ConnorX

About Me

Hello person who is looking at this. If you're looking at this you're either a new instagram follower who clicked the link in my bio, one of my friends who's pulling it up to embarass me, myself looking at the books list, or an employer seeing as I put this link in my resume. This page was written for none of those people.
I'm a first year (but second year based on grad credits, AP scores for the win) student at UC Santa Barbara, and my major is currently undeclared. I have a girlfriend named Madi, at least as of November 2023, and she is lovely. She's going to community college and still has a car so she can drive to visit me or I can ride the train and visit her while also sleeping in my actual bed.
I HAD a wonderful Hyundai Ioniq but sadly it has suffered a gruesome fate (it now belongs to my sister).
Idk. If you have any questions you can ask me or something. My instagram is @connor_xvr and my number is not something I'm sharing on a public webpage, even one that nobody looks at.

Hobbies

• Biking
  While my initial foray into the world of cycling was fairly rocky (7 year old me was difficult to deal with), I became fairly proficient at it in middle school when I biked to school every day, about a mile in both directions. This ended when I started going to a high school over 3 miles away, a bike ride which was too daunting to do every day in the morning with a backpack. But during Covid, I eventually got so bored that I used biking aimlessly as a way to get some sunlight and exercise. Once I got comfortable biking all the way to the coastline, I began experimenting with biking along the Strand (a path along the beach). Eventually covid ended and I did it less often but still did occasionally. Now I bike to class every day so the allure to do big long distances is less powerful. My record is biking from my house in Redondo Beach to about a hundred yards past Santa Monica Pier (because every time I went there I would go a few extra feet to set a new record)
• Reading
  I'm a huge reader. I used to read a lot in elementary school, but that kind of tapered off in middle school. There were of course a variety of reasons, but begs notice that following the Twilight series I didn't read another book for over a year.
  I enjoy fantasy and comedy, and especially combinations of those two. That's why my all-time favorite series is Discworld by Terry Pratchett, which I'm still not done with because it has so many books. I also like science fiction, but there's a lot of bad SciFi out there so I tend to read more fantasy just because good fantasy is easier to find.
  I try to add actual literature into my reading diet, so every few books I'll read some old book that's renouned as some great work. I still have my tastes so the classics I've read tend to be the more action-oriented ones, as opposed to romances for example. I literally tried and failed to read Pride and Prejudice because I had so little desire to know what happened next.
  To see my all-time favorite books check out the "Favorites" page.
• Watching Movies and TV
  I can't really talk about reading without mentioning that I also consume vast amounts of television and movies. Over covid I just completely devoured sitcoms on netflix, and this was before the streaming wars so there were a lot of them. For my favorite movies and shows see the favorites page except as I type this I haven't made the list yet.
• Wasting time on the internet
  I do this more than I care to admit.
• Drawing
  Not good, or anything, but I'll occasionally draw when I'm bored as a sort of stress reliever. The only thing I'm good at drawing is dragons. I don't know why.
• Dungeons and Dragons
  I put this at the bottom of the list when I made it because back then I was still embarassed to admit to playing DnD, which I'm not anymore, but I'm too lazy to move it up. I played with my friends and now we're all going to different colleges and I don't have anyone to play with anymore and I'm very sad about that.

Fun Facts About Me interlaced with Fun Facts About Dolphins

• I'm left-handed. This means absolutely nothing except that I smudge the paper if I write with ink, which is a little annoying.
• Dolphins can't really sleep safely since they're aquatic animals, so their brains have 2 halves that can shut down independently of each other. So a dolphin can sleep in shifts while still being lucid enough to like breathe and stay afloat and avoid danger.
• I have two ancestors that fought in an American war against the United States. The first (based on tracing names, we don't actually know anything about him) was a Hessian (german mercanary) who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War, but evidently stayed in America after the war was over. The other example is less fun. I know I have ancestors that were in the South during the Civil War, and at least one who fought for the Confederacy, but I haven't asked for more details because I really don't need to know. My great grandfather fought in WW2, thankfully for the US, but then he stayed in Europe for years after and very possibly started a second family there so he wasn't exactly a hero.
• There are some species of river dolphins, who have adapted to survive in a freshwater environment. All of them reside in the Amazon River
• I tell people I'm 6 feet tall but I recently learned I'm actually a half-inch short without shoes on. Even worse, I've been telling people I was 6' for years and I was even shorter before. UPDATE: I'm now taller, not sure how much but past the six foot mark
• Dolphins are one of the few animals to use tools. Some dolphins in the Australia area fit sponges on their beaks to protect from sharp rocks when foraging for fish.