...goodbye 22; it's been lovely...

Today I’m 23. My birthday always feels rather more like a new year than January 1st does and though I never make resolutions either on the national new year or on my own new year (why set yourself up for depression the following December 31 [or in my case, October 31] when you realize that, after all, you’re only human and the year, though wonderful, was just a year), here is what I hope becomes of me this year:

I hope to delight in getting to know 23. I hope that this new year I am braver and stronger, that I learn how to love better and to be less judgmental but more honest. I hope at 23 that I find the words, whatever and wherever they may be, and that I do many things.

A new age never comes without having to say goodbye to the old one. In some ways, 22 truly kicked my butt. I experienced, for example, my first mid-life crisis (more on that later), discovering, in the mean time, that who I was at 17 is not who I am today no matter how much I loved that girl. I realized also that I still lack any form of wisdom, in its broadest and narrowest senses, officially placing me in the age range of “too old to be wild and free and too young to be over the hill.” Having once been in the age range of “old enough to know better but still too young to care,” I can tell you that reaching this new plateau is, to put it nicely, an extraordinary disappointment. I don’t care how romantic it is to be a song lyric, there is nothing romantic about much of growing up.

Still, 22 is tucking itself away in a corner of my heart and I am sad to see it go. Why? Because 22 taught me something else about growing up. It doesn’t stink as much as I thought it did. Okay so it’s not romantic, but some things still are.

For the first time, at 22, I felt like perhaps I wanted to be an adult, wanted to view relationships and events in my life from that perspective and act accordingly. And for the first time I felt that being an adult may be beautiful in that you never lose the child that you were because it was she who brought you to this place and because you and she are one and the same. The five-year old, big cheeked, enormous imaginationed Roya is still in me, the eternally eight Roya, the wildly happy 11 Roya are too, even the 17-who-I-am-not Roya is still something I was, and so something I am today. Growing up, perhaps, doesn’t mean losing childhood entirely; it means having the strength built up from all those ages you were to create who you have become.

At 22 I began to learn how to slow down, to discover happiness in waiting and stepping lightly and moving forward only a step a day instead of in leaps and bounds. I learned about ties and how to have stronger and better relationships. I have never been more successful, in fact, in the past have failed miserably, at holding up my end of a friendship, or a loveship. I began to grow into myself. Cranberries became my new thing. I organized all the old letters people have sent me throughout my life.

And now, here comes 23 and this is what I have come to realize:

• I now have only five years left during which to acquire a horse and a piece of land on which to put it.
• I am the same age as my mom was when she got married.
• I have yet to learn to play guitar, learn Spanish, or learn to surf.
• This just may be my year to write the next great American novel...but the pressure has never been greater.
• I am still afraid of crabs.

In light of these realizations, and others, I have gathered together some quotes that I hope will guide me through 23 – some profound sayings that remind me that I have never said anything this remarkable, but also that there is always hope...

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” ~Matthew 7:7-8

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” ~Blaise Pascal

“President Roosevelt once said, ‘speak softly and carry a big stick.’ I say to you, ‘yell loudly and swing a yard stick.’” ~Jason

“I defend myself against failure in my main design by making every inch of the road to it pleasant.” ~Emerson

“So damn easy to say that life’s so hard. Everybody’s got their share of battle scars. As for me, I’d like to thank my lucky stars that I’m alive and well...And today you know that’s good enough for me. Breathin’ in and out’s a blessing can’t you see. Today’s the first day of the rest of my life and I’m alive and well.” ~Kenny Chesney, Dean Dillon, & Mark Tamburino

“There are instincts for all the crises of life.” ~Victor Hugo

“I heard what was said of the universe / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; / It is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?” ~ Walt Whitman

-R.A.

A List Of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist

I have often thought that the city of Los Angeles (although it is arguably more a pit than a city) is really quite worthless after all is said and done. But recent events have started me thinking that there are many other things that the world would most probably be significantly better without. So I have begun compiling a personal list of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist. The list is very much a work in progress. Please feel free to add your own.

A List Of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist:

• Los Angeles, the city

• Obama as president

• The Nobel Peace Prize

• mean people

• in-car video players

• pants with stuff written on the butt

• litter

• anything besides the military that the federal government feels the compulsion to spend money on

• veal

• "presidents" who are actually dictators

My own personal literary and philosophical theory

This is my own personal literary and philosophical theory. Years of higher education and practiced BS convinced me that to be a true intellectual I absolutely must have one. So here it is, complete with hypothetical example and strong bias:

“Science is an art;* art is a science. Everything is everything.”

There it is, guaranteed to explain and interpret any conceivable literary or philosophical ideas, past, present, or future. I like to explain it using the great wall example:

You are in a room with a great, blank wall. Someone hands you a marker and says, “please write your name on the white board,” indicating the wall in front of which you stand.

“That’s not a white board; that’s a wall,” you tell him. But you are wrong. If the wall has characteristics like those of a whiteboard, is it not a whiteboard? It is hard and upright and smoothly white. You can write on it with a marker. And, some way or another, you can wipe it off. If you want to split hairs you can call it a wall. If you want to be specific, pointed, descriptive. If you want to be picky, intellectual, uncompromising, you can call it a wall. If a behemoth, muscular giant approaches you and says walls are life and whiteboards are death and you value life, you may call it a wall. But really, it is just as much a whiteboard as a wall, a science as an art. Everything is everything.

P.S. Some people may tell you this is not a theory, but an anti-theory. Don’t believe them.

*Please note the semicolon, without which my own personal literary and philosophical theory is incomplete.

-R.A.

I woke up this morning and realized there were starving people all over the world

I woke up one morning and realized there were starving people all over the world. So I wrote the White House: “It has come to my attention that there are starving people all over the world and I find it outrageous that no one else has done something about it before this, particularly you, Mr. President, as you are the moral guardian of our nation. Please fix this problem.”

The White House wrote me back one line, “Where do we get the money?”

I found this response disappointing, irrelevant, and downright offensive. These are STARVING PEOPLE we’re talking about; what does money have to do with it? So I compiled a list of facts about starving people and sent it to the White House.

The White House wrote me back one line, “What is the solution?”

It seems surprising to me that a mere citizen like myself should be expected to have answers to problems. What, I ask, is the government for if not to help the unintelligent general public find enlightenment? But I compiled another list because it is my duty as a human to find ways that other people who are also human but less compassionate than I to help people who are also human but more victimized than I. I sent my list to the White House. It looked like this:

Solution to World Starvation

· Provide all starving people all around the world with a balanced diet.

· A balanced diet includes all known vitamins.

· Provide all starving people all around the world with kitchens in which to cook their food.

· Provide all starving people all around the world with good medical care.

This last bullet may seem like a different issue entirely, however I believe it is important so I included it in the list. If the government follows my list exactly, I will have solved not only the world starvation problem, but also the problem of subpar healthcare for all around the world.

The White House wrote me back one word, “How?”

I have spent my entire life dedicated to the belief that money is bad, making people greedy, heartless, and selfish. Marxist philosophy is the closest a human has ever come to truth. But I think you will agree that my Solution to World Starvation list makes it evident that the starvation problem requires money. Lots of it. So I made a list, cataloguing the many uses of money in saving the starving populations. “Take it all,” I prompted, “all the oppressive capitalistic money and give it to the starving populations and they will be fed and the money will be cleansed.”

The White House wrote me back one line, “There still won’t be enough.”

All I have left to say is this: I am fed up with the unambitious, nay saying, skepticism of our government. Apparently, as a private citizen, not only am I supposed to solve the problems of the world, I am also supposed to fund them. I find the government’s utter lack of understanding of the severity of this situation absurd. I have provided them with a clear answer to the WAY THINGS SHOULD BE. Why, I ask, should rationalism get in the way of it?

Talk about not ending up where you started out

You know what phrase I currently dislike more than any other? “Reverse racism.” This phrase is meaningless. There is no such thing. Racism is not this grand golden ticket endowed to minority populations as a defense against the majority. A black man voting for a black president simply because he wants to see a black person in office is just as racist as a white man voting for a white president because their skins match. A Hispanic judge ruling for a Hispanic public servant who is less qualified than his white colleague is as unjustified as a white judge ruling for a less competent white man.

Reverse racism implies that a minority directing racism at a majority is a secondary form of immorality – a more recent form of social injustice based off of – even perhaps a result of the first – racism itself. It is such a disgustingly beautiful way of allowing minority populations – bigoted and otherwise – to remain victimized and to dedicate only a measure of acknowledgement to majority recipients of injustice.

The implication is that I, a white majority, may have been dealt with unjustly based on my race, but only after I – even if only by association – dealt unjustly with others. The injustice dealt to me is – reverse racism admits – still an injustice, but it is, practically if not actually, based off of my own unjust treatment of another and thus less sympathetic and – on the grand scale, perhaps more deserved.

If I were a minority I would be, at my best times aggravated, and at my worst times irate at my fellow minorities' constant attempts to victimize me. How, I would like to know, can I be both an empowered individual and a predestined victim? Injustice is wrong and should be righted by individuals and society as a whole. But playing the victim in order to right the wrong is counter-productive. How can a woman who is attempting to prove to her world that she is as capable of rational thought as her male counterpart do so by portraying herself as the weak puppet of fate? How can she expect to be seen as strong and competent when all she will focus on is her oppression? If I want to impactfully prove to the world that I am capable, I will not ask for fairness from a population that has no faith in me and then attempt to prove myself on the “equality” that they never actually granted me because they do not yet believe I deserve it. I will practice and grow and learn and then I will prove myself, without any of their grace or assistance, against the odds. This is strength.

What happens when a population focuses on being victims is that instead of gaining freedom and respect they gain entitlement and think it is the same thing. This is why politically correctness is so disgusting. A feminist changes women to womyn and believes she has won a victory. But all she has really done is changed a spelling and not the opinions of the people who believe women are inferior to men. John Morley said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” If a society insists on calling white people Caucasians and black people African Americans, it does not follow that they have expelled racism in that society. I can call a man anything I wish to his face and still vote, speak, and act against him.

Treating people with equality is not the same thing as treating them the same. I am different from both the white woman and the black woman sitting nearby and I am glad of it, as, I’m sure, are they. Please treat me differently than you do the person in the corner who is fascinated by computer engineering; I would much prefer a good conversation on Steinbeck. Equality involves opportunity. It means that I can choose between computers and literature, not that I am forced into the same field as everyone else in society’s attempt to neutralize and to avoid racial, gender, and socioeconomic categorizing.

Equality is also not the same as being on equal footing. It’s like Emerson’s squirrel said to the mountain, “If I cannot carry forests on my back, / Neither can you crack a nut.” If I wish to be a philosopher, but my eyesight is so terrible I can’t read Aristotle, society does not owe me laser eye surgery. Equality does not mean we all get the same thing; it means we all have a chance at these things. Circumstance, character, and work must carry us the rest of the way.

…I have been searching in these past few paragraphs to find some thread of my original topic and I am fairly certain no such thread exists. Nevertheless, I have one more story to tell on the topic. I was listening to some political commentators on TV the other day (please don’t even get me started on commentators…I have no idea who you have to know to get one of those jobs but I cannot believe that I am the chump going into debt for law school when there are people out there who get paid to verbally blog) and one of them said something about how white males in today’s society have more restricted first amendment rights than others. The other commentator actually said, of course they do…they should have more limited freedom of speech; they aren’t a minority. This is not “reverse racism.” Don’t attempt to soften it with modifying adjectives. As Yann Martel says, “Don’t you bully me with your politeness.” The word for this kind of opinion is Racism. Just because society has chosen to be less appalled by it in this form, does not make it any less vulgar.

P.S. A note on my last entry: I received an email today from LSAC (Law School Admissions Committee) which is the avenue through which you funnel all your recommendation letters, LSAT scores, essays, etc. when you apply to law school. The subject line read “IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR LSAC ACCOUNT” (I do not exaggerate, the all-caps were their own).

I think: something is expiring, something didn’t go through, I’m missing a prereq, they lost my LSAT score, USD rejected me after all…

This is their urgent message: “Starting in 2010, the US Department of Education will be requiring significant changes in the way educational institutions collect and report race/ethnicity data. Accordingly, on July 19, 2009, LSAC changed the race/ethnicity designation in your LSAC account.

So I think: Lukas is right; they’re going to make me check Persian/American.

They continue, “Your previously reported ethnicity, Caucasian/White, has been changed to the subcategory Other Caucasian/White under the category Caucasian/White. Please log in to your LSAC account to view/update your race/ethnicity designation. Additional categories have been added, and you may select multiple categories.”

The problem was that classifying people within only one category was too limiting. It turns out that there are too many minorities nowadays. The US Department of Education finally read a history book and realized that only 2% of the population is purely British and 0% is purely American, officially making every single person a minority. They also realized that if you trace things back far enough everyone actually came from Africa, making everyone a majority. Subcategories were the only way to organize all the muck. How else could they know who to send scholarships to? The LSAC people kindly left a number at the bottom of the email for me to call in case I had any questions or concerns. I am calling them tomorrow to ask how much tax-payer money the US Department of Education spent on reorganizing the way educational institutions collect and report race/ethnicity data. I will also ask why, if they have extraneous money lying around, there are so many teachers receiving pink slips and so many students being rejected from the CSU system.

-R.A.