Toilet Paper Alarm

Seated on my humble throne, hooked onto my in-house favorite, Harry Potter, I absentmindedly completed my morning ritual - my nine year old self as content as could be. Thirty minutes later I grudgingly accepted that perhaps the bathroom wasn’t the prime location for immersing myself into the World of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I began to finish my business, fingers craning to reach some 3-ply goodness when alas: I was confronted with the distressing touch of an unreplaced toilet-paper roll: the epitome of a “crappy situation!”

Irked, I began my pursuit to create a “Toilet-Paper Alarm” and eradicate the morning mourning that was ravaging innocent lives everywhere. Courtesy of Google’s instruction and dad’s willingness to cart me around the local electronics store, I created my first circuit that would flash whenever a toilet-paper recession loomed. While my hopes of breaking into the mainstream market never materialized, as a child who’d never imagined dabbling with batteries and wires (and enjoying it so immensely) this process ignited my desire to capture and explore every opportunity.

From animated debates concerning whether Ivanka Trump truly is a feminist - to the more quintessential questions: does pineapple belong on pizza? Trying to build a robot maid (it was as hopeless in the kitchen as me) or create kooky music with friends - these avocations have been a haven for my curiosity and imagination. Even the activities I wasn’t great at brightened my heart. But throughout highschool I reserved Friday afternoons for a sacred cause: science tutorials. Armed with a week’s worth of ammunition, I fired at my teacher, comforted and bewildered to find that none of my questions seemed to stump him. If ice is slippery then how is it a solid? If there are billions of stars in our galaxy, why does it go dark at night? Christmas came early with each newly unraveled mystery toppling like a domino, only to unearth myriads more that called for explanation. His knowledge appeared as limitless as my curiosity.

However, the most invigorating answers were the ones I never set out to find.

One afternoon, as I ploughed through the content for an exam, I asked in a moment of desperation, “How can we be sure all of this is even true?” My teacher, witty as ever proclaimed, “We can’t! All we can do is hypothesize the meaning of our experiments and observations - till a new discovery challenges and reinvents our understanding.” He then illustrated the progression of Atomic Theory to show us that what we currently hold to be inalienable truths may one day be completely superseded. All I sought was reassurance, and yet, his elegant answer belay the inelegant truth.

I kept that exchange in mind as I approached other ambiguities of life. If we see the world in colors, how can we be truly colorblind in perceiving one another? As we aim to make machines imitate life, how can we instill human-compatible values into repairable units that don’t face the existential crisis of death? Questions like these lack standard answers, but somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known and I am eager to find it.

Initially I questioned because I felt mesmerized and empowered by the answers, but as I query today, I aspire to use learning from an amalgamation of interests to generate my own explanations. By combining a critical debater’s perspective, a creative artist’s outlook and an analytical scientist’s eye, I hope to help fill-in more blanks and to let curiosity lead me through the seemingly unanswerable ones. But most importantly, I hope to keep learning and creating. There is so little time, I want to absorb it all.

Today, I am tearing away the skin of the little girl in awe of the boundless world which dwarfed her and making place for a strong, independent woman to make her own mark. Growing up - but never growing out of my childlike wonder.