“She looks like a Petunia!” My mom proudly announces, swinging my door open at 8 am on a Saturday morning. 

I rouse and mumble, “What?” 

“She looks like a Petunia!” She repeats. I’m still lost. “The bunny!”

Ohh. I had gotten a pet bunny a few days before.

I get out of bed to follow her downstairs, still not understanding that “looking like a Petunia” meant that her name should be Petunia. I had thought she was sitting in a position that made her look like a flower. 

It’s already been a week with my bunny, and I still can’t quite conjure the perfect name for her. Her vet records say “Momo;” the original name I had for her before realizing it didn’t quite fit. 

I had bounced between several names on the car ride to the breeder’s house. 

Bonito or Momo, I had decided. 

When I first saw my bunny she was sitting in a cardboard box, barely the length of my hand. I picked her up to place her in the carrier. She was warm and soft. The breeder named her Cassy. 

Neither Bonito nor Momo nor Cassy felt right. 

“You’re going to confuse her,” my mom jokes. For the past week, I had been calling her many different names, searching for the ones that stuck. I set her name to Momo when I registered for the vet.

Every day, I took her down to the basement to let her run around freely. I began to bond with her then. I brought my homework down with me, and I watched her jump around as I leisurely completed my AP biology readings. One day, when she laid down after running around in the basement, my intrusive thoughts won. I stuck my face in her fur. For some reason, she smelled like a toasted marshmallow. I ran upstairs and told my brother to sniff her too. 

For the next few days from then on, I called her “my toasted marshmallow.” Eventually, “my toasted marshmallow” shortened to Toasty. I liked the name Toasty because her fur color was similar to toasted wheat bread, as well as her semi-unconventional namesake.  

Now that Toasty’s name is much more secure  (she’ll even run to you if you shout her name), she’s also gained a few nicknames. 

1. Toaster Strudel
2. Strudel
3. Toast
4. 我的小宝贝

My ability to have Toasty was the result of hard work (not Anse-style hard work I SWEAR). My dad’s condition for getting her involved was a high academic achievement bar. Toasty is a reminder of the best worst years of my life. She’s a covid bunny. 

I don’t think that there is a pet more perfect than a rabbit. Rabbits don’t smell, they don’t bark, and they clean themselves. Their homes aren’t hard to maintain, and they can be very loving. 

Actually, there’s no pet more perfect than Toasty. 

My cousins have a rabbit from the same breeder named Blue, but she’s a bit of a demon. I still have a scar on my arm from picking her up to take her out to let her play. Blue sprays her pee and nips at my cousins. 

Toasty lets me pet her, and she flops over when she gets relaxed. She likes to rest her paws on a wooden toy and put her head on it like a pillow. She kisses my nose when I get close to the cage, and she takes a victory lap around her cage every time I give her a treat.  

She’s not afraid to thump and shut me up if I’m being too loud while calling my friends. 

I know that Toasty will be there to lick the salty tears off of my face when my work starts to feel like it’s too much. I know that even when she turns her butt to me in rebellion, she’ll still let me put my face into her fur.

She knows that I will always give her a treat when she jumps back into her cage (it’s 3 feet tall off the ground haha). She knows that I will always keep her home clean and stocked with fresh food. She knows I’ll shut up if she stomps her feet, and I’ll go close the blinds when the shadows scare her at 6 am. 

To Momo, to Bonito, to Petunia, to Toasty, I love you. 🙂 

I used to be deathly afraid of zombies.  

In elementary school, I read a zombie graphic novel that was meant for 4th graders and up. During LRC time, as the mischievous 3rd graders we were, we plucked the book from the shelf and read it huddled in a corner of the library. 

Quite honestly, it had me traumatized

The pictures of the zombies had become engrained in my young head. I struggled to fall asleep for a week. I kept my head under the hot covers, refusing to come up for air out of fear that there would be one of them looking at me through my window.  

I wouldn’t even let my mom say the word “zombie”. It was like a curse. “He who must not be named.” I told her to call them unicorns. I made my mom tear out the pictures of the zombie costumes in the Party City Halloween magazines. I was horrified by them. 

Despite this, if you were to ask me today what movie I wanted to put on, there’s a pretty high chance that I would respond with a zombie movie. I’m not sure what flipped the switch in my mind from absolute horror to entertainment, but over the summer of freshman year, I became a frequent binge-watcher of zombie movies.

I admit lots of zombie movies can be redundant: our main character wakes up from a coma in a hospital in desolate ruins. Blood is spattered on the walls and there is nobody to be found. Then, the main character makes noise too loud, interacts with a hunched-over figure, or opens a door that should have remained closed. Suddenly there are 4-5 infected cannibals running after him. 

Bam. I just described the beginnings of The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later. 

If it isn’t along those lines, it’s a man living everyday life with his family when suddenly the news flashes, or he sees something strange in the streets. He has a few close calls with desperate people or the zombies themselves before he finally settles in an area he deems safe enough for himself and those he loves. 

I just described Train to Busan, World War Z, and Shawn of the Dead. 

Despite the redundancy and predictability of zombie movies, I find myself captivated by the screen every time. 

Zombie and apocalypse movies boil down to the ways humanity and morality intersect in the event of the destruction of society. Our ideas regarding this occurrence tend to spin around in circles. 

For example, zombie movies commonly have the conflict of sacrificing someone for the sake of those around them. The protagonist’s group is faced with a dilemma: a horde of zombies is right on their trail, and somebody is limping, slowing the whole group down. If they continue on like this, the zombies will catch up and all of them will die. So the limper is cast aside. The zombies spend time eating away at the limper and the rest of the group gets away safely. This trope reflects the well-known moral dilemma of whether you should sacrifice the few to save the whole. The ways people react in a zombie movie is often the same. They choose to sacrifice. 

Furthermore, zombie movies commonly have a bitten individual hiding the fact that they are infected. Out of fear for their own lives, they put the lives of their entire group in danger. The viewer becomes completely frustrated. How could someone be so selfish? In 2020, we began to see why. This trope manifested itself in reality as the pandemic rolled over us. People not wanting to change plans refused to tell others if they were sick, putting the health of others in danger. This shows human nature’s tendency for self-preservation as shown. 

Lastly, there’s the unstable one who believes that they are the “chosen one” to end it all and purge the remnants of humanity. These are the individuals who sabotage and betray the protagonist. This character reflects those who crumble when faced with tragedy. Unable to cope with the loss of control, these people find control by believing that they are the ones in charge of the lives of others. They mask their fear with destruction. As long as they believe that they have a purpose and make some kind of impact, they are doing the right thing, right?     

I used to be deathly afraid of zombies, but it’s the people that are the ones that get scary in the face of tragedy. I can’t help but become entranced by zombie content. Despite my prior phobia of zombie content, the theorization of humanity’s reaction to the worst possible scenario is now among my favorite subgenres of media to consume.