DISCLAIMER: The following eight stories are childhood experiences of mine. They have absolutely nothing to do with politics or current events, and I make no guarantees to their humor content or their authenticity. Thank you in advance.
Footsteps
Throughout my entire life, and even to this day, I have been able to tell who in my house is walking outside my door just by the sound of their footsteps. Everyone has a distinct way of walking, or a unique way that their feet hit the floorboards. I’m sure everyone has a similar situation in their home, but this is mine, and to me, it is unique and special. After all, your footsteps say a lot about you.
My father’s footsteps are heavy, and make a fair amount of noise every time he walks somewhere. His footsteps are by far the easiest to hear and are the easiest to predict the destination of. My mother’s footsteps are the complete opposite of my father’s: soft, quiet, and are easy to miss. I still don’t know how my mom makes so little noise walking somewhere at a normal pace. Finally, my younger brother’s footsteps are so easy to identify because he often wears sandals in the house, and you can hear a distinct clicking sound as they make contact with the bottom of his feet.
What about me? To be honest, I never really thought about my own footsteps at all before now. However, if I had to guess, they’re probably on the lighter side, because I only weigh about 110 lbs, and on the quieter side, because I wear socks inside the house, not being able to wear shoes due to my culture. I’ll have to listen more closely next time I’m inside my house.
A Desire for a Dog
Growing up, I had many longings and desires. I wanted more independence, I wanted to be able to play violent video games, I wanted to eat out at restaurants every night… the list goes on. One childhood desire in particular that still irks me to this day is the argument I had over owning a dog. I wanted (and in fact still want) to own a golden retriever, which I remember deciding at the wise, knowledgeable age of eight. As any eight-year old third grader would do, I decided to ask my mom if we could get one. Her answer?
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Your brother has asthma, and he would be affected by the dog hairs. Also, if we were to get one, you wouldn’t take care of it.”
The first part was true enough, so I suggested that we get a beagle, my second choice. If you didn’t know, beagles shed very moderately. That was also rejected, for the same reason in the first time I tried, that I wouldn’t take care of it. Her justification was that I had a goldfish when I was five (true), and it died after less than a year because I didn’t try to take care of it, which is not true. I was five, and I tried to explain that to her , but she didn’t listen. To this day, I still don’t have a dog, and I can thank a dead goldfish for that.
Discrimination by Height
When I was in fourth grade, I went to one of my friends’ birthday parties. It was at Boomers, the one near the 405 Freeway in Fountain Valley. During one part of the party, some of my friends and I went to the go-kart area near the golf course. There were about seven or eight of us, and several parents, one of whom was my dad. As you can probably guess, I wanted to ride the go-karts along with my friends. They have a height restriction, which might have changed from when I went years ago, and I remember being shorter by an inch or two. I believe I was one of the only two people who didn’t go on the go-karts, but the other person had been getting over being sick, and didn’t want to go on the go-carts. That meant that I was the only person in the group who didn’t ride for height reasons!
That really annoyed me, and I remember getting into a brief argument with my dad over going on the go-karts. In the end, I didn’t go on the ride. There was nothing worse than watching my friends go on the ride, while I was at the outside fence, I’ll never forget the first and only time that I was discriminated against on the basis of height or physical characteristics.
I’m just kidding. Obviously, I was not “discriminated” against. Still, that irritated me greatly at the time, and I still remember the incident today.
Companionship in a Club
When I was in eighth grade at Fulton Middle School, I was in a club, which was different from the previous two years. I wanted, and still want, to be an attorney when I finally pursue a career, so I decided to join the brand-new Mock Trial Club. They had an eighth-grade only Law and Order class the year prior, but it was eliminated due to lack of interest, and was replaced with the club. The club advisor and the teacher that ran it was Mr. Hood, my seventh and eighth grade history teacher, who was also my favorite teacher. However, one of the best parts of the whole experience was that I had about four or five friends in the club with me.
The club was really enjoyable. We spent the first few months learning about legal proceedings and how to “object” and make a decent argument. However, from about December 2016 to early March 2017, Mr. Hood was actually gone for some reason, probably because he got sick. So, the club was largely canceled for four months, and we had to pick up where we left off when he came back. Once he did come back, we started our first “trial”. I played a defense witness in our “trial”, and thankfully, I was with some friends on the defense team.
Unfortunately, the club only got through one “trial” before the year ended, but we had started another in which I was actually supposed to play the part of a prosecutor. Despite this, I’ll never forget the experience of being with friends in a competitive club in the eighth grade.
Tae-Kwon-Do
When I was a kid, probably from six or seven years old to nine, my parents enrolled me in a Tae-Kwon-Do class. Tae-Kwon-Do is a fairly popular form of martial arts started in Korea. I took my lessons with my younger brother at the Boys and Girls Club in Fountain Valley, near the library and police station. It was pretty fun starting out, and I could tell that I had a lot of potential. We took the class, which was every Saturday, with a bunch of other kids whose parents made them go. For the first few years, everything seemed to be going well. Through testing, I was able to move quickly through the ranks of Tae-Kwon-Do. I advanced from a white belt (sorry, Spongebob fans: no clear belt), to a red belt, the second-highest rank and the one before black belt, which was the highest. However, testing for the black belt was where I hit the proverbial wall.
To graduate to the next rank, we had to break an actual wooden board with your arms and one with a kick. These weren’t thin pieces of wood, either. I took Woodshop in sixth grade, and we made an entire box out of thinner pieces of wood than the ones we had to break in Tae-Kwon-Do. I highly doubt I could do that even today, when I’ve been lifting weights and do daily exercises. I tried again and again to break the boards, testing probably about seven or eight times, before calling it quits. When I think about this now, I just think about my potential, and what I could have been.
A Political Junkie
Based on the other content on my site, you probably have figured out by now that I’m very interested in politics, obviously being most familiar with political life in the United States. In fact, you could probably call me a “political junkie“, even though I don’t watch C-SPAN. However, I’ve never said how I got so interested in politics.
When I was in the fifth grade, my fifth grade teacher was really obsessed with history, especially anything having to do with the United States presidents or the government. She was so enthusiastic about this that she tended do spend an inordinate amount of time on it compared to other subjects, So, it was natural that, after a year, I would pick up on it. History led to an interest in current events and politics. Soon after, I began reading the newspaper to see current events, I watched the news on TV, and I read about political philosophies and how the U.S. government worked. I became more experienced with politics, and I soon began to form my own political opinions. It’s pretty easy to find out where you stand in the traditional left-right axis of politics; there are several online tests that can help you determine this.
Thankfully, in November 2016, when I was in eighth grade, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States. Luckily, this gave me a “reset”, and I could begin looking at a new administration with new people. I guess you could say that this became a pseudo-identity for me: I’m still extremely interested in politics and current events, and I read news articles daily. So, if you ever wanted to know how I became so interested in politics, it all started in fifth grade.
Fresh Fish
I have a lot of experience with fishing. For almost every summer of my life, I’ve gone fishing with my parents, brother, and paternal grandparents up in Mammoth Lakes, in northern California. My grandparents own a condo/vacation home up there, and every summer, around early July, we would make the eight-hour drive up to Mammoth both go on vacation and to visit my grandparents. From before I was born to 2014, we would head to Mammoth, but we missed three years, 2015-2017, because of various circumstances. It rained heavily up there in early July 2015, preventing us from going. My parents’ 20th anniversary was in 2016, so we went to Hawaii instead, and my brother got sick in 2017. The point is, this year, when I was fifteen years old, was the first year since 2014 that we went up there.
That meant that I had to relearn how to fish. I had learned it for the years leading up to 2014, but due to lack of practice, had forgotten how to do so after four years. Thankfully, fishing is very easy to learn. My grandfather handled all the harder parts, such as attaching the worm correctly and gutting the fish, so all I had to do was cast the line, watch the pole for a tug, and reel it in while someone else held the net. Luckily, I somewhat remembered how to fish, and it made the job slightly easier. The hardest part was actually catching the fish. After waiting for random amounts of time ranging from twenty minutes to an hour and a half, I would get a tug and reel the fish in, only to find that it was a smaller fish that needed to be thrown back. While that could be irritating, the whole experience was fun, and I was glad to finally be able to use my experience once more during last summer.
Moving Schools
The year was 2010. I was seven years old and about to begin second grade. My parents wanted to make a short move, from our old house to a new one about a mile away. While I didn’t want to leave my house, and I liked the neighbors, we weren’t moving far. The real problem was that I would have to change schools, from Moiola Elementary School to Courreges Elementary School to begin my second grade year. This wasn’t just because of the move; I could still have gone to Moiola, but my parents actually wanted me to attend Courreges. As you might expect, I didn’t want to leave any of my friends or the people I had known at school in the two years that I attended at Moiola.
From what I remember, I did not want to move at all. I remember fighting and yelling that I didn’t want to move, and that I didn’t want to leave my friends and the other people I knew. But, my parents wanted a bigger house, and for me to go to a school that they felt was better for me. Eventually, I came to accept this fact, and made the sacrifices of both moving to a different house and changing schools and leaving behind my old friends. After moving, I made new friends and met new people. The whole situation was somewhat dampened after Moiola closed down two years later. I made the sacrifice, which hurt back then, but I don’t regret it .
The Science Project
When I was in sixth grade, we had to do a science project, for a school-wide sixth grade science fair. It could be on any topic(meaning any field of science), but it had to be approved by the teacher first, and it had to be something that could be experimented and tested through the scientific method. For the two weeks following the project’s assignment, I could not think of a project topic that wouldn’t be rejected. So, I was forced to choose from a list of ideas my teacher had given me. I chose to do a project in which you would find out if planting different types of beans in a certain orientation in the ground would affect the height of the plants after three weeks, when it would mature. That project idea was accepted, and after doing background research, I chose four types of beans, gathered all my materials, and began the three week long experiment.
Fast forward three weeks, and I collected my data, put it all into charts, wrote my conclusions, made a poster board , and prepared my presentation. In early March 2015, I gave my presentation. My teacher loved it! We were actually competing as a class period to be in the aforementioned school-wide science fair, and these class presentations were the “playoffs”. So, when the time came, I took first place. I had achieved success! This eventually led to the school-wide fair, and then the OC Science Fair, which was a fun experience, even though I didn’t win any awards. I guess the judges didn’t like beans. I achieved success, and it is something I will never forget.
Video Games
I’ve loved playing video games my entire life. The first real video game I ever played was the game Wizards101, which I discovered from a commercial on TV. As you might have guessed, it was about creating a character that was a “wizard”, and battling NPCs (non-player characters) and other players in a virtual medieval world. Unfortunately, the game didn’t last long, because it was heavily restricted by paywalls and additional fees to access new content. I guess I should have expected this, given the fact that it was a free game. When I was in second grade, I met some friends who introduced me to the games Club Penguin (which closed down early last year) and Animal Jam. During this time, I also became interested in Cartoon Network and their shows on TV, and I played games on their website.
As I grew older, I changed my interests in video games, and began to play more mature video games. Throughout my middle school years, I dabbled a bit in the Blizzard developed online game World of Warcraft as well as Overwatch. During eighth and ninth grade, I played the mobile strategy game Clash Royale with some of my friends, which was a great social experience. When the video game Fortnite came out, I also began to play that (I admit that I jumped on the bandwagon). Even now, I’m also thinking of getting into “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege” soon . I have always loved playing video games because of the social aspect of them, and for the vast majority of the games I’ve played , I’ve had friends who I knew that also played the game. I’ll probably still love playing video games for a long time in the future, too.
The Freedom Flame 