle that is unmeasurably old. And so it must be. Older than the sun.

I never really felt the need to classify myself into a particular group because I felt like classifying myself would mean that I would be stuck in one specific thing while I wanted to be so many different things. Now that I am a little older I can see that it is not a terrible thing to acknowledge that not only do I fit into a community, but that I also fit into many different communities and as cheesy as it sounds it really makes me the person that I am today. There are many obvious communities that I am part of such as the hispanic community and the women community, but there are also some communities that I am part of that relate to the things that I am interested in and passionate about such as the art and design community. I have been part of the art and design community for as long as I can remember. Since I was a little kid I have always been interested in anything that had to do with using the right side of the brain. The right side of the brain is the creative side while the left side of the brain is the more technical side. Some people are either right brained or left brained while many people are both creative and technical. I am more of a right brained person and have always loved drawing, painting, and anything that had to do with being creative. This creative spur started with the inspiration of my family because most of my family are artists so I was exposed to art very early in my life. Fortunately, I was able to see the work that my family showed me when I was a kid and used that inspiration to make doodles and paint with my fingers. Over time I started to think about the future and realized that I wanted a job that allowed me to be my creative self. By the age of ten I made up my mind and decided that I wanted to be a graphic designer even though I did not really know what a graphic designer was. Since this realization, I have taken so many drawing and basic art and design classes that I have really dug myself into the core of this community. Whenever I meet someone who is also into art I feel like I am meeting another club member, which is really funny to me because it sounds like I am in a cult. I just feel like whenever I meet someone who loves art just as much as I do, it is like we are on the same wavelength and we instantly get along so well. It is almost like there is this unspoken understanding of why we are in this community. With this unspoken understanding I always feel excited to see other people's art because I love seeing what they are inspired by. Seeing what other people are passionate about motivates me to keep creating based off of my inspirations from the other cult members in my community. Since I have been part of this community for so long, I realize that there are many words that we use to describe art and to communicate in general. For every art class that I have been in, the class was always given a list of vocabulary words to study and memorize. These words are only useful to the art community because it helps to describe an art piece in a more detailed way instead of just using the words “pretty” and “cool”. These words also help to know what a certain technique is called. Instead of just saying “move the pencil up and down a lot” it is easier to just use the word “hatching” which means the same thing. I never really realized that many people do not know these art vocabulary words until I say one of them. One day in the summer I went to an art museum with my friends and we were looking at a black and gray colored painting. After looking at it for about five seconds, I speak up and say “I like the monotone colors that are used in this painting”. My friends look at me and one of them says “what the heck is that” and while looking at their confused expressions, I thought about what I said and described that monotone means different tones of one type of color. After I finished explaining what monotone colors mean, I realized that they were already walking to the next painting and that they stopped listening. This was pretty funny to me because I knew that they did not care because they did not have to care and the only reason that I do care is because of my art classes and the career that I want have. Knowing and learning these art vocabulary words to describe art pieces and different types of technique was basically my first step into the art community. I have been part of this community for so long without knowing it. Looking back at all the things that I have learned while being in this community has made me feel secure in knowing that I want to stay in this community because I feel like I belong in it since I am so passionate about art and design. I know that I am qualified to be classified into other communities, but I also know that I am and will always be another art kid.