I am light.

I applied for USC today. Yup, USC. I hate Los Angeles but this is what SFSU budget cuts have given me. I'm headed to University of San Diego but I've got to have my plan B and USC happens to be it (only because it's listed as one of the top biology schools in California along with Berkeley, SJSU, USD of course, and a few others). Funny how I'm at San Francisco State studying bio and it's not on that list.

I was prompted to write an essay between 500 to 700 words, easy enough, about Thomas Edison. The prompt read as follows: Thomas Edison failed many times before successfully inventing the modern electric light bulb. He said, "If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." Reflect on a challenge you overcame through persistence.

So this what I came up with in a matter of 45 minutes and one ice cream break later:

Thomas Edison believed in himself a lot more than many people care to do in this day and age. Most people will attempt something once or twice and easily give up after a few short trials. Edison was a brilliant inventor, in addition to, being a true optimist. He strove for excellence and was not only persistent but a determined individual. He believed that even if you have failed at a task more than once, one shouldn’t be discouraged by their failure. Instead, he looked at each failed attempt as a step in the right direction and towards him achieving his goals. Each failure helped him get closer to his goal and as a result he created one of the best inventions, the electric light bulb.

As a college student currently attending San Francisco State University I have always wanted to excel beyond what was being offered to me. San Francisco State is a great institution but I have found it to be a failure to my education due, in large part, to our California state budget cuts. My education has become limited severely under the constraints of our economy’s budgeting system. For a while I’ve sulked around campus hoping to miraculously find ways to better myself as a student in this present situation. I have come to realize that I need to be trying a lot harder because things aren’t getting better instantly and our economic recovery will take time. I am majoring in biology and have hopes of becoming a pharmacist. Semester after semester I have attempted to get into biology classes but have only been turned down over and over. Each time I have felt like a failure and not worthy to study this field of science. I want to graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree and further my studies at a pharmacy school. Nonetheless, there are many times that I have given up on my chosen career path and have contemplated switching majors and to study something with more classes available. However, biology is my strong suit and is something I excel in. I have a great passion for it and believe that if given the right tools I can go far. However I cannot obtain these tools at my current institution so I spend my time in classes that do not account for much towards my degree.

Each semester I have felt the familiar sting of failure by not being allowed to grow in my chosen area of study due to limited seating in classes. Recently I have learned that I can do one of two things with my life thus far. I could continue to sulk in my failure and let it consume my entire being like it has been. On the other hand, I could use these miniature disasters, like Thomas Edison had used his failed attempts, as a way of getting a few inches to feet closer to my goal. Today, I’ve felt that I have taken a step in the right direction and towards a better future by applying to University of Southern California. I write this essay with the ability to understand that each failure is a step closer to my goal and today I shall walk over my failures with my best foot forward. My education is to me what the light bulb was for Thomas Edison.

Today I am closer to sparking my own light bulb.

DEment

Part One.

I was sitting on her front porch steps in what should have been the freezing cold October chill but to me it was anything but. You could tell there was a slight glimmer of sweat on my forehead and that my skin was burning red hot. I was waiting for her to come back because I didn't feel comfortable knocking on her door at such an early hour or late hour, depending which way you look at it. Whichever way you looked at it- it was a rather indecent hour. I waited for what seemed like hours but may have realistically only been a few minutes. The night was dark and in a normal state of mind I would have been scared shitless but I was smiling with my jaws tightly locked in place having a jolly good time and feeling very pleased with myself. I was in the middle of a suburb right on the outskirts of town. These neighborhoods scare me on most nights but today it was slightly peaceful. I only had the one streetlamp to depend on for light and even still the grass seemed greener than ever even in the darkness. I couldn't resist touching it. My hands felt the tiny soft blades crisp and standing straight. I couldn't help myself and before you knew it I had moved from the steps and sprawled out on the ground laying in it. I'm usually a germ-phobe and I would hate to be rolling around in dirt but today it did not matter. Today I was everything I ever wanted to be and the sky was the limit. Still I was waiting for her. It felt like I'd been sitting here a whole day. And in the silence of my loneliness the weight of stupid hit me like a brick. I wouldn't feel the sore bruise of it until after I came down. I started to hear whispers in the distant darkness and the shadows I initially saw as playful glimpses of light had now turned menacing. My teeth clattered gently but the noise hammered hard in my ears. My senses were heightened and I could feel every change of direction in the wind and every hair on my head, every pore on my face, I felt everything. My anxiety was coming back and the end of this trip was fast approaching.

I played songs back to back in my head but the music stopped playing. I didn't like being alone and the nightmares of my imagination were closing in on me. So I did what anyone in my state would have done, I turned around and knocked on the door.

Her mom was terrified at the sight of me. I was the college bound smart kid in class who loved the "Hugs Not Drugs" slogan immensely. Believe it or not, but here I was, in plain black and white, staring back at the eyes of a confused and worrisome parent, 16 years old and strung out, make up smeared, and shivering in the cold of night.

And she let me into the house and right there on her kitchen table I poured out my soul for the first time...and her heart opened up and listened.

A little impatience

I don't want to be second best. Don't want to stand in line. Don't want to fall behind. Don't want to get caught out. Don't want to do without. And the lesson I must learn.
Is that I've got to wait my turn.

Looks like I got to be hot and cold. I got to be taught and told. Got to be good as gold. But perfectly honest I think it would be good for me. Cause it's a hindrance to my health if I'm a stranger to myself.

Miniature disasters and minor catastrophes. Bring me to my knees. Well I must be my own master. Or a miniature disaster will be the death of me

I don't have to raise my voice. Don't have to be underhand. Just got to understand. That it's gonna be up and down. It's gonna be lost and found. And I can't take to the sky. Before I like it on the ground

And i need to be patient. And i need to be brave. Need to discover how i need to behave.
And I'll find out the answers. When i know what to ask. But i speak a different language. And everybody's speaking too fast.

-KT Tunstall just sang a song about my life..in a nutshell.

More on that later.

thought.

I don't know what compelled me to do it but I did it. Something inside me stirred.
After many months of bringing myself back from the dead... literally. I thought I was well enough to look through everything again- think about every thing again, ponder about every thing that happened over again. The keyword here is.. I thought. I thought I was well enough. I thought I was fully repaired. Yet I knew that I shouldn't have done it. I should have waited for a better time because, quite frankly, 2 am is not the best time to make any type of decision no matter how big or small. "I solemnly swear I'm up to no good" and I told her exactly what I was doing. She doesn't know the half of it. So I sat in the dark of night, thinking about everything, alone.
Thinking is the greatest gift that we, as humans, possess. Our ability to reason, plan ahead and think critically with our brains is a function that is uniquely ours, respectively. It is what separates humans biologically from all other mammals, animals, species and organisms on the planet. Thinking is my greatest endowment, a talent that I treasure, an ability that I have honed throughout my academic life. It is also the source of my mental and emotional downfalls and the root of all the misleading and diabolical wanderings my mind encounters. My cognition is up to speed after a good night's sleep, my ideas are of the utmost brilliance on most days, my consciousness awakened if I've had my full cup of chai, my sentience toward others a bit dilapidated like the home I was raised in, and my imagination just runs away with me... all the parts of thought are present.
2am is the time a brain should be resting and not thinking.
However, tonight I find myself sitting restlessly... doing just that.
Naturally, I have thought overload. I scrutinize every aspect of everything. Try to figure out every thing before everyone else does and be two steps ahead of the entire world. I crave perfection. That's what being in the GATE program all your life will do to you. When asked to distinguish whether I see the glass as half full or half empty, I go on to wonder who left the glass that way in the first place. I question the glass' very existence and why I'm being asked to determine it's state of being? I try to solve for the x when there was no need to, build mountains out of moleholes that don't need to be touched, create something out of nothing. Academically, thinking teaches me to be wise and critical. Not to leave any stone unturned. To try and try, then try again. Have a keen eye over every thing to avoid mistakes. In life, it's caused me to be an overattentive wreck with borderline obsessive compulsive disorder. Or maybe that's just my hypochondria kicking in.
Apart from all that life is good right now. I feel like I'm on top of the world and I'm waiting for life to catch up to me. I'm stronger, better, faster. I've become so empowered, I try to face my fears in a single night. Flipping through the pages of each scrapbook I built knowing that I should have ripped and burned these pages a long time ago, I try to mask the burn I feel from all the hurt I see. I try to tell myself to be ruthless and to believe that the memories will fade into the shadows and after a while I'll get insensitive to them. They will cease to exist and the old me will rest in the pieces of ripped pages and burnt photos. The flesh wounds are now closed and there is no one around to rub salt. The scars have lost their dark marks on my skin and his hands can't feel them anymore so he doesn't know what existed before. I can be anyone I want to be and this is my reincarnation. It's the chance to get back on my own two feet again. I find my balance on them and I take flight through the streets and life is beautiful again. I talk, I laugh, I smile and I'm free. And that's all he sees- all the perfections, nothing else. He's a perfect stranger. He doesn't need to know.

And I sit here, thinking I'm completely healed.

So I flip through everything again. I thought about what went wrong, how I could have fixed it all, what would have made a difference and how I would be or where I'd be now in a different life. I throw my head back and close my eyes. The pictures project on the insides of my eyelids and a tiny smile appears on my face. I watch and I stop thinking about the what if's and I just lte it be. I take a final deep breathe and close the book.

Then I turn out the lights and get the best night's rest.

I just let it be.

Misfit Island.

He came in the evening and knocked on our door with a darkened eye and a shirt pressed against his face which he had filled with ice. He asked me for any quick remedies to help reduce the swelling and explained that he came out of the blue knocking him off balance as he was walking home. Because he was able to speak he knew that his jaw may not be broken or even fractured but my guess assumed that it would swell up pretty badly by morning and knowing exactly who had done this to him it may even be slightly knocked off center requiring a medic to put it back in place.

To help the inflammation I suggested that Ibuprofen would work better two-fold compared to Hydrocodine to reduce the swelling before his next job, tomorrow morning. To ensure that this wouldn't happen again while he was in this safe sanctuary of his home I could only offer a smile, a hope to God that it would stop, and the number to the Tenderloin Police Station, a few blocks up the street, in case he encountered him ever again.

This isn't the first time that he's put hands on someone. A few months ago it was the partially blind man living upstairs helping my grandmother in kicking him out of the building when he had trespassed through the front door. He knocked him in his good eye and now the poor man constantly looks over his shoulder and shivers after every shadow that passes. My grandmother got pushed to the side by his forceful hands in the same ordeal and something in me burned a new hatred for this man. He's dangerous, offensive and a monster when he's coming down off his withdrawal. With nothing to feed his appetite he fuels his body with violence using his aggression and size to his advantage. He's seen loitering outside of the building and has called me by every wrong name in the book. At first I'd take part in yelling back and flashing forward my aggression now I just walk past and save my breath for something worth value.

Just this afternoon she came down and asked what could be done to get him to stop coming to the building. He only comes here to visit one person and this person seems to be just as terrified of him as everyone else. Yet, the drugs and the addicition seem to drive them towards each other so parasitically that they can't stand to be apart, talk about a Bad Romance. He'd been 86'd from the building months ago but finds his ways through the front door, in through the fire escape and even climbs up walls using the trees to leap into open windows, jumps across roofs and walks about the second floor freely away from the security cameras. No one and nothing is safe in his way and nothing or no one is stopping him. "He takes doors off hinges" one tenant describes to me. You can see the fear in her eyes as she is one of the only females that choses to live upstairs where he storms around through the corridors in the dead of night feeling like a king as everyone else bolts their doors tightly.

Someone once compared this shit hole of a place to the island of misfit toys in the Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer TV special from 1964. And the analogy holds true. The minds of the people living here aren't quite working the way a normal human brain should and their body parts seem like they've been put together in entirely different ways and not by God but by demons from the deep realms of hell. Most of their limbs revealing scars of all sorts from crack craters to stab wounds, diseased skin and damaged beyond repair hair that falls out in chunks daily from a scalp that has been battered from the constant abuse of dirt and filth, flaking and dehydrated like the desert. At times it can become like a Sci-Fi movie in here. People walk up and down the hallways, linger in the thresholds or corners of the bathrooms seeming to be in a different world. Tripped out and stuck in an alternate reality that no one in their right state of mind can ever imagine. They can't see you anymore and just continue about their day, living and barely breathing waiting for the substance to subdue their body like it has their soul. People stay here because they are lost. They've been lost for years. All those frightful stories you hear about on the Channel 7 News of kids and celebrities dying from heroine or cocaine overdose is almost pleasant to watch compared to being in the constant struggle that drug addiciton has brought them to make this place, their home. And I, inside my home, am the constant spectator of such wasteful recreational use of poisonious drugs and human deterioration.

Every day I walk to school and I hang out with my friends all of whom are full of laughter, we tell stories and we eat most of the time. I take the BART to the airport and fly away to relieve my city life stress and take refuge in the country or friendly regions of California. I spend the day locked away in my office at work or being the hostess stand greeting the elite upper class of San Franciscans as they prepare to dine on the finest, most-expensive Indian food within city limits. Almost every evening on the end of every vacation I still make my way back to this home. Trudging up the escalators of Civic Center Station and dragging myself up the stairs into the less than heavenly gates of the Tenderloin.
And so I'm sitting here now and it's a seemingly quiet night except for the cops that came by an hour ago along with an ambulance. So I'm going to delve into a good book and sit here trying to read as many pages as I can tonight because it's usually never this quiet here. Ever.

Phenomenal Woman

And today was my 20th birthday.

I'm sitting here closing my eyes, taking a deep breath and preparing to blow out yet another cake adorn with candles. The tradition calls for one to make a wish before they blow them out and at this moment I can't think of anything to wish for. World peace is out of my hands, global warming was last year's wish NOT come true, and for one who loves to live life on the edge to wish for my life to be perfectly put in place would only make it boring in the long run. I've got everything that I've ever wanted and for the most part I'm completely content with myself at the moment- apart from one thing that's been chewing at the sides and driving me insane. I can't doubt that I'm anything less than beautiful. I'm not saying this narcissistically or with great vanity, I'm not saying it because I've been told- I'm simply stating a fact that I've come to grips with- a fact we should all come to grips with- we are all beautiful. I was born with this face and I've been carved this body and neither disappoints the world at large. However, I long for something more along the lines of the respect a woman deserves and for someone to see something more than what meets the eye when you look at me.
Living in the small city of San Francisco I constantly walk about the streets and come in contact with many folks along the way- some strangers and others more familiar. No matter who they are I get the same up and down glance from most of them upon our first encounter. The look that most dogs give you when you're holding a juicy piece of meat and asking them to sit, roll over and play dead and they've completed each task, now waiting patiently for the prize. Yes, people look at me like I'm a piece of meat. (Most) Men look at women like their pieces of meat so tender and juicy they can't help but drool and leave us with a feeling nothing short of self-worth-lessness. Yes, it is biological and is linked to pheremones and the like but it can also be controlled so mind your manners. Granted some women feel great when they walk out of the house and men catcall after them, whistling, honking horns, and even following them down a few paces with an "Excuse Me Miss"- I'm certainly not one of them and don't believe I ever have been. Some women gain self-esteem and feel an increase in self-worth. I feel the complete opposite.

There is a person here. A real person. A person so deep that staring hard enough at my chest and seeing nothing more than my DD cups can't and won't tell you shit about me. And I'm sure many women feel the same. I'm sick of being a constant object of lust because its starting to come at a heavy price- my dignity. You're attention seems to be focused on one thing and one thing only and I think we all know what that is. That isn't going to happen because I'm simply not that easy. I'm an open person and I tell you the do's and the don'ts straight up. I'm indescisive but I know exactly what I want and when I want it. For those who have known me for months or years I open up as easy as a Guide for Dummies book and become quite simple. To the less familiar I'm complex and hard to predict. But as you get to know me you understand the mad workings of my brain. I do what I say and I say what I feel. It's easy to make your place in my heart and it doesn't take much. And you get there through conversation.

So we sat there that evening and we smoked hooka- the perfect ending to every perfect night. We talked about things I don't think I could talk to many people about. It's great to have someone that feels you and makes you feel like they're almost at the same level. Or maybe even surpassing it. For a while now I've believed that I'm not on the same page as everyone else- tonight I realized I'm not alone and that I'm passing up chapters compared to everyone else. Thanks to the GATE program we read alot faster than most. To make my head even bigger than it previously was she called to wish me Happy Birthday and told me the greatest thing I heard all day. Sir Isaac Newton has the same birthday. So I googled it and it is disputible whether his birthday is actually January 4th or December 25th. Apparently the google doodle on January 4th was only commemorating his birth but isn't the real date. Regardless, I know she told me this for a reason. One of the greatest scientists man has ever come to know shares something with me. And my mind grew to maximum capacity. The apple hath fell from the tree and hit me on the head hard. My reality has just been checked. That girl's got a brain on her. Teachers, parents, friends and others have said this about me. And I never understood how much of a brain I actually have. Until now.

As a child my parents molded me into being the perfect student. I love to read the random stuff most people my age don't ever look at. I crave knowledge like a fat kid craves a chocolate cake. I'm not a brilliant pianist or the all star jock of a team- my talent is learning and I'm a real point dexter. It always has been my strong suit. Everything, every subject I set my mind to melts into my brain cells and makes my brain stronger. I'm brilliant and this I have known. My vices get the best of me most days just as they do to many college students. Now, in 2010 the dawn of a new year I'm going to tap back into my skills and be the best I can be. I'm going to exercise the one and only muscle that matters in this world- my brain. I'm going to take the world my storm and seize everything in sight and apply, apply, and apply my entire mind and soul to knowledge. Just at this point I know I've got one up against everyone else my age but I want more, I need more.
I'm not going to sit around and play video games or facebook all day long. I'm not in college just to waste time and be a trophy wife for some rich kid that inherited daddy's money in the future like our culture dictates. I'm going to be the brains of my entire family operation and I'm going to be the girl out the ghetto that made it all on her own. The rose that grew from concrete and excelled to the greatest heights. I'm going to be the one you always remember and look up to. I've got the biggest shoes to fill but there's no doubt in anyone's mind that I'll be able to fill them. The one standing next to me better come prepared and step his game up because I'm not settling for anything less then the best because it's what I deserve. I've come a long way and the journey continues. I'm empowered right now and that's the best way to start a new year. I'm beauty and brains all in one and it's going to be an amazing ride. A life worth telling a story about.

One day you're life is going to flash before your eyes- I'm going to make sure that mine is worth watching.

Moment of honesty.

Someone's gotta take the lead tonight.

Whose it gonna be?

I'm gonna sit right here and tell you all that comes to me.