I’m at my ten-year high school reunion.

Acquaintance: “I haven’t seen you since school! So, what are you doing these days? Computer programmer? Computer engineer? Computer technical support?”

Me: “You just assume the geeky guy went into computers, huh? Well, I’ll have you know I’m a teacher.”

Acquaintance: “Oh? What subject?”

Me: “Computer skills.”

I overheard this in a group project workshop.

Student #1: “Ah, sorry we’re late! Traffic, you know?”

Student #2: “YOU LIVE ON CAMPUS!”

My high-school calculus class was very chill — around twenty kids who were all friendly with each other, a laid-back but enthusiastic teacher, and a light enough workload that we could afford to goof off in class but still learn and do well.

At some point in the year, I got really into cooking. It’s my stress reliever. My family couldn’t possibly eat the amount of food I was making, so I started bringing it into school and “hosting” Friday parties in my calc class — with my teacher’s approval, of course.

I’m Vietnamese and I live in a predominately white town. This is only important because it meant that most kids from town only ate American or European foods and weren’t used to eating other ethnic foods.

Last year, around Lunar New Year, I wanted to bring in some Vietnamese foods to celebrate. It is a very important time of year for my family. I ended up making a bunch of Bánh Da Lợn, a steamed layer cake and traditional Vietnamese dessert. Some of my friends from class found out I was going to bring in a traditional dish and brought in their own traditional dishes from their own cultures, whether they celebrated Lunar New Year or not. We had different Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Spanish desserts. It was great, and I was really excited that my friends wanted to celebrate with me.

Apparently, this was an issue for one girl in my class.

I would say Bánh Da Lợn is an acquired taste, so when not a lot of people ate it, I wasn’t offended. I knew not everybody would like it. There was a lot of other food, anyway.

During our lunch period, one of my friends (who wasn’t in our class but knew I brought food in) overheard a girl from my class complaining about the food while in the lunch line. Apparently, she was saying really negative things about how I “forced everyone to eat weird Chinese foods.”

Later that day, I texted her.

Me: “Hey, I heard you didn’t like the food today, and I just wanted to know why.”

I don’t really care when people don’t like the food — I make it for myself and just bring it in when I have extra anyways — but her calling it “weird Chinese foods” when she KNOWS I’m Vietnamese didn’t sit right with me.

She texted back.

Classmate: “It’s rude of you to bring in weird ethnic foods that nobody likes except for you. You should know better since most of the class is white.”

Me: “I bring in food to share because I feel like it, and I don’t have an obligation to cater to your tastes. If you have an issue with it, you literally don’t have to eat it. Other people can bring in food, too, so if you want to, you could bring in something more to your tastes.”

Classmate: “You shouldn’t bring in ethnic and foreign foods. Stick with American foods. We’re in America!”

Excuse me?! How much you wanna bet if I brought in jambalaya, which originated in Louisiana, she would call it a “weird foreign food”?

Fine. She only wants to eat American foods? Then she can eat American foods.

The next week, I brought in a bunch of Oliebol, a Dutch doughnut, and started passing them out at the beginning of class. When I got to her desk, I pulled out a loaf of Wonder Bread and plopped it on her desk.

Me: “Sorry, but these are Dutch — too ethnic. Here you go! All-American cuisine.”

Later, she texted me.

Classmate: “What the f*** is your problem?!”

Me: “Almost every single food I brought in this year was ethnic. It pisses me off that you only have an issue when it isn’t European. You’re entitled to not liking Asian foods, but if you’re going to complain about it being ethnic, then you’d better have that same attitude when the ethnic food is from a white culture. And especially don’t call another person’s culture weird.”

She didn’t complain about the food again.

For the record, I’ve enjoyed making many different kinds of American cuisine, including tater tots, jambalaya, fried chicken, many types of pies, smores, and Philly Cheesesteaks. America is a very diverse place, and that’s reflected in its food. Happy eating!

I attend university for animation. At the moment, I’m in my senior year, which means senior capstones are in full swing. Senior capstones (senior thesis films at some schools) are a big deal. We had to do official pitches for our films. Then, some were “nominated” and we had to assemble teams of ten students to work on films for the next year. 

It is a hefty process, and there was a mad scramble in the week we had to “recruit” or be recruited. A lot of films were not greenlit due to a lack of people, and a lot of students were either rejected from films or were on those teams that were dissolved too late to join another film.

Enter [Classmate]. During the “recruiting” week, [Classmate] was on one film and then jumped ship onto another. 

When the director/pitcher of the first film announced that they were no longer trying to be greenlit and had decided to try to let their team find new members in a group chat that all of the rising seniors were in, [Classmate] went into the group chat and publicly said:

Classmate: “Oh, no, I’m so sorry! I only switched films because the film I’m currently on had more opportunity for me to animate characters! Is there any way to rejoin your film if this one doesn’t work out?”

This was not received well by the group chat.

Fast forward to now. We are now two weeks into the new school year, in preproduction, and working on getting everything ready so we can actually begin animating. At this point, we have all received important information such as deliverables and assigned roles, and we generally have a lot of important work done on our films.

[Classmate] suddenly messages after months of inactivity in the group chat:

Classmate: “Is it possible to switch capstones?”

The ENTIRE chat immediately erupts in disbelief. Many people ask him how he has the audacity to be so disrespectful to ask this kind of question publicly.

The reason he has decided to try to jump ship (AGAIN)? The team he was on made a plot change that he didn’t like. 

Keep in mind that we have spent YEARS at this point having classes where almost all the professors have drilled one thing into our minds: “Your professional career doesn’t start when you leave [University]; it starts now. These are going to be your professional peers.” 

And yet, in a chat with over 300 people in it, here [Classmate] goes, advertising not once but TWICE that he is unreliable and will jump ship at the first sign of something not going the way he wants it to.

We’re barely two weeks into this year-long film, and [Classmate] has already managed to ruin his professional reputation among all of the students that are about to graduate, be his peers, and be people who can recommend him to jobs.

Yikes.

I grew up in California, and we have a species of Condor called… wait for it… the California Condor! I was and still am an animal lover. In elementary school, I would read books about all kinds of snakes, lizards, vultures, and condors — basically, creatures that most little girls wanted nothing to do with. (To be fair, once I learned how spiders “ate” and then about “spider wasps”, I kind of noped the hell out of the insect/arachnid kingdoms.)

As a little girl with eclectic tastes, I spent my childhood perking up with a lot of interest upon hearing about how the California Condors had gone extinct in the wild and how conservationists were reintroducing them from captivity breeding programs. By the time I hit high school, I was ecstatic when condors began wheeling and circling in the skies around my hometown. For some odd reason, they really seemed to like our imported-long-ago eucalyptus trees.

Enter [Girl]. [Girl] went to the same school as I did, and we ended up butting heads off and on throughout my childhood. Now, for whatever reason, [Girl] believed that it was her life’s goal to out-knowledge the local animal lover. Unfortunately, [Girl]’s life’s goal coincided with absolute conviction that she was right about so very many — VERY, VERY many — wrong things.

Snakes are slimy — regardless of what the books say. All snakes are poisonous. There is no such thing as venom; that’s the incorrect and out-of-date term for poison. Constrictors are poisonous, too. Frogs and toads can give you warts — because the human papillomavirus (HPV) can be contracted from amphibians. Cows are animals, NOT mammals — because the two are mutually exclusive. Ants are NOT animals; they are insects — again, mutually exclusive.

And the crux of our story: the giant birds circling over our town were red-tailed hawks. As I watched our condor population soar (pun intended) from six to twenty-plus individuals over the years, [Girl] and I had several verbal altercations over the identity of our birds. This sums them all up.

Girl: “Oh, the hawks are back!”

Me: *Looking up* “Nope. Those are condors.”

Girl: “No, they’re hawks! Want to know how to tell the difference? The shape of their wings. The wing shape of those birds says they’re red-tailed hawks.”

Note: these birds were circling and coming down to land on our eucalyptus trees at a height of about three stories up in the air. They would land awkwardly, flaring their huge wings until they got their balance. Even from this distance, you could see that their heads were naked of feathers.

Me: “[Girl], these birds don’t have feathers on their heads. Their tails aren’t red. And their wingspan is huge.”

A condor’s wingspan is about 9.5 feet. A red-tailed hawk’s is 4.8 feet at most, y’all.

Girl: “Nope. You’re wrong. You just can’t see the red of their tails from below. This is one thing I know more about than you.”

Me: “No… No, you don’t, [Girl].”

Girl: “Yes, I do. The shape of their wings says hawk, so you’re wrong.”

She turned her back and walked away the instant I held a science book about animals anywhere near her. She wouldn’t even acknowledge anything that could possibly prove her wrong. On the plus side, this provided me with a very “cross versus vampires” way to make [Girl] shove off during my school years.

Twenty-two years later, [Girl] is a staunch anti-vaxxer. She found me after a twenty-year gap and spent far too much of the next two years yelling at me on social media to wake up, do my research, and stop injecting my body with autism before I blocked her. Yes, vaccines don’t GIVE you autism; the injections ARE autism. I just can’t even anymore.