Mening Oilamning Hikoyasi

My father beat cancer; he slowly recovered and began to work at Domino's with my mother. Following this, he began to operate a trucking business. The trucks would constantly break down and be out of service. He would also drive the trucks to better help the buisness income. Our mom would look for help part-time, but was predominantly focused on raising us and keeping us entertained. After a while, my father's trucking business was not having much success, so he began applying for jobs. He landed one in Florida, working in IT.

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We moved around when I was about 7 to 8 years old to Florida. I began 2nd grade at a new elementary school. My most considerable fascination, of course, was megalodons, but I distinctly remember the first instance of a rocket being shown to me in a book in my teacher's class. It was fitting since Cape Canaveral was not so far away. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it was still a rather odd spectacle to someone who had no clue as to the function of a rocket. A tall white pillar, with heaps of smoke and fire as a result of an effort to create a thrust that rivals natural disasters. Florida was always warm, and our neighborhood was very inviting.

I spent much time either on our trampoline or in the pool. My friend, Paulo, and I would try to engineer ramps and courses as little race tracks for his go-kart to race my bike. My father began to revamp the house we were living in. He bought lovely sets of hardwood flooring and began to demolish the old floors. This was a lengthy process; he would section off a piece of the house, then apply a sandstorm-colored liquid to the floor for adhesion, and slowly begin inserting each piece of hardwood one by one after coming home from work. After months of this routine, he had completed our house. At some point, he was removed from his job. He was lost for what to do; he had no business, and his Uber job pay was minuscule in comparison to the cost of living. He had a significant deficit and was unable to support us there. His renovations were fortunately helpful, as he was able to sell the house for a sizable profit. 

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We moved back and began to rent a condo in Brentwood, Tennessee, again. We were essentially back where we had started a few years prior. This time, however, he had contacted an Uzbek businessman, and he was allowed to participate in a joint venture to operate a car business. The building was an old house that had been left vacant; the businessman had previously used it. There were overgrown weeds scattered throughout the lot. The concrete was slanted and uneven; the house itself was not level, nor was it very nice to look at. The paint was chipping, and the metal piping was rusted. The lot itself was very narrow, but my father managed to squeeze a car into every available space. He began to step into the world of used-car selling. He worked very hard; he would leave at dawn and return very late, sweaty, grimy, and exhausted. 

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My brother and I helped out; we would spend weekends cleaning cars. Now, when I say cleaning, I don't mean a little polish up; these were dreadful cars. Each car had its own story, each was littered with one or another form of grime, pollution, hair, unexplained substance, and fast food. We did everything by hand, which meant scrubbing the cloth seats until our arms wore out. I was about 9 years old at the time. We used Awesome Cleaner. It is a good product, it's affordable, and it will remove almost anything if you apply enough of it. The issue is it's a chemical that has a distinct, strong chemical presence, mistified into the air, it sticks to the ceiling of the car, or floats in the hot, airless cabin of a Tennessee summer, or it sticks like a wet, cold, unpleasant puddle in a Tennessee winter. No matter what you wear, a mask for your lungs, latex gloves for your fingers, and goggles for your eyes, it has a way of finding its way back into all parts of your body.

The yellow substance would foam, and we'd leave it for a few minutes before proceeding to the small compartments, which included cup holders. We'd use a cloth with a pointed tip to work on the vents and other small areas. These were the worst, it wouldn't take long for the latex gloves to become an uncomfortable nuisance, they would swell with a thin layer of sweat, and I'd usually take them off. When done, the chemical would seep into my finger pores until they became shrivelled. Every millimeter of every car needed the chemical. Our microfiber cloth towels would become infested with the chemical and become drenched, so we'd go through 5-7 towels for every cleaning. These would take between one and three days for a single car. Because it would be so hot, I would sometimes take off my mask and begin work. A wrong spray, just a little too close to my mouth, and I would start a fit of coughing until it eventually ended with me gagging and spitting on the floor. We would use pressure washers for the car's exterior, its metallic interior, including the metallic outer rim of the car doors, and the rim and hinge points of the metal lining the entrance into the seat. We'd get our fingers into every rusted section of rim and cleanse grime with soap. We, of course, benefited from working for our father, such as not having to worry about food. We'd come back with him on weekends, tired and covered in substances that were either a form of grime, sweat, or chemical residue. At the end of a car's cleaning, we earned $50.

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I began to save up, and when I had around $200, I could finally buy myself a 3D printer. I had become obsessed with them. The thought that you may create any object you want, and manipulate a machine that may, in turn, manipulate matter to constitute almost anything you could think of, as long as it was within the printer's bed size, was nothing short of a miracle to me. See, while at the condo, I had begun to tinker; we had a sand belt and a few tools for wood cutting. With these, I had started making toys. I would gather materials and spend afternoons slowly making my toy, then sand it, and finally prime and paint it. I had also begun to hydrodip. These brought more joy to me than any Nerf gun or toy that had been manufactured because I had made it. 

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I purchased the Anet A8 3D printer for $180 from China, with an additional $80 for shipping. I was extremely excited to receive it; the thought of it would cloud me with so much joy, but it did not come for months. When it did, I couldn't wait to bring it home before unboxing it.

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As it often does in Tennessee summers, it was raining. I was outside my father's business shop when I finished up for the day. I had put the vacuum away, neatly coiled the power washer, and put the tools and cloths in the red tool swivel cart. I was walking in from the dark. The various glues, power drills, extensions, tapes, and car parts lined the left side of the shop. Right above was a light fixture, which was illuminating a slightly worn package at the center of the room. It was a box with Chinese lettering on it, and it was probably a quarter of my total size. My father warned me not to open it there, but the white circular desk had a machine that could make me anything I could dream of. So, of course, I began unboxing it. Immediately. The result was an extremely confused 9-year-old with a tangle of intricate wire, motors, and acrylic pieces. I started to assemble it, but then I began to disassemble it because I had assembled everything up to that point incorrectly. I lost a piece, but then I found it. The process continued in this manner until my father was finished for the day. I packed everything back into its original box in a huge mess, and I carried it to the car with a massive smile on my face. When I got home, I unloaded it into my room and went at it again. A few weeks passed, and the printer, well, it didn't print. I had gotten to run successfully once. This single success was again... complete ecstasy, but it was just the basic x,y,z cube that tests the printer, and it was rather horrendous. When I went to school, I would try to have conversations solely about the printer, but, of course, I had trouble finding anyone enthusiastic about it. I once talked about it with a girl I sat on the bus with, and she told me her mother had a printer as well. I was almost jumping with joy, but I had a suspicion that she meant a standard printer and did not understand the jargon I was spouting. I began to become bummed about the whole situation. I had burned the tip of my fingers countless times on the heat bed and nozzle while messing with it, and had researched for many hours to find specific ideas as to why it may not have worked. I would find videos with 12 views, and electrical ideas and engineering that were very foreign to me, and were not being explained in the video either. Nonetheless, I would try to mimic the videos, but I found that I did not have access to things like soldering equipment. So, I would research more and buy parts online, only to find that again, they required knowledge I did not have to continue. If I made progress, it typically lasted about a day before the printer stopped working again. It had not occurred to me that a $180 printer from China may not be the most quality-oriented product. I eventually returned it, but I was not disheartened. 

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During the summer of 4th grade, I became interested in Rubik's Cubes, so I bought one. I quickly found it impossibly puzzling to solve, so I searched for a solution. It required the use of something called an algorithm. I didn't pay much attention to the word, but I understood that if I found a pattern that worked with a set combination of moves, I would then only have to execute another set number of specific moves. In this way, I solved my first Rubik's Cube. It didn't take long before I memorized the whole sequence. I found myself quite bored, however, with constantly undoing and redoing the same cube. I then bought about nine different cubes.

Contrary to the name, these were in the shapes of dodecahedra, tetrahedra, and other cubes ranging from 2x2 to 5x5. My favorite was a silver 3x3 cube that required the same logic as the original Rubik's cube, except that it was utterly void of any other color; you solved it based on the shape's alignment. That summer I memorized all the various algorithms for each puzzle and it felt like a super power. I could take a puzzle so complex in its iterations and, with simple movements, transform it into a collapse of organized certainty. 

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In 2018, we moved to a house in Franklin, Tennessee, located in Williamson County, a charming place nationally recognized for its high quality of life. My parents were on the fence about it; it was a significant investment, but the prospects of settling down and the incredible education won them over. For me, at the time, the bonuses were obvious: a pool and a slide. I could not believe that we had slid; it was incredible. Our first memory at the house was sitting down to eat donuts and celebrate the substantial transition in our lives.​

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Before COVID, I had bought and returned multiple cheap printers because they didn't work. Now I was onto my fourth printer, called the Adventurer 3 Lite by FilamentForge. Commercial printing had improved exponentially over the past three years, and this one worked immediately. I needed a personal PC to run CAD software and input slicer data into the printer, so I began researching. I once again saved up money and bought the parts. I was able to build the computer and get it running, and start the next step of my 3D printing journey. By this point, I was about 11 or 12 years old, in 6th grade.

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I spent much of my COVID-19 break playing games, watching Studio Ghibli films, and tinkering with my 3D printer. I would try new filaments, create shoes, props, gadgets, and toys for my cousins. I found the sharing aspect to be much more rewarding. So I began making flower vases, pots, phone holders, soap holders, and other various household items to share. I once even gave my mom's office all purple, sparkling, elephant-shaped phone holders. When school started again, I began selling puzzles and miscellaneous items. I would sell them relatively cheaply, a Kim Jong Un cup was bout $8, and an Among Us prop was about $5. I made them affordable to attract customers, because secretly, I loved creating, sanding, and coloring the products. I would paint them in the grass, and I would find the props on the cardboard, covered with morning mildew from the surrounding grass. The selling part was really just out of curiosity. During this time, my robotics teacher had taken notice of my interest in machinery, and I joined the Vex Robotics team for Grassland Middle. This was my entry into robotics and sparked my interest in engineering.