My story of how I started cubing
Hi! I’m a cuber with a best time of 31.4 seconds on 3×3. I did not start out getting a half minute time though, and this is my story of how I started cubing.
When I was seven and in first grade, I remember my father bringing home two of these strange twisting puzzles. He said they were called “Rubik’s Cubes,” something I had never heard of. He said it was a very difficult puzzle to solve and you have to get all the sides to have all matching colors. It didn’t seem to hard to only a first grader’s mind, so, naturally, I scrambled it. I used a lot of my free time to figure it out, and got one side, and never really got more than that. My dad looked into it and found out that you should get a “T” shape on all the other sides once you solve the first side. My dad figured out how to get it to there, and I took, tried to do the rest, and, as you can guess, scrambled it farther, mixing the first side when I tried to do the second. Looking back, I realize why it didn’t work: I was solving it one side at a time rather than one layer at a time, the correct method. I eventually came to a YouTube tutorial on how to solve it. I was confused at how that would work, as he would not have the cube scrambled the same way I did. I decided to look into it anyways, and ended up with a solved cube at the end. I was so proud and i showed my parents and they thought it was the coolest thing that me, a seven year old, could solve it. I left it on a shelf for a few years and didn’t touch it.
After a break, when I was ten, I had a few of my cousins over. I wanted to show them my cube, as I did with all visitors to my house, and they thought it was really cool. I handed it to my younger cousin, around 3 at the time, and I walked away to the bathroom. When I came back, it was scrambled. Actual tears streamed down my face and I went into my room so nobody had to see me like that. I took the cube after they left, went to my dad’s computer, and watched the tutorials again. I NEEDED to solve that again. It was my claim to fame in the fourth grade. I eventually solved it, but didn’t want that to happen again, so I took a couple days to figure out how it worked. I watched those tutorials over and over and over and-…
I had it down
That was one of the happiest days of my life. Sitting in a basement, a ten year old, had completely memorized how to solve the cube, in two minutes no less. Of course, that was just a rubik’s brand cube on my first week of solving. I now have a Weilong, learning new solving techniques by myself, and with ¼ of my original time.
And that, my friends, is how I met the rubik’s cube and how it has stuck with me throughout my life.