When I was a little girl, I read all the time. Everywhere I went, I had a book tucked under my arm. I distinctly remember getting in trouble for reading ahead during English class in elementary school, but in my defense, people were just too slow when they read out loud. For me, books were a safety blanket and close companions; my family and I moved around a lot when I was younger, and as an only child, it was pretty lonely. Not much would stay constant from place to place, but my books were always there. Like many kids out there, I would pretend I actually went to Hogwarts or rode into battle at Helms Deep, and it was a wonderfully immersive experience.

But as I grew older, reading started to lose some of its magic. It was getting harder to get into the narrative and actually delve into the characters. I found the books I was reading in class interesting but in a deep and very introspective way, not in that indulgent, easy to understand way that I had been going through rapidly as a kid. When I tried to find a new book to read, I wanted it to be somewhere in between those two, which was a very hard balance to strike. As it became harder to find something satisfying to read, I turned to TV shows, which were easy to understand and not really pay attention to, which was perfect.

So I made do with television for years, watching the terrible choices executives made and somehow got money to produce until this last winter break, when I finally went to the library with my mother. There was nothing to do at home; TV wasn’t tempting, cooking wasn’t as fulfilling and staring up at the ceiling and napping had lost its novelty a week into break. So I decided to turn to my childhood friends, books. I decided to start with books that had been critically acclaimed and won prizes. If so many people loved them, surely I would as well and maybe be on the right path to the sort of book I would enjoy reading.

So I settled down with one of the books I’d found, curled up next to a window, and read. I found the magic of reading again that night. I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d finished and afterwards, I sat there, rereading passages and thinking about the characters. It felt good to find that interest again and to feel that excited while I read.

There’s something purely wonderful about being completely immersed in a book and imagining the characters coming to life. You join them through their story, relate to them a little and root for them all while escaping your own life. Television offers that sort of escape, but there’s a level of freedom and creative choice you cannot control. But when you’re reading, you’re in charge of imagining everything, and in that freedom you can find escape from pretty much everything else in the world.

When I was a little girl, I read all the time. Everywhere I went, I had a book tucked under my arm. I distinctly remember getting in trouble for reading ahead during English class in elementary school, but in my defense, people were just too slow when they read out loud. For me, books were a safety blanket and close companions; my family and I moved around a lot when I was younger, and as an only child, it was pretty lonely. Not much would stay constant from place to place, but my books were always there. Like many kids out there, I would pretend I actually went to Hogwarts or rode into battle at Helms Deep, and it was a wonderfully immersive experience.

But as I grew older, reading started to lose some of its magic. It was getting harder to get into the narrative and actually delve into the characters. I found the books I was reading in class interesting but in a deep and very introspective way, not in that indulgent, easy to understand way that I had been going through rapidly as a kid. When I tried to find a new book to read, I wanted it to be somewhere in between those two, which was a very hard balance to strike. As it became harder to find something satisfying to read, I turned to TV shows, which were easy to understand and not really pay attention to, which was perfect.

So I made do with television for years, watching the terrible choices executives made and somehow got money to produce until this last winter break, when I finally went to the library with my mother. There was nothing to do at home; TV wasn’t tempting, cooking wasn’t as fulfilling and staring up at the ceiling and napping had lost its novelty a week into break. So I decided to turn to my childhood friends, books. I decided to start with books that had been critically acclaimed and won prizes. If so many people loved them, surely I would as well and maybe be on the right path to the sort of book I would enjoy reading.

So I settled down with one of the books I’d found, curled up next to a window, and read. I found the magic of reading again that night. I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d finished and afterwards, I sat there, rereading passages and thinking about the characters. It felt good to find that interest again and to feel that excited while I read.

There’s something purely wonderful about being completely immersed in a book and imagining the characters coming to life. You join them through their story, relate to them a little and root for them all while escaping your own life. Television offers that sort of escape, but there’s a level of freedom and creative choice you cannot control. But when you’re reading, you’re in charge of imagining everything, and in that freedom you can find escape from pretty much everything else in the world.

The older generations like to blame us Millennials for everything; they’ve really got it out for us considering all the things they ruined for us. But one thing that they’re especially fixated on is how self-obsessed we apparently are.  We take selfies while they’re hard at work, paying off mortgages and doing other grown-up things.

The thing is, every generation has looked down at the generation below them and despaired at how they would never amount to anything. Once the older generation lays the groundwork for innovation, they don’t seem to realize that the next level of innovation is arriving. They don’t recognize how their previous work made it possible for a new age to analyze their mistakes.

If you look at history, as each era has progressed, people have had more and more resources to work with and more innovation to take advantage of. People in the Bronze Age had knowledge from those in the Stone Age about what shapes worked best for what use; they didn’t have to start from scratch. We stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us. Scientific innovation continued to progress the same way; researchers look at what worked in the past, and how previous methods could be improved upon. This also applies to other progressing fields; music, social views and
even literature.

How does this tie into our narcissism? Well, we’re just improving how we capture our moments, whether its Vines, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter. In our parents’ generations, remembering an event was a bit of an ordeal. You would get a camera, take the pictures, get the pictures developed, hopefully organize them and then put them in a safe place so that you could look at them sometime. Maybe you’d put them into an album that would be shoved into a box in the attic; perhaps you would frame a copy to remember the good old days. We have the luxury of taking thousands of pictures from the same devices we can talk to our friends with and sharing them with the world. Perhaps this generation is obsessed
with itself.

But why is that bad? We’re in an age that grew up with innovation and economic turmoil. The generation above us may have been able to pay for college with money from a summer job and buy a house a year after college, but most of us don’t have that luxury. So in the mean time, we share articles and pictures taken from painstaking angles with our friends while working to stay relevant in a fast paced world.

We’ve managed to reach a point where we can celebrate the big and little things in life, and we can share it all with the people closest to us. If that means I get the added bonus of being able to reminisce with even more materials when I’m older, great. Besides, by then, I can drink my coffee, read the paper and tut at how crazy the youth these days are; I mean, what would life be without that tradition?

The city of Atlanta is often overlooked when large U.S. cities are mentioned, but it definitely has its fair share of events and places to go to for new, unique experiences.

For instance, fall is right around the corner, and the first annual Old Fourth Ward Fall Festival, held at the BeltLine last weekend, was a good way to celebrate saying goodbye to this summer’s excessive humidity and sunburns.

This season’s festival was meant to serve as an extension of the annual Atlanta BeltLine Lantern Parade, which started in the year 2010.

Food and fun were expected by the Old Fourth Ward Fall Festival attendees. As far as food options, the festival had several  food trucks, some of which can be found around Tech’s campus during the week, such as Mac the Cheese and Viet Nomie’s. Additionally, they sold beverages and had some traditional festival food such as corn dogs and funnel cakes, which brought a familiar comforting element to the new event.

The live entertainment especially brought a familiar southern note to this festival. For instance, one of the performing bands, The Whiskey Gentry, was an upbeat Bluegrass group from Nashville, Tenn., who made sure that the energy of the afternoon remained lively. The band’s enthusiastic performance kept the attendees on their feet and away from their seats, dancing to the spirited tunes of the performance.

The event was held over the course of two days, Friday, Sept. 11, and Saturday, Sept. 12.  The lantern workshops began on Friday, and people came to mingle and enjoy the festival atmosphere.

Saturday started slowly with yoga and culminated with the Lantern Parade. The optional yet exciting Lantern Parade Viewing Party, which was a fundraising effort, was also held that night. The proceeds from the fundraiser went to the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership and Art on the BeltLine, two organizations who were working together to revamp and beautify the land and surroundings of the Atlanta BeltLine.

The Old Fourth Ward Fall Festival is a perfect example of what  The Beltline’s creators intended for it to stand for.

The idea of the BeltLine was originally introduced by a Tech graduate, Ryan Gravel, and has grown over the years to be a project for transportation, expansion of green space, promotion of sustainable growth and a location to showcase local art. As of now, the entire project is not complete, but if work continues at the current rate, the BeltLine will be completed by 2030.

According to current plans, once the BeltLine is completed, it will connect 45 neighborhoods in Atlanta and have transit options to make it more accessible to the general public.

Atlanta’s BeltLine is meant to be a way for people to explore different parts of the city and to unite the region as a whole — all while being a unique attraction for the city and a lively venue for events such as the BeltLine Lantern Parade or the Old Fourth Ward Fall Festival.

Additionally, because this event was incorporated with the Lantern Parade, there were lantern-making workshops where interested attendees could make and decorate lanterns for the next night’s parade.

Participants decorated their lanterns with anything from faces to Gallifreyan, as they celebrated the start of cooler weather and the season of layering.

As for the Lantern Parade on Saturday, thousands of Atlanta residents showed up with decorated lanterns and plenty of excitement to light up the night and brighten people’s weekends. The lanterns had a wide variety of sizes and styles which made the parade an exciting, diverse and colorful event.

Despite this being the first year of the Old Fourth Ward Fall Festival, this event has the potential to become a major annual event, much like Taste of Atlanta. It could also become one of the many fall festivals Atlanta residents have come to know and love.

Being a vegetarian isn’t really that hard nowadays. I remember when I was younger my family and I would go on road trips, and we’d stop in the middle of nowhere for food, and struggle to find something other than fries and a salad.

Now, we just stop at a Taco Bell or Subway. I still remember the first time I walked into a Taco Bell, and was blown away by the sheer number of options I had; replace anything with beans? Taco Bell was vegetarian fast food paradise, and quite frankly, still is. I’ve noticed that a rising number of nice restaurants are offering more vegetarian options, be it a good veggie burger or just really good pasta, but there’s still a lag
in the world of fast food.

I bring up fast food because it’s the most convenient food, especially for college students. See the thing is, cooking is my best bet as a vegetarian, but sometimes I just don’t want to cook. I also don’t want something so fancy I have to look decent, and I don’t want to wait for my food; I want something quick and easy, something with a drive through. Burger King has its veggie burger, and Chick-Fil-A has its wraps, but there are so many other restaurants
that could have more.

For example, McDonald’s is not ideal for a vegetarian; they’ve got fries, a salad and some breakfast items, but no veggie burger. In other countries they’ve customized specific brands to the countries’ tastes. In India, McDonald’s has masala patties and plenty of other vegetarian options. I’m not asking for a masala pattie, but it would be nice to have a decent black bean burger; I want to be able to say I’ve eaten a Big Mac. Sure it would be vegetarian, but it just seems like one of those formative experiences.

Ask any vegetarian, they will tell you that options have significantly improved
over the last decade, and there are some pretty delicious meat substitute products out there.

Food has always been a large part of my life, and there is very little I love more than sharing a meal with the people I care about. I’d like to be able to do that without restraint. I don’t want to have to go to McDonald’s and have a potato party by myself while
everyone else is digging into their burgers, or go to Chick-Fil-A and eat a cold wrap while people are eating warm chicken sandwiches. I want to be able to eat something substantial and satisfying, without having to cross my fingers and hope that the
fast food restaurant we’re going to has more than salad
for vegetarians.

So, why is it that there are still so few fast food chains with decent vegetarian options?
I get that the eating options in an area are influenced by an area’s culture, and I also understand that accommodate that culture isn’t the easiest thing.
But I also see that the demographic of these areas are changing, and I think that businesses, including restaurants, should reflect the wants and needs of their consumers.

The end of every Game of Thrones season brings a deluge of pain and emotion along with wild fan theories, and this season ending was no exception. The internet was flooded with millions of fans sharing their feelings with the world and for the first time, readers and watchers are on the same page.

I started reading the series after I watched the first season of the show, and I was hooked. Not only does George R.R. Martin vividly describe a world, he also writes incredibly realistic characters that aren’t one dimensional with their desires and motives. It’s often difficult to know who to root for.

Now, G.R.R.M., unlike most authors, managed to capture the fact that women are in fact, just as different in terms of personality as men are. While terrible things do happen to characters of both genders in this series, he hasn’t written off a woman character solely for a man character’s plot progression, and sadly, even this is considered groundbreaking.

Two wonderful examples of this are the Stark sisters. The younger, Arya Stark is currently off in the Free Cities learning how to kill people and exacting her revenge on the people who wronged her family. The elder, Sansa Stark, is gentler and sweeter, but is no less strong for it. While Arya learns how to fight with swords and knives in a very literal sense, Sansa learns how to fight with words and by understanding her enemies. Her sister can survive by fighting, but Sansa relies on her words and saying the right things to the right people to keep going. These two are very different characters, yet at the end of the day, they’re both doing what they’re best at to stay alive.

Daenerys Targaryen is another wonderfully written character. She’s introduced as a young girl who’s frightened of the world and her future, and has ended up being the ruler of several major city-states with three dragons to her name. However, she’s not free of flaw; she often makes misjudgments while ruling these cities, and isn’t always the most receptive to criticism. After all, she’s only a young teenage girl in charge of multiple cities, who was only recently made aware of her potential and given this power.

These are just four characters that are cohesive and have fully fleshed out storylines, and they take the fact that they are women, and completely take charge of it. Arya and Daenerys take people by surprise at what young girls can do. Sansa Stark has managed to live amongst her enemies throughout the story because they don’t realize how clever she truly is. Cersei Lannister, despite resenting her femininity, uses it as a weapon and a tool to get what she wants, and to get the best for herself and those she loves.

While the show doesn’t always capture the intricacies of female characters, it does show the variety of women in this series that make their own fates. They aren’t all necessarily strong in the traditional sense, but they’re very human and realistic for it. In a time when the media and world are obsessed with the idea of the “strong woman”, who can demolish a man’s self esteem in one sentence and look flawless doing it, its refreshing to see characters that subvert that trope, who are not used as mere fuel for the progression of a man’s storyline. It’s nice to see real women with a variety of motives and desires in mainstream media, and hopefully, it’s a trend that continues.