Essay | Wander

College has, through its friendships and connections, given me the good fortune to once again take up travel. Travelling used to be a big part of my childhood. It was a point of pride. When the Mrs. Marquez would make each kid stand up and say something about themselves, my interesting fact would always be the amount of the world I had seen.

By elementary and middle school standards, it's an impressive resume: Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Philippines, London, New York, Vancouver and more. I wasn't old enough to appreciate the sights much, or fully grasp the new worlds I was entering, but I still had a bigger sense of the planet and its diversity. More so than the other 7-year olds sitting cross-legged on a multicolored carpet.

By 22 year-old standards, that resume is not as impressive. The world turned and travel became less and less of a characteristic of my life. My youth was extraordinarily jet set, but my adolescence was spent staying still. The occasional drive to Las Vegas was the closest I would get to road trips, though it's more of a long-distance wander. I wouldn't get to feel that horrible/wonderful rumble of a plane taking off for years.

Years, until college, which gave it back to me in some small part. We weren't going to Europe or even Texas, but we were travelling again. It was always good, even if it was short-lived or not the life-affirming, answer-finding game changer we always expect from the road. But sometimes the little bites are enough to nourish you. Sometimes the little bites feel like a main course.

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Essay | We Had Courts

It's hard to tell now, but basketball used to be a defining part of my life. When I was a child, it was more than just a hobby and sport of choice, but my goal in life. Back when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls defined the league, when Dennis Rodman was more than just obscure pop culture trivia, when Nick Van Exel was the coolest guy on the Lakers. Today, it's a faint lingering taste. It's a source of brief nostalgia.

Charles Barkley, Dennis Scott, Shawn Kemp, Grant Hill, Tony Kukoc, David Robinson: these guys were my NBA. They was my cast of characters that I had grown to know from stats on the back of Upper Deck trading cards and blurbs in SLAM magazine. Now, these guys are either all retired as color commentators or analysts. A few are still playing, but as backups to backups, veterans with limited minutes in free agent limbo whose sole purpose is provide mentorship or act as maturing influences on the locker room.

The prime example of this fall was Penny Hardaway, who could be described as my basketball idol. I had the shoes, jersey, even sent him a letter (all I got back was an application for his fan club.) It's not uncommon: Penny Hardaway's work with Nike & Chris Rock on the Li'l Penny shoe commercials made him a household name and a piece of 90's pop culture. It endeared him as the cool new star that young kids could latch onto, many of which still latch onto today. It's a rare quality for sports stars: not just a following, but a cult following.

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Essay | Something I Heard About Changing The World

When I went to the Student of Color Conference in Santa Cruz last year, a gathering of young activists mobilizing around issues that affect minority and low-income communities, one of their great speakers told us, "be prepared to never enjoy the fruits of your labor."

It was like someone told us a secret we weren't supposed to know. It was something that was painfully true, yet familiar, something we must have known on some level but never acknowledged. I thought about the causes I had a hand in, and even more, the causes that I didn't have a hand in. I thought about the petitions I signed and didn't sign, the people holding them, the people knocking on doors and holding rallies and making movements. There's so much of it out there in the community and yet there's that universal element of it. All of us who care about something more than we are expected to, will likely never get to see the fruits of our labor.

Activism is hard. Activism is draining, tiresome, frustrating, and consuming. It is also the only way we are ever going to get out of this mess.

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Essay | Place and Patriots

I'm going to attempt to do something that I hope is not taken the wrong way. But with the question of patriotism bouncing around the conversation of our current event, it's hard for me to not try and express it. This is an attempt to explain the function and place of patriotism for the rest of us -- that is, those of us for whom it's not an automatic given. It's not a criticism, a rebuke, or even denial. Just a description and a hope to convey how people like me have come to grapple with the idea since we were little kids.

My early childhood was marked by trips abroad: Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Canada, London and more. My dad worked for an airline and so we were a band of jet-setting travelers. Early on, I understood that the world was big, varied and unpredictable. I knew that much more extended beyond the playground.

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Essay | Superconnected

I think at how history will look back on us a lot, and the only thing I'm sure of is that my generation is the internet generation, and somehow that feels more world-changing and significant than the roaring 20's, or the hippie 60's. It's not just a new way to spend time, or a place where you can look at videos of dogs riding skateboards (although it is that too and we should never forget the contribution of animals doing human things on YouTube.) It's the expansion of the mind in a greater context. A dissenting opinion is a few clicks away. But it also so much bigger with the realization, like the top of your skull opening, that the world is so goddamn full of so many people. It is the first glimpse at the vastness and variety of the human experience, and we are growing up with that with every kilobyte.

That's what the internet is to me. It's the access into the greater world, into the subcultures that were once kept in secret club houses, and into the subsubcultures that divide them. It is the spread of ideas - the good, enlightening ones and the awful, horrific ones that make you lose hope in the human spirit. But it's human all the same, we just take a shot of the terrible and chase it with the good.

I know it's been a defining part of my life. I feel pretty privileged to be able to be part of the generation that can be the first to say that. I came upon the internet at the unusually young age of 9 -- 1996, just as the internet blew that dot com bubble out of a soapy plastic hoop.

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Balikbayan, pt. 3

One of the things that I miss the most about the Philippines is that everything was interesting. It took me back to a time when looking out the window of the backseat of a car was a viable entertainment option. Wherever we went, be it the crawling pace of the rain covered city or the speeding, winding roads along the tropical hills, everything was interesting. Not pretty, not vibrant, not even infusing any particularly good feelings. It was just always stimulating to thought, giving you, the outsider, something worth examining. The titanic billboard for Coca-Cola has you concocting sociological theories. The rural unfamiliarities have you picking and prying at who you claim to be. The pile of electrical wires, hanging precariously overhead, has you wondering what big ideas are to blame for the shape of things.

Act three of our trip to the Philippines had the most to see. It's a story that starts off with lots of gleaming tourist attractions, funnels down into a complacent sense of family, and ends as all good stories do: A conclusive finale where the characters are changed and exit stage left. Curtains drop.

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Balikbayan, pt. 2

The first three days in Metro Manila were an exercise in privilege. A big city, with American franchises, air conditioning and pavement. The next week or so would be a few steps towards the other end of the spectrum. This was Angeles City in Pampanga. We had experienced what the successful in capitalism had to offer. Now it was time to see the rest.

Angeles, and the surrounding areas like Dau, are not minor villages full of living-off-the-land types. It is still a city by every means, but not a major, highly developed, nicely planned out one. They don't build their structures to the sky, they don't put lines on their roads, they don't paint over every cement wall. But it's not the province. The air is thicker with smog and nothing looks like it was ever new. It is urban decay bustling with activity, but not wealth.

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Balikbayan, pt. 1

Filipino immigrants always return. Like an annual ritual, they come back regularly to family and familiarity. For American-born Filipinos, they are brought along for the pilgrimage by their parents. I could call it a rite of passage, or an exposure to one's roots, but it's a part of Pilipino American culture that has many different meanings and indications for many different people. Some hate going, some never see more than their Lola's house, and some go every other summer.

For me, it had been at least 12 years since I last set foot on Filipino soil. As the years went on, another trip to the Philippines became more and more inevitable. You could only go so long without visiting. So it was decided that in the summer of 2007, that we would spend over one month immersed in the Philippines. We wouldn't just be visiting family and hanging out in the province. We would also see the sights, from the tourist destinations to the historical landmarks that defined the country's history.

It's been three nights here in the Philippines. I'm enjoying it, but it still a little bit daunting to think that I'll be away from the familiar routines for over a month. It has been, and will continue to be, much more than a vacation.

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Essay | Joining the Work Force

"You look really tired," she said.
"Yeah. I am," I replied as I proceeded down the steps.

I didn't even look at the stranger's face. I hoped her remark didn't mean my exhaustion was obvious. I hoped she just had a sharp sense of perception, because no one wants to buy candy from a weary-looking seventeen year old.

So, candy, right? Selling candy at stadium events was probably my second job ever. Mostly at the local Home Depot Center for LA Galaxy & Chivas USA football (read: soccer) games. Oonce I got to work a Coldplay concert in Irvine, where we weren't even allowed to sell inside the actual venue, but those opportunities were few and far between. The gist of the job is that you lug a heavy tray of candy for hours, walking up and down stairs, around well trafficked areas, selling your wares.

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Essay | The Farm

In Middle School, I used to walk home every day around 3:00 PM. I would look down at the floor while I dragged my hand along the chain link fence. Sometimes I would look up to make eye contact with the chickens and move on.

Did you know there were chickens in my Middle School? Probably not, because this conversation has never come up before. But there were. There were chickens, a couple of cows, some peacocks, and a handful of pigs. I may also remember an ostrich, but they may be an invention of my imagination. You know how unreliable memory can get, randomly inserting awkward, flightless birds into places where there were none.

The point is, we had a farm. I don't know why in the middle of the city there was a farm attached to a middle school. I would be very interested to know who came up with the idea. Maybe they thought it would make an interesting juxtaposition -- the concrete city and the fenced in farm animals. Or maybe they were passionate about bringing horticulture education to kids while they were young. Perhaps everyone was required to propose a change to the school, and this person simply thought of the first thing that came to his or her mind, thinking no one would buy it.

Regardless, it was there, it was a farm, and it didn't fit with the rest of the school/neighborhood/city/zip code. It was the location of the Horticulture class, which was undoubtedly the least popular class in school. It was the dirty, smelly, crap-infested bottom of the barrel. The class with which teachers would tell their students about in hopes of frightening them to be good students.

"Be sure to register on time," they would warn. "Or else you'll get stuck in Horticulture!"

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Essay | Childish Things

All memories fade over time, but the ones from my childhood that seem to be best preserved are those of the games we played.

They were always these simple things we did to pass the time while we were growing up. Digging holes, for example, was a daily source of fun. There was this little spot of dirt in front of our small house, where grass didn't grow, that my sister, my cousins & I would take a small shovel and, well, dig. The point? I'm not really sure. I think maybe we were trying to pretend we were at the beach and making sand castles. I remember turning cups of dirt upside down on bricks. Maybe that was our way of dealing with the fact that we never go to the beach, the way other kids would throw confetti in the air and pretend it was snowing.

When I still lived in the same house as my Lola & uncles, my sister and I played with my two cousins down the street with similarly makeshift versions of actual games. We had no basketball court or, even, a basketball. Instead, we used a rusty shopping cart and a volleyball in the backyard, where there was no pavement to even dribble. It fulfilled it's only purpose, which was to keep us busy for one afternoon

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Essay | Laughing and Writing

As an extremely late social bloomer, I'm finding that a sense of humor is important, useful, and completely difficult to utilize properly. I've been thinking a lot about comedy lately, it's something that I consider important to my person, but it was definitely not something I was inclined to. I've tried to examine what my sense of humor derives from, and it may be consistent exposure to David Letterman at a very young age.

That last sentence makes him sound like he's radioactive.

What I've been thinking about recently is their significance and how hard they are to pull off. First, look at commercials. The most successful ones, the ones that everyone remembers, are usually the funny ones. The ones with the amazing special effects, yeah, people will talk about those too. But if you're an ad executive, what's cheaper? A good joke that fits in 30 seconds, or 30 seconds of CG? These are ideal to advertisers because something about humor is more appealing to the human being than any other emotion. More than sadness, more than happiness, more than anger. Even socially, there is nothing more useful than the ability to come up with humorous zingers. If you're funny, people will remember you.

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Essay | Felt, Not Heard

I took up the bass guitar on almost a whim. It could even be described as an accident. My sister bought a bass to join a band, and soon dropped out of it, leaving the big dumb thing without a home. It was offered to me, and I took it. Despite this very unserious origin, it is now one of my hobbies that I am determined to make something of. It is one of the few things that I actively aspire to be great at someday. Other hobbies or skills stagnate after a while, when you're satisfied with your level of expertise, which is usually mediocre or good. With this, though, it's one of the few things that I dream of being able to keep doing until fluency.

Of course, I'm nowhere near that right now. I don't think I can even justifiably call myself good yet, not while I'm still trying to properly understand how to utilize scales and barely getting the slap-n-pop technique right. In fact, I found out just a few days ago that I've been doing pull-offs wrong for two years. It's like learning you've had your pants on backwards since the 1st grade.

What attracts me as I study the bass guitar is its interesting role in the typical band: It is the anti-spotlight. The lead singer gets all the face time, and the guitarists get the crazy, easily discernable riffs and mid-song solos. The drums are the loudest, and any extra instruments have a novelty factor. The bass, it seems, is necessarily hidden and cannot draw attention to itself. If you've ever wanted to play the thing, chances are that someone's related to you a common, tired, saying: the bass should be felt, and not heard.

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We Will Pay For Everything

I've been worried about money since I was 8 years old. Mostly, it comes from a long-running fear of poverty, but I can't trace where that originates. Maybe at a particularly impressionable age I saw my first developing world charity donation hotlines, one of those Sally Struthers commercials, and that ruined me forever. I say, "ruin" because my paranoia and discomfort with having less than stellar security has often caused me unfounded stress, even as a miserable little child.

It's always just felt so heavy. As a small child, sure, I could be spoiled and ask the world of my parents. But when something clicked and I became motivated more by fear and less by desire, I started to tame my wants. I never asked for clothes, I didn't purchase much more than a $12 paperback book once a month. New toys and video games would come out, and I would tough it out as a 9 year old and learn to just deal with the longing. I was the only kid without a SNES, PlayStation, and later, a PlayStation 2. I wouldn't have been in that console generation at all if my friends hadn't pitched in to get me a GameCube for my stupid birthday.

As the most financially concerned child in the world, I was even worried about the things my parents bought with their own money. They brought my sister and I along for one of their biggest major purchases: a brand new, dark green Saturn. It was nerve wracking and I didn't understand any of it. The dealer told us the price, and a vague whining noise fell out of my grimaced face. My parents had to explain that this was just my thing. I worried about money. It was funny.

At one point I even invented a new economic system. I told my dad in sister my idea of a world where the means of production were owned by the government, who could evenly distribute it on, like, a weekly basis and we could all have the base level needs. Turns out it already existed, and it was called communism, and my dad said it didn't really work.

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