My 200th Post is a Face-Filled Extravaganza

“They are (mostly) my face and they are (usually) ethically-sourced.”

Surprise! Did I say that this week would be the second part of the photos from my trip to Glacier National Park? Well, I was lying. Because there’s something way more important happening today! This post right now, that you are reading, is my 200th post ever! That is bonkers to me! I’ve written 200 of these things? And only like, a third of them were just reposted stories that I had already written and/or Spectral Crown? Wow! I’ve been doing this for almost four years! It’ll be exactly four years on November 22nd! And yet it still hasn’t made enough money to pay for itself! But the payment isn’t really the point, you know? Why would I keep doing this if it were? Wait, why am I still doing this?

Anyway. I thought that, in the same vein of what I did for my 100th post (which was almost two years ago, minus four weeks exactly), I would celebrate me for a little bit. You know, as if this whole blog wasn’t already a self-centered mess of self-idolization. But let’s do something different this time; instead of me telling you what my favorite posts are from the last hundred, I’m going to tell you what my favorite faces are from the entirety of my public-facing collection. Why? Because there’s no way in hell I’m going back and reading all those 100 posts before this one.

I kind of did this once before, with Spectral Crown royalty-free headers, but this one’s gonna be bigger and better than ever!

“But Andy,” you may be asking yourself, “How do I work this? Where does that highway go to?” No need to fret, I know what you mean. You are likely asking “what does a “favorite face” mean, exactly?” Well, lucky for you, I know the answer. Over the last four years of this blog, and the last decade of my existence (Oh. Oh no), I have slapped my face on countless ends and oddities. For shits and giggles, of course. Is it a practice in vanity? Yes. Does it take a lot of time? A bit. Do I think it’s funny? Hell yeah. Will you think they’re funny? I sure hope so, because otherwise this whole thing will have been a great big waste of everyone’s time.

And of course, all of them were made with what I refer to as the poor man’s PhotoShop; good ol’ Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint. You can tell because of how shitty they are!

Now, not all of these are going to have my face in them, and this is not technically an exhaustive selection of all my face dances. But be that as it is, I am going to (sometimes) rank these on a scale of how much I hate myself after looking at them. A sort of cringe-factor, if you will. A past-self punchability scale, of sorts. A scale of one to ten, with ten being “I would absolutely still make this today,” and one being “dear lord, I wish to scrub myself from existence.” Or, you know, that’s the general idea. Let’s hop to it! Also, if you’ve read this far, a minor CONTENT WARNING for, uh, discussions of mental illness. Oops, cat’s out of the bag, we’re fucking going somewhere today!

Starting with what is, chronologically, my oldest faces, are my old YouTube channel thumbnails. Although I think about these videos pretty regularly (from all three of my YouTube channels), I can never bring myself to rewatch them. Because they are terrible. Like, so terrible. They just are not good! A handful of them are even kind of problematic! For a number of reasons! Believe me, I’ve tried my fucking hardest to get them removed. But I lost access to two of my three channels years ago. So what’s done is done, I suppose.

Ah, yes, my very first YouTube channel. Lots of random nonsense that was literally just whatever me, Nick, and our friends recorded and put together. We spent a lot of evenings together making YouTube videos. And you know what? It was fun! I think every kid should make YouTube videos, and then they should never, ever post them. But because I did, I now have to contend with the fact that that yarn doll video is, perhaps, my single most-viewed piece of content in existence. That fucking yarn doll video got eleven thousand views. Are you shitting me? Maybe now some of my stories (i.e. Burn Zone) have had more traction because they were published by the U of I, but for a long time, that stupid fucking yarn doll video netted me over 10K views. And before YouTube disabled comments on videos with minors (thank heavens for that, by the way), it had a solid selection of choice messages, including single mothers who thought I was gay (I mean, were they wrong?), someone who thanked me because her differently-abled child could make these yarn dolls, and a handful of trolls complaining about how I wasted their time. So, not bad, all around.

Oh, Herzegovina, it’s my old Sova Productions videos! You know, these all stem from a time when I briefly tried to be a YouTube vlogger/game streamer, except I put in exactly the minimum amount of effort I thought necessary to make a go of it, and it turned out exactly as poorly as every fifteen-year-olds Minecraft streams should turn out. The only redeeming quality of any of these is that, in one of them, I had my friends help me out. We did, like, a series of games together. I remember it being a fun couple of hours, but it was a bitch and a half to edit, so I just threw the whole stream up and it was boring.

Among the gameplay videos, there’s random ramblings about life, some original writing content and short stories (both of which are now on this website), book reviews, game reviews, and an environmental science thing (Tab for a Cause). This is literally me today. I have not changed. Nothing has changed. I am the same as it ever was, apparently. I will never outgrow the YouTube videos I made when I was fifteen.

That last statement, about not outgrowing the YouTube videos I made when I was fifteen, is thankfully not actually true. I like to think that it is the opposite of true. It is, in fact, false, because I am very, very glad to say that I have outgrown who I was in high school. Mostly. With the few exceptions of a handful of University projects I legally had to post on YouTube to get a grade (like that last one up there), I haven’t used YouTube in years. And I’m fucking relieved about that.

Am I going to link you to any of these youtube videos? No. Fuck you. No one should watch these. No one should perceive them. The fact that I am acknowledging them at all is a sin that shan’t be forgiven, and it’s especially true of those second-to-last-three, because I was a dogdamn menace in high school. A pimply, overweight, awkward, self-possessed, depressed, quasi-incel menace. My pubescent psyche was married to a totally-inaccurate-yet-totally-consuming sense of superior self-worth that was completely at odds with my simultaneously deep-seated self-loathing and self-destructive tendencies. I was, hands down, the worst version of myself sophomore year of high school through sophomore year of college, being closely tailed by my second-worst self from about sixth grade through sophomore year of high school.

So, yeah, I didn’t “grow up” in high school (and the first year or so of college), I just took everything that was good about me, watered it down with teen angst, and then got neurotic, mean, and tried to kill myself. If you want to talk about trial by fire, sure, there’s that, but hot damn, I was a fucking moron and I seemed to hurt everyone around me. 90% of the time this was accidental because I just exuded self-destruction and awkwardness and I made it terrible for everyone to be around me. Thank you so, so much to those that stuck around. But for the 10% of the time it was intentional, I am so, so sorry. There is nothing I can do to fix what I’ve done. I wish I could do it over again.

But, on the plus side, it’s high school. Everyone is their worst self in high school. If you think you weren’t your worst self in either middle school or high school, then buddy, God help you, you may be your worst self right now. At any rate, hopefully, I can only go up from there. I’d like to think that I have, but who can tell.

Anyway, a couple years after I quit making YouTube videos and around the same time I started by journey toward quitting being-an-asshole, I started writing this blog! Man, remember those days when I would slap my face on just about every post? I sure don’t!

Is it better or worse that I’m not giving you the context for most of these? I mean, I could if I wanted to. But I don’t. I think it’s better without context, and also it would be a pain to go through and collect all the links to these posts again. Especially because they’re just kind of… meh, I guess? I don’t know, I have never once re-read any blog post I’ve ever written. And there’s a funny thing about that, because I have rediscovered so many blog posts I had completely forgotten about while doing this little project. Like, I had no idea they existed.

Obviously, I remember writing most of them. But not all of them. Did you know I wrote a blog post about how gardens are great and grass sucks? Because I didn’t! But you want to know the worst part? It isn’t that I don’t remember writing it; it’s that I don’t remember writing it and it’s kind of good.

When I started this blog, I wanted maybe every fourth post or so to be about environmental science, climate change, social justice, or something else with meaning behind it. Something more than just bullshit about video games or books or movies or whatever the hell I happened to be doing on a given day. Obviously, that didn’t happen. And it fell apart quick. There are easy reasons for this; writing about that stuff is exhausting, and so is reading about it. It’s research-heavy, it’s usually depressing, and more often than not, it’s not very funny. This blog is entertaining if nothing else, and climate change? Not the most entertaining thing in the world.

Another easy reason is that, at least for the last year or so, I’ve been actively working on a whole-ass environmental science book for children, and before that I was being graded on my writing about environmental science, and after a day of doing either of those two things the last thing I want to do is write about it “for fun.” But that’s not the point. The point is that I sometimes look at these old posts and I think, “Man, I must be getting stupid or something because there’s no way I can write something that good again.”

The fact that I am no longer in an academic system is, in some degrees, petrifying. If you had told high school me (remember him? The asshole from before?) that, in the future, I would miss being in school, he would have kicked you in the nuts and started to cry. But it’s true. I deeply and truly miss the rigor of academia. It kept me sharp, it kept me flexible, and it kept my writing on topics that weren’t always so easy. I don’t write about environmental science stuff as much anymore because I’m not being taught it anymore. I don’t have to know what the major negative impacts of factory farms are, or how many mines there are in the Canadian oil fields. And I’m starting to forget it. Things don’t come to me as easy as they used to, at least in terms of environmental science stuff. I have almost completely forgotten how to code, a skill that I was immensely proud of myself for developing. I took a break from it all, and it all vanished. As if it were never there at all.

There is, obviously, a gulf in these photos from the beginning to the end. My face changes. I have facial hair where I didn’t before. I go from thin to fat to thin to fat again, across the four years or so I’ve been doing this. I’m older now. I couldn’t even drink (legally) when I started this blog, and now I’m nearing the age where I have to find my own health insurance. But there is another kind of immense gulf in my memory now, too. A gulf that exists between “the before times,” or the era pre-pandemic, and “now.” I can no longer imagine what life was like before we entered our new normal, at least not in the same way. But even that gulf is made up of smaller, alternate divides. For example, the person I was before I went to Philmont is a foreign man to me. As are the posts written before Philmont. And those posts written in that weird middle ground between Philmont and Covid? You better forget it, buddy, they’re all gone. Memory is one of my most important functions. If I don’t have that, I have nothing.

And so it’s terrifying that my memory feels immensely short. From this last year and a half since I’ve graduated, I feel like I’ve changed in ways that I can’t entirely comprehend. I’ve lost a sense of purpose, of direction. I’ve lost a sense of confidence and self-assurance that I had briefly cultivated before the pandemic, and then started to recover later on. Part of this is because, for the last year or so, there’s been no one to grade me. I’ve had to find my own reassurance, and it’s been terrifying. My entire life, I’ve judged my self-worth based on my intelligence. And for that same length of time, I’ve had that sense of intelligence constantly reassured by good grades. Stellar good grades, no less. I knocked everything I did out of the park, when it came to school stuff. I never scored lower than an A- on anything in college, and there was only ever one A-, in my first semester. It never happened again.

I scored a 36 on the ACT, I was de facto valedictorian in high school (story for another day), I scored in the 95% percentile on the GRE without studying, and I graduated among the top 1%, perhaps top 0.1%, of my graduating class at the University of Illinois. Everyone has told me I’m the smartest person in the room, 99% of the time. Everything, ever, has confirmed this. And then, all of a sudden, it stopped. And I plummeted.

I don’t say this as a “oh woe is me, I’m no longer ~superior~ to everyone else! How ever shall I go on?” kind of thing. I think I’m a pretty humble person about my intelligence, or at least I try my best to be. I hate pretension, it’s perhaps the fastest way to make me dislike a person, and I will do almost anything in my power to be unpretentious. But I have, consciously or not, tied my entire self-worth to my intelligence. And, because my anxiety and OCD are constantly making me doubt myself and question my own abilities, I never learned to reassure myself. External reassurance has been my OCD compulsion since I could speak. Are you starting to see where I’m going with this?

The strongest external validation source, a grade, has suddenly disappeared from my world when I graduated. And it has absolutely wrecked my self-confidence. That, along with two nightmarish incidents involving writing and writing with other people and a series of fallings-outs and/or abandonment by friends, have tanked my self-confidence and my motivation. And looking back at this blog, for me, it feels like I’m watching a slow decline of my own abilities.

I am afraid that I can no longer be intelligent. That I no longer am intelligent. That, because I’m no longer being challenged enough or no longer have the mental fortitude to try hard enough, I am not smart anymore. I don’t read enough books. I don’t write about environmental science enough. I can’t remember things as well. I can’t analyze things anymore. I don’t have any new ideas. I’m redundant. I’m useless. Nothing I say is anything interesting. Nothing I say is new. I can’t remember what I was saying. I don’t have the motivation to do anything else. No one’s telling me I’m any good. I haven’t produced anything good. My gears are whirring and spinning uselessly. All my good writing is in the past. Things that mattered so much to me just a year ago mean nothing, and I struggle to recall them. I have no sense of if I’m getting better or if what I’m making is any good. I’m not learning anything new. I need to be learning more to have value. A lack of regular socializing with other people has knocked out my jokes and wit and ready access to knowledge. I’m losing everything that makes me unique, and losing everything that people like about me. I’m no good without exterior validation. I’ve lost my edge, and I don’t have the energy or means to get it back. I feel like I’m stuck in a rut, languishing by the wayside and unable to make progress. I’m endlessly spinning in a cage that I made. I have made no progress towards any of my dreams since I’ve graduated.

So I have to ask myself: was I ever really smart to begin with? And, since that’s connected to intimately to the way I value myself, was I ever worth anything to begin with?

The reason I bring this up is because I find that these pictures and blog posts, for me, highlight this gap, this decline, this falling down. Maybe you can see it. Maybe you can’t. Maybe it isn’t there at all. But things from before seem so, so far away now. Even the middle of the pandemic is a whole different world. Tracking this blog over two hundred posts makes me feel like I’m losing hope, losing interest, losing myself. This blog was never that important to me, not really. But I’ve lost whatever edge I had with it, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Nothing in it is any good. The disappearance of “hard hitting” or “serious” topics in this blog is reflecting of my own disappearance of rigor and structure in life, of my own complacency and a shift towards focusing on things that are trivial. Pop culture. Video games. Bullshit and nonsense. Where did my activist streak go? It just evaporated, along with everything else. I’m obsessed with a sense of progress, and grades and college made it easy to move forward. Now, lacking that sense of forward progression, perhaps this is why I turn to video games, because they offer exactly that. But if nothing else, it feels like it’s just gone.

See, I started this project as a way to celebrate my past posts and spread some relish over the stupid photoshop projects that I do so enjoy making. I mean, it’s a thing that I’ve done for literally, like, forever. The last ten years, at least, have been me slapping my face on just about anything I could. I thought it would be an easy, light-hearted time to go back and laugh/cringe at my old posts and photos. But it hasn’t. Not at all.

Writing it, or at least going through all my old posts and thinking about it, has not been that. It has been something of a mental exorcism, to be honest with you. Some of this stuff feels like exhuming a grave, of going back in time to peer at a person that I used to be, and now I am forcing myself to compare what I am now to what I once was. And it is both exhausting and, to be honest with you, kind of disheartening. This blog is a living, breathing, weekly-updated journal not just of my thoughts and feelings, but of who I am. What matters to me. What’s on my mind. Sure, you can look at it as a way to chart how my writing, my humor, my topics have evolved over the last almost four years, but to me, it feels so much like it’s tracking that decline. And that’s absolutely brutal.

Much like this blog, I keep a daily journal of what happens to me. It is a bonafide, clinically-diagnosed compulsive action. I hate it, with every fiber of my being, but I can’t stop myself from doing it. And like this blog, I never once go back and read it. If I did, I do wonder what I would find. Maybe the same backwards slide. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just crazy after all.

But now we reach the end. Those were the last four faces. So, do you want to know the heart of the matter, though? Deep down, when I really take a look at my life, none of what I’ve written is true. Not really. I just can’t make myself believe that. Some of these posts don’t feel like so long ago. And then I look at the date stamp and I have to confront the fact that, holy shit, I wrote that over a year ago. It’s been a year since then. And I feel I have nothing to show for it. But in reality, I have quite a bit to show. Realistically, I’m doing really, really well for myself.

Since I’ve graduated, I’ve moved to a brand new city and started a new life with a partner that I really well and truly adore, I’ve been to probably twenty different states across four-plus different vacations, held a seasonal job that I loved and learned a lot from, found a new job after that which I really do enjoy. This new job is actually perhaps going to be a saving grace of sorts, because it does, to a certain degree, force me to return to the mental rigor of academic research. So we’ll see about that. It also lets me go outside and play at summer camp with children, which is immensely refreshing. I love this job. But besides that, I’ve done more, too. I’ve worked on making new friends, and have gotten decently close to one, while still keeping in touch with a handful of old friends. There’s probably more that I can’t think of right now. And, to top it all off, I wrote a whole damn book between October of 2021 and March of 2022. Sure, it’s a book for children, it was an absolute nightmare to write, and it’s non-fiction (not really the scene I want to get into), but still. I’M GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR IN 2023. A real, veritable, published author, with a book on store shelves and my name on the cover. It might not be the book I wanted, but it is a book. And that’s more important than I’ve given myself credit for, I think. That has been my DREAM since I was little. And somehow, among all these worries of decline, decay, and falling apart, I am achieving something I had only ever reached for. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. I’m doing very well for myself, even if it feels like everything is a mess. The only thing that’s missing? I haven’t written as much fiction as I would have liked, I gained a bit of weight, I don’t read as much as I should, I feel I should be learning more, and I haven’t gotten a grade for any of it. That, maybe, is the key.

So what am I going to do now? I guess the only things I can do. Keep on trucking. I may never have truly outgrown the neurotic mess that I made for myself in high school, this twisted ball of snakes and neuroses and self doubt, but I’ve changed once. I can probably change again. If academic rigor is good for me, well, then I have to make my own rigor. I’ll be my own grindstone, learn to judge myself fairly and confidently and reassure myself without the need for others. I’ll disentangle this falsely-placed sense of intelligence as being absolutely worth, even if it takes very small steps. And slowly, even if it takes forever, I will try to make myself into the person I want to be. Because what other choice do I have? I could give up, sure. I tried that in high school. Thankfully, it didn’t take. At the end, what else is there to do? I have to get better. I will get better. Even if it takes a hundred more face dances to do it.