I noticed you're in Burbank. I used to live in Burbank.
GET READY FOR MY BEST-SELLING NOVEL, Jim's cube
Moving on...
Cubing made a huge and rather unexpected impact on my life. Throughout my youth, I had many interests. One huge interest since maybe 2nd grade was Rubik's Cubes. My parents bought me one because they knew I loved puzzles. That was in 2001. My main interests were drawing and playing music, but when I wasn't doing that, I was busy trying to figure kut that damn cube. The most I could ever get was 1 side. I did that so many times that I got pretty fast at solving 1 side. I remember being at the DMV with my sister and my grandpa and I managed to get two adjacent sides. I was so happy.
Fast forward a couple years. In 2005, I was at a birthday party. I went into my friend's sister's room and went to see what she was up to. She then showed me this cool new site called "YouTube." I don't think it ever took off... Anyway, the first youtube video I saw was a commercial for some gamestore. It had super mario in it because I searched Super Mario. I realized what this meant. I immediately searched for a video on how to solve a Rubik's cube. I found nothing.
Over the years, everything around me changed. I moved twice, my mother got remarried, I lost old friends and then made some new ones. I got better at drawing (which I do for a living now, thank you very much.), and I took up more hobbies, like collecting comics and action figures. But one thing still remained: I couldn't solve that damn cube. Until one day...
I was playing around with it and made some blocks and then solved it entirely through intuition. I freaked out. My mom didn't care much. It was that specific moment that set off a train of events that shaped me. In the winter of 2007, I searched on youtube to see if any tutorials had come out. I saw the legendary video from Dan Brown. I hated it. It was hard for me to follow, it made no sense to me, and it felt stupid. So I kept trying to make my own way of doing it again, not to just solve the cube, but to at least make my mom proud of me. She rarely was. In early 2008, she signed me up for ice skating lessons. After 3 months, I was thrown into a hockey team. I loved ice skating, and I still do. Hockey, however, made me extremely upset. I didn't want to do it. Every day, I would travel to Anaheim Ice whilst listening to the album "Funeral" by Arcade Fire. That's like the only cd we had at the time. My dad had a ton of music, but I rarely saw him. My stepdad was not an active listener. Driving to practice was an absolute nightmare. Just thinking about it sucks. Anyway, I put up with it, but eventually stopped showing up to practice. I couldn't take it anymore. I asked my mom why she made me do that. It was apparently to "be part of a community." This is important.
Then high school came. My first year was full of crap. Had no friends because I was new to the area. I did make a group of friends, but they left me. I was diagnosed with manic depression and short-term memory loss (that hit me hard). I was out in special ed. I even broke my leg that year. On campus, too. Although I had a broken leg, I still had to attend P.E. Not actually participate fully, of course. I started talking to people more and became friends with a couple of 'em. Then one day, I saw one of my friends fidgeting with a Rubik's Cube. Then he solved it. I thought he was faking it, but he did it several times after I scrambled it. The very next day, I brought my Rubik's cube to P.e. And he agreed to sit out the class and teach me how to solve it. This is where the short-term memory loss really shined. I had ridiculous amounts of trouble with algorithms. After two weeks of struggle, I finally solved it. We started hanging out more, and I was introduced to his group of friends. They were all funny, smart, and all of them knew how to solve it. Over the course of high school, I kinda stopped playing with the cube.
In my senior year, somebody saw me solve it. They recognized me from my old special ed class and they thought it was cool. After talking to him for a while, he made me realize that if I can do that with such a mental impairment, then I can do anything. So I was like,"Yeah I'm gonna spend this year learning new things and trying out cool new stuff." That was the best year I ever had. I joined a beginning acting class, but after doing our first monologue, I was immediately put into the advanced class! I was so excited. I loved being in plays and would get big roles. Man, this sound so arrogant, but it made me feel better about myself. The only issue was that my mom hated it. She never wanted me to be part of the drama community. She would yell at the drama teacher on the phone. In that hear, I saw a video of Mats Valk getting a 5.55 3x3 single. I immediately searched online for advanced solutions.
The course of getting faster was about the same as for any other cuber. I still had trouble with algorithms, though. But getting faster wasn't what made an impact on me, it was the fact that solving it in general helped me realize that people can do just about anything. Because of that idea, I now live life differently. I was in a recording studio for a band I was in and there was a sign on the wall that put it incredibly well:
A bad idea starts with "that looks easy. I can do that." A good idea starts with "That looks fun. I should do that."
So year tl;dr I learned a life lesson. And also my mom dislikes the cubing community.
