Coleman's Personal Essays

  Technology is in every part of my life. Every day, I use my phone, laptop, and TV. However, if I think about any specific piece I would write a love letter to, it’s the Wii U. I have the most memories with this console than anything else. At its release in 2013, it was not received very well. To sum up what critics thought of it, “meh”. But as a 9-year-old whose Wii mini had finally broken, the Wii U was a beacon of light. The Wii U was very similar to the Wii, so the same wand-like motion controllers worked with it. The main change was the addition of the ‘gamepad’, a large controller with a screen in the middle which acted like a Nintendo DS. You had an iPad to play games on that connected to your TV. I made some of my best memories with the Wii U. I can still remember one specific sleepover when I was about 10. My best friend Tiago was over for the night. We bonded over video games, so we played the whole afternoon. The time passed quickly, and we needed to head to bed, ...

Doing nothing often is not really doing nothing. Overanalytical people might say that you’re never “doing nothing” because you are always breathing, but “doing nothing” can be applied to a lot of scenarios. Because it is so broad, doing nothing is not always good or bad, it depends on what kind of nothing you’re doing. One definition of doing nothing is not being productive. If I have a paper due in two days and I spend an afternoon playing video games on the couch, you might say I’m doing nothing. My actions aren’t leading to anything consequential, therefore they are nothing. In this case, I consider doing nothing to be a bad use of my time. Of course, doing nothing could also be literally nothing. Sitting down with no activity to preoccupy myself with is not anything. This isn’t inherently bad or good because it is tough to categorize “nothing”. My personal definition of doing nothing, however, is being alone with my thoughts. Letting my head go through its own stream of conscious...