Scary Bus Ride

Between Sub-Freshman and Junior year I rode the bus every day to and from school. Generally, I had good experiences every time I rode the bus, however, one experience tainted my bus ride home forever.

I got on the bus and went to the most comfortable seat, below the heater. The frost outside caused the windows to fog up and the loud clank of people knocking ice off their feet was ever constant. The bus ride was a blur, with a podcast in my ear and my hands in my pockets I was more than content. I gathered my things as my stop arrived. I noticed another man preparing to get off at the same time. The man was wearing glasses has a dirty shirt and seemed significantly overweight. I thought nothing of it.  As the bus slowed down I leaned against the momentum of the bus making sure my feet didn’t slide over the wet, slick ground. I pushed the back doors open and mumbled “thank you” under my breath. I jumped over a patch of snow and landed on the sidewalk. The night before the snow plows pushed all the fresh powdery snow to the side of the road, clearing them for all the morning commuters. But the snow piles hid a dangerous threat. The ice that was under the snow was not visible or made any signs it was there just a silent piece of dangerous ground. I got off the bus and with pure luck avoided the ice, however, the disheveled man was not so lucky. As he jumped over the snowbank his feet flew out from under him and be began to fall backward. I noticed all of this with the corner of my eye. I turned around just in time to see the back of his head hit the doorsill of the bus. His glasses flew off and broke. He fell down the snow bank and his head rested peacefully under the bus only two feet from the wheels which prepared to depart to the next stop. As I ran to the man I yelled to the bus driver not to move. I tried to pull the man from the wheels, but the snow and his weight made it impossible. The wheels began to turn. After only half a rotation they stopped and bus driver jumped out. The man was out cold. I tried to find his glasses but they had shattered on impact. I heard the honking of cars behind the bus and later the sirens of the ambulance as it approached. Luckily the woman whose car was stuck behind the bus was a CPR instructor and allowed me to step away from the scene.

After the ambulance arrived I prepared to go home, I filled out an incident report with the CU-MTD, not waiting to see what happened to the man hoping he was ok. This bus ride is perhaps one of my strongest memories and every winter as I get off the bus I remember that crazy day.

My Lego Story

Building things has played a major role in my life. But it all started with Legos. At this point, I assume you are thinking “As a kid, he probably loved playing with legos and loved to build new things.” That is very wrong, I hated legos as a kid. The stereotypical lego brick that is the likely a role the everyone’s childhood and even a modern-day “meme” was the bane of my existence. From the age of three to about eleven my parents had a successful online store where they bought Lego NXT kits for low prices and then parted the kits out to make a profit. As a result, my house was filled to the brim with various Lego sets and semi-parted out NXT kits. Despite the fact I had nearly unlimited access to Lego bricks I often refused to play with them and allowed them to collect dust under my bed. The only time I would take them out was to entertain friends who loved them. I have a clear memory from 4th grade where after school my friend came to my house and I watched him have more fun with the lego set then I’d ever had. I was amazed at how he could care so much for something that I saw as an annoyance. Eventually, I called to him and asked to play outside, I had grown bored of watching him play and wanted to have fun, he grudgingly responded only to be polite.*

As time passed I spent less and less time even thinking about legos, on the rare occasion my parents would enlist my help to help sort and count a new set and prepare it for resale but that was my extent of my interactions with Legos. I did not stop building things, rather I was driven even more so as I distanced myself from Legos. I spent over 3 months designing and perfecting paper guns out of paper (This was during the height of my DIY faze in Youtube as seen in the previous blog post). Only when I entered middle school did I start to show a slight interest in Lego's again. Lego has released a new NXT set and I discovered that my middle school had a team that competed with the kits, I was ecstatic. I was happy to find a purpose to my building, I hated having to imagine a purpose for my simple buildings and this competition allowed me to fully devote my time to trying to win. I discovered that if I wanted to be passionate at something I needed something stable to drive me, I would get bored with my imagination, in middle school my competitive spirit gave me that drive. Even now doing Highschool robotics I find that the competition often forces me to persevere even when I want to give up.

(* edited to finalize my thought)

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Youtube...

 For the last 5 years, I have been addicted to watching YouTube. It was completely normal for me to spend up to 2 hours each day watching my favorite content creator, ignoring the world and issues around me and rather indulging in an escape. It sucked my motivation and killed my time yet I still justified it to myself.

Even when I was very young I loved learning new things, I loved learning how to build new toys especially those which my parents would not buy for me. My logic was my parents could stop me from buying them but they couldn't stop me from making them. As a result, I spent tons of time on the internet researching different “toys” to build. When I say toys I mean weapons that shoot small objects, but other than the weapons I also researched anything that caught my fancy. I did not only use Youtube to research these projects, At this point in time, I didn’t spend too much time on Youtube, I watched a few videos to gain inspiration then continued to work on my projects. In my opinion, when Youtube is used in this way it is very beneficial, it can be used to gain new ideas or perspectives on your project and see how other people solve the same problems that you have faced.
As I grew older and started school I became more bored with my projects and spent more time on Youtube. Rather than using it as a jump off point for my project I would rather just watch other people do the work. Generally, these were short videos that I would easily binge watch. However watching these short videos introduced me to channels with longer videos that sucked up even more of my time. Then I began to watch Youtube far more seriously.

During the first two years that I seriously watched Youtube, I mainly watched Minecraft Let's Plays and other games. I moved away from the DIY projects due to my friends at school getting into video games and me following the trend. A Let's Play is watching someone else play a game and listen to their commentary. The personality was one of the reasons why I continued to watch and enjoy content creators that I grew out of, their commentary made them so likable they became my “friends.” I not exactly sure if this type of relationship with what is essentially a stranger is healthy but at the time I didn't care.

In the most recent year, the majority of my time on Youtube has been on following various car channels and the cars they are building. Each one of these videos could be up to 30 min long and it was not absurd for me to watch 4 videos a day. That is 2 hours of my life wasted on watching someone repair their car, and the time I didn’t even have my license. I continued this cycle of watching hours of Youtube each day for the majority of Junior year and the 2017 summer. As school started again I decided to quit cold turkey. I deleted the Youtube app off my phone and deleted the bookmark off my laptop.

Looking back on the amount of time I spent on Youtube and how much time I wasted, I do not regret quitting. I would like to say that if I went back to watching Youtube that I would be able to control myself, but I don’t believe that is possible for me.