Nuzlocke Challenge

Sometime during my junior year of high school there was a momentous shift in my psyche. There's a moment like that for everyone - the realization of freedom when you hold your first driver's license, or the feeling of pride and responsibility at your first job. But my moment of epiphanic maturity was more unique - it was when I realized that I wanted to hang out with girls more than I wanted to play videogames. 

During freshman year of high school, kids quickly and justifiably came to call me "gameboy", as the machine was my only real friend. Even throughout middle school, my mother and I battled over the game system in a sort of nuclear arms race. I'd pretend like I was doing "homework", and she'd ground me and craftily hide the gameboy in increasingly obscure places. I in turn spared no effort in scouring the house and stealing it back - repeat ad nausem.

This was the weapon with which I saved worlds. And escaped from mine.

Sad? Perhaps. But honestly that impulse hasn't changed; it's just disguised and buried underneath layers of experience that tend to provide a fuller experience of life - like music, nature, or relationships. But the nerd inside hardly dormant - it only bides its time, awaits moments of weakness, and jumps out in random conversations. It's part of who I am, and - in case you can't tell - I relish that. While there have been drawbacks, videogames were a stepping-stone to much of the good in my life today. But that's a different story entirely, and is just a lame transition to the fact that I want to talk about Pokemon.

Solid relationship advice.

How Dance Changed the World

This was a formal paper written for a Modern Civilization class during the latter half of college. We were free to choose our topics - so on a whim I of course said "I wanna write about dance", which mutated into "dance caused WWI" which solidified into "the political impact of dance in history." And when the papers were handed back, this one had a happy "A+" scrawled across the top (that paper was 40% of the class grade too). Of course I'd just stayed up absurdly late the night before and cranked the paper out with almost no editing. My guess is that the professor loved the topic, read the first few paragraphs and slapped the grade on there. I'll take it. Reading this now, the paper should've been reorganized and better applied to politics - but hey, an A+ is an A+. 

I bolded a few cool facts and threw in some pictures to keep things interesting. 

How do you define dancing? Maybe with whirling bodies, graceful flourishes, impressive routines – but these are only pieces of dance. Exercise, competition, fun, romance – these are reasons to dance. But what is dance? Certainly, dance is a form of self-expression, taking what you hear and moving your body to it. Phrased better: dance is the synthesis of musicality, physicality, and personality. More importantly, dance is a relationship – between music and dancer, performer and audience, lead and follow. Inexorably intertwined with emotion, once these relationships are taught and replicated on a large scale, dance begins to reflect the emotions and passions of society. As such, it should be no surprise that dance historically reached into politics. Notably, in 18th-19th century Europe, dance embodied the transformative spirit of the era, generated remarkable social and political sway, and profoundly impacted the ideas, passions, and emotions of the era.