Category: Other

“Woah,” not necessarily as in the most profound things you’ve ever heard/read, but because I needed a short way to say “Food for thought and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have an existential crisis while you’re at it” for the title. This is the other side of my quotes document, and for sanity’s sake I’ve posted less of those than I did of the happy quotes (you might need those, they’re here).

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” -William Shakespeare

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” -Ambrose Bierce

“Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.” – Cecil Baldwin, Welcome To Night Vale

You could call this a writer thing, but I look at it more as a source of entertainment and less as an actual influence in my work. Thanks to a certain personalized media platform, *cough* Pinterest, I am consistently bombarded with what have become one of my favorite things to read on the internet.

The types of my prompts vary wildly – some are serious, some are uplifting, some are downright hilarious. Some of them make you want to think about them for hours and some stand alone. Some of them are long, and some are only a sentence. Some include a response from someone else who has written a short story based off of the prompt. But all of them are great. Below I have included one of my “Fun” ones, a serious one and a happy one. Enjoy!

Have you ever played a game online that you were so good at, someone accused you of hacking? It’s quite obnoxious, and poor sportsmanship, and something I get quite a lot, especially when I’m playing games on Roblox.

The interesting thing is, I’m not particularly good at many of those games. Not on my own, at least. But my secret isn’t codes or the exploitation of glitches, it’s music.

See, some of the games I play, like Mad Paintball 2, don’t have music at all. That makes it hard for me to focus, so I’ll pull up my own music on YouTube. I, personally, listen to a rather eclectic selection of works, but that doesn’t affect how I play the game. Each genre brings its own impact on me, but they all end up adding motivation and concentration to how I play.

Most of the other games I play have their own music, but the way each is set to the game’s pace can mess with my head, so I still mute it and play mine.

Really the lesson here is that music is great and you don’t need hacks when you have motivation.

This week is more of an advertisement for my mom’s blog than a standard post on my own, but hey, it’s cool and it’s geeky, so I’m counting it.

Almost two years ago, my mother decided to join me in the land of weekly blog posts (something that she is much better at keeping up with than I am), and not just as my editor. She got her own website, entitled Mom’s Guide to the Galaxy, where she talks about, well, everything.

Unlike Random Geek Child, Mom’s Guide to the Galaxy is largely direct personal information. She talks about our garden, our cats, karate, books… like I said, kind of just everything. In general, her writing is more cohesive and better at explaining things than mine, probably because my mind jumps from A to G with nothing in between, and then I have to try and fill in the blank. But whatever the reason, I find her writing to be surprisingly enjoyable. I mean, I always knew she could write fiction (see the Papa’s Gift series, part 1 here) but she also somehow manages to make the real world seem interesting, a difficult feat indeed. I won’t gives you specific examples for that one, since they make up most of the website. Go find them yourself.

One of the most overlooked entertainment sources: the puzzle. I love puzzles — everything just clicks right into place, cleanly and perfectly to create the bigger picture. All you have to do is find where what goes. It’s a nice contrast to real life, which is messy and things usually don’t fit into place without adjustments or trimming, leaving part of the picture incomplete. And even worse, in real life you have no idea what it’s supposed to look like, so you’re trying to put pieces together without knowing what you’re supposed to put where.

I also like the idea behind the pieces versus the whole. When you look at a piece, you might just see black with some light grey in it, but once it’s in place it makes sense, and moreover, that one piece may not seem like much in the whole picture, but if it weren’t there the image wouldn’t seem right. It would be incomplete, something that irks me unendingly. I doubt I’m the only one.

Beyond the fact that the picture looks nice, and the puzzle has nice metaphorical value, I can think of two other main reasons why I like puzzles so much. The first is that it provides a sense of satisfaction, to have figured it out on your own and to have created something nice by doing so (the same satisfaction applies to LEGOs). The second is that it can be a relatively mindless activity (or at least, doesn’t require total focus), since it’s very much a visual connection or attempting to put the piece in various places. This leaves the mind open for wandering, which, for a writer like myself, is a wondrous thing. This is especially beneficial for me, because, as much as I love contemplating plots and characters and the perfect wording for some sentence or another, I have trouble focusing to do so. It’s the issue I run into when watching YouTube or television or listening to music: I can’t sit still. I want to be doing something with my hands, to feel like I’m doing something productive. The same goes for mental writing exercises: I want to do them, I enjoy doing them, but I have to be doing something with my hands. And puzzles are the perfect candidate for that, because they don’t detract much attention from the story, while giving me something fulfilling to do.

This is a story I wrote based off of a picture of someone staring horrified at a lump in the carpet. Enjoy!

    “What were you thinking?” my father yelled, waving my wish list in the air. “You are not getting a dog! I want you to rewrite this letter, and I don’t want to see it even mention a dog!”

    Yep, that’s my father for you. Once he makes up his mind, there’s no changing it. Unfortunately for him, I may have inherited some of his stubbornness. So when my father told me I had to rewrite my letter, and I couldn’t mention ‘a dog’, I erased ‘a dog’ from my number 1 ‘want it’ space and replaced it with ‘a puppy’.

    Needless to say (though I’m going to say it anyways), my father was not pleased. He said I was grounded until I had rewritten the letter. I was fine with that. If I wasn’t allowed to leave my room, I didn’t have to go to school, right?

    Well, so much for that idea. My father made me go to the bus stop, so I sat down next to Donna, my best friend. “What’s wrong?” she asked, only briefly glancing at my face before returning to reading. I explained my problem.

    “Why don’t you start with something small like, say, a hamster?” she suggested.

    The reason I didn’t try to get a hamster was I didn’t want a hamster. I wanted a dog, and that was final. In reading, we learned about figurative language. That gave me a great idea.

    When I got home, I rewrote my list. This time, it didn’t mention a dog. Instead, my wish list included a “Servant-bot 3.0”. I said I wanted it because I was ‘lonely’.

    I showed the list to my father and then I put it in my backpack. Hopefully, the person who recieved my list would see the word ‘lonely’ and get the clue.

    All I could do was wait, so I went to my room. There I found my toy food bowl. I gently placed it on my nightstand. The next day I couldn’t pay attention in class. My mind kept drifting to my list. If this didn’t work, what would?

    When I got home, I went to my room. I turned on my lamp and gasped. My little food dish was gone!

    I immediately stormed downstairs and into my father’s office. “Where is it?” I demanded, tears in my eyes. “Where is my little food dish?”

    “I thought it was in your room.” my father nonchalantly replied, not looking away from his paperwork.

    I stomped out of the room, fuming. I immediately ran straight to my room, searching furiously through my stuff. I stomped back down to my father’s office.

    “It’s not there!” I complained.

    “Why don’t you check the garage?” he suggested.

    “Oh no you don’t!” my mother exclaimed, entering the office. “You’re going to go wash up for dinner.”

    The next day, after school, I stepped into my father’s office. “Can I have the keys so I can check the garage for my bowl?”

    He thought for a moment, then replied, “No. I’ll come with you, though.” With that we set out for the garage door. My father slid the key into the hole and opened the door, revealing a vast, dark opening.

    “After you,” my father said, gesturing towards the garage. I took a deep breath and plunged into the darkness.

    A moment or two later, a lamp flickered on. I saw my father change the settings on the dimmer, and suddenly I could see the other side of the garage.

    I turned back to my father. He grinned and did a mock bow like a stage performer. As he straightened up, he froze. The look on his face was clear. I turned very slowly to see where he was pointing.

    “Wha-What’s that?” my father stammered, his eyes wide. I cautiously approached the lump. I reached down, grabbed the end of the carpet, and yanked it back. My eyes widened for a moment, then I burst into hysterical laughter.

    There on the floor was my food bowl. But that wasn’t all! There was also a small, adorable yellow puppy! “Happy Birthday, son.” my father said, stepping over and patting me on the back. And that’s the story of how I got Dandelion.

Today, I want to talk about impressions. Not the imitation sort, but the “this is what I think about this” type of impressions. What people think about us plays a huge part in our lives, primarily what bad they may think if you do something wrong. We spend so much time troubling ourselves over little imperfections that they might notice that we completely overlook all of our winning traits, which are, ironically, usually what they do notice. There’s an amazing balance to it — no, Thanos, not that type of balance, what are you doing here? Go bother some other planet. — Anyhow, it seems poetic that in ourselves we see the bad, the flaws and mistakes, but in us others see all the good that we cannot.

This was something I first really encountered four(ish) years ago, when my dad fished up a blog post from a friend of mine about the day we met. I hadn’t thought much of it, but she must have, because it warranted what transfers to Google Docs as a solid three and a half pages. There was something extraordinarily enticing about reading someone’s honest opinion of me.

On that note, I’d like to call out Cheshire Moon and thank them for Apple, a personalized version of their song Critters. It, just like that blog post, was a moving reminder of the good that others see, even when I can’t, and there is a uniqueness to the inspiration I get from both of them, not as a call to be more, but as a reminder of what I already am, and to not lose sight of that in the midst of the bad.