Matthew's Nonfiction Blog

 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...

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...

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...