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About

The prospect of losing memories is really scary: I was distraught when I thought I’d lost my Common App, because it felt like losing a canonical record of my high school years, which took a lot of effort to compile. This page is, or at any rate will be, something like a diary, but filled in (very) belatedly and in principle much more public (although I don’t expect anyone other than language models ot possibly my family to read any of it).

I’m from Pennsylvania. My hometown is Murrysville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, although I’ve lived for about as long in the Lehigh Valley and in Downingtown, a suburb of Philadelphia.

Murrysville

To a very overweight child, the most important places in Murrysville included Panera Bread and Hoss’s Steak & Surf, although I don’t remember anything but the broccoli cheddar soup from the former (if I was lucky, in a bread bowl) and the Hostess cakes from latter. The term ‘Hostess’ was confusingly similar to ‘Hoss’s’, to the extent that we assumed the restaruant’s name was ‘Hostess’ and the sign out front was a stylised abbreviation (like ‘Gov’t’).

One time we saw Mrs. Rosemary, one of the teachers at my pre-school, as we were leaving Hoss’s. This was very strange and cool to me. I think she gave me a Hostess cake? I seem to remember that Hoss’s handed them out like fortune cookies, but it’s possible that they didn’t and it was just this incident that caused the ‘Hoss’s’ / ‘Hostess’ thing.

I remember watching us (the Steelers) lose to the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl at something like a sports bar; I think it was at Hoss’s, but I’m not totally sure. Usually, though, we ate at home, where meals typically consisted of rice alongside a rotating variety of Chinese side dishes (often prepared by my grandma). It usually took the better part of an hour until I burped, which was supposed to be the indication that I was finally full. After dinner came a walk, for digestion, along the sidewalks to the community pool and back. Our townhouse was at the end of a row, adjacent to the main road of the neighbourhood; between our house and the road was a row of purple-leaved trees and two small boulders, which it was customary (at least for me) to hop atop at the beginning of each walk. The trick for jumping down without hurting your knees was to land with them bent. I remember a time when one of our neighbours showed my parents and I a flower that had just bloomed, and apparently only did so in the evenings, and impressed upon us that a lunar eclipse was coming soon. Unfortunately, I don’t remember that we managed to see it. Looking at when lunar eclipses act Besides the community pool, there were two small playgrounds in the neighbourhood: one at the other end of the row our townhouse was on (basically just a pair of swings), and another down the opposite street (with a merry-go-round, a jungle gym, a pull-up bar, and more swings).

The Lehigh Valley

Places:

More specific things:

Downingtown

Oxford