PE

Uni high fitness is something that every student has to endure. Even before attending Uni the young subbies hear about how “terrible” and “exhausting” Uni fitness can be. But I think that in the end the Uni high PE classes and department are very beneficial to Uni students and make them healthier and instills a positive routine that keeps their bodies healthy for the future.

Personally, I have always loved PE. When I was elementary I loved playing all the fun games in PE such as bumper carts and the everyone’s favorite Parachute game. PE allowed to me release my stress and spend some time having competitive, exhausting fun. Then when I entered middle school PE was a bit less fun, we were forced to focus on more “healthy” exercises, such as running, push-ups, and the FitnessGram Pacer Test™. The more intense exercises really opened me up to the idea of fitness. I despised the pain and soreness from working out and doing those exercises but in the end, I felt better and healthier. I realized that not everything can be fun when you want to stay healthy. I would do fairly well during the mile and other running events and decided to join cross country. After next year I decided I hated running and never continued my running career, despite the fact I was fairly good.

When I got accepted to Uni. my older sister would tell me how terrible the fitness program was and how she despised it. But when I had my first PE classes I realized I loved it. The fact that my class is fairly athletic and has a disproportionate amount of really fit people, pushed me to try harder and harder to stay fit and push myself to become more athletic. Unlike most Uni Students I was excited to enter Junior/Senior PE. Despite the fact that we replace playing fun sports such as Pickleball with weight lifting I was excited to see myself get stronger. Weight lifting can either be the most intense 25 minutes or the most boring depending on your mindset. I try to get the most out of it, but like most people, I have off days when I would rather be playing ultimate frisbee.

   I feel like the Uni High PE classes prepare the students by instilling a more healthy lifestyle and giving them the knowledge to understand the basics of strengthening their bodies. I definitely feel that in the future I will try to work out and keep my body healthy and I can thank the Uni PE classes for that.

Change in Music

My relationship with music has been a rocky road. When I was young the only music that I listened to was played by my parents, their limited collection of CD’s was the only music that I was exposed to. My parents rarely played the radio while we drove and if they did they only played classical music. Never did my parents tune into any of the “popular” music stations. I didn’t relate to any of the songs that my classmates would reference and it made feel like an outsider.
To add on to this fact, I was forced to play the piano for over 8 years. I hated playing the piano, I would regularly cry as I practiced, my parents forced me to use an abacus to record the number of times I would play each piece. Move a bead from one side to the other when I finished a repetition. I had piano practice every Friday after school, during the practice my teacher would correct my mistakes and remind me time and time again to use a metronome to stay with the time signature. But the use of a metronome made my flaws more obvious and would make my parents make me practice more so I ignored the advice. Twice a year my piano teacher would hold a recital amongst his students. We would choose a piece play it in front of a crowd of parents and siblings. These recitals were the most stressful thing, I would often make mistakes and once was even forced to restart my piece. Clearly, all these events put a bad taste in my mouth regarding classical music and made me think I disliked all music.
It wasn’t until I entered High School did I learn about the various types of music and found artists that I enjoyed. I pivotal moment was when my friends introduced me to Kanye. Kanye was an artist, unlike anything I had heard before, his combination of samples and beats together with his often deep and thought-provoking lyrics was an amazing combination. Since then my music taste has expanded enormously, I have found various genres that I love and even was able to find a music to compromise with my parents and find better music to play when we drive. I hope that in the future I will refine my music taste but at the same time keep my ears open to any new artists or genres I might enjoy.

Driving

I love to drive. I understand why some people view it as a hassle and a chore but I find it almost meditative. I find a long drive very relaxing, and it gives me time to focus and think about things I wouldn’t normally think about. However I wasn’t always like this, I waited over a year to get my drivers license and I regret every minute that I spent waiting.
When my parents first proposed the idea of getting my driver’s license I was against the idea completely. I thought that learning to drive was a waste of time and I could just take the bus anywhere I needed to go. I help on to these ideas until right until I turned 16. Once I turned 16 and the majority of my friends had their licenses (since I have a late birthday), I realized that driving was actually super useful(who knew🤔). Rather than asking my parents to drive me to hang out with my friends I could just jump in the car and go. As a result, I asked my friends for rides whenever I wanted to hang out. I realized I was a burden on my friends(😓) and enrolled in driving school as soon as possible. Driving school was a breeze, I was one of older kids in the classroom since I waited a year to take driving school but that was OK with me, I happy to being left alone and focusing on the class. The material that was taught was simple, most of it was logical. But driving is a lot of responsibility, you are responsible for a ~2-ton hunk of steel that can go over 100mph and your brain isn’t even fully matured. As a result, I focused on the material that was taught and made sure to remember everything I thought was important. After I finished driving school my mom planned a road trip to Florida and I was expected to drive at least half (😵). I gained a lot of experience on the road trip, I learned how to properly drive in heavy rain and even learned how to speed (😋). I think the road trip really made a better drive and allowed me to gain a lot of real-world experience. When we came back from the road trip I promised myself to the “behind the wheel” portion of my driving school done. But due to laziness, I waited until this summer after I got a job. This was stupid. Only when I realized that taking a 1.5 hr bus ride to get to my job sucked(🤢), did I push to get my license? I finished the “behind the wheel portion in exactly a week, I tried to rush it as much as possible. I have blessed that the behind the wheel teacher recognized my desperation and fast-tracked my progress.
When I finally complete all my requirements, I went to take the test. I waited over 4 hours in the DMV. It was one of the worst most bureaucratic experience of my life. The test took only about 10 min but the waiting killed me. In the end, it was all worth it I got my driver's license and earned my freedom. I earned the ability to leave almost whenever I want and I earned the freedom to just think and drive. I think earn is the right word proportional the amount of time I put into this and the amount I learned.

Teeth

Teeth are very important. Most people hate going to the dentist, they find someone digging in their teeth under a bright light unsettling, intrusive. I love it. I see taking care of my teeth as an investment into my future health. Brushing my teeth, flossing, gargling mouthwash makes me feel good. Just like a long, hot shower properly brushing your teeth make your mouth feel fresh, clean and most importantly healthy. As a result, a trip to the dentist is a reassurance that I am properly caring for my teeth and of course a professional cleaning. I am proud to say that I have never had a cavity, and am overall very proud of my teeth. I do of course relate to people who are less fortunate than I. The quality of my teeth was not always perfect. In fact, in elementary and middle school I had to have over eight fully attached teeth pulled from my mouth. These healthy baby teeth needed to be extracted. In normal cases, a baby teeth start to fall out between the ages five to seven years old and they continue to fall out until you turn about 12. My baby teeth didn't want to come out. It wasn’t their fault but rather the permanent teeth whose job is to push out and replace the baby teeth had failed. My adult teeth grew in behind my baby teeth rather than underneath which is normal. This resulted in my having two rows of teeth for a period of time. The image is very reminiscent of a shark.  My parents wanted to wait for my teeth to push forward and eventually push out my baby teeth, but my dentist recommended just pulling out my baby teeth. When I arrived at the dentist office, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My dentist sat me down, showed me the x-ray showing that my adult teeth wouldn’t push out my baby teeth and began the procedure. My dentist poked me with a needle and my whole mouth felt numb. He then got a pair of pliers and started to pull. I was incredibly surprised, even in 7th grade I visualized modern dentistry to be more advanced than just “make it not hurt” and “PULL.” My hope of a modern robot pulling my teeth was dashed and I had to deal with what was available. You may not know but just like icebergs, teeth are much larger under the surface than above. The roots of a tooth hold it in place and supply nutrients, they also make normal human teeth look like monster teeth when not hidden under gums. So since none of my baby teeth had lost their roots, my dentist was pulling monster teeth from my mouth and all I could do was look at the pliers with amazement. Particularly while pulling the last tooth my dentist couldn’t get a good grip and chipped it while trying to get it out. For a split second I thought he chipped a healthy tooth and I got extremely nervous and scared. But on the second attempt, he pulled out the chipped tooth and showed me the chip and the root. “That was a stuck one,” he said. I didn’t respond just drooled on the towel covering my shirt. My only dental procedure was done just like that. The recovery was simple and all my teeth moved to the proper places. Looking back I am grateful for the procedure it allowed my teeth to fill in naturally without braces and in my opinion my teeth look alright. But ever since getting my teeth pulled I have spent an extra minute flossing or gargling for a second longer despite the alcohol burning like hell in my mouth. I care for my teeth and I hope they will take care of me.

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.