I’ve never liked the Super Bowl, and I will never like football — at least, the American kind. But one thing I have enjoyed in recent years is the Super Bowl Half Time performance (clearly, I am not representative of the American populace). I was especially looking forward to Lady Gaga’s performance tonight after reading that the NFL explicitly told her not to say anything political during the show. I knew she’d do something to make it political, and that the conservatives would probably be too blind to catch it.

From beginning with “This Land is Your Land” to the order of the songs she sang, it was very clear she was saying she was against President Dipshit’s poorly thought out travel ban, as well as just him as POTUS in general. I loved seeing all the commentary on Facebook after the show, where users are moaning on about people trying to make a non-political performance political. Wake up, peeps.

Tonight’s mentoring session was not going well. Our group of mentors and mentees played a long game of Apples to Apples, but my mentee was not having it. She’s 18 years old, and like all the kids in this small program, she has specific medical and psychological conditions and is part of the foster care system. When the session began, she had just returned from the medical clinic because she was experiencing bad headaches, so she told me she didn’t want to participate today but wanted to sit and watch. Instead, she sat next to me and pulled out her smart phone, checking Facebook every five minutes and texting multiple friends. Well, I guess we weren’t bonding.

The last session, she was super quiet and hard to reach, which I expected would be the case. I tried to crack some jokes to soften her a little, and she eventually lightened up a bit (she was visibly on guard, as her shoulders were very tense). She gave me a hug before she left, and at the end of that session, I wondered if she just thought I was just some loser who was going to leave her like all the other people in her life had previously.

But after today’s session, the lead of the program told me otherwise. “I know she’s hard to crack, but she really is a sweet person,” our program coordinator told me. “After the last session, she actually texted me on her way home and told me how much she enjoyed talking to you and how amazing you were to her that day. She looks like she really wants to give you a chance. She’s the kind of person who, if she didn’t want to be here, she would just never come. And she came and wanted to be here today to see you.”

I smiled. Sometimes it’s the words unspoken that may never get shared that mean the most.

Tonight, I had a mentoring session with the foster kids at the program I participate in, and our activity tonight was making healthy holiday treats. The program hired some ladies from a nutrition company to come in to discuss healthy eating habits during the Christmas season, and provided food to assemble little dishes and bites. Some of the foods they brought included Quaker Oats rice cakes, plain and red pepper hummus, cucumbers, cream cheese, grapes, strawberries, and honey ham. Two of the kids had never heard of hummus, and one of them said it looked and sounded absolutely disgusting. He initially refused to even try it, but after a little coaxing from a few of us (“don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,”) he finally gave in and put some on his rice cake. And he ended up loving it and making seconds and thirds, topping his rice cake not only with hummus, but with vegetables he normally never eats.

It was a different world to be in at the moment; I forget how picky children can be, and to see these kids completely change their minds about something like hummus in a matter of 20 minutes was such a reality check for me. These are kids who aren’t exposed to foods of different cultures, and because of that, they have very fixed views of what they like and dislike. With a little coaxing, though, they relented and found something new they all enjoyed, and I think that’s what a lot of parents fear doing in general. We cannot just give up on people who say they don’t like things, especially as growing children. We need to reintroduce to them and explain why these things are good in not just taste but also in nutrition. And maybe they don’t like the hummus with the cucumber, but they’d like it with something else like the rice cakes. These kids had never even been exposed to why vegetables are actually beneficial to them, much less a whole variety of vegetables that exist out there that they have just never seen. Habits are learned, both the good and the bad ones.

I have a whole drawer full of Christmas ornaments. This is kind of sad because the last time I had a tree to decorate, it was December 2008 in Cambridge, and my then-boyfriend and I bought a tree from a church charity and decorated it together. It’s been eight years without a tree of my own to decorate. Yet, I’ve still been accumulating ornaments that have been given as gifts to me, not to mention ornaments from traveling to areas that are famous for their Christmas markets, like Austria and Germany. These ornaments look up at me every year, wondering, when are you going to hang me up? When are you going to make use of me? Get me outta this drawer and let me breathe!

I’ve been passing by lots of corner street Christmas tree sellers, inhaling that magical pine tree smell. Passing by these streets makes me wish I had my own tree to decorate. I have no idea how much these trees cost because I’ve never been in the market, but I just heard that there are some 6-ft. tall Christmas trees in SoHo that are going for $900-2,500 each! New York City is so ridiculous for prices, but I had no idea it could be that insane just for a Christmas tree that would be up and decorated at maximum a month and a half.