Matthew's Nonfiction Blog

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...

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...