4. Stellar Sea Lions 2026

How does money affect our identity? I have always believed that money ran nearly everything in our daily lives, but I have never sat down and pondered on its effects on our identities. The only time I truly thought about this was when I was working on the Personal Management merit badge. Without further ado, here are a few of the many ways money affects our identities .  1. Empathy - According to the Psychological Science journal, wealthy people struggled to read faces compared to less wealthy people. Underprivileged people also tend to understand and comprehend emotional responses in regular conversation significantly better than richer people do.  2. Judgement - According to researchers from Harvard and the University of Utah, more money leads to less moral decision making. Money is so powerful that even the mere thought of money from something as simple as reading words that relate to money can result in people acting in morally questionable or downright immoral ways. Compa...

Week 3: Girl, Put Your Records On – 09/23 [9:56PM] I am a geek. I am a complete geek for music. When I say this, I am not talking about music theory, because if anything were to make me want to rip my hair out more than math—it would be that. Do not ask me to read sheet music or break down chord progressions. It would take me five minutes to read out five seconds of sheet music. When I was around eight years old, I started learning the piano, but the deeper I got into it, the more sheet music awaited me.  I eventually cried to and begged my parents to let me quit my piano lessons , just so I wouldn’t have to deal with time signatures and fifty different kinds of scales. By eleven, I realized that I still really wanted an instrument to accompany me while I sang, which is why I picked up the acoustic guitar instead. It wasn’t too hard to learn. Guitar uses tabs rather than traditional sheet music, meaning I could actually focus on singing and playing instead of getting stuck trying ...

Sibling Banter– 09/23 [9:59 PM] I only have one sister, but I think she’s the best one I could’ve ever had. That wasn’t always my mindset, though. As a child, I never looked up to her. She’s two years older than me and would always boss me around. I remember that whenever we played games on the Nintendo, she always took Player 1 while I was stuck with Player 2.  As kids, we had a lot of altercations because she loved teasing me and I was a big crybaby. I don’t remember every exact incident, but I do remember the satisfying feeling of tattling on her and watching her get in trouble whenever she poked fun at me. Her type of teasing was a little rude which I think influenced my humor in a way that I don’t take jokes to heart. We often held grudges for the oddest reasons. However, as time passed, the grudges faded and we started addressing the issue directly.  If I could relive my childhood, I wouldn't change anything. My sister’s teasing actually benefitted my character developme...

An inevitable question that comes up with identical twins is, Which twin am I talking to? or I’m close with one twin but not the other, but I can’t tell which one I’m talking to is… or What if they were to swap places in their classes or jobs? In the standalone manga My Gemini , twins Jekyll and Hyde—originally from gothic horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson —in fact do pretend to be each other, with outsiders being unable to tell who is who, bar the protagonist, John Utterson. In this game of theirs, they deliberately created two different personalities with different quirks, ranging from slightly different hairstyles to polar opposite personalities.  This distinction strangely leads to the question that their friend John, the only one who can tell them apart, has: after one of the twins die, which one was the one who was remaining? Hyde, duh. The one who is dead is Jekyll. Everyone says this, it’s the name on the gravestone, the othe...

  Week 3: Time to go to Costco, We’re out of milk - 09/23 [5:55 PM] It’s not crazy to say I have little to no memories of my childhood. I don’t think anyone can recall the exact moments of their lives from years ago, however, out of the events I can remember, one of the most vivid is the one of my dad sitting across from me and my silver glass filled to the brim with milk.  “If you don’t drink this, you won’t get taller Naeva” An irrational fear of staying 2 feet tall overcame me, and I drank the milk so fast a sort of mustache formed around my mouth. Throughout my life, milk has always been constant in my life. The last day at Thornton Middle School involved plans for brown sugar milk tea and freedom. That summer was also the year my parents learned that they had their own personal chai maker: half a cup of water, two spoons of chai masala, nutmeg, and sugar. Lastly, a quarter cup of milk was added, which made the murky tea water turn into a wonderful pool of light brown. E...

Every year in elementary school, there is always that one kid who, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, says, "The President of the United States". I was that kid. To me, that answer is a solemn promise to my dream to one day be elected to the United States Congress and who knows maybe a higher office. As an Indian American, I have connected that dream to the importance of seeing people like me in government.  This summer I had the opportunity to work on Aziz Akbari's campaign for Fremont City Council and also Congresswoman Dr. Aisha Wahab's campaign, helping elect the first Afghan-American woman to Congress. My work on these campaigns showed me that my identity should influence your leadership while keeping an open mind to people whose experiences differ from your own. The history of South Asian American representation stretches back all the way to 1956, when Dalip Singh Saund became the first Asian-American to be elected to Congress to the modern da...

Week 2: Friend for Life and Change of Mentality – 09/09 [9:29 PM] Last September, I was sitting in a cozy coffee shop with my best friend, Adele. The sharp, sweet aromatic scent of coffee blessed our noses as a quiet chatter made the coffee shop the perfect studying atmosphere. Rays of golden sunlight streamed through the windows, casting patches of the warm, delightful light onto the table. Between the boring duties of completing homework assignments and studying for upcoming tests, we found ourselves talking about our future. As we were talking about our career interests, Adele brought up the idea of creating our own clothing brand. However, it wasn’t exactly a new idea, as we started brainstorming the designs, names, and marketing tactics in the summer. In fact, we discussed this idea with her father who was open to the idea of assisting us in terms of finances and the establishment of connections. And for some background info, Adele converted to homeschooling in 2024 and I stayed ...

“2042. It’s a year that every schoolchild knows. It was the year where computational power became infinite—or so it was so close to infinite that it could no longer be measured. It was the year we knew… everything.” - Scythe H.S. Curie, Scythe .

Week 2: To Sunvee and the Other One, From Sanvi – 09/09 There is a strange feeling that comes with watching your name shift meaning simply because you moved. For the first couple of chapters of my life, my name always made me an outlier. Growing up in Wilmington, Delaware—a predominantly white town with barely any people who looked like me—I noticed teachers would always pause during attendance. I soon learned to take that pause as a signal for me to say “here.” Hearing my name get butchered became part of my daily routine. It was always “Sunvee” or “Sandy”(???) and the occasional “hmm, this is a new one.” I never thought my name was that hard to say, but there I was. I hated it because it felt too loud and too different, like an unwanted spotlight that I wasn’t in control of. Then everything flipped. In eighth grade, I moved to Fremont. I want to say moving here was a pleasant change, but initially, it wasn’t. Relocating to a community with more people from my culture brought a comple...

Week 2: Tongue Tied - 09/09 [7:56 PM] A couple weeks ago, I took a practice test for the dreaded SAT. One particular question stood out to me. The questions talked about the folklore origin of Mesoamerican stories. The question focuses on two ethnographers with different opinions. Aurelio Espinosa claimed that folklore had origins in Spain because of its colonial history. Americo Padres argued that folklore was made from the interactions of Mexican and Native cultures. The answer choices asked to find evidence that would support Padres argument and the correct answer choice stated that the folklore showed songs and texts about the tribe's history and social life.  This answer got me thinking. Much of our knowledge on ancient history comes from the study of their languages and texts. Look at cuneiform and hieroglyphics . We have learned so much from ancient languages, but today, those same languages are being forgotten generation by generation. In my own personal life, my family sp...

Recently, I learned that my mom grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates during the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm . For those who are unfamiliar, the Gulf War began in 1990 when the country of Iraq, led by dictator Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, prompting a United States intervention called Operation Desert Storm to liberate the people of Kuwait. My mom and her family lived near Jebel Ali Port in Dubai which was the home base for the American military moving through to fight on the frontlines in Kuwait. On this week's episode of the Shon show, I will be conducting an interview with my mom to get a first-hand account of what life was like during the war.  Q&A with Mom! Q: Hi, Mom, can you introduce yourself to the audience? A: Hi Shon's English Class, I am Shon's mom, Ramani Gokhale and I teach at the California School for the Blind! Q: What do you remember about living in the UAE during Operation Desert Storm? A: I remember seeing the American, Canadian, and Briti...

     Recently, my dad asked me to watch a documentary on the political state of India in the 1980s and the man who helped solve its problems at the time. It sounded excruciatingly boring and I asked to watch something else since I was not interested at all. Unfortunately, we still ended up watching that and nothing else.      While we watched, I started to wonder why I lacked interest in it; after all, India is my home country, right? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I know nearly nothing about India and my family’s culture. I only know surface level knowledge from my trips to India every other year. No matter how much I may want to deny it, my identity was shaped by my experiences living in America, not by my few vacations in India.      During these trips, my relatives simply confirm that I am more American than I am Indian. All I hear is, “Your Telugu needs work,” even though I have decent grammatical skills, I just lack th...