Adam

Adam was always unsure of himself. It was a condition he developed as a child from the constant teasing of three older brothers, and the father that imbued upon his children a sense of entitlement to belittle dreams. Adam’s father was a man broken by the strains of hard work for menial pay – by the fact that the world, according to him, had no compassion for dreams. Adam’s father, pragmatic, encouraged his sons to learn the lesson early. Unfortunately for Adam, being the youngest, the lesson was taught hard and mercilessly at a very young age. Every time he dared to speak about a want or an idea, he was quickly shot down by his father and brothers. Adam always wanted to be something grand – a man among men on the cover of magazines and newspapers across the globe. He wanted to be important. He had never figured out how he would become the important man he desperately dreamed to be, but he knew, even with the taunting and derision of his family, that it had to happen. As a child, he also developed a sense of secrecy, keeping his grand dreams to himself, but he still dreamed.



Adam had to learn to hide his dreams because, for him, it was not the world that lacked compassion for dreamers; it was only men. Adam’s mother, no longer on this earth, would tell him stories as a small boy about those who did the impossible – those who dared to dream greater than what anyone dreamed before them, and succeeded in those dreams. Adam sometimes cursed his mother for infecting him with hope, only to take it away when she was diagnosed with a malignant and aggressive cancer. He watched his hope wane away as did his mother. All that was left behind was the cold and bleak lessons of his father. “Be practical, mijo. The world does not care about what you want. It always takes away what you hold precious. Nothing should be precious.” An errant tear crawled down his father’s cheek as Adam watched the last little light in his father’s eyes die when they buried Adam’s mother. Adam was ten years old.



For fifteen years, Adam practiced squirreling away his dreams. He never spoke about them to anyone. He used to write them down in a journal, but he was taught at age thirteen that even writing down dreams was too dangerous. Ernesto, his oldest brother, found the journal which Adam thought he was so careful to hide in a crevice behind his nightstand. Ernesto was just shy of eighteen and enlisting in the army. He was the most unforgiving of the sons, and took perverse pleasure in crushing the spirits of those least able to defend themselves. Ernesto was, by all definitions, a sadist. He was tall and stocky, and loved the idea of a good brawl. His interest in joining the army had very little to do with serving his country, and everything to do with learning new ways to inflict pain on anyone. Ernesto’s favorite past time was to practice his torture methods on Adam. Adam was always an easy target – slight, sensitive, and quiet. Ernesto’s alpha personality willed the two middle brothers, twins, Alejandro and Cain. The twins knew that if they went with Ernesto’s musings, they would be spared his cruelty.



It was a bleak January morning when Ernesto discovered Adam’s journal. It was a simple title – Sueños – scrawled across the front of a beaten up composition journal with a crease down the center of the book from the times when Adam would secret it with him to a place where he could be free to imagine the things that would make him a big man; a better man than the ones he knew. Ernesto happened to be in a particularly devious mood that day, and entered Adam’s room only to torment him. He knew Adam was hiding something somewhere that could be used as ammunition to destroy his youngest brother. Adam was at a friend’s house which gave Ernesto free reign to stalk about the 15-foot by 15-foot room. He checked under the bed, scoured the drawers of Adam’s dresser, and anywhere else he could think of as a hiding place. He was hoping for something simple – a love letter, a silly toy, underwear with skid marks. He searched through everything and found nothing. In his frustration, he slammed his fist into the wall, knocking over the lamp on Adam’s nightstand. When he went to pick up the lamp, he found what he was looking for, only better than anything he could have imagined.



When Adam returned home that day, he found Ernesto leaning comfortably in their father’s Lay-Z boy, a grim smirk creeping across Ernesto’s face. Ernesto cleared his throat and began to read aloud as Alejandro and Cain sat expectantly on the couch facing Adam. “When I am a man, I will own my very own Laundromat. It will be the fanciest of Laundromats with plush seats for all of the customers.” The twins began to snicker. “It will be so fancy that people will come from miles around to use my laundromat. It will have a play area for the kids so they’re not running around on the laundry carts, and it will have marble folding stations, and it will always have someone sweeping and cleaning. On Friday and Saturday nights, we’ll turn it into a club called Clean Linen, and all of the coolest guys and hottest girls will party there.” The twins’ snickers had turned into riotous laughter. Ernesto stared straight into Adam’s eyes, and Adam was frozen where he stood. He had not even taken off his coat, trapped in his eldest brother’s sights. The ripping of paper echoed through the room like the world, itself, had been ripped from the heavens. Ernesto crumpled the page of dream #32, and threw it into the fireplace. Adam felt faint, hot, but could not move from where he stood. Ernesto repeated the process over and over again with every dream that Adam wrote in Sueños. Ernesto would testify of the dream to a cacophony of laughter — Adam as a business man, a criminal mastermind, a superhero, a savior, an inventor — then he would rip the dream from the page, and toss it into the fire. And poor Adam, all he could do was bear witness as each of his dreams were engulfed in flames. Ernesto savored every moment as he watched all of the joy deflate from his littlest brother’s eyes and the light fade. When all of the entries in Sueños were destroyed, Ernesto stood up, raised his hand to silence Alejandro and Cain, and approached Adam. Ernesto stopped only a pace away, and bent his face close to Adam’s. “Let this be a lesson, little brother, I will always take what you hold dear. You can never hide it from me.” His grin grew broad as he saw the tears begin to well in Adam’s eyes. Ernesto turned and walked to the fireplace, and tossed the emptied shell of Sueños into the fire. All three brothers laughed together, and Adam never moved.



Adam was finally able to move after staring into the fire for what seemed like an eternity. He had seen all of his dreams rise and fall in the flames. He removed his jacket, and sat on the floor in front of the fireplace until the fire was nothing more than ash and the gray afternoon had turned into night. Ernesto, Alejandro, and Cain would enter the living room throughout the evening to taunt him about his entries. “Oh, I’m Adam, and I drive a Ferrari in Madrid fighting bulls!” “No! I’m Adam, an astronaut discovering a second moon!” They jeered him without mercy, but Adam just sat in front of the fire in silence. He didn’t hear what they said. He could only hear his father’s words spoken a little over a year before – the world always takes away what you hold precious. Adam thought to himself, “It’s not the world that takes it away; it’s men.” He stayed before the fireplace long after the embers faded, and he decided in the darkness to hide his dreams the only place he knew Ernesto could not find them, where no one could take them from him. He thought of his mother and her kindness, and he wondered if she, too, was only a dream. Her warmth fading from him like the heat of the few remaining embers before the fire died completely.



Adam, now a young man of twenty-five, was secretive and awkward. He had difficulty looking men in the eyes. He was in a constant cowering position. He had difficulty speaking to people because all that filled his mind were his dreams. He kept obsessively meticulous care of his thoughts, holding on to every random idea, almost to the point of delirium. He had difficulty speaking because all he ever wanted to do was talk about what he wanted to do – build an eco-friendly manly hotrod; be the catalyst to peace in the middle east; fight the power; fix the economic crisis in Europe. Adam had a million and one ideas, but he was too afraid to tell anyone because he knew the consequences of them being discovered. Instead of chasing these dreams, he chose a cubicle with moderate pay where he did nothing but regurgitate the same information to countless, faceless people. “No, sir, that option is not available to you under the plan.” “Yes, ma’am, payment will be issued promptly.” “I understand your frustration with the process, but …” He didn’t mind the work at first because it was relatively simple, mindless. He had a script, and it kept him busy and fed. When the call volume died down, however, he couldn’t help but allow his mind to wander through his ideas – inventing a new smartphone app that let you buy your dinner by tweet; creating the plot to the next great American novel stylized like a reality tv show and facebook had an illegitimate child; inventing a tonic that gave every man the beard he always wanted. He found himself now restless and unable to keep his composure in front of his laptop station. He had to get out of there. There were offers for people to leave, and he always accepted. He did so because, if he did not, he thought he would combust.



Every day, at around 1:30 he would skulk out of the building, get into his car, and then race off to his home. There he would draw out all of his new ideas, map them and experiment. He would create detailed graphs of how he would become the big man he always dreamed. Before the sun set each day, there were pages thrown all over the one-bedroom home he rented – a quiet unassuming guest house in the middle of suburbia. He would let himself go mad with the overflow of everything he could possibly want and how he would go about getting it. Today, he chose to work on how to create the day-time Laundromat and weekend Club Linen. He wrote out every possibility, designed a business plan, and printed possible sites for the location. He spent hours creating a plan for success. At 9:00 pm, he finished it all, then he lit his fireplace. As the fire began to roar, he took a moment to go over everything he had created, admiring the possibilities, and then he threw every piece of paper into the fire and watched it burn until there was nothing but ashes. He did this night after night – a new flight of fancy, an old idea that needed reworking; everything that could have been. He would make everything tangible, and then he would throw it into the fire. As the last of the embers would burn out, he would think to himself, “Only men have no compassion for dreams, and they cannot take what I do not keep.”

Maybe the Most Difficult Act

There comes a point in all of our lives in which we have to determine whether or not love is enough to be able to forgive. There is this concept of unconditional love, something I thought I had for all of my friends, but then comes an act of betrayal – the moment in which I discovered that what means love for me, means something different for others.

I follow the same path with certain friendships. We meet. Something drives us together. We have a great time & then some female destroys the friendship and I walk away a little battered and bruised, but mostly just angry. It's happening again & I wonder if I ever really loved these people. I wonder how God feels when He finds that His creation does not adore Him the same way in which He loves His creation. I am not likening myself to God, but I try to embody Him in most things I do. I can't help but stick to this idea that there is something in this world that loves unconditionally. It's something for which I don't think we have the capacity. I want to believe that I can continue to be loving and understanding when my ego is bruised, but pride gets in the way every time.

I learned to quell the outbursts of my pride and be graceful in the face of opposition, but I am not a saint and most certainly not the embodiment of God. I am petty more than I would like to be and as much as I want to rise above the most base emotions of humanity, I can't. I still want to cuss out the girl who stepped to me. I want to run her over with my car, to be quite frank, but not until after I tell her why no one likes her and make her cry. I won't. I want to make him live his days out alone and forever ostracized, but I wouldn't know where to begin with making that a reality. Even if I did, I couldn't. I want to be who I used to be in a lot of ways. I want the aspect of myself that knew how to hold on to anger and bottle it up and use it at those who harmed, but somewhere in my maturity I learned that loving your enemy is the best decision – that I don't have to be confrontational to get my point across, and that sometimes forgiveness is divine.

I remember listening to this sermon a couple of years ago, and the pastor was speaking on forgiveness. And he cites how Jesus said, when questioned about the limit of forgiving a person, that you forgive 77 to the 77th power. I tried to calculate the real number, but the calculator wouldn't give it to me, but it's enough to say that it's a lot of times. I don't think that we, as a species, are really able to conceive some millions of times to forgive. The other thing the pastor said was that even in our forgiveness we should not forget. There is what I find to be the most difficult task. How do you remember the act that caused offense without harboring the anger that comes with it?

The saying is that time heals all wounds and erases all past indiscretions. I used to hold on to so much anger and resentment. I used to think that the anger was my comfort, but with age I have learned that it just keeps you empty. I tend, now, to leave my anger in the past with the person who caused the anger and move forward, but it appears more as a safeguard, locking my self up in self-righteousness. My gallery of friends always in my corner to say “you deserve better,” but then I have to question their motives – what anger are they holding on to that keeps them from being forgiving? I keep returning to my pride – that stupid voice in the back of my head that keeps me moving forward, back to where I begin. What of my pride? What does pride do for anyone? But respect, for self and for others, that is where my focus should lay. And in that aspect of respect, how can one not respect one's self for forgiving?

So, the decision is made. Pride is forgotten and respect is maintained with the simple act of forgiveness.

The Problem with Preaching to the Choir

In reading an article from Foreign Policy regarding what I assume is Palin's new book, I realized that while I might sit through the article nodding my head, thinking, "well, duh," my agreement with the point of view means absolutely nothing. By most's standards, I am a bleeding heart liberal with want to only further the Democratic Party's agenda. I am not who needs to read the article about former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. I am not her demographic, not one of the conservative, "drill,baby, drill" chanting, "family values first" Americans who love seeing a pretty woman from a small town without any knowledge of foreign or domestic policy almost attain the second highest seat of power in the United States. Pretty women serve beer and sell clothes, but if you're pretty and want power, you better know what's going on. I digress.

I am concerned that while the article is less than biased, it brings up some interesting points on Palin's naivete, but think of the people who have faith in her as an adequate representation of their views on the world. How do you combat ignorance, which in many cases is willful? Before Palin was thrust onto the national stage, she was governor of a state ranked 47th in population (with just over a half-million residents). A large portion of the residents of the state are blue-collar workers in fishing or natural resource industries. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live what I expect to be a difficult life (mostly because of the cold).

I assume that, in Alaska, family is first, and education is not necessarily on the top of the list because children are taught early-on that the options for employment are limited. It is less competitive in such a small world to rise to a seat of power. Palin was able to become governor, raises a number of children, and still have time to run for vice-president of the United States. How do you combat that? A full-time mom, elected official, and small-town lifestyle-- she speaks to a part of America with whom most politicians cannot truly empathize or emulate.

Every politician has stories about small-town, working-class people, but very few can state what it is like. There are always embellishments (especially by the conservative right) to play down any sense of entitlement or privilege in order to gain a particular part of the population that prays before dinner, all members of the family present at the table; that goes to church every Sunday and attends Bible study on Wednesdays; those whose entire universe exists within the boundaries of the town in which they were born. The liberal narcissist in me rolls my eyes and says, "what's wrong with you people!"

The fact of the matter is that there isn't anything wrong with them, other than their ignorance that there's an entire world beyond their immediate view which they don't care about. We (liberals) admonish these people for their limited knowledge of foreign policy and domestic issues, but these are the people who bear the burden of the wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are the people who forgo a doctor's appointment because they don't have the money to pay for basic prevention care. So why do they support a Palin over an Obama when one cannot name a periodical she has read and the other offers possible solutions to the person's most immediate problems? The simple answer is identity.

This country has spent so much time dividing and categorizing people, that we ignore that all people are generally the same. Douchebags and saints, all of us. If we could show the Palin population that the discussion is the same whether we are big-city or small-town, that poor is poor, that the war hits home no matter what part of the nation you live in, that we all want our children to have a better life than ours, that liberals are not per se atheists and that, regardless of religious beliefs, very few people want the government interfering with our personal lives more than is necessary. We have to close this socio-political fissure which divides "us" and "them."

How do we do this? Well, us liberals have to stop being so condescending. We stick our noses up and talk about how bad Fox News is, and how American news outlets are too skewed. There is no room for a "I'm better than you" mentality. The sad fact is that most of us will die within 30 miles of where we were born, whether we grew up in a big city and know the goings on of every nation in the world, or a small town with only an 8th grade education and a knowledge of no more than who slept with whom at the Piggly Wiggly. The point is, we need to get off our high horse and recognize that we are no different than Palin people at the root.

Hold a conversation with someone whose politics disagree with yours. Don't fight. Discuss. See where that gets you. Honest conversation may destroy the threat of the future Palin's of the world. Try it out.

What if... the words that drive us and keep us trapped

I recently turned 26, and with every birthday, it is my new year. This is the year not to wonder "what if." I can only do what I will do and not do what I choose not to, and in no way will I allow "what if" to enter into my mind. I deleted it, and it feels kind of amazing to live without it. I feel more free, excited about the future, and happy. I don't care about the other possibilities, only what I do now.

I say, try it. Try to delete "what if" from your life. Are you still driven? Are you still trapped? Are you you anymore, or are you someone new? I am the same person as I was before, just more confident in my decisions-- still going to school, still doing homework, still unmotivated to clean, but there is no nagging in the back of my mind that leads to "would, should, and could."

Math in America

There was a time when I was good at math. Then, came geometry, and I started to struggle. Proofs were the bain of my existence for about 4 weeks in high school and then it all of a sudden clicked & I was golden, but I started having to actually put effort into the subject that I had breezed through before and I gave up. I didn't like doing homework. I was used to (up to that point) doing a handful of homework assignments and acing the tests, and once I got to a point where I actually had to try, I decided I hated the subject. I made it through Algebra II (although I did have to take it twice due to my unwillingness to turn in homework). I never took physics because of my newfound hatred for math & I regret giving up on the subject. Looking back, the issue was never one of math being exceptionally difficult for me to understand or carry out, but that there lacked a sense of discovery. In math, two plus two always equaled four and what was the fun in that. If you're finding x, you use y formula and everyone should have the same answer. A little older and equally as inquisitive about the world, I wish I would have worked my way up to physics so I could get to the good stuff. If a teacher had told me early on that in some cases two and two could be twenty-five I would need to know how and why. If they pitched to me that I could possibly prove the existence or nonexistence of God with math, I would have been a Physics major instead of political science. When you learn about math no one offers up anything interesting at the basic levels and math remains boring and unmystical. I would like, one day, for someone to teach math the way it should be taught: as a key to unlocking the universe; as a strange and mystical wonder to be awed and enjoyed. The labor that comes with it is less burdensome if attached to it is everything wonderful.

"Hey Baby" Inspired (Stephen Marley not No Doubt)

So I was compiling a playlist of the Marley family on Imeem and came across this song Hey Baby and thus a muse whispered the following into my ear. I am not stating that it is anything profound, but when words present themselves, you should just write them down.

Forgive the time that i been gone
My time away is not yet done
Too many roads to travel
‘Though i been down every one
Love i from afar my baby
Love i over distance lady
Don’t give i none too much care
Know i will return to where
My freedom was born in your eyes
You be my setting sun and my moon’s rise
I will come and go with the changing tides
But my love will remain constant

A Right to Die

I have thought about my death quite a bit in my lifetime. I was a morbid child which turned me into a morbid adult. I let my parents know by the age of 18 that if I were on life support, I want them to pull the plug. I was fair. I told them to give it two weeks, but if I am not awake at that point, let me die. It’s an odd thing, this mortality we endure. It is not that humans are the only specie to endure it, but we are the only that appear to brood over it and mourn those we lose. Somehow, as we get caught up in living, we ignore our mortality or we begin to fear our final crossing.

I kind of cannot wait to die, mostly to see what it is like to be dead. Is it Heaven and Hell with a giant scale to weigh your soul? Is Saint Peter standing at pearly gates handing out flight manuals and a set of wings? Is Cerberus hanging out at the river banks barking at all the new souls, sniffing and growling as souls procession into the underworld? Or, is it darkness—no consciousness or acknowledgement of one’s demise? This is the only reason I would want to die: to find out what is next. Believe you me, I am in no rush to die as interesting as crossing over could be, it could also be a big disappointment, but I do not fear it.

When I die, there are only two ways I want to go: either peacefully in my sleep, or a bullet to the brain. I’m a simple girl with simple needs, like a quiet and private death. If I should end up with some terrible disease with no chance of recovery, I will find an easy to clean place and end my life. Christians (mainly Catholics, but the whole lot of sects) feel that it is a sin to commit suicide. I do not understand why it would be a sin when the only person you harm is yourself. The internet is teeming with websites that tell people how to kill themselves, best time to not be stopped, etc. People argue that if one is ready to die, we must convince them that there is something to live for—that they should want to keep living. That may be a great idea for a sixteen year-old girl in a suicide pact with her boyfriend because they couldn’t get enough Romeo and Juliet by reading it, and she believes that the only way her much older sociopathic boyfriend and her can be together is in matching plots on earth and spiritually in the afterlife. (Actually, let her do it to help human evolution along.) What about the 65 year-old grandfather who found out he is in the later stages of colon cancer, who defecates blood, who they had to attach a catheter to because his intestines are shutting down, who will waste away until he is only 100 pounds, each moment in agony save the morphine drip which he runs out of by the second hour of his day, only to go into cardiac arrest while his family suffers with him as they watch grandpa waste away? Why is he not allowed to die with dignity? Why must we make him suffer if he wants to die when there is no chance that his quality of life will improve?

My mother and I spoke about her wishes if she reaches a point in her life in which she cannot carry on. She gave me her wishes for burial and service. It took place a short time after her mother passed from ovarian cancer. I remember the last time I spoke with my grandmother. The cancer was in remission. She was lively on the phone call, talking about the next time she would see me, preferably outside of the hospital, congratulating me on going to college. She was amazing and strong of will, unafraid of death. A few weeks later, she slipped into a coma. She passed within a week. I learned a few things from this loss. The most important things I took away from her passing was that death is very much an inevitable consequence of birth and that you cannot fear it. When the doctors found her cancer, they gave her a death sentence and she chose to make her peace with God and resign her soul to the fates. Do not misunderstand me; she underwent chemotherapy and had the tumor surgically removed. She took her meds and some days were better than others, but I think she continued to live in order to see her last grandchild and only grandson born. In my argument I sight my grandmother because when she was faced with death, she did not shy away. She had a strong faith that when her body expired, it was the proper course of her life. I am sure that at some point she may have thought she still had more to do or that there were things she would miss out on, but she also knew that no one lives forever. I remember feeling robbed because I did not have more time to spend with her; that she would miss my graduation from college, she would not be there when I got married, that she would not see the first of our next generation. What I felt for was not the end of her misery, but more my personal loss, and that is what it all boils down to.

We are selfish in our pursuits of “pro-life.” When we make these judgments regarding whether people are forced to live or die, we do it based on how we will feel and not on what the person wants for his or her self. We make these decisions based on fear of loss because we who remain on this earth want solace. We want to know that our mother/father/sister/brother/best friend will always be there, even though logic and history tell us otherwise. Death reminds us of our own mortality, of the futility of our existence and unnerves most people to the core of their souls. It means that, depending on one’s faith and style of life, we have to be responsible for our own happiness and the choices we make, live now, and find contentment in what we have because tomorrow is uncertain. People who willingly meet the final threshold of what we know or can know shake our beliefs in what life is and vilify those who seek to end “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he questions whether or not to commit suicide. In the end, he dies at the hands of his enemy but of his own device.

We are fortunate enough to have free will and reason, but we rarely use either. We tend to make decisions based on emotion which make logical arguments moot. I have gone on a rant that comes no where near where I initially intended this to go, but it remains that I am irked by arguments against a person’s right to end their life. This is not to say that we should all go around killing ourselves, instinct tells us otherwise, but if a person reaches a conclusion to meet their maker, who am I to tell them that their appointment is later than the one they scheduled? I would want every person to have the chance at immortality but all good and bad things must come to an end and it is in understanding that which we can find comfort in such certainty.

“Don’t take life too seriously; it isn’t permanent.” – W. C. Fields