I cannot believe I missed it.
I’m so sorry to have let you down, blog.
Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of the inauguration of my love-hate relationship with blogging. A full four years. That’s a lot to swallow. Over one-fifth of my life. Hell, I was hardly conscious of time my first four years, so let’s just round up to 30%.
A handful of years ago I remember sitting on my bed looking at my photo in each year’s yearbook. I was told that I looked exactly the same in each one, which is hardly a stretch of the imagination. Maybe my face was a little less round in each successive year, and the hair was varying degrees of poofy but always the same cut (I swear it grows that way). I always guessed that puberty would change things, but I still look just like a stretched and skewed version of the five-year old me.
Maybe it’s this very fact that has always led me to believe I’ve been a very static person. And maybe it’s my realization that I haven’t changed much physically over the years that has recently led me to realize just how much I have evolved over the years.
I haven’t always been smart, though that might sort of be a lie. In fact, through the third grade I was quite the rebel. It was quite the occasion if I got an “S+” on my weekly report because I would usually get in trouble for talking during class. (And that one time I threw a pine cone at a kid…) I was put in gifted classes even back then, but I don’t think anyone (or even myself) really considered me to be that much above average until middle school. And by that point I stopped talking in class.
In the beginning of middle school I was painfully aware of my peers. The couple of months that I insisted on attempting to spike up the front of my hair (which didn’t work, because it grows to the side), how I insisted on sagging my pants like everyone else, and all the mental contention brought on by Kylie. That girl drove me crazy. But after moving at the beginning of seventh grade, I took a turn again. I stopped caring about what people thought and associated with the nerds. I gradually became cool again through the end of ninth grade. I honestly think during these years I was probably the most sociable. Others considered me to be pretty friendly and deathly funny with my stupid witticisms. Of course, do another reset with sophomore year when I moved again, but things were generally the same.
I guess a lot of my behavior has been dictated for me because I moved so much growing up. My favorite years of school were definitely twelfth, ninth, and sixth, each of the last years I spent at a school. Through all this though, I’ve grown to be much more serious and (unfortunately in my opinion) my sense of humor has definitely waned.
There have been a few constants though. I’ve always been an engineer at heart, whether it was building with blocks, LEGOs, or HTML. My love is solving problems to create something from nothing. Part of being an engineer has been a constant accumulation of knowledge. My friends and family will let you know that I know a little of something about practically everything, and it’s not that far from the truth. I’ve also never grown up. As a kid I was always the mature sensible one, and now I’m still the same child at heart. I’m not kidding when I say that I spent last Thursday night doing handstands and trying to climb my dorm room walls…
I guess it’s only fitting on this fourth anniversary of blogging to reflect on how much and how little has changed from my first freshman year, arguably the best year of my life, to my second freshman year. It was only today that I finally learned a song that I’ve for years thought to be Third Eye Blind (even though I’ve always known it wasn’t) is actually “The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe.
And even though no one cares what song I’m listening to while blogging, this time you should.