Soccer

I love playing and watching soccer. I’ve been a fan of Arsenal in the Premier League since I became obsessed with them playing FIFA twelve years ago. I watch all of their games, and am perhaps more emotionally invested in them than is healthy. I still play soccer frequently for fun; when I’m at school in Boston, I play on various intramural teams and at pickup games on some weeknights. When I lived in Italy for four months in fall 2023, I played on a team with all Italian-speaking teammates, which was a super fun opportunity to immerse myself in the culture as well as share in a sport I love, which served as a universal language to connect me to my teammates.

Playing soccer in Boston

My Italian soccer team

Music

I’ve played guitar for about eight years, after watching the movie “Sing” with my grandmother and sister, in which there were two porcupines who could shred like nobody’s business, which compelled me to start learning songs I liked on my dad’s guitar, which, in turn, led me to become obsessed with the instrument. In high school, I played in bands at school and outside of school and started to write my own songs, combining my passion and talent for guitar reluctantly with my ability to sing (just about well enough to be the frontman for a rock band). I have music published on Spotify under the moniker of my high school band, Peabrain, and am currently working on an album with my band at college, which goes by the similarly visionary name of Pigeonhelmet.

Philosophy

Before my junior year of high school, I was almost exclusively interested in STEM. I thought, unfairly, that the humanities lacked concrete answers about life and the rigor required to arrive at them. This was until I took Jared D’Onofrio’s AP Language and Composition course during my junior year at Francis Parker School. He opened my eyes to how the analysis of literature could serve as a canvas on which to paint new insights about the nature of ourselves and our reality. This led me down a rabbit hole of philosophy podcasts, and, eventually, books, which fundamentally changed the way I saw the world. For the first time, I was able to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the human experience, which I find to be derived from its inevitable end and inherent chaos; our inability to completely reduce our existence to equations.

The work of the Existentialists, particularly those in the Absurdist camp, speaks to me the most. Much of my everyday outlook on life, reduced roughly to the idea that the lack of inherent meaning in our existence is liberating, as it gives us the opportunity to carve it out for ourselves in whatever form we desire, is influenced by this camp of thinkers. I’ve recently taken particular interest in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, which I find to be even more applicable to today’s world than Debord’s when he wrote it in 1967 where social media and consumerism have taken his concept of the Spectacle to extremes that perhaps even he could not have foreseen. Particularly interesting to me, and perhaps a bit meta as I am currently in the process of creating my personal website, is the idea of the “brand-that-is-you,” the personal brand we use to encapsulate our identity as a commodity.

Languages

As a Latin American, I grew up around spoken Spanish at my grandparents’ house, then fleshed out what I'd picked up with studies in high school, and, in the past couple years, conversations with people in Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona, and Medellin to achieve a level somewhere between proficiency and fluency. My knowledge of Spanish has formed the basis of my studies of French at college, and my learning of Italian, somewhat out of necessity, during my four months working in a small city in Italy. I enjoy furthering my knowledge and understanding of these languages through individual study, films, music, and conversations, because I believe that everyone has their own story to tell, and that, within every story, is some nugget of wisdom or some cool experience that promises to enhance the life of others, and that, by learning these languages, I increase the sample size of potential people I can form connections and have these exchanges with.

Surfing

It’s fun! I like it!

After surfing in Lisbon, Portugal

Surfing at home in San Diego