I love my hometown. I’m from a small town in the southern part of Missouri. While I’d love to live in an urban setting, able to walk everywhere and constantly meeting new people, there is something appealing about my quaint, suburban town. The people are warm and pleasant, always welcoming new faces. The owners of stores know their customers by name and are able to ask their customers about their family members health and activities. I think this is cool—we’ve bonded as a community even though we’re unable to walk to most of the places that reside in our community.

There are so many resources and potential research that we as a collective race could tap into, however we’re at a loss with the current structure of our world’s division into countries and powers. If I could be anything in the world, I’d choose to be its emperor. Yes, eventually I’d probably become corrupt, but in the beginning I would try as hard as I could to solve the problems that plague us—such as poverty, hunger, and genocide. Imagine the possibilities of medical advancement if we had a supreme ruler that recognized the importance of curing disease over that of the acquisition of oil and power.

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If I could have anything in the world, I’d like to gather as much time as I could. There seems to be nothing more valuable to us than time. We live in a world where we perceive two things, space and time. The blind experience time and time alone. Space is irrelevant, because it is infinite and a matter of perception, whereas we are constantly losing time. With more time, I could make more friendships, have more experiences, find more meaning to life—so this is what I’d like to take from the world, it is time that I’d desire.

It’s difficult to find an answer to the question of what means a lot to me. I suppose I find that many things mean a lot to me throughout the day, and while I appreciate these things, I don’t acknowledge their independent worth or compare their relative value to other things that mean a lot to me. I guess the thing I appreciate most is the friendship with which I’ve been blessed to have with so many wonderful people. I’m grateful for each and every one of the people whom I can call my friends, and I definitely value them more than any material possession.

With Christmas a few days away, I’ve returned home and I look forward to spending the holidays with my parents, grandparents and twin brother. We’ll celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas day rather intimately, probably by having dinner with our immediate family and then exchanging gifts for each other. Though come New Years, I’ll be going to New York to visit my boyfriend and to stay with him for a week. We’ve already purchased tickets to see Bizet’s opera, Carmen. I think we’ll also be seeing Puccini’s opera “Turandot”, which is actually a favorite of mine. I’ve never been to the Metropolitan Opera, I’m so excited!

As a classical pianist, I enjoy spending most of my free time playing the piano. My favorite pieces to play are usually written by the composers Johann Sebastian Bach (the first and father of all the other famous Bachs) and Franz Liszt, a Hungarian composer from the Romantic Era. I find that while Liszt offers a sense of faux intimacy, his pieces are more enjoyable because of the level of virtuosity that is required of the pianist. Bach, on the other hand, has a sense of depth to his music. Bach’s music never lacks intelligence and is always a joy to play.

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I do most of my shopping online. While I do enjoy going to the local malls, I find that one can typically encounter more items for cheaper prices on the Internet. Sure, you have to deal with the price of shipping, but in most cases you can find incredible deals that are simply impossible anywhere else. The site I use most regularly is Amazon.com, most probably because they offer such an expansive list of categories from which to choose. I really appreciate the speed and quality of the interactions between buyers and sellers and I’d recommend Amazon.com to anyone looking for a place to shop.

I absolutely love the winter, and I by far prefer it to any other season. I’ve always been partial to colder weather—not only is it more comfortable than hotter weather, but we’re allowed to dawn a plethora of new, warm clothing. In the summer there is no immediate action which we can take to change our independent perception of temperature, but in the winter, should we feel too warm or cold, we can simply remove or add an article of clothing respectively. That’s not to mention the beauty that accompanies the winter season—snow beautifully gracing the branches of trees, ironically adding a glaze of life to the dead forms that make most appreciate autumn and fall.