Inroduction

         Hi, I’m a sophomore in high school and for a project in my English II Honors class entitled “Life’s Little Lessons Blog” I am making a blog inspired by the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, showcasing a several lessons I have learned throughout my life.  In the Last Lecture, I was able learn valuable lessons from Randy Pausch. Randy Pausch was a wise very and when he was diagnosed with a terminal pancreatic cancer he wrote a book filled with detailed lessons he has learned throughout his life. I am doing something very similar just with blog entries.  Some entries may include lessons I have learned from past experience and some lessons may come from influential people in my life. If you think about it hard enough, we all have learned valuable lessons in our lives.

The Last Lecture By Randy Pausch.

My Sister

Ever since I can remember, I had a little sister. She has always been a little strange and always had an exuberant interest in, cartoons, videogames, stuffed animals and painting. Occasionally she would make paintings of rainbow like colors and hang them up in her room. She would also bleed markers out on tissues with water and then turn them into rainbow tissue art. In my opinion, she was brilliant. Though she was just a child, she was able to make herself happy through expressing her own colors. When I think about the art she would do, she would never ask for help or recognition. She would always do unto her own liking. I always liked that about her.  I cannot emphazie enough how much my sister likes rainbows.  When I first saw her art I came unto a realization, happiness is never about receiving recognition it’s about enjoying whatever one is doing and making the most of it. Living life like my sister does is something I want to be able to do. Also someday I hope to paint and draw as well as my sister and I hope to annihilate her in Mario Kart  DS(she always beats me). A familar scene of races between me and my sister.

My Dad

Of course the one who gave life to me and the one that I resemble has taught me a few valuable lessons.  My father (who also has the name Myles) is a good person. He works as an architect from around 9-5 and 6-10. He comes home late almost every night. Because of that, I always used to ask why he works so much and every time I did  he always would reply “it’s not work it’s just something I do“.  I never understood that, how could going to work be just something you do; I go to school it’s just something I do. I found that quite bizarre and after a while, my dad started to become an enigma to me. I started to look at him as though he were an old pet walking around, his youthful energy all gone and now just going through the motions of daily life. Soon, I started to ask him strange questions and say peculiar statements just to hear his reply just to find out how much he knew. Some questions were math problems others were statements about colors, but on one regular day, I told him that I didn’t want to go to school. This was the time I heard the wisest thing he has ever said to me. He looked at me puzzled and said “you are in school right now, it may not seem like it, but you are learning everyday”. Then he got his comforting parent look and said, “I learned a lesson from you, sometimes you got just man up and do it. Do you remember that online personal fitness class you had to take, but didn’t want to?  You spent hours on those assignments you thought were pointless but you did them anyway. Sometimes, you just got to do what you have to.” After he said that, we left to go to school, and later on the bus, it finally clicked with me. We are learning everyday and even the things we do or don’t like to do make us wiser and more knowledgeable in the end. After this experience with my dad, I started to ask him even more complex questions just to hear his response, but replies are filled with I don’t knows and go ask your mother’s. I kinda view my dad  like an old bicycle as well.  An old bike is old,  it works, and has to keeep  balanced to stay like  and my dad is the same way. I guess you can conclude from this is that father’s are very unreadable book’s that today’s youth are ill-equipped to comprehend. Although I this fact about fathers may only apply to mine he taught me how to buckle down and do things. As I mentioned earlier, my dad is a workaholic and always has stuff to do. I watched do pointless work for countless hours on end. I learned from him what he learned from me, sometimes you just got to do what you got to do.

My Mother

The one who gave birth to me has also been a big influence on me.  She is teacher and always has interesting stories to tell. She’s a social butterfly and a great mother as well.  She’s my chauffer, my chef, my counselor, and my teacher. She is there when mess up and she is there to laugh at all of my mistakes. When I was little I wanted to learn karate. One day I got video to teach karate from the library and when I got home I practiced whatever I saw in the video. To this day my mom laughs when she remembers me doing this. Actually she laughs at me rather a lot. One time she laughed at me for just making a bowl a cereal. Not to mention the times I showed her something I thought was cool and she laughed at me. One time, I showed my mom this new dance move I learned from a TV show and once I started doing the dance, she started to laugh at me. Now that I think about it, my mom has laughed at me loads of times. Every time she remembers me doing something that I thought fun, she would laugh at me. Now I’m not saying my mom laughs everything, because she doesn’t, she just laughs at me and whatever enjoyable thing that I thing I decide do. After a couple times of her laughing extremely hard at me, I started to get over it the frustration of this situation reoccurring humiliation from a parental. I guess you can you say I learned not to take the frustration too seriously, from my mother. Her laughter taught me frustration only lasts for a moment and if you let go of whatever discouraged you, the frustration will go away. My mother taught me that discouragement and frustration will happen but, it is up to you to decide how to handle it.

Competition Is The Birth Innovation

Competition Is The Birth Innovation  I’m very competitive it runs in my blood. My mom says it comes from my grandfather because my grandfather is very competitive. On a recent Thanksgiving trip to visit them, I saw why.  When we visited their house my mother took me into my grandfather’s bed room. In his room were two NES’s (an old videogame console) on top of each of other under a television stand. In the topmost NES was an Othello videogame. We left the room. After Thanksgiving dinner I asked my Uncle Willy why my granddad had two NES in his bedroom. My uncle laughed and said that he used to stay up all night and try to beat the computer at that Othello game until he won.  A little while later that day me and him played WII bowling, and when I won he wouldn’t let me stop playing him until he beat me.  This by far is the wierdest and hardest game I have ever played. I have no idea how or why my grandfather tried to play this game. A NES. My competitive nature is no different. I remember in elementary school I would used to race finish homework faster than the kids that were smarter than me. In kick ball I would always be pitcher and still try to run to the outfield just to catch an out.  Through the years my competitive nature and I were my best friends, until I started losing. I remember in middle school I used to always miss layups when playing basketball and as I got older I would always get picked last. At the skate park I would always play games of S.K.A.T.E (A version basketball’s H.O.R.S.E. on a skateboard) against little kids and would always lose. As I got older the line of losses got more devastating and terrible.  Just this year I auditioned for a spot in an All County Band and I didn’t make it after practicing hours on end. Then I came to a realization competition makes you work harder. The more you lose the more you want to win. Think about it, how many times have practiced for something just to beat someone else who you know is better than you?    This has happened to me numerous times, but as this started happening more and more I realized why it was happening. If I would have won or succeeded in whatever I was doing I would probably stop practicing or trying as hard as I did, because I had nothing to compete with. I realized what was driving me to do whatever I was doing not was winning, but destroying my opponent and making them realize that I was better than them. Upon my new discovery I realized that winning was pointless, someone else is always better than you and someone else’s opinion never matters. From my reflections on this experience I concluded that competition is pointless and the only good that comes from it is the failure that pushes you to improve and win the next pointless competition.

Failure Happens

When I was fourteen I entered into my first skate competition. After months of preparation the contest finally came on Labor Day weekend. I was ecstatic; so much so that I went to the event three hours before it started just to warm up. Upon my arrival I saw that there was a new larger rail on the fun box. My friend who visited the park the night before said that they were going install a new rail but I could never imagine what I saw. The new rail was three times thicker and flatter than the original. Personally like steep rails skinny rails because it’s easier to bail out on when you mess up which was not the case for the rail in front of me. After not warming up I attempted a to do a backside board slide on the ever so slick rail and let the board slip out in front of me. At the time I was wearing holey ES theory 1.5 shoes with the thinnest sole you could possibly imagine; literally a centimeter thick. With my terrible shoes catching me, avoiding injury would be difficult. Once I had slipped out I used my left foot to catch myself from falling and the impact from the waist high rail bruised the Metatarsal of my big toe. I could barely walk. I had experienced this injury before so I knew what was going to happen. I was going to limp from the pain, I was going sit down and I was going to lose the contest. I had failed. After watching contestants destroy my local skate park, I took my run landed a much easier front side board slide and a measly two inch nose slide. I was very disappointed but at the end of the contest I got a free t-shirt, which was nice.

This is me at my first skate competition. This particular trick took all the time I had for run to land.

What I learned from this is that failure is often like a reflection oneself. It helps you determine where you are at, where you going, and how you want to get there. For instance the most clichéd quote about failure,"I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Thomas Edison. By failing at attempting to make a light bulb 10,000 times he was able to determine where he was at, find out where he was going, see a way to get there and create a light bulb. If he was able to learn from failure don’t you think we all can? I do. Though I failed from this experience I learned not go all out in practice, I learned that you must always be aware of your surroundings and that you must always plan out your ideas. Reflecting back on this experience I think in some way we can all learn and find a bright side in a failure evens if it’s a valuable life lesson and a free t-shirt.

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Things Weren’t The Same Last Year

Things Weren’t The Same Last Year Now for an amusing story. In the hilarious comedy 30 Rock  there was a scene were Tracy Jordan was in central park swinging a plastic light saber in his underwear screaming I am a Jedi when a group of hipsters started  to walk up to him. The hipsters started to analyze the situation by saying he was re-appropriating his bad past behavior (he did this Jedi thing on the first episode of 30 Rock) by commenting on FitzGerald Dictum. The hipsters then proceeded to take pictures of it with their old fashioned cameras. When I watched scene I started to remember and learn from my decent past behavior and realize that things weren’t the same last year. The hispters commenting on Tracy Jordan comments on Fitzgeralds Dictum about to take pictures with their old fashioned cameras. I learned that time is constantly moving forward and life is always moving on. There is no looking back; the things past are actually past. There are no second actions. I can never retype what I have just typed, but why would I want to if the future is in front of me. How could I live in the moment if moments are flying past me as I type? Look there goes another one. I remember watching the Avatar and no, not the good movie and no, not the bad movie, the television show on Nick. In one episode of the show, the Avatar was talking to a giant tree spirit in the swamp. The big tree spirit told avatar that time is an illusion. This might actually be true, if we can never repeat any action exactly the same. The author of the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American life. This basically means that life doesn’t get better than what it is and if it does it never lasts for long. This basically relates to almost anyone’s child hood or any ones past. Childhood is a time glee, a time when you are unaware about the world. As one gets older, one starts to gain more knowledge and start realizing more about the world that surrounds one. Childhood a time for happiness, innocence and memories clearly supports this dictum and the quote “ignorance is bliss“because the majority can say they had a happy innocent childhood. Sadly some evidence supports that this is true and we can never go back to that. Actually we can never go back to anything; everything in this world is changing around us. After watching this scene I was able to conclude that can that things weren’t the same last year and never will be.