Something I found

I don't know if I was supposed to see this or not. But I have. My husband and I have our own computers that are on a network at home, and we each have a shared folder. He moved a lot of documents onto that shared folder, for safekeeping if his machine went down. Blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, I wanted to share what I found.

Warning: It's long.

The 5K – A personal thesis (Not a memo. A mission statement.)

It’s been a little less than three years, at approximately 4.4 posts per day. Not that the numbers mean anything. I like to think that it’s the quality of the time spent and the kindness of the company. The numbers are just reflections of that.

Some time ago, a wiser man than me posted his personal thesis in celebration of his 5K. He now builds death camps, but that’s not the point. The point is that he posted something that is very true: Really, it’s very little of us that can be seen when we post. We know how each other posts, but we don’t know each other. I’ll try to fix that now. This is not a roast, so this time I won’t listen. I’ll do the talking. About what? About me. I know it can be an excruciatingly boring topic, but I’ll do my best. Work with me.

I was born (< --- I still don’t believe that part) in Buenos Aires in 1975. Right about the time the hysterics decided, like every other moron-in-charge thru history, that they had been selected by divine providence to rule the land and inaugurate with drums, trumpets and cymbals, the arrival of a new dark stain in the pages of humanity. But that was not the worst, for I was born squarely in a middle-class family, half spanish, half italian. Catholic, of course. So it wasn’t really the best of both worlds. It was probably the worst of every possible world. But even though the odds were against me, I made it out of my mother alive and unscathed. The rest is where it gets interesting. Catholic schools for nine years. If that doesn’t break a man, nothing will. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always the recalcitrant agnostic I am now. At some point, yes, I sincerely believed in all the dogmas, accepted things as they were presented and was generally another happy cog in the mechanism. Why? Well, I suppose that the fact that I really had no fucking choice is probably the culprit. And it’s not that if I had a choice I could’ve used it anyway. All my friends were going to school with me and when I got home, the informal theological instruction continued. So it was either that or going to live in a cave somewhere, which is not an attractive prospect for a 5-14 year old.

We’ve had several discussions here in the box that goes something like “Ok, so when did you lose your faith?” or “What made you reject (x)?”. I always say that in my case it happened in my mid-teens and it was kind of a nebulous process. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. It was a process (actually, in the words of my mother, a “degenerative process”), but I do remember distinctly two particular instances that played a great part in swinging me to the dark side.

One, I was 14. In high school. During mass (yes, God creates you with free will but you better hold on to the skin of your ass if you choose to skip mass… ‘nuff said). It was the mass on the ‘day of the dead’. Nothing as colorful as the Mexican celebration, I’m afraid. It was simply the day where those who attended mass and wished to have the mass dedicated to a friend or family member that had already passed away could do so. Normally, before the mass, those who wished to do it would approach the priest before the ceremony and tell him or pass him a note with the name of the person they wanted mentioned. However, since this was high school after all, this task of collecting names was delegated that particular day to somebody from the senior years. And you know what happens when a message gets passed through many nodes: It gets degraded. Long story short, when it came to that part of the mass the priest called for this guy with the list that had been already passed through pretty much the whole school (hundreds of kids). So the guy steps to the little podium that had the mic and started reciting all the names. An incredibly boring time ensues. Name after name after name from people you didn’t even know, one after another. Like a mantra. But something happened after maybe ten, fifteen minutes of names. It appeared that some creative hands ‘slipped’ some questionable names into the list. There were hundreds of names, nobody thought to check the list beforehand and by the time the poor guy reading them got to these names, he was more numb than a drunken dervish and didn’t catch them.

So we had a nice, big, fat mass for dead people like “Donald Duck”, “Minnie”, “Mike Torello” (of “Crime Story” fame), “John Rambo” and many others, inserted between real names. The laughter amongst the kids present was barely containable. Some simply couldn’t. But suddenly, like everybody else (except the priest and the school directives, I’m sure) I felt good. I felt alive. And then it kinda dawned on me. Right there, sitting in that mass gone awry. I realized how bad this whole thing has to be for me to feel good when it goes wrong. Perhaps it was (is) meaningless. Perhaps it was just the endorphins kicking in. But that moment, and what I felt at the time, stuck with me.

Two, my planned catholic education and upbringing had always been a big deal in my family during my youth. It was the way things were and the path I would eventually, but inevitably, follow. Or else. Severely, but never aggressively or violently or anything like that (in fact I can count with one hand the times that my parents actually had to hit or spank me. And the times they did, I assure you, it was completely just and deserved. After I was 8 I wised up and they never had to lay a finger on me anymore). Nothing violent. It was simply the absence of a choice. I didn’t have one. Perhaps I had one, but not in this reality, dimension or universe. There wasn’t a choice of paths for me, at least in these religious matters. There simply was just one path. God was the way and my mother was his prophet.

And I say this kinda literally, because the parental unit in charge of setting me in this most righteous path was my mother. My father did not intervene much, but when he did it was always to back my mother’s position. As if she needed reinforcements. But anyway, what I extracted from years out of my father’s sort of ‘hands-off’ approach was that he also sincerely believed in this, but that he always deferred judgement to my mom for whatever reason. And since I had always been more attached and looking up to my dad than my mom, my reasoning went along the lines of “Well, she may be wrong. But if dad is onboard too, then she isn’t/it’s true/I deserve it/there’s no way out”. Having my dad onboard something that my mom spearheaded was the difference between reading the theory of relativity and having Einstein explain it to you personally. No room for error.

Until one day in high school (same school). It was customary at the time that the parents went in to talk to the directives at the beginning of each school year. So there I was, waiting outside the Principal’s office while my dad was inside talking to him. Problem is, if the area around the office was quiet enough (which was rare) you could hear the people talking inside the office perfectly. And it was a very quiet time. I don’t remember how the conversation between the Principal and my dad had reached that point, but I had the pleasure of hearing out of my father’s very same mouth and in no uncertain terms whatsoever that he didn’t care one bit about the religious instruction, that I was attending that school for the education standards and nothing else and to further drive the point home, that he wasn’t a believer at all and he put me in that school because my mother wanted me there.

Well, spank me in the ass and roll that beautiful bean footage.

I never confronted my dad and told him that I have heard that. He doesn’t even know I did. But that made me realize that not all was as it seemed. That fortuitous and savory accidental ‘in’ to previously hidden family politics was the other big factor that made me reconsider my own position. Before that, it was divine word more or less. But after knowing that, I knew that such a disagreement was what I needed to make me realize that I was free to choose my own path. I wouldn’t tell them about it, if it ever came to that (it never did), but it was something to keep to myself and use it if needed. I realized that if my favored parental unit chose a different path for himself, he had no grounds to ever forbid me to choose my own.

And so the process began. And it probably went on like it did with anybody else who went through a similar process. I began voicing the questions that couldn’t be answered. Seeking to read for myself the things that were never offered to me before. Slowly realizing that whereas before only one path existed, it wasn’t time to follow it but perhaps instead carve a different path of my own. It was the beginning of the end of the age of conformism.

Of course, all hell broke loose at home. But I knew I was on the right track when I saw who was doing all the breaking loose of said hell: my mom. My father simply sat it out. Intransigent. Perhaps never wanting to openly question my mother in front of me, but perhaps also cheering for me on the inside. I’ll never know. And I think I’d rather not know. If there was something I learned at that time was how to embrace doubt and how it can be something positive sometimes.

Of course, like everybody else, I was very interested in Buddhism at the time (I still am, but not enough to make it my path). I read them all, from Aquinas to Sai Baba. I got all the t-shirts.

Enough of religion. Curiously, politics was a much simpler matter.

My father had always been leaning to the right more often than not. A business owner (at least during most of my life), but previously he had worked for years at a textile cooperative. And before that, the Stock Market… of all places. An admirer of the core ideals and values of the western world (by extension, an admirer of the US as well) and a fervent believer of the principles behind Capitalism.

My mother, on the other hand. Literally. Hardcore, down to the marrow of her spine Socialist. Borderline Revolutionary Communist when you got her riled up (something my father was an expert at). If you think I’m bad with my posts here in the Soapbox, I assure you with the utmost sincerity and from the bottom of my honest heart… she’d be ten times worse. Ten times worse than a horny Keystone high on meth. She would’ve hit Marx with a broom on the head for not being hardcore enough, according to her. She was a typist and a piano teacher, whom developed into a dedicated homemaker after her marriage. Picture a Martha Stewart that would put a bomb under your bed if you dissed her floral arrangements.

Now you know why I’m so fucked up.

From my father, I learned a distinct sense of honesty, as applied to any activity you might engage in. I also learned, by example, a balls-to-bone passion for life and knowledge, in any way those two choose to manifest themselves. Also by example, he tried to teach me his impeccable work ethic, but to be honest it’s something I haven’t been able to replicate for myself so far. And I probably never will.

From my mother, I learned how to be passionate about music. How to appreciate it, play it and listen to it, which is such an integral part of it that’s often overlooked. Sadly, I didn’t inherit or learned her manual dexterity in areas other than playing piano. I also learned from her how not everything can or should be considered purely in economic terms. That there’s a whole array of elements, a big part of what makes a human being that simply does not understand economics, is unable to speak that language and it’s futile to force it.

But there’s a very important thing that I learned from both. And I’m sure it’s a lesson of life that, if it was up to them, they would’ve chosen not to teach me: How to hold on, be prepared, unfazed and how to keep on hitting when the world around you starts to crumble down.

Due to reasons that are of public knowledge, the situation back home has been steadily going down the crapper for years. They taught me that lesson as all this unfolded with time. What once was an upper-middle class family easily cruising by was transformed into a lower-class one desperately trying to make ends meet in the space of just less than ten years. The business started to generate less and less income (like everybody else’s!), things were getting more and more expensive. That ridiculous, humilliating and almost inescapable vicious circle of inflation and recession that caught the country just as it was starting to emerge from its own little hell during the dictatorship and kicked away fifty or more years of progress.

The car had to be sold. Our apartment, home for over fifteen years, sold as well. We had to move to a smaller apartment. And three years later, we had to move again. Most of the employees in the business had to be let go (it was a business of 20+ years and most employees had been there since… a decision that I caught my capitalistic father crying about once). My mom even went to help and work at the business, and she hadn’t worked in thirty or so years.

As for me, I had to get a job as well. I was maybe half into my first year of (public) college, but unfortunately I had to put that in the backburner. I regretted it inmensely at the time and it was my hope that it would turn into something temporary (the hours of the jobs I had lined up were simply incompatible with college. Something had to give) and I could return eventually. But I never could.

Besides, and to quote my father, it was “about fucking time you get a job”. Followed, of course, by the inevitable speech of how when he was my age he had already worked probably twenty different jobs (probably untrue), how he had almost made into the River Plate first team (definitely untrue) and how he was developing a cure for cancer, solving Euler’s theorem, the problems of Kierkegaard and saving the free world from Communist infiltration (mostly true).

Yet, in the middle of all this shit, food was always on the table, football was always on TV and the laughter, kisses and hugs never left the family. They made damn sure of that. They taught me probably the best way to face adversity and not lose your mind.

So what about me? This post is supposed to be about me anyway.

I don’t think I should talk about my views. At laest not in this post. Talking about my views is what I do here every time I post. This one is not a pulpit, it’s just a table, coffee and friends. What am I? I am nothing more than the sum of what you’ve (hopefully) read. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a guy with a whole lot of virtues and a whole lot of pitfalls. Like everybody else. Twenty-eight years old. Old as the hills. So, what am I? How am I?

I’m the guy that if you ask him nicely, he’ll even give you his underwear.
I’m the guy that will always prefer to give you a nice, big hug rather than a handshake.
I’m the guy that’s utterly and almost pathologically paranoid of losing his keys.
I’m the guy that likes to think before acting.
I’m the guy that likes to give because he has seen how it comes back.
I’m the guy that always falls in love and is always too late to say it.
I’m the guy that runs to know instead of sitting down to believe.
I’m the guy that’s incredibly inconstant.
I’m the guy that’s shy until he knows you.
I’m the guy that was expecting a son and got the whole universe wrapped in a blanket instead.
I’m the guy that’s not ashamed to cry, but would rather not do it.
I’m the guy that’s a terrific winger on the right side of the field but can’t dribble to save his life.
I’m the guy that loves his wife and recently realized it was in a big part because she routes around his crap.
I’m the guy that doesn’t remember phone numbers.
I’m the guy that wants to be a writer and eventually make a living out of it.
I’m the guy that will kick your ass, not because he’s stronger or faster, but because he’ll always get back up on his feet.
I’m the guy that is impossible to get riled up.
I’m the guy that’s pissed off about that last one because it’s a good thing and also a bad thing.
I’m the guy that hates politics because it’s full of politicians.
I’m the guy that doesn’t know the end of his road, but that doesn’t bother him.
I’m the guy that bites his nails.
I’m the guy with the karma. Apparently! Sheesh… never a break.
I’m simply the guy that posts here. Always your friend, and even if you decide otherwise, never your enemy. Thanks for reading.

Peace…