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<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>
Cramped
</title>
<base target="_blank">
<link rel="icon" href="images/favicon.ico">
<script src="https://epicenterprograms.github.io/standards/behavior/general.js"></script>
<script src="behavior.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://epicenterprograms.github.io/standards/formatting/foundation.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="formatting.css">
</head>
<body>
<nav class="hidden-left-nav">
<iframe src="navigation.html"></iframe>
</nav>
<h1 class="main-title">
Journal
</h1>
<main>
<div class="page-jump-sections">
<h2>
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
</h2>
<p>
This is my first full day back at college after winter break, and I thought I'd finally get to work typing some stuff. Although I want to just say I have a bunch of stuff to do and be done, I'll include a list of the majority of the stuff (including some of the things I've already done):
</p>
<ul>
<li>
Go to the student health services office.
</li>
<li>
Get my computer's space bar fixed.
</li>
<li>
Do stuff about jury duty.
</li>
<li>
Scout out my classes.
</li>
<li>
Scout out my SAT subject tests' testing location (near Harvard).
</li>
<li>
Email my work-study job when I'm coming back and at what times.
</li>
<li>
See how many pull-ups I can do after becoming a wimp over break.
</li>
<li>
Color-code my printed-up classes schedule.
</li>
<li>
Look up what materials my classes need.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
Just to be clear, that's all the stuff I need to do <em>today</em>; I left out the other stuff that I should be doing but won't have time for. Also, I hope you aren't waiting for me to give that list a context because you're going to be disappointed; I might expand on some of the stuff later, and I would imagine future entries will be better (if only because I'd feel bad for doing the same thing every time), but for now, I need to be done.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Saturday, January 21, 2017
</h2>
<p>
Today I had to wake up way too early (≈4:30) for my SAT subject tests (for MIT!). Although I'm sure for freshman admission last year the testing requirements for MIT were ACT + writing <em>or</em> SAT test and SAT subject tests, apparently things are different this year for transferring (even though one of the people who works in the admissions office tried to tell me that it's always been this way, even for freshman). As a result, I needed to pay a bunch of money to take the necessary math and science subject tests. Because I had to wake up so early, I had to steal some food from the dining hall yesterday so I could eat breakfast before 7:00. I don't know who decided that having important tests so early in the morning is a good idea, but they were most certainly wrong. On the bright side (or more exactly, the dark side because that's what it was outside), I had no trouble fitting on the T and getting to my testing location. Something that I didn't expect to happen was that, as I walking to the classroom I was going to have my test in, one person asked me if I was a BU student and proceeded to tell me how they thought they were in the same biology class as me. I didn't recognize them (or understand what they were doing taking an SAT subject test), but it's ridiculous how often people recognize me. There's a lot more I could say on the subject, but I need to move on.
</p>
<p>
I suppose the test went as you would expect any other standardized test to go: lots of structure, lots of quiet, and lots of questions. I particularly had fun trying to salvage my knowledge of cursive to copy a statement which was far too long. Although there were questions I had to skip, I'd say I felt fairly confident about the ones I answered. Don't worry, though, if the scores come back as less-than-satisfactory, I'll be sure to come up with some reason for it that I'll put in the Excuses section of this website. I'm not excessively worried, though, because apparently, you can flunk the SAT subject tests and still get a 200 and you can get the top score of 800 without getting all of the answers correct! Initially, I was intimidated by the average SAT scores MIT students get on the tests, but apparently, there's a lot of nonsense going on with the scoring, so it's not quite as scary anymore. At least the ACT test has the excuse of not having enough points to give away to be able to represent each question. Anyway, there are more things to talk about than that.
</p>
<p>
After the test, I gave myself a moderately brief self-guided tour around Harvard. I have to say that I don't think Harvard is as cool as MIT. (Now I'm sure to get in.) For one thing, the huge gate encompassing Harvard Yard makes me feel unwelcome. Besides that, they make the NO TRESPASSING signs into the buildings more visible than MIT. I don't think the insides of the buildings are as cool either (or at least don't have as many signs talking about cool stuff). Although there are some impressively designed buildings around Harvard, something about how the the all-brick buildings are designed makes me associate them with formality and elitism (although I can't speak for what the people are like) whereas MIT makes me think of creativity and experimentation. I didn't want to stay too long at Harvard, though, so I made my way back to the immensely crowded T and home (if that's what you call a dorm room).
</p>
<p>
The rest of my day was less productive than I had hoped (as is every day). I did my laundry today which is something I would have done yesterday, but then I realized when I'd have to be getting up, and I quickly decided against it. I got a foreign coin out of the experience, so it wasn't too bad. During and after that, I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to format seemingly simple things for this website in the way I wanted. It's quite annoying how even the simplest formatting or behavior takes an immense amount of time to create from scratch; I'd say there's at least a minimum of one hour invested in absolutely every single feature of this website with the higher end being something like 20-30+ hours. It wouldn't be too bad if this were the only thing I had to do (because I like programming), but such is not the case. I would condemn the frequency with which I get distracted from doing more necessary work, but when I think about all the cool things I've done, I also think that a good 95% of them wouldn't have been done at all if I hadn't had a lapse in my better judgement and worked on something much less important. Naturally, it's still important to actually do the necessary work, and I'm working really hard on trying to find that balance, but I'd say distractions can have their place. However, this distraction needs to come to a close; I have a lot of work to do tomorrow (which is pretty much the normal state), and I like to at least pretend like I'll be able to focus on it completely and get it all finished in time.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Monday, January 23, 2017
</h2>
<p>
There were a lot of interesting things that happened today; however, due to how ridiculously late it is, I'm only going to be able to provide you with summarized versions (even though they may seem like the long versions). Since it would take too much effort for me to decide how transition in and out of each paragraph, I'm just going to list each event in order and try to provide enough background for it to make sense.
</p>
<ol>
<li>
My roommate finally shut the window. For reasons I consider largely insufficient, my roommate has insisted that the window be kept open all the time despite the fact that it's the middle of winter; I was on board with keeping the window open in the summer since there's no air conditioning, but it just doesn't make sense anymore. For the record, we get along quite well, and I've always gone on the assumption that, if I insisted earnestly enough, he would shut the window, but it had always been just barely warm enough that I didn't want to put my foot down. Last night, I had quite a difficult time keeping myself warm in bed, and later on, I woke up presumably because I was tense and having a hard time keeping myself warm. For the first time, I decided to break out the thicker blanket I had stashed away in an effort to keep myself warm. I slept quite nicely after that. When my alarm told me it was time to take on the day, I noticed that my roommate was awake (he's almost always awake before me) and the window was closed. Apparently he saw what great lengths I went through to keep warm, felt bad, and decided to close the window. Even though the window is shut right now, you would hardly know it based on how strong of a breeze is still coming through the sides. I'm uncertain what the future holds with regards to the opening of the window.
</li>
<li>
My professors started explaining concepts I had been wondering about for a long time. By in large, I understand what's going on with whatever is taught to me, but occasionally, there's one or two things that I would prefer some elaboration on, but I'm often still stuck with the simple version. Today, things seemed to take a rare shift for the moment, but I need more time before I can tell if it actually turns into anything. Beyond that, it's too abstract for me to be able to effectively talk about, so I'll move on.
</li>
<li>
I went to a non-existent class. My Calculus discussion was scheduled for today, but when I went to where it was, all I found was one person in an otherwise empty room. Soon enough the person found out and told me that the discussion had been moved to Thursday. For one thing, I couldn't find anything that said what must have been an obvious fact to everyone else in the class that things had been changed. For another thing, I don't have room in my schedule for a class at the same time (I assume) on Thursday. To make things even better, the discussion section is where we're supposed to turn in our homework. I emailed the professor about what's going on, but I have yet to receive a response.
</li>
<li>
I had brownies. There's a professor who lives in my building with her husband, and every Monday, she cooks a bunch of brownies for whoever wants to come by and get them. Obviously, brownies aren't meant to be passed up, so I had been going there a while, and I returned today. We just talked, and other people came by and they talked. Eventually I left to face the slowly mounting pile of work which I never make enough progress on.
</li>
<li>
I did cool stuff for this website. What more needs to be said?
</li>
</ol>
<p>
As you might expect, my day was composed of more than just those instances, but I tried to get the highlights. I need sleep now.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Friday, January 27, 2017
</h2>
<p>
The week has finally come to an end. Hopefully, I'll be more prepared to take on next week because I'm not a fan of the miniscule amount of sleep I've been getting. I thought I'd have more to say today, but somehow, everything I wanted to say has gone away. I'm not complaining, though: I need to focus on getting to bed. My goal this weekend is to sleep and then try to keep on top of my homework in between typing up at least a large portion of the essays for my transfer application to MIT. Next time, I'll try to talk about something other than how tired I am all the time.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Thursday, February 2, 2017
</h2>
<section>
Guess what? I'm going to talk about how tired I am. I would have tried to avoid it, but the events that transpired today make it impossible. What events, you ask? Well, the main one is how I woke up today when I should have been in my lab: Last night, I was up way too late (even later than normal) trying to finish a massive amount of homework that had accumulated, and it was going well into the early morning hours. Eventually, I decided that an hour more or less working on my homework wasn't going to make much of a difference, so I tried to get at least an hour of sleep in before I had to wake up at 7:00 to make my 9 o'clock lab. I got three hours of sleep. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I woke up without my alarm clock, and as I stared at the time, it took me a little while before I could process that it was after 9:00 and I was just waking up. Confused as to how this could happen, I spotted my alarm clock next to me in bed, and it was turned off. This isn't the first time this sort of thing happened: Last semester, even though I always hit "snooze" instead of turning my alarm clock off just in case I fall back asleep and need to be woken up again, I made the mistake of bringing the clock closer to me, so I could hit snooze more easily, and I was tired enough to not get up by the time it stopped going off after an hour; I missed my lab that day. (It's always the labs.) To ensure that I didn't repeat the experience, I resolved to hit snooze until I'm fully awake <em>and</em> leave the alarm clock where it is at the end of my bed even though it's more inconvenient (which is the point). I've stayed true to that resolution, but somehow, today, without me remembering it, I faltered<note-><div><div>No, I'm not going to consider the possibility that I just forgot to set it last night, especially since I make a point of checking it twice before I go to bed.</div></div></note->. I got to the lab as quickly as I could (an hour late), and by some miracle, I was still allowed to participate. Really, I don't know what else I can do to make sure I wake up when I need to: I thought I had a solid plan, but it still got sabotaged. I suppose I can try to set my phone's alarm as well (which I might do), but I shouldn't have to. I don't know what happened; all I know is that I don't want it to happen again.
</section>
<p>
There's a few more things I could talk about, but time is precious, so I'll just say that Google didn't have a doodle for Groundhog's Day today, and I find it quite disappointing.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Saturday, February 11, 2017
</h2>
<p>
Since I feel bad for going so long without contributing to this (the journal section), I'll give you a brief overview of things that have happened recently (although it's hardly as brief as the essays for MIT need to be).
</p>
<ol>
<li>
The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl. I've never been much of a sports person, but apparently I'm in the minority here. There was a big Super Bowl party in the study/theater room which I visited briefly, but I spent most of the time doing stuff in my room. I could tell when the Super Bowl was over and what the outcome was when I could hear extensive (happy) screaming from miles around through my window. Apparently, the Patriots came back from a huge score deficit to pull out a win at the very end. Two days later, despite less-than-ideal weather, there was a huge parade through Boston (which I didn't see).
</li>
<li>
Snow day
</li>
<li>
I finally got to participate in one (of three) of the clubs I tried joining at the beginning of the year. As it turned out, I had class during the time the club met last semester (like the other two), so I couldn't ever go; this semester, my schedule had that space open. To be completely honest, I kind-of expected more from the club (more people, cooler stuff, ...), but it wasn't too bad. One cool thing we did was make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. (I can only imagine how much ice cream MIT could make with all of the liquid nitrogen it has lying around.) It was all pretty low-key, and not much was expected from me. One thing I found interesting was how they were a sneaky type of inviting: No one singled me out or even acknowledged I was new (despite the fact that there were far too few people to not notice new arrivals), and any sort of interaction was casual, as if we had known each other for a long time; it was an interesting experience, and I kind-of like that way of welcoming new people. There's a pretty good chance I'll go to their next meeting.
</li>
</ol>
<p>
As is always the case, I have stuff to do which prevents me from elaborating as much as I'd like, the main thing being finishing the actual application for MIT. Although I'd consider this better than the real application if only for the ability to elaborate on the spot-on essay topic choices (found <a target="_self" href="stories#The Happy Birthday Song">here</a> and <a target="_self" href="moments#Extreme Lonliness">here</a>), it doesn't matter how cool this is if I don't make a submission with their form. I also have 3 tests on Monday that I should study for and homework due at various times, but considering how the application to MIT is due Wednesday, it takes priority.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
</h2>
<p>
I would have liked to have made more entries before this one, but after completing the application to MIT on February 15 and finishing up the more important parts of this website, doing the perpetually immense amount of homework I had overtook this in importance. When I noticed it on May 7, or more exactly, on May 4, I was denied transfer admission to MIT. The only conceivable way in my mind that I could have been denied is that my standardized test scores were too low (which isn't too unreasonable when you compare my scores to the ones people at MIT have): I had tons of awards; I aced the essays (as much as you can with so little space); I had good grades; and you can't top including a website as awesome as this. The only imperfection in my portrayal as the perfect candidate was in my test scores (and maybe in my activities but the stuff I did wasn't necessarily pathetic so much as it was unconventional). I'm a little disappointed, but I put everything I had into that application and exhausted myself doing it. If they don't want me, that's their loss; I'll be cool without them. Besides, one thing MIT is notorious for is giving out tons of homework, and I haven't really been able to keep up with the homework given out at Boston University. As a matter of fact, I was seriously considering the possibility of needing to decline a hypothetical acceptance into MIT solely because of the homework: Regardless of how well I understand something, I invariably take a long time to do problems, and if anything, that consumed time hinders my education, not advances it. Having a bunch of homework has always caused issues with me, and this last semester has been especially miserable: I've gotten a <a target="_self" href="experiments#Amount of sleep">terrible amount of sleep</a>; I hardly learned anything; I almost failed two classes (naturally, the ones most necessary to my biology major); and my GPA has gotten dangerously close to disqualifying me from thousands of dollars of financial aid. I can't afford to go someplace that dishes out a lot of homework.
</p>
<p>
The next, most logical follow-up to this is what am I going to do now? At this point in time, I don't have all of the details worked out, but there is a general direction. The first thing I'm doing is figuring out what college I'm transferring to: Boston University is far too expensive, and I'm not sure if I could rebound from another year of awful homework anyway. If I decide fast enough (May 31) and discover they'll allow pass/fail grades to count towards my major, I can have at least my worst grade from last semester converted and therefore removed from my GPA, raising it. I don't think my college prospects have been ruined quite yet, but I have to keep on top of things to make sure it stays that way. In less stressful news, I'm going to be using this summer to jumpstart <a target="_self" href="projects#My business">my business</a>: Spending so much time on this and other websites has given me great confidence that I can make a bunch of money off of making websites (although I plan on expanding to other things as well). I have everything all laid out in my head, and I'm hoping to become successful enough to be able to put something public together for the eclipse on August 21.
</p>
<p>
I think this is going to be the last entry in this mini journal. I could easily go on and on about various things that happen in my life, but that's what my real journal is for. I hope this has provided you with a small glimpse of my personality in day-to-day life.
</p>
<br>
<h2>
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
</h2>
<section>
As you can see by the date, the previous entry was the last one for a long time, but as a few people have found their way to this website over time, I've decided that it wouldn't hurt to add another entry every few years or something to provide a more up-to-date overview of my life for anyone who's interested. I aspire to make this overview relatively brief, but I'm frequently unsuccessful with such aspirations, so we'll see what actually ends up happening.
</section>
<section>
There are a number of noteworthy events which occurred prior to college, but with how this mini journal is set up, it seems to make the most sense to just pick up where I left off, so that's what I'm going to do. As I said in the last entry, I was denied admission to MIT, so they missed their opportunity to claim someone as amazing as me as an alumnus, and I was on the hunt for a different university. I didn't end up starting a business making websites, but I still have ambitions related to something like running a busniess which I briefly mention later, and I've made plenty of other websites for my own purposes. I did find a new college, though: Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), and I eventually got a bachelor's degree in biology with a concentration of microbiology, cellular and molecular biology, and biotechnology. (That whole thing was the official title of the concentration.)
</section>
<section>
<img src="images/Biology Club cover photo.jpg" class="horiz-media" style="float:right">
While I was in college, there were more things that happened than I can say here, but one of the major highlights was that I started a biology club. Technically, there was a preexisting biology club which I <em>re</em>started, but there were no longer any meetings or members, so the only evidence of it was a few administrative processes conveniently already completed. We did a number of cool things over the 2 years that I ran it such as "cook" eggs with ethanol, grow plants, make bacteria fluorescent green or bioluminescent, and watch <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoes">Attack of the Killer Tomatoes</a>. Sometimes figuring out what to do and how to fit it in between my school work was a little stressful, but many of my favorite memories are from the biology club, and it could be argued that the part I enjoyed the most about college was the meetings of the club.
</section>
<section class="t20">
In practical terms, it seemed like SEMO was working out to be a better college for me: It was much cheaper, and the workload wasn't nearly as bad, so I was satisfied. I can't totally remember what happened with the pass/fail grade stuff I was talking about in the previous entry, but I'm pretty sure SEMO didn't accept any pass/fail grades, so I kept the letter grades and later ended up retaking one or two of the equivalent classes to raise my grade. Issues started arising as I moved into the more advanced classes, however. It seems that advanced content also means stricter grading and increased homework. I wasn't intimidated too much by the increased difficulty, but the extra homework was killing me just as it always had. Except for homework, there's no reason why I should ever get less than an A in any of my classes, but one semester, I failed two of my classes. Naturally, this was an upsetting experience for me, and it was immediately after this that I pursued and received a diagnosis of ADD. For complicated reasons, I never actually got it treated, but having a piece of paper saying I take longer to do things allowed me to get a few accomodations, and it helped enough that I managed to finish my degree with a halfway decent GPA. I debated whether I wanted to include this part on this website because I've been trained to be ashamed of psychological disorders, and people do occasionally come here, so I would be exposing myself, but anyone who cared enough about learning about me to get all the way here would probably also care enough about me to handle this topic sensitively, and it would probably do me good to have more experiences of acceptance. Needing to say "probably" rather than "definitely" makes me nervous, but I shouldn't live my life in fear of a fairly small percentage of the population, and the people who visit this website are typically already my friends on some level anyway, so the risk of an unfavorable response seems pretty small. Just know that I'm not very eager to dive into this topic.
</section>
<section>
Also while I was in college, I started dating my second girlfriend. As you might imagine, there's plenty of material for discussion on that topic, including a number of interesting stories about girlfriend prospects leading up to the one I actually went out with, but in the interests of brevity, I'm only going to make tantalizing references to stories I won't explain such as the numerous instances when various people, including the police, approached us to make sure our roughhousing wasn't me abusing her or the time when I gave her a concussion by hitting her head with my head or the time when she stole my pants and drove off after she got me into the trunk of her car. I also found it mind-blowing how, not only was she also from Pacific, Missouri like me, but she also lived a few blocks away from where my first girlfriend lived in her same neighborhood. I'd imagine that most people would be surprised to discover that I was only on my second girlfriend by the time I was 21, particularly since it had been 5 years since I was with my first girlfriend, but I take my relationships very seriously, so I skip over the numerous short-term relationships most people have and only consider the people who I think I have a good chance of spending the rest of my life with. Many people have questioned my methodology, but I'm not interested in debating its value, so if you're one of the peope who also questions it, you can just get over it.
</section>
<section>
As the end of my time in college approached, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and SEMO shut down along with basically every other place in existence. I never got to have a graduation ceremony; I never got to have some of the best biology club meetings I had been planning; and I never got to say a proper goodbye to my friends. It was also hard to get food and toilet paper. On top of that, my computer broke almost immediately after we had switched to online courses. I had imagined a different ending to my time at SEMO, but it seems that it wasn't meant to me.
</section>
<section>
<img src="images/My impact on Walmart.jpg" class="vert-media" style="float:right">
After college, I was still with my girlfriend, and skipping all of the explanatory details I could easily get caught up in, I started staying with her in Cape Girardeau and working at Walmart while she finished up her last year (or maybe just semester) at SEMO. This is also when I got my first (and current) car from my dad who saved it from a junkyard. Working at Walmart wasn't too bad, but there were some underlying concerns I had, much like in my personal life at the time, and my mood over time would vary. I worked as a person who handled online orders, and the job was generally divided up into 2 parts: getting the groceries from the aisles and taking out the orders when the people arrived at the store. They would usually start people off on getting the groceries off the shelves because it was the simpler job, so that's what I did for a while, but I was struggling greatly to reach the speed they required of employees. My boss was starting to talk with me about trying to transfer me to a janitorial position since she figured it would be helpful if I had a job that had less to keep track of, but it was then discovered that I was actually much better at the more complex and faster-pace job of taking the orders out to the customers, so she made sure that's what I was doing all the time. I thrived on that constant activity, and I was told that mistakes and potentially also wait times were decreased while I was working. As my fears of getting fired subsided, I started looking for ways to make things better, and it wasn't long before almost every square foot of that place had some kind of evidence of my presence. I'd like to brag about all of the cool things I did, but to keep things short, I'll only mention the one that garnered the most attention: the barcodes. Barcodes were used (mostly) to keep track of which tote of groceries went where in the room, so when the customer arrived, we could quickly find all of their stuff. There was limited space in that room, so sometimes things were put in strange places that didn't have a barcoded position, but after I figured out the version of barcodes our scanners could read, every place you could ever want to have a barcode did have one, and I was epecially proud when people started favoring the duplicates I made of the barcodes that already existed because my barcodes were easier to scan than the official ones. I was also proud when I pranked one of the critics of my barcodes by barcoding all of their stuff one day.
</section>
<section>
In the meantime, though, my girlfriend and I weren't very happy together anymore. We stuck it out for a while and tried to work on things, but it wasn't enough. The original plan was that she would be going to pharmacy school in Arkansas, and I'd probably find a university near her to go to graduate school, but as the move approached, it was decided that it would be better for us to part ways at that time instead. Thinking about what I would do after that, I didn't really want to contiue working at Walmart living in an expensive apartment in Cape Girardeau 2 hours away from everything else that had been a part of my life before, but I didn't really want to just get some random job near home and muddle forward either. It then occurred to me that there wouldn't be any school, job, person, or any other commitments holding me to one place, so it would be the perfect time to go on an extended road trip as I had always dreamed of but had always thought of as being far in the future. Although it was sad that we were breaking up, I started looking forward to what would come after. I made a QR code leading to <a href="https://coolprogramminguser.github.io/specialprojects/wmt/farewell">a website</a> to say goodbye to the people at Walmart (and they knew I was leaving); my girlfriend and I parted on good terms; and I started making preparations for the next stage of my life.
</section>
<section>
I don't want to spend too much time on what I did to prepare to travel, but I think it's worth noting that I didn't want to blow a bunch of money on motels, so my plan was to find good parking places and live out of my car as I traveled. I would've preferred a larger vehicle to live in, but I made the most of what I had and got together stuff that would be useful on my journey. You likely won't be surprised to learn that my parents were strongly against the idea. I was lectured for hours on end about how "unprepared" I was, how dangerous doing that was, how selfish I was being for "ignoring my family responsibilities", how I was throwing my future away to live like a hobo, and any number of other derogatory remarks meant to convey what a terrible mistake I was making. I made sure to try to address any legitimate concerns they had, and I told them about the steps I took to prepare, and I drew attention to how there are a number of people who have done something similar for a long time, but it didn't shock me to find that nothing I said made any difference. I gave them reasonable advance warning for when I was going, but they pretended like I had given up on the dumb idea when I wasn't actively reminding them I was still going to follow through, so when the day came, they freaked out, and my mom even tried letting the air out of my tires to make sure I couldn't go anywhere, but in the end, on September 27, 2021, I still left.
</section>
<section>
Although there was some required adjustment, I was totally fine living out of my car, and my expectations were much more consistent with reality than my parents' were. I stopped back at home a few times for things like the holidays, and every time I tried to leave again, it was almost as hard to leave as it was the first time because they were always convinced that I had "gotten it out of my system" and that I shouldn't tempt fate by going back to such a risky and irresponsible life. I would also be consistently lectured every time I talked to them on the phone. You would think that a year or more of on and off traveling with everything being fine would cause them to start reconsidering their positions, but that largely wasn't the case. None of that stopped me, though. You could consider this to be my rebellious phase, although is being less of a pushover than normal really considered a rebellion? I had hardly been anywhere prior to the start of my travels, but by the end, I had been coast-to-coast and had visited many landmarks in between. I had planned on posting videos to YouTube as I traveled, and I actually did record videos for the duration of my time roaming the country, but I never got around to the editing part, so the videos currently sit in various storage devices awaiting the day when they move high enough on my priority list to actually be dealt with.
</section>
<section>
There are endless things I could say about my travels, but let me try to list a few things:
</section>
<ul>
<li>My standards greatly decreased.</li>
<li>I coasted on saved money for a while but then started doing DoorDash and random one-time jobs</li>
<li>Finding a bathroom at night in a post-pandemic world with no place open 24/7 anymore is the worst.</li>
<li>If a homeless person asks you for money but won't accept food instead, the legitimacy of their need should be questioned.</li>
<li>The Mexican guys hanging around the Home Depot parking lot are looking for a job.</li>
<li>Snapchat lenses work on the faces of Mount Rushmore.</li>
<li>The desert is <em>not</em> cold at night.</li>
<li>The desert in summer is the worst.</li>
<li>Louisiana in not winter is the worst because of the humidity (and this is coming from someone from Missouri).</li>
<li>Don't turn on your hazard lights in dense fog even if all the other dumb people in Louisiana are doing it.</li>
<li>Make sure the parking lot you're spending the night in isn't going to be hosting a parade the next morning.</li>
<li>It's hard to grow bacteria on Petri dishes in your car.</li>
<li>Ocean water leaves a nasty residue you need to wash off.</li>
<li>Large tumbleweeds can look like animals darting out in front of you at night.</li>
<li>Watch out for elk in Colorado.</li>
<li>Filming videos while walking on slipery rocks is risky business.</li>
<li>If your car is starting to slide on ice, don't press the brake even lightly.</li>
<li>Donkeys have the right of way at the Grand Canyon.</li>
<li>Don't try to deliver food in downtown Las Vegas unless you're a local.</li>
<li>Park in New Jersey and take a bus to New York City.</li>
<li>Beware of police unjustly towing your car out of library parking lots without warning in New Jersey.</li>
<li>Washing your dishes in a Walmart sink is awkward.</li>
<li>Eye protection is a must against the sand at Arches National Park.</li>
<li>Seagulls fly all the way to the Great Salt Lake to have babies.</li>
<li>The streets of San Francisco are unnecessarily confusing, although a few other places try to outcompete them.</li>
<li>Drivers in New Jersey are extremely impatient.</li>
<li>You don't make left turns in Phoenix: You make U-turns, then right turns.</li>
<li>Don't dig up a saguaro cactus in the desert even for a job or else you can go to jail.</li>
<li>No hitchhiking is allowed near the prisons of Nevada.</li>
<li>I visited and helped out at a community biology lab in California.</li>
<li>All the cool people partake in <a href="https://www.biosummit.org/">Bio Summit</a> each year.</li>
<li>I participated in an online course from MIT called How To Grow (Almost) Anything.</li>
</ul>
<section>
That was more than a few, but that's still a fraction of what I could say about everything.
</section>
<section>
In addition to that stuff, though, there was another notable event that occurred in the midst of it all. With my farewell website to Walmart, I included my phone number and an invitation for anyone to contact me. Very few people ever ended up saying anything to me, but there was one girl who used it as an opportunity to establish a closer friendship with me. Soon enough, we were talking quite frequently, and it even came out later on that she was interested in pursuing more than friendship. Ordinarily, I would've been open to seeing what happened with someone who I seemed to get along with rather well, but I was going to be and later was traveling, and it didn't make sense to start a relationship off with a long period of long-distance. Also, I felt uneasy about moving on from my previous girlfriend so quickly (although many people wouldn't consider months to be very fast at all). I told her about all of this, and she was understanding, but she insisted that she would be okay with everything, and she didn't stop being a good friend. There were things leading up to it, but one day, I was on the road somewhere in South Dakota I think, and this girl and I had our first video chat. I didn't say anything about it during that conversation, but I knew I was looking at her in a way that I only would at a girlfriend, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I had fallen for her. I had hoped to avoid unnecessary complications, but I could tell that I liked her too much, so I decided to try out being her boyfriend while still traveling.
</section>
<section>
In the beginning, it seemed to work out great: My girlfriend had an even better disposition knowing I was hers, and I enjoyed having such a great person to talk to while still seeing through my adventure. We seemed like an unlikely pair because we had vastly different personalities and opinions, but we accepted each other as we were, and I was very happy. After something like a month, I had finished the first leg of my journey, and I had come back to Missouri to visit. As you can imagine, my girlfriend was thrilled when I stayed around Cape Girardeau for a little while, but her disposition took a sharp turn when I was preparing for the next leg of my journey. Apparently she was under the impression that I would be so overwhelmed with love after spending some time with her that I wouldn't be able to bear being apart from her again, so I'd put an end to my travels. I had always been very clear about my intentions, and I tried to explain to her how I could care about her but still need to see this through, and I reminded her of how understanding of it all she was not very long ago, but she had changed her mind, and she was extremely upset with me for not changing my mind as well. I'm not one to bail on a relationship the moment things get tough, so we stayed together (in status) after I left for the next leg of my journey, but from that point forward, she said nothing but harsh things about my travels and what kind of person I was for leaving her. As a matter of fact, although the focus was shifted away from my family to her, the things my girlfriend said about me and the (lack of) value of my trip very closely paralleled the things my parents said (which is ironic because she hated them which created additional complexity in my life). For something like a year, my parents would tell me how dumb, selfish, and irresponsible I was for traveling, and my girlfriend would also tell me how dumb, selfish, and irresponsible I was for traveling, and I had limited contact with anyone else (which was an issue of its own for me). My girlfriend had a tendency of letting her emotions get the better of her, and I knew she had some insecurities and personal issues contributing to her feelings (not that she would usually admit it), so I tried to work with her and give time for things to work out, but it was an uphill battle.
</section>
<section>
I remined myself just now that this is supposed to be a brief overview, so I'm going to skip the analysis of my girlfriend's psyche and my own and just say that, although there were some good times mixed in and things were actually somewhat better at the end, our relationship didn't work out, and it was sad.
</section>
<section>
It was at this point that I felt completely lost in my life. A year or two prior, I felt like I had a pretty good idea where my life was headed, and maybe there would be some twists and turns along the way, but I had a clear destination. However, after traveling longer than expected, having a relationship fall through, making no measureable progress in any lasting endeavor, questioning everything I thought I wanted to do, and losing all confidence in my ability to predict even the near-term future, I found myself struggling to find a path forward. Partly because I didn't know what else to do, I went out on one more trip which unexpectedly ended up being the longest continuous time of me being gone (around 7 months), and during this time, I slowly collected myself and started figuring out what I wanted to do.
</section>
<section>
Upon returning on July 26, 2023, I decided to take my life in a new direction. Traveling was fun (or at least as much as it could be while being poor and constantly told what a terrible mistake I made), and I was glad to have done it, but I was lonely, and I also wanted to leave more of an impact on the world than I could while drifting from place to place. Maybe I'd travel again in the future, but I wanted to establish myself somewhere. I went back to staying with my parents, and I started looking for a better source of income. It took a few months to settle on what I wanted to do and what would be viable options, but in November 2023, I started working at a local business called <a href="https://dangelospacific.com/">D'Angelos Pizzeria</a>. I didn't plan on staying there forever, but I thought it would be a good choice for this stage of my life.
</section>
<section>
Although I've been interested in expanding the number of roles I can fulfill, I've been doing deliveries for D'Angelos, and as a part of that role, I've also been washing the restaurant's dishes. Consistent with my expectations, D'Angelos is a flexible and informal workplace, and the people who work there are nice. I think I've been doing fairly well there, and I've tried making my own contributions with things such as cutting out paper snowflakes for decoration, including origami swans with my deliveries, and creating a program to schedule people's shifts.
</section>
<section>
Interestingly, legitimately something like a third of the people who work at D'Angelos have ADHD, so I'm in good company, although excluding this, I haven't told anyone I'm in their company because of the shame I mentioned earlier and because I don't like using it as an excuse for my behavior. (I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that some people were suspicious, though.) I never told anyone at Walmart either in the 9 months I worked there except for the website I made for when I left, and I was even in jeopardy of getting fired from there for problems associated with my ADD. I don't think I'm in jeopardy of getting fired from D'Angelos, and I've even somehow managed to get there on-time for the most part, but washing the dishes definitely brings out the worst of how slow I can be, and I suspect it's at least partly because of that that there has been hesitation on training me for other positions despite a clear need for those positions to be filled (and much less of a need for drivers). I can't say for sure whether I'd be faster doing something else, but I think Walmart clearly demonstrates that I'm much better at some things than I am at others, and regardless, I'd definitely get to talk to people more if I had a different position. However, I couldn't complain too much even if nothing changed because D'Angelos is a nice place to work.
</section>
<section>
Being a delivery driver is actually the lonliest of the jobs available, especially with how slow I am with the dishes, but with how isolated I've been from everyone for so long, even working as a driver for D'Angelos is a significant improvement in my social life. In the past few years, I've only seen a few of my friends a few times (and that's not an exaggeration), so I'm definitely in the market for some more friends. I come across as a rather reserved person, so people tend to think I prefer my solitude, but I'd be happy to have company all day every day, and I've had to be careful to regulate my emotions and prevent myself from seeming needy as I slowly establish friendships with the people at D'Angelos. Something from my life before these journal entries is that I was painfully lonely for over a year in high school after my family moved and changed school districts, and it was after that that I forced myself to be more out-going and made loneliness much less of an issue for me. More recently, I've been beginning to wonder whether even I have misjudged how much I enjoy talking to people because I've noticed long conversations having an unexpectedly large impact on my disposition, but the quality of conversation and other influences may factor in as well. I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm hoping this update will help foster friendships with the people who come here, and it's not a coincidence that I was particularly inspired to provide an update when I knew some people from D'Angelos were starting to look at this website, but I still think it's a good addition to this section of this website regardless of my reasons for typing it. I was thinking of updating the website more broadly because hardly anything except for the analysis of <a target="_self" href="experiments#Conversations">the conversation data</a> had been touched in years, but after only adding some headings and pictures, I'm thinking of shifting my priorities to things that more directly result in more interactions with people such as 3D printing a water-powered dish scrubber to help me finish the dishes faster (and then socialize). I'll probably get around to filling in most of the stuff on this website one day, but in the meantime, the headings can serve as good conversation starters for the people who know me.
</section>
<section>
I have plans for more than washing dishes faster, though. I've debated the value of discussing my plans for the future since my life could end up going in a completely different direction as it has in the past, and then, when I make another update potentially years from now, it would seem meaningless and tiresome to address the plans I mentioned but which never panned out; however, big plans are a central part of my personality, and it also doesn't take much to convince me to talk about things I'm excited about, so I can just sort out how to handle the mention of my plans when the time comes. I do think, however, that I'm better off only briefly listing my plans because I was starting to type them out in more detail, and it became quite clear that they were all going to turn into long paragraphs, and I don't want to spend that much time on them. Depending on who you are, you're either let down by that decision or you're breathing a sigh of relief, but I'm moving forward with my list regardless:
</section>
<ul>
<li>Turn a metal shipping container into a house and move out.</li>
<li>Do a cool science experiment with the class of the <a href="stories#Ice Cream Oreo Cake" target="_self">Ice Cream Oreo Cake</a> teacher.</li>
<li>Start a community biology lab / hackerspace.</li>
<li>Decode the encoded messages I've received.</li>
<li><del>Become awesome.</del> Oh, wait: I already did that.</li>
<li>Change the world.</li>
</ul>
<section>
Anything shorter than a novel can't come anywhere close to fully encompassing my life, but I think this has been a respectable overview for its size. I hope you enjoyed learning about what's been going on with me since the last entry, and even I'm excited to find out what the next installment brings.
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