101 Things: Collin Tinen

1. I am scared of my future. I like to think everyone is.

2. But not scared enough to live in fear.

3. I have a beagle/collie mix and a black lab whose worst crime is vomiting on the carpet; pretty tame if you ask me.

4. Springfield, Missouri, born and raised.

5. I’m a pretty indecisive person sometimes.

6. My favorite color is blue or sometimes green.

7. I’m not the most creative person out there, but I think I make pretty good stories.

8. I’m the worst drawer/painter/illustrator I know.

9. I don’t have a single favorite song or genre.

10. Sometimes I draw just to laugh at how disfigured it came out.

11. I appreciate art’s beauty immensely because of my inability to replicate it.

12. As well as nature’s. Sunsets and skyscapes are the beautiful.

13. I’m called intelligent often, but sometimes I don’t feel like I am.

14. I’ve never been out of the state Missouri.

15. Science and math are my forte.

16. I have a 12 year old brother who is failing math.

17. Writing has always lingered behind math and science, and I frequently consider it as a future path.

18. My favorite movie is The Shawshank Redemption.

19. The pockets in my pocket shirts contain the secrets of the universe.

20. My favorite food changes depending on my mood, but the foods I’m always in the mood for are cookies and pizza.

21. Onions are the worst things to ever grace my tongue.

22. I love rollercoasters.

23. Others describe me as calm and unstressed.

24. Sometimes I think I come off as a really boring person.

25. I received 7 days of OSS in my junior year of high school for something I’d like to forget about.

26. My mother is the strongest person I know and will ever know.

27. I never fully appreciated family until it was gone.

28. I cherish what is left of it.

29. My brother replays movies and TV episodes nonstop; I don’t understand why that’s entertaining.

30. I’m a competitive person, but I’ve never won anything significant.

31. I’m about as lazy as a sloth. Or maybe a turtle.

32. All-nighters must be done in the namesake of procrastination.

33. I’m awful at public speaking.

34. I used to write and rap my own raps for a rap group composed of my best friends.

35. I listen to a wide variety of music; some of it people don’t expect me to like.

36. I browse the internet almost too much, probably too much actually.

37. The same goes with video games.

38. There are some things I wish I’d never seen on the internet, but there are some things that I couldn’t live without seeing.

39. I don’t like to pick sides usually.

40. I chose to be agnostic freshman year.

41. When I told my Christian mother, she cried and cried, fearing her religion and her values meant nothing to me.

42. I still engage in Christmas and Easter every year.

43. Freshman and sophomore years were the worst years of my life.

44. By the time I turned 15, both of my grandparents had passed, and my mom had divorced twice.

45. I’m stronger for it.

46. My nickname, KT, comes from an old Xbox gamertag I made in 6th grade by the name of killer tiny, which comes from the nickname Tiny, which only my elementary best friend called me.

47. I’ve always used music as an intangible emotional vessel.

48. I wish I never quit the piano.

49. I can’t remember the last time I actually cried.

50. I have an emotional shell that has only been through broken twice, which is probably a bad thing.

51. I think that the new digital age will bring with it incredible responsibility.

52. I am a liberal, though politics aren’t important to me in general.

53. I’ve never been a big reader, but of the books I’ve read I’ve enjoyed most of them.

54. Arts and crafts type projects are especially difficult for me.

55. I drink so much loose leaf tea that my cupboard looks like a gardening stockpile.

56. Every class I’ve taken at Kickapoo has left little impact on my life.

57. It’s the teachers that affect me.

58. I can’t remember what I wanted to be as a kid.

59. Sometimes I do well under pressure, other times I don’t.

60. I’m a pretty inconsistent person in general.

61. I hate my hair so much.

62. It’s thinner than paper.

63. I write letters to myself frequently.

64. I am almost pure Irish in ancestry.

65. I went to 5 different elementary schools as a kid.

66. Ever since then, I’ve stayed in the same school until my next phase in education came.

67. Sometimes I despise my talents.

68. Occasionally, and weirdly, I wonder what people (including myself) would be like as the opposite gender.

69. I regularly wish I could go outside of the city and to a place where there was no light to block out the beautiful stars, and gaze upward into near infinity.

70. My favorite seasons are fall and spring.

71. I hate extremities.

72. I don’t have an impressive track record at high school.

73. I typically wear the same set of clothes every week.

74. I’m still slightly traumatized from an old paranormal TV series on Discovery called The Haunting.

75. It is so melancholy: just as I was actually starting to like high school, love even, age has to come and rip it away from me.

76. I don’t have a dream or life goal.

77. I have nearly no direction in life, and sometimes I wish I had more direction.

78. But that’s the beauty of life to me, I just wish it lasted longer.

79. I once heard someone say that in a memory of a person, their voice is the hardest to remember.

80. That’s why I think if you remember a person’s voice, you truly cared about them.

81. A friend of mine once told me that chocolate is the way into someone’s heart. I would tend to agree.

82. I’ve idolized people I never thought I would.

83. I’ve made the most mistakes of my life in high school.

84. I have no regrets.

85. Comedy is one of the best things in life.

86. I think humor can be found in everything; whether or not it’s appropriate is debatable.

87. Sometimes I just don’t care.

88. The Netflix addiction is real.

89. Video games have always been a source of joy for me.

90. I remember in middle school my friends and I would always play Halo until the Sun came up on weekends.

91. I miss that, dearly.

92. We tried to do a very tedious, challenging sequence of events called the “Death Desert” in Halo. 5 hours in, one of my friends fell asleep, and we had to quit.

93. We tried again a couple months later, and the same friend fell asleep. Again. He was promptly crucified.

94. I hate my current job as a carryout for Price Cutter.

95. I’m only there to get a job at Starbucks with one of my best friends.

96. I’ve been there for 3 months: progress.

97. I love my car.

98. Money is something I think I manage somewhat well. I spend a little too freely sometimes.

99. The opposite of number 67 is true.

100. It is so melancholy: just as I was actually starting to like high school, love even, that age has to come and rip it away from me.

101. Oh well. High school has been a wild ride, and it went by way too fast. Such is life, the ephemeral rollercoaster. Thankfully number 22 is true.