Luke Stiles

When I can’t order my ideas, when they’re bumbling around like the balls in a wire bingo tumbler, I pull on my shoes and go for a run.

“And honestly, I’m jealous of you because I didn’t get a roadmap. I can only hope that one day I get one of these letters from a future Luke explaining what to expect next.”

“I know that the next time I open the door to a place that will be mine but isn’t yet, I will map this place onto the next one and see what sticks. I’ll choose which drawer will hold the spatula and which cabinet will house the spices.”

“I will keep thinking of it not as four months or as sixteen weeks, but as eleventy-one days, because it feels bigger. Longer. It’s a reminder to take it a day at a time, not to chop it into chunks that make time fly even faster.”

Essentially, if prohibition worked, it already would have. In my eyes, that logic is dangerously misguided, because, well, it never stopped me.

Whether my time at Cal ends with quiet resignation, a standing ovation, or simply a puff of smoke, these articles will forever be a part of who I am.

If these traditions revolve around stressing about a point here or there, it tells us that being a Bear means living an anxious academic life.

I want my music to act like my neighborhood’s little library tucked between trees — a space where people come to inhale and exhale sorrow and glee.

I loved the feeling of it — having things to hide, having invisible strings to pull, the light-hearted manipulation of misdirection.

When academic expectations are sky-high and the appetite to grind is insatiable, illness can feel like a thick fog that I should just turn up my collar and trudge through.