Day 29

Name: Michaela Owen

Profession: Student, Horizon High School

Location: Her car in Scottsdale, Arizona

Question: Why are you here?

Answer: Why not?

High school senior Michaela Owen hates old people.

“They’re just really gross. They’re just so pathetic and fragile and smelly and wrinkly and they just kind of seem really weak,” she said. “It just really freaks me out. I get really bad anxiety every time I’m in a foot radius of an old person.”

Though interactions with the elderly constitute one of her biggest fears, she isn’t as intolerable as she may initially seem. In fact, today’s conversation with Owen revealed that when it comes to past, present, and future, she’s generally optimistic and even borderline bubbly.

A member of Teachers of Tomorrow and her spring musical’s costume crew, Owen always keeps herself on her toes and in search of a new diversion. Being the youngest member of her family, she is now the last bird to leave the nest, and in the meantime has to be creative with her time.

“I’m pretty much home alone with my parents, which sucks because too much attention is on me and it’s a lot quieter and boring at home,” she said.

She does usually get along with her parents, she said, who are native Canadians but have recently gotten their American citizenship.

“My whole family kind of prides ourselves on being cultured, even though we’re just from Canada and it’s not that much different from America,” she said.

The family loves to travel, and, having already hit France, Italy, and England, Owen has made it a life goal to visit all seven continents. It’s no wonder, considering how much the first trip has affected her.

“France and Italy is really where I loved art and architecture,” she said. It was then that she decided to study art history. She also hopes to take French at the University of Arizona, which she feels will help her most in that goal. Though she isn’t sure exactly what she wants to do with it, “I’m only seventeen.”