Advanced Essay #1: A personal definition of change.

Introduction: This paper was a very confusing task for me. When I started out, I wasn't worried about it. I wrote a simple essay, based around a scene, with an intro and a conclusion, and a few paragraphs. I was confident in my work. However, once I realized that the point of the paper was to actually evaluate a scene without the use of the simple five paragraph essay, I had to completely re-evaluate my paper. My goal shifted from writing a solid essay to writing an essay that purposefully tried to stray from the original format. This made it much harder for me, because of what I started out with, and what I was used to. I did my best to follow the open-ended instructions, and in the end achieved mostly what I wanted. In the future, I will make sure I completely understand the instructions before I jump into writing. I will also utilize help from the teacher, which I am only realizing now that I did not do. Advanced Essay: Recently, I’ve been trying to reach out to bond with my younger brother. His name is Nico, and he’s ten years old. He’s one of the smartest ten-year-olds I know, always great at problem-solving and has incredible verbal skills. However, his interests are still exclusively ten-year-old activities, which consists of a lot of army soldiers, legos, and comic books. But ever since I came back from an intensive unsupported month-long canoe trip, where I did a lot of reflecting, I’ve come back wanting to nurture certain relationships in my life. Nico was on this list. I haven't always been able to connect with him, especially because of our six year age difference. But recently, I discovered a pretty cool way to connect with him. When I was his age, and younger, I would spend nearly all of my time playing with many of the thousands of legos my brothers and I owned. There is a whole room in our house dedicated to legos, and Nico spends a solid amount of time in it. So the other day, as part of my reaching out to him, I offered to play Legos with him. This was a plus for me, as I was slightly invested in playing with legos as well. It had only been six or so years, and I expected a welcoming nostalgia with him.“Yeah! When?” He said, overjoyed. My other brother is thirteen and is growing farther and farther from him as a playmate, so having one of us reach out to him really excited him. Because of my history of not following through with him, I made sure to guarantee that I would play with him. “Now?” Of course, the answer was yes. We went up to our third floor, where the TV is, and where are all the legos are kept. Even just walking into the room, a wave of nostalgia rushed over me. Even though it was only five or so years ago I was obsessed with these toys, it felt like a millennia. Even some of the lego structures that I had built, years back, were still partially or completely intact, with obvious wear and tear. It was overwhelming but in the best way. I felt like I was eleven again. We sat down and immediately jumped to pouring out different bins and boxes of Legos. So many of them were so familiar to me, it felt like hopping on a bike again. Legos are something that once you learn you never unlearn. We jumped to planning on what kind of structure/spaceship/warzone were we planning on creating? What theme of minifigures? What color scheme for whatever we’re building? I hopped into my old routine of sorting “valuable” pieces into different piles, hoarding them for later, most of which I never end up using. I also hopped immediately into the shoes of a big brother, I had to take a minute and step above just being a playmate. I had to match his skill level, which made the whole thing less hobby like but still extremely satisfying by helping him and the nostalgia and pleasure making my own creations. After multiple hours over multiple days of building, we ended up with a unique lego structure. It was a combination of a Star Wars base, but also a battlefield that was very much in action. There was a building that the whole battle was centered around, surrounded by excess pieces to create debris, emulating a war zone. It was a very cool structure something that I was proud of and also surprised that I could make. What was more surprising though, is the feeling that I hadn’t changed a bit in the past six years. Thinking back, the change I’ve made since I was Nico’s age is incredible. I probably wasn’t even four foot six and was no more than eighty-five pounds. My voice was higher than my mom’s and my lifestyle was drastically different. I would wake up with the sun, and fall asleep with the sunset. On weekend days, I would follow a recipe to make myself a fancy breakfast, embracing the art of cooking and food. I felt so sophisticated. After breakfast, I would normally go immediately to my countless legos. Granted, my toy interests changed every few months, but throughout my entire childhood (as in before being a teenager) legos were my most consistent hobby. I had a habit of dumping one of the two dozen medium-sized bins onto the floor, for maximum creativity. I never thought of the past, like the giant mess I probably left in the kitchen, or the future, when I would spend hours cleaning and sorting all the legos I dumped. When I started high school, I was probably five or six inches shorter, at least twenty pounds lighter, and had a bowl cut. I had an entirely different group of friends, and I would do entirely different things. My main hobbies consisted of going to friends houses and just walking around the city. I was a pathological liar, which eventually lead to me losing all of my friends. I soon became friends with an entirely new group of people, and I decided to change my ways. I stopped lying. Occasionally my old tendencies will rise, but I always catch myself and make sure I don’t go down the same path. I love my friends to death and am not set on making the same mistakes. I haven't told a lie in a long time. That’s a really big change, that happened in just over a year. Since I was ten, I’ve gained probably two or three heads worth of height, eighty pounds, doubled my vocabulary, and my voice has changed. Those are all statistics though. When I revisit my roots, I still feel like the ten-year-old in the Star Wars tee-shirt, with the bowl cut grown over his eyes. It’s who I am though. Because now that I’m sixteen, I still play guitar, I still have brown hair, my name’s still Sofian, and I’m still pretty creative when it comes to legos.