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What Would You Wait in Line for?

I’ve always hated waiting for my turn. When I was much younger, I hated waiting for my mom to kick my siblings off of the Wii so I could have my turn to play LEGO Star Wars or Mario Kart without using the god awful diagonal split screen. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’ve realized that patiently waiting for my turn still sucks. What’s worse is just how common lines are: stop-lights, Chipotle, the bathroom, etc.  If I can avoid a line, I’ll take that opportunity without hesitating. I know people at Uni love Chipotle, and I do too, but there is no excuse for lining up outside in order to get your burrito bowl. There are so many great places to buy food on Green Street; I don’t see how waiting in line for food could be worth it. That said, I willingly wait in line for food everyday. The kitchen microwaves make my day worse without fail. No matter how quickly I run downstairs from physics, I just can’t seem to beat the line. On multiple occasions, I’ve seen people start microwaving...
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Do you ever eavesdrop?

  Do you ever eavesdrop? I love to people-watch; it’s my favorite hobby. During the Cross Country season we would occasionally have two practices in a day. One practice would be after school has scheduled and the other would be in the morning. Once I finished whatever run we had that morning (usually an easy run), I entered my routine. When I was finished showering I would walk to the Dunkin Donuts on Green Street, order a large black cold brew coffee, and sit on the second floor of CIF until Uni was unlocked for the day. From my perch I watched the comings and goings of whoever was drawn to study at 6:45 in the morning. I didn’t find any regulars. Most people on the first floor were rather uninteresting, sitting down and immediately opening up their laptops. I wish I had better eyes so that I could see what they were doing.  To answer the question, “Do I ever eavesdrop?”. No, I never got the opportunity. Noone brought a friend with them that early in the morning, and I woul...
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To what piece of technology would you write a “love letter."

There is a reason the 21st century is called the information age. Smartphones, social media, etc define the modern world. I remember adopting one innovation and how it changed my life. The mechanical pencil was long before my lifetime (google says 1877), but it wasn’t a part of my life until middle school or so. Whereas boring technologies like computers and phones have surrounded me all my life.  I lied. I did know about mechanical pencils before I fell in love with them. My first introduction to mechanical pencils were those awful ones that required you to twist them to push out more lead (why do we call it lead if everyone knows it’s graphite) and were tipped with garbage erasers. My younger self would always push his pencil into the paper way too hard, and I would snap the lead over and over again. I still push into the way heavier than I need to, as evidenced by the first page of my Junior year US History notebook becoming smudges of lead with a few legible words thrown in t...
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Is Doing Nothing a Good Use of Your Time?

My favorite days were the ones where I got nothing done. The ones where I did “nothing”. But there is a big difference between doing nothing and not doing anything. Doing nothing is when you procrastinate, watch too much tv, etc. Doing nothing is fun. Everyone needs a break once and a while, but stuff needs to get done and so you can’t do nothing forever. That’s what makes doing nothing so enjoyable. On the other hand, not doing anything is a very different feeling. Nowadays, I never find myself doing anything other than sitting down and not doing anything.  Despite its joys,  doing nothing can become annoying sometimes. I can only watch so much tv in a week before feeling like garbage. I (+ many others) became well acquainted with when doing nothing goes too far during COVID-19 quarantine. I found myself doing a whole lot of nothing. It’s not as if there was nothing to do. There was still homework to be done and tests to study for. Instead of being productive, I simply proc...
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How good are you at waiting for what you really want?

 Note: This is a little short, and I would like advice on what I could expand on / add to it.      There aren't many things that I want so badly that I cannot wait. I used to be so good at waiting months until Christmas or another special occasion to ask for whatever I wanted that year, but recently I’ve become worse at waiting, especially for the little things. When I was about eight I worked for around two hours cleaning every little crevice of the living room in order to earn ten dollars. I can’t remember what I wanted to do with that money, but I do remember that ten dollars was a lot of money. Another time I spent half an hour every day all summer working on a math-workbook. My reward was fifteen dollars worth of Wizard 101 credits.  It’s not that I’ve become more inpatient as I’ve grown older, but twenty-odd dollars is just no longer the big deal it used to be. Purchases only a dollar or two changed from small to nothing probably to my own detriment. W...
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What’s your role in your family?

When I’m asked about my family I default to describing how I’m the second oldest of four children - three boys and one girl. We were all born rather close together with there only being a four year gap between the oldest and youngest. Maybe it’s because of this close packing that I never felt like the ignored middle-child that is shown all over tv and movies.  I’ve shared a room with my older brother even before my family moved to Champaign from South Carolina when I was two. Within our shared room we didn’t put down a chalk line dividing my half and his-half instead we continued to share. We shared a bunk bed (I was and still am bottom bunk), a dresser (we split which drawers were ours), LEGOs, etc. Although we shared with each other for the most part without issue, what did cause fights was the messes we would make. I’m not a particularly organized person but seeing clothes on the floor or tripping over some random junk would make me so angry. In some ways I helped balance him ou...
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Objects of My Life. Roughest Draft

The first thing that I ever owned was my floppy-eared, cream-colored, and brown-spotted stuffed dog, who I creatively named Puppy. Unfortunately for Puppy, I didn’t have any particular love for stuffed animals. He became yet another member of my older brother and I’s pile of stuffed animals sitting in the corner next to the closet. He fit right in along with my brother’s stuffed dog, my pillow-pet, my brother’s pillow pet, and our matching owls. To this day Puppy is still in my room. Instead of being thrown in the corner, he’s now thrown in a plastic box that supports two blankets, a baseball cap, and a shoebox.  My relationship with my stuffed animals may have resulted from me believing myself to be much more mature than I really am, but I haven’t abandoned all mementos of childhood just yet. The corner between the ceiling and the wall is still wrapped in a banner of monster trucks climbing over desert rocks after I chose those images over images of Formula 1 cars (one of my bigge...
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