Ratna writes

As I'm sure all of you know by now, I've been working on campus for a start-up called Sense & Sustainability since last spring. This April, S&S has the great honor of being invited to co-host the K.E.Y. Platform 2014 conference in Seoul, Korea on Business Innovation and Sustainability . So tomorrow, our team is setting off for Seoul to present on how sustainability can not only be a source of cost-savings, but also a major driver of future profits at this event, which will convene business leaders from across East Asia. In attendance will be 1000+ senior-level management from major corporations including Samsung, LG, Hyundai, KIA, Baidu, Sharp, etc, as well as representatives from the city government of Seoul, and various Korean Ministries. I couldn't be more excited! I hope you all will follow along with my travels as always, and take a second to like the Facebook page for the conference , where my colleagues and I will be posting articles we write reportin...

I generally like to write a quick post looking forward at each semester before it begins, but I've been enjoying this one a bit too much to have written yet. (Which is not to say I write now because I'm not enjoying it, but rather because I turned in four infuriatingly large assignments last week, and would not want less-than-optimal results returned to me next week to color the view of my classes presented in my reflection.) To say this semester has been a "blur" would be lazily to fall back on an overused phrase and an inaccurate representation. This semester has been a blast of color, a slew of sound, and a barrage of contentment. When asked why, I say because of a) classes and b) friendship, but I guess at the end of the year (or four) that's all that college is. So first, my classes. I am taking four wildly different courses this semester, that nevertheless seem seamlessly to dovetail together, as things had a habit of doing in high school. Macroeconomi...

What if I let my hair keep track of time for me instead of my phone, lopped it off before any extra trying experience and let it track my strengthening through its growth. Maybe the most illogically iridescent outlooks were made for the most amusingly impossible situations, so my blessing is its own confusion. When do people become the real kind of people who tuck themselves into taxicabs and work demurely at desks? Will my mind still swim in sine waves when I'm older and I map out an ecosystem or schedule appointments for something that matters? Will I still shiver at night and hold all tension in my toes, strands falling around shoulders whose prior priority was "independence"? And how long will my hair be by the time I can make my own decisions?

We all have the things we hold on to.  The end-all be-all worst-day-ever things, that time I wrote this and thought it was clever things.  They carry words or sounds that someone gave us a long time ago and never fail to take us back there, places we prided ourselves on being sad to leave.  I listen to a song you sent me in the car as someone who saw me as imitable tells me she's reading something I wrote her, stamp slightly upturned and penmanship deliberately rushed. A little gesture swimming in the bottom of my backpack that sits at the top of her top drawer.  Don't be afraid to give them out. 

We woke up this morning to a monkey that had entered our room on the prowl for a snack. The little guy slipped into the room through the ceiling rafters, darted to a bag of granola lying on our coffee table, snatched it up, and had disappeared before we could register its presence (and I could open up the plastic bag of cereal for him). Over breakfast, our friends at the hotel spotted a sloth crawling by on a nearby tree, and Priya again managed to snap a sleuthful shot through a telescope! After a morning of taking in our surroundings (including a pair of endangered scarlet macaws flying across the sky) one last time, we hopped on a boat  that would take us to our plane across the bay. Our 45-minute flight to San Jose was scenic as ever, and helped us trace much of the Pacific coast of the country as we sped along. We now sit at the airport in San Jose, hardly feeling ready to leave behind the tre...

Our last full day in Costa Rica was a hectic one indeed! We started off the morning at 6:00, embarking on a motorboat tour of the mangroves along the Sierpe River. We “mangrovers” were able to spot a group of white-faced monkeys, a couple of crocodiles, a handful of baselisks, a pair of nesting macaws, and a boa constrictor on our trip, that was seven hours total in length. This left plenty of time for activities the rest of the day! After a light lunch, Priya and I trekked down through the forest to the hotel’s beach, where we found a large troupe of white-faced monkeys, playing a game with one of the families’ pet dog! Priya fervently took photographs as I enjoyed the sand. We raced up from the beach back to our room to convene for afternoon horseback riding on the beach. The four of us galloped into the sunset, my horse Suaso enamored of the waves and constantly hungry (much like myself). We got back from our equine adventures just in time for the firs...

Today was our day of water! We started off the morning zooming  to Caño Island in a motorboat. About 30 minutes into our 45-minute ride, I commented to Mama, "I wish we'd seen a dolphin." Just then, our tour guide exclaimed, "¡delfines!"  and asked the captain to follow the four fins he had spotted in the distance. Moments later, our boat was surrounded by a group of between 30 and 50 false killer whales, individuals from the third-largest  member of the dolphin family. The playful creatures surrounded our boat on all sides as we sped toward the island, cameras in hand. Once at the island, we started snorkeling. I hadn't been in several years, and the experience was as awe-inspiring and breathtaking as I remember it seeming to my 9-year-old self. Today, we managed to spot the multicolored Parrotfish , royal blue Giant Damselfish , adorable Moorish Idol , and a school of about 500 Green Jack s, moving together to impersonate a much bigger animal and...