About

About the Blog Title and Tag Line:

This blog used to be known as “avocadoenthusiast”, but I figured that was too long and niche to spur people’s attention. Mid-2016, I changed the blog title to “pradahag” because it was funnier, had a bit of a self-depreciating ring to it, and was a clever play-on-words. I’ve played with many online personas, ranging from a space captain to a quinoa princess (very, very dark times), and most recently a SUPER INTERNET SENSATION (caps imperative), which you can read about here.

Now that I’m no longer a young and confused undergraduate, I figured that my blog should reflect that. I took inspiration (read: copped) from one of my favourite podcasts, Partially Examined Life, and changed up the syntactic structure a bit for effect. Part of the reason why I chose the title “Life, Partially Examined” is because I’m still young and confused (just not an undergraduate, on which I’m crediting my past titles/personas), and I believe the human experience can’t be encapsulated even by a full examination of one’s life. That doesn’t mean that I can’t try to make meaning for myself though!

On fragmentation: pieces of myself are scattered – snippets of my past self exist in the memories of others, on sign-in sheets and book cards and data files, on records stored deep in a banker’s box, and so on. At any given moment I am a fragment of my own self, potentially comprising my future self or withering away as we speak (as you read?): I am whole in a different way.

About the Blog:

This blog started off as a space for me to extrapolate the absurdities of relationships, but has since evolved into a space based on my interests, including:

  • Reflections on how I navigate my body and existence as a racialized woman
  • Summaries and commentaries of current events in relation to critical theory
  • Discussions of mental wellness
  • Blog posts about daily occurrences and oddities
  • Excerpts of my essays and academic work, some of which can be found here
  • Other miscellaneous posts about linguistics, intersectional feminism, Russian literature, continental philosophy, photography, media studies, and so on
  • A space for my creative work to flourish when I have time to write

About Me:

My name is Melissa and I am a writer. I used to write a lot of youth fiction and poetry, which you can find on soon-to-be-constructed pages of this site, but now I focus more on blog-writing and digital story-telling. As someone who always struggles with articulation, I find that writing often allows me to express myself in ways I would not be able to verbally.

I am also an alumna from the University of British Columbia, having majored in English Literature and Language, and minored in Philosophy. I am currently enrolled at UBC as a teaching candidate to teach the IB Diploma Programme. I also hope to further my education in a Masters program, focusing on the benefits of multimodal literacies in pedagogy.

All seriousness aside: I am religious about my skincare routine, I work at a gym and enjoy hiking, I am an avid fan of TV comedies, I listen to sad acoustic music, 70’s Hits, and trap (weird combination), I love animals and veggies, and I have a crush on Harry Styles (and my partner, Nicholas). These are among many other trivial niceties.

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This is me! Captured by Nicholas Mani-Flower

A Note about Creative Commons:

Copyright is sometimes a pain in the ass, and I feel that (#throwback to Taylor Swift suing her fans over having her face on their own personal shirts 😦 ). Taken from the Creative Commons site: “Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms; those who want to make creative uses of works; and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis”.

Other than my essays and academic work, all of my material operates under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license, which means you can:

  1. Share — copy and redistribute my material in any medium or format
  2. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon my material