Ian's Blog of Doom

I’ve always been a pretty outgoing person. I like being around people, joking with friends, and inserting myself into conversations whether I was invited or not. I’m not the type to sit quietly in the corner or back away from group plans. But for someone as social as I am, I’ve always found it interesting how much I still value those small, quiet moments of being alone. Not all the time, but just enough to make me realize that being alone and being lonely are two completely different things. For me, being alone isn’t about escaping people. It’s more about making space to think. When I’m around others, especially in busy or loud environments, I don’t really think that much. There’s so much going on, especially with my attention constantly being pulled from one thing to another. I like that energy, don’t get me wrong, but after a while, it builds up. That’s when I feel the need to retreat for a bit. Not to shut everyone out, but to give my brain some breathing room. S ome of my favorite...

Every time I end up on social media, I always see some absurdly productive high school freshman giving advice on how to manage time. They all say the same thing. Focus on what's important. Get rid of distractions. Allocate your free time to doing something important. I used to watch them over and over again, and then save them for future use. But of course, they were all eventually forgotten, buried in hundreds of more videos that had the same prospect of revisitation. I could never figure out why I didn't have that same motivation to do more, and I still don’t know. Probably something to do with my laziness. While others were doing something productive, I would always end up goofing off with friends after school or doing some random activity. I hated the fact that I was wasting my time with these random things and not focusing on something more important to my life. But over time, I started to notice something strange. Those little moments of “doing nothing” stuck with me. The...

I can’t wait for things. I hate waiting in general, especially if I know what I’m waiting on. Why wait for something when I can get it now? At the end of the day, our time here is limited, so we should make the best of our time, right? Do it now so you can enjoy the time you would’ve spent worrying about it on something else. Get it now so you can enjoy the most time with it. That was my ideology, my motto. Of course this really only applies to the things I can control, but It’s worked for me so far. Ever since I gained consciousness and could finally retain memories (at the start of elementary school?), my family has named me the doer of the house. If I wanted something, I would get it. If I wanted something done, I would get it done. As simple as that. Wait for my lazy sister to finally get up from her bed to clean the dishes, which would take a couple hours and result in our parents getting mad at both of us, or do it myself now? Free 10 day shipping or spend a dollar more to get th...

To say the least, I have collected a lot of awards over the years. In my room there lives a shelf of boxes, filled with medals and awards from all sorts of activities I have been a part of. Well, at least most of them are medals and awards. Thrown in there are also some random fun objects or gadgets that I was able to get my hands on. But what makes my collection of stuff so interesting is the different parts of my life that you can see from it. Probably the most important was my gymnastics experience. It all started with my career in gymnastics, which was the source of most of my collection. I was just a young little kid interested in a new thing every day, and when I always asked for advice from my parents. I was pretty stupid. However, physical sports seemed like an actual skill of mine, and my parents saw gymnastics as the perfect sport to get me into. When I eventually became a decent gymnast and obtained my first medals, I remember asking my father what to do with them on the way...