Who Am I?

In the following posts I hope to retrace the steps of my life to explain how it is I came to be sitting here, now, as a 31 year old post-bac student in the Secondary Ed program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, USA. I've often wondered at the present and how I got here. Is life a series of random  events tossing us this way and that? Am I am where I am today because of my race, gender, sexual preference, age, etc. You hear that a lot. But when I slow down and reflect, I have perfect certainty that life is not random but that each moment is a choice to move toward one's fully realized self--their destiny; or away from it. There are certainly guides along the path of life. After all it would be foolish not to recognize how many wonderful people are bumping into each other out here and that any full self reflection will uncover just how much other's actually shape who we are.

I'm going to start with my childhood and family which I have to admit I lucked out on. I was blessed with a loving and caring family that told me from as early as I can remember two things. 1. Jesus loves me. and 2. I can be anything I want. I have doubted those two things as much as anything else in life, but as I continue to traverse the path of life, I continually test these assertions in as reasonable ways as I know how and I find that indeed, my parents were on to something.

In this self identity project I want to examine one moment of time and how that moment of time has unfolded and created has shaped where I am today and most importantly where I am going in the future.

I was born on February 10, 1980 to two young parents in Southern California. I was their first born son. My mom, while cleaning out her closet recently came across my baby book and she shared it with me. My father wrote something there that blew me away. It was a prayer he had written on the day of my birth. He was 25 years old and probably terrified of his new responsibility. His parents, my grandparents were loving people; I remember that about them. My grandfather always had a big warm bear hug to offer when us grandkids were around. But they had their struggles in life. They abused alcohol and I am sure caused scars in my father. My father has wanted to give me the life he never had growing up. His prayer went something like this: "Lord, let me raise Matthew to know you. Guide him and let him grow up to be a man of God. Protect him and watch over him."

Though my parents weren't rich or highly educated, though my parents are just average people with their own scars and are trying to make it in the world as we all are, this prayer above all else has shaped my life.

Baseball

I am building up to a moment. A moment of seeming randomness that happened my sophomore year in high school. But I have to stop along the way and talk about baseball. Countless books, articles, documentaries, movies and interviews have highlighted baseball as a truly American pass time. Baseball doesn't hold it's place in the American imagination that it once did. One of the results of globalization has been the rise of soccer and the slow sad fading of the glory of baseball. Still, my boyhood was shaped by the sport.

I was a shy kid--a smart kid. I played violin and GI Joes. But when I was 9 my parents forced me to play baseball. They just signed me up and said it would be good for me to be around other boys. I was resistant to the idea initially. Soon I discovered that I had a talent for ball and that talent made me popular with the other boys. For 9 years, from Little League to high school ball, summers meant being outside on warm evenings: parents cheering, team mates chattering; the smell of hot dogs and bubble gum, mounds of spit covered sunflower seed shells.

Baseball, really was how I learned to be a social creature. It wasn't just my brother, parents, and myself, but my teammates, school, and community.

So Many Trees

When I was 11 years old, my father moved my family up to Washington State. I had never even heard of Washington State. In the moving truck, with our family car hitched up to the back, I anticipated our arrival at our new home. Maybe I could see the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, or maybe if I was fortunate get a glimpse of the President Bush.

My father to this day explains his reasons for moving us: he didn't want to raise a family in the smog, the gangs, the racial wars at school. But now that I am older, I know it must have been very difficult to uproot and move away from everyone we had ever known.

We left the rolling desert hills and sunny southern California and trekked north. The desert turned to dry grass, then to rolling vineyard on the sides of warm hill tops and eventually into trees that were bigger than I had ever imagined. There was a gray mist about us and lichen and moss hanging from trees. I thought we had gone to Endore, the forested moon of Star Wars and we would meet the Ewoks. We were not in Washington D.C.. We now lived in Fern Gully.

My body has never truly grown accustomed to the dampness and chill of Western Washington. It is almost as if there is a melancholy spirit that hovers above this region. A kind of darkness you can feel pass as you clear the region by plane. This moldy spirit has also shaped who I am today and it creates a bond between everyone in the region as we all trudge along through long winters.

New Kid

Now we're getting close to that day in my Sophomore geometry class. The moment I like to trace my footsteps back to.

It was hard to move from all my friends in Southern California, where I was always picked first for team sports to this cold damp tree infested region where I had to prove myself all over again. The kids in Washington state didn't seem to put academics or sports as high up the value scale as people in California had. I remember they asked me, "Are you a Husky or a Cougar?" They just kept asking that over and over and I had no idea what on earth they were talking about. They wore strange gear too, like parkas and raincoats. I didn't think much of this new place at all. And so I read a lot of books, especially science fiction and fantasy.

There was no orchestra program at school and I seemed to be a grade ahead of everyone else. So for some very odd reason the kids made fun of me for my intelligence. I remember being called dexter and bookworm and things like that in seventh grade. It is sad but I did indeed dumb myself down to fit in. I found that B's were better than A's as far as social standing went. School seemed like a great big waste of time.

01101 100101 0101

Now we come to it. It was the first day of Geometry on the first day of high school my sophomore year. My school was at the time one of the largest schools in the state with over 2600 students. My middle school and junior high years weren't the highlights of my life. I mostly tried to stay out of sight, devouring novels like Jurassic Park in a matter of days.

But now I was in high school. I'd seen movies about high school and looked forward to living out the familiar narrative--rejoicing in the locker room after home field victories, falling in love for the first time, taking the SAT's and such. It all seemed so big.

I had taken a seat in the rows of desks and looked to the front of the room where my teacher, an obese old man sat breathing through his mouth. As I would soon learn, it was his last year as a teacher and he would soon retire. He was one of, if not, the worst teachers I have ever had in my entire life and probably a big reason that I never took another math class after my junior year of high school.

He called roll and put all of our names into his computer and the computer spit out a random seating chart. He printed it out and tacked it to the wall. We found our names on the chart and took our seats. I was bummed. I got a seat in the front row to the far left, right next to the teachers desk. There weren't any hot girls next to me and all the cool guys that looked fun were on the other side of the room. But sitting behind me was a tall goofy looking kid whose name turned out to be Aaron. Aaron and I soon became fast friends.

So there I was in high school and I wanted a car and fashionable clothes, things my parents couldn't exactly afford. They told me to get a job and so at 15 I got my first job at a hole in the wall teriyaki shop. My boss was an imposing Japanese man who yelled at me constantly and never once gave me a break the whole time I worked there. After 3 months of grueling work over the oven, I quit. My new friend Aaron had pulled some strings and got me a job at the Royal Fork Buffet. It was the start of great things. The question I find myself asking to this day, and will touch upon later, is how would my life be different if that computer had randomly assigned me to sit next to a different kid that September morning. Let's see how that computer program has affected my life.

High School Graduate

In June of 1998. I graduated high school. I had played on the school baseball team, golf team, and tennis team. I worked the same job for three years, working my way up from a timid bus boy to assistant manager at the buffet restaurant. I had experienced my first kiss, my first broken heart, and some other things that I'm not proud of.

So here I was, Done; the rest of my life in front of me. I didn't enjoy school very much at all and unfortunately, I wasn't as strong as I could have been. I found that being mediocre was better than excelling. The slacker attitude was pervasive throughout my time in the Marysville school district. I had no plans after high school. I hadn't even taken the SAT.

One thing I did enjoy though was work. I have always been a hard worker. My friend Aaron: he remained my good friend through out high school. He had got me the job at the buffet and now with a diploma under my belt, I was ready to move on from the buffet and make the big bucks. Aaron got me another job with his friend working as a landscaper making a mind blowing sum of ten dollars an hour.