I am a storyteller—or rather, I’d like to be one something dreadful. In school, I have always preferred the humanities to any other topic for one reason only: while the sciences are lovely for showing us the way in which the world works, we need the humanities to remind us that it is beautiful. As such, it may not come as a surprise that I will be pursuing a BFA in Film over the next four years. My aforementioned academic proclivities point to the fact that I greatly enjoy being human and all that that entails. That perspective not only informs my approach to life, but how I approach my art as a thespian, filmmaker and playwright. But what exactly is my approach? Well, despite the fact that the universe is a great collection of muchness, I also believe that each and every thing within it possesses a certain art to it. I am partial to what Socrates would call the “examined life.” Allow me to explain. Say that I wanted to learn how to make a house, and in doing so, started with something simple, like the windows. I might look around me for inspiration. In the room in which I currently type, there are eight windows exactly, 15 panes each. Their very existence seems to beg a question: do I even know what panes are? If so, how? And what of the glass which I now observe—from what sandy, windswept beach did its contents originate? In what fires were the sands stoked and refined to produce my windows? And who once trod upon its minerals in the days long since forgotten? I could spend a handful of lifetimes on houses to be quite truthful, studying everything from their aesthetics to their molecular structure. And yet I have this one short life to do it all. In my time on Earth, I’ve already found that answers tend to manifest questions infinitely. And let’s not forget that the windows that I mentioned belong to just one room in my house. I live in a neighborhood filled with houses filled with windows filled with panes; they must have each had their own beaches and minerals, too! As I was walking about one day, I noticed a home which I had never seen before, though I must have driven by it a thousand times in the past. It was just sitting there, odd and charming and still. It was then that I realized just how much I would never know, how easy it is to miss entire histories in my speeding through modernity. There are stories everywhere we go, and to encounter them is to be alive. As an artist, I want to question the mundane, to revel in it, to undo the normalcy that we’ve ascribed to it by way of repeated exposure. There is something particularly moving about being so small in this universe, knowing that there are millions of extraordinary things obscured in waiting. Life’s purpose lies, even now, in the discovery of life’s purpose. However clichéd it will sound, the end does not matter so much as the roaming does. For me, art is more than beauty; it is an apparatus through which we experience life itself.