Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning (1)

"Oh, decisions, decisions!"

Starting a blog entry is not easy. I’ll spend up to an hour staring at the blank screen, playing a mental game of Scrabble with tiles that belong in a Clue board, struggling to find the letters, let alone the words, to string together my thoughts coherently. I obviously have too much time on my hands, and a few too many board games too. How many exactly? Roughly around twenty-two, and I know that figure because I recently made an excursion to the shabby dark room where all the boxes are stored, and counted them all. Some were pristine and hardly touched (those were the ones with instructions too complex to maintain the attention of an agitated 6 year old boy), while others were so worn you could have sworn they dated back to when cavemen rode dinosaurs! Wait a minute…

          Seeing all those old dice, imaginary money, colorful playing boards and minuscule figurines brought back a feeling of nostalgia to the time of my childhood, to which everyone can hopefully relate. Seeing as I had nothing better to do than finish my mountain of English assignments, I decided to play a game of Monopoly Disney Edition against myself. For myself, I picked the statue of Peter Pan as my ambassador, and my opponent contended himself with Pinocchio (that way I knew he wouldn't be able to cheat without giving himself away).

"All children, except one, grow up."
      -J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I started the game by rolling a 4. Incidentally, that’s how old I was when my parents bought the game. I remember vaguely coming home after having attempted (I use this word lightly) to ride my bike for the first time without training wheels. The result was a badly scratched boy in tears, halfway through a temper tantrum, enraged and stumped by failure. After all, the lack of two extra wheels couldn't make THAT much of a difference?

Pulling myself back to the present, I made Peter advance to his designated tile, landing squarely on “Scrooge McDuck’s tax – Pay 10% or 200$”. Two hundred dollars of my hard earned money?! Then I recalled, of course, that 200$ here was very little. Two dollars in the real world used to be a vast sum in my youthful eyes. You could buy two things at the dollar store (13% tax means very little to children)! The first time my dad gave me money of my own, he told me to save it and let it build up for something that I really desired. So naturally I spent it on the first shop item I spotted. The next day, I saw a homeless man on the streets and realized how much value 2$ had to him, and how I had spent mine so frivolously.

Hold on tight.

My opponent rolled and supposedly got a 13, except we were playing with two 6-sided die, so I called him out on the fib. My sister had a knack for knowing when I wasn't

being squeaky clean about something, and I often paid a heavy price when my parents caught wind of my dishonesty. It resulted in their lack of trust, something which I had come to rely upon and which had meant a good deal to me. Mutual confidence binds people closer together and there’s a certain comfort in knowing you can depend on others and that you yourself can be relied upon.

His Pinocchio piece moves to a “Magic Moments” square and he picks up a card that reads “You tell a lie to the Blue Fairy – Pay 20$ and go to jail”; justice. It’s my turn again, and this time Mr. Pan flies to a “Show Time” tile, and I draw a card. Something in my memory shifts, and in my mind’s eye I recall drawing this very card as a child, though admittedly I was unable to understand it. This time, the meaning is clear: “If you are playing as Peter Pan, Tinker Bell sprinkles you with her magic, unlocks the child within and sets you free – Return to Go and recollect your memories”.

Fairy dust only helps those that believe.

I realized then and there, that despite the hairiness of my body, the deepness of my voice, my self-instilled delusions of adulthood, and generally high testosterone levels, I’m nothing but a slightly older Peter Pan who’s just remembered how to fly again.

I challenge you to steal a few minutes of your oh-so-busy-day to take a glance at the games, the toys or the artifacts of your time as a kid, and relive the memories associated to each of them. Who knows, you might just manage to find Dumbo’s magic feather and take to the air.

Timing or Refining?

Today’s blog materialized itself much faster than I would have expected, because the words that need to be written are too impatient to wait an entire week. It’s funny how some things take forever to come to fruition, while others are just bursting to come before their time. We as people are no different, and babies, for that matter, are infamous for their tendencies to not appear at the proper time.

"What's the most important aspect
of comedy? T I M I N G !"

A man whom I consider as my surrogate grandfather once told me that the perfect wine is the one given just the proper amount of time to ferment. “The sublime nectar”, he would call it, is incapable of lying; regardless if picked prematurely or aged for too long, “the wine will always whisper into your mouth with complete, unabashed honesty every time you take a sip"1.

      

        What he meant was wine tastes terrible if the timing is wrong, just as unpleasant as a bad joke. To him, the same rules apply to newborn children (somehow he never had any kids of his own). They are either premature and therefore immature, or stubbornly late and without any regard for timeliness.

           

       I disagreed with him, for the same reason I disagree with Louis C.K.² He’s no child development specialist, but rather a vulgar yet witty comedian who believes that how you treat a child in the early developmental stages is irrelevant, since they won’t remember a single unpleasant memory of that time period. My belief, echoed by many scientific theories, is that who we are has little to do with when we’re born. In truth, our genetic code allotted to us by our parents had a certain hand in it, but we’re also partially reliant upon the conditions in which we are formed and raised³. The old, never-ending argument of nature vs. nurture is indeed relevant; though your looks are determined by your DNA, the type of person you become is a variable prejudiced by the factors of your upbringing.

       

"Mom, can you read me this book?
Again?!"

The idea is that if you raise two children from the same parentage but with different methods, they can turn out quite different. As the youngest child, my parents employed many techniques they learned after raising my sister. While I was still a fetus, my mother would rub her stomach and gently hum polish lullabies. Other times, she would speak a few words to me of love and care, and though I could not hear them (the inner ear is only fully developed by the time the mother is 20 weeks pregnant ⁴), the general tone of her voice may have left an impression. When I was a young child of three or four, my father would read me stories from Dr. Seuss, or folkloric tales from his motherland, and I would often enjoy those bouts when he would play the part of bard, not so much for the plot line, but rather the simple act of reciting. As a result, I am more of a gregarious person than my sister, who always preferred to read stories independently and focus on the content of the account; she is somewhat more reserved than I, though admittedly more intelligent.
  

       

Can you spot the problem?

       Right around this point, if not before, you may be asking yourself why I bothered to write any of this at all (I know I have). What does this have to do with those fundamental Life Stages that shape us into the man or woman we strive towards? Well, it all comes down to what that vile comedian I spoke of earlier had to say. The type of person you become is dependent on the manner in which you were raised. If the foundations are sordid, so too will be the overall structure.

       I will always defend the axiom that who you are is largely up to your discretion, but the manner in which you perceive yourself is instilled by others, and once fermented, you had better hope the timing is right.

Life’s a snapshot of moments

Some say Life and Death are the great equalizers, because everyone who has ever existed had to have been born, and death will come for them as surely as the Sun will rise and the snow will fall.

Carl Sagan said it best: “ […] every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, […] hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived [and died] there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” ¹

Life goes on.
Make sure you're on board for the ride.

It is without question that every second that ticks by is our personal clock running out of time, and the majority of those seconds agglomerate into minutes, then hours, followed by days, weeks and finally years, that are wiped clean from the dark recesses of our memories. The fraction of our existence that we manage to remember is a feeble sliver of the entire masterpiece.

The moments that we recall can be powerful and leave a lasting impression on our lives, the death of a family member or acceptance into medical school after years of painstaking hard labor, for instance. Others seem so insignificant and feeble we wonder how they managed to cling to our recollections at all: our first crush, a Hot Wheels car we traded for a Han Solo Lego character, an unexceptional park bench covered in morning dew, the day it snowed 6 inches of snow and we had to shovel it all with nothing but the companionship of our superman of a father.

Life’s this game of connect the dots; each circle is one of those precious snapshots that we hang onto ever so dearly, while the lines that connect them are the unremarkable instances that our over saturated craniums decide are unworthy of reminiscence. My grandmother has a scrapbook of pictures of those moments in life she deigned worthy of immortalizing, and upon perusing this vast treasure-trove, I saw they were strewed with her collections of stones, the animals she had owned, the students she taught, the school she helped build, her honeymoon, but mostly her family, past and present. That’s when the realisation struck me like a lightning bolt (shockingly, that’s no metaphor): our lives are the sum of our memories.

Tune in next week for those stages of my life, and humanity’s existence in general I deign the most noteworthy, and that make up the person I am today as well as the one I hope to become.