Universities Don't Define Me

Today in a conversation with the wife and female friend from high school, they both stated that their college education defined them while I argued it didnt for me because I had a life before and after. Yet it made me think that what defines me is the life i have lived. Which starts with my mother saying my paternal grandmother was una india which led me to conclude that it included me as she pointed at me and my father but equally that she was not. My mother only saw herself as a Mexican in an non india way because she didnt speak the language that my Apache grandmother spoke and she was fairskinned because my father had full red skin that was dark, even the brother in law defined him as indio de sangre pura and my father would distinguish the specific Apache like him on our forays into Baja California in Mexicali by pointing them out and them him or my grandmother too, as it happened on the bus. This has always shaped me into adulthood because ive always been judged this way both good or bad. I learned later in life that if a woman liked me it was because I was Apache and if she disliked me it was because I was Apache.  My mother would not see herself this way probably because they only spoke Mexican Spanish but my mother did not discriminate as she chose the dark skin Apache even if the clan was crazy.

Then I was shaped by the work poverty struggles of my father and into adulthood. He never had a steady job and having lived close to my age 44 neither have I. From my teenage years of working job to my first adult recession in the early 1990s. Poverty has shaped me not that i want all the material goods i just wanted basics which i never had until my late 20s and lived in Lennox until age 25. That even after having graduated from undergrad and grad school i was in the same predicament sleepin in a shared room on a twin bed into adulthood with no privacy even for the masterbations all young males go through.  The irony I was rejected for financial aid while I saw White females get assistance and I lived in Lennox then while at USC and UCLA hunger was a way of life at school, not affording  the parking pass because it was either a a decision between that or my books much less living on campus or spring break.  Life revolved hunger which is why I was arguing positions related to class which Whites at both campus could not comprehend becaue they did not live it. I went to college but never lived the college experience and even when I applied for those brown scholarships nothing came of it, it was just a waste of time applying for them. The poverty has shaped my life and my brothers, and no I'm not the immigrant kind just Mexican Americans left out of the equation which was generational.  And yes we worked hard including my widowed mother, we just never got ahead and I know it affected my brothers too as my brother David left when he could at age 19 and split to Stillwater, Oklahoma and never looked back. He says what was there for me in Ca?Nothing, in Oklahoma i was somebody even if he equally struggled and he's never looked back.  I feel resentment even until today not that life has gotten easier professionally its stagnated.

My third influence has been every job I have had from being a gardner at age 14 to college teaching.  In simple terms, I have hated every job I have ever worked at.  Specificially I have hated the people I have worked with because managers and supervisors have been pricks to abusive to envious as well as other workers.  We are just strangers thrown together and everybody is out for themselves from their self advancement to their bigotry.  I have never seen any camaraderie or help or cooperation just a place of combat and every manager I have had I have eventually wanted to fight them but my logic wins out as I have always been smarter than them.  And this includes unions that are suppose to fight for workers as the lying professors preached they also turned out to be exactly as everybody else self serving conniving scums no different than management.  And its no coincidence there is no correlation between merit and progress, its always never been about merit but more like being selected by a woman of their choice for their exploitation and their dirty work to satisfy them.  The work place for me has been worse than hell and add living in Lennox and 2/3turns of my life has been hell in America.  I hate the work place, the process of begging or whoring for a job and dont care anymore about it.  As my friend Ruben says, "it doesnt matter if they are Chicanos, Blacks, Whites all of management are enemies and I say co workers too as we are strangers in competition.

My third influence more as an adult has been women I have come across in my life, they are like looking for a job and living with an abusive management who discart you when they get bored out so my attitude is the same now but with a critical eye of deconstructing the noble view of women, beware is all I say.

Lastly, death.  Death has shaped me profoundly from the death of my father at age 10 to continues death until adulthood.  It has just happened frequently which I know understand as a way of life but when my father, uncle, adopted father, childhood friend, cousin, it just becomes a painful part of life.  But I am still in shock of my father because I was young and felt orphaned as happened to my both grandmothers who didn't have a father, my own father was raised without his father and even my children face life of never knowing either grandfather as their maternal grandfather died two years before their birth.  They innocently call their cousins grandfather Papa but it hurts me because they will never know and I seem to have passed my family curse to them through no fault of theirs.  Death angered me as I often viewed life through those lenses even hoping others especially cousins who were jerks would suffer the same fate which it did when I turned 18 making me feel guilty for wishing death unto my uncle the same man who called my father indio de sangre pura. Team has healed especially the birth of my children but at moments tears come upon me from that traumatic experience because we were all shocked.

Looking back through my 44 years I can't help but notice universities didn't define me or shaped me, all they did was get me debt and screw me over, life has been my true teacher, come to think of it universities don't define me, I won't give them that much credit, they were just quantity work with no quality.  Anger though drives me and vengeance.

The Meaning of Gettin Old

I have recently become concerned over aging and the meaning because I am aging fast. I am past midlife which for me is age 40 because average age is generally 80 if one is lucky assuming one is going to live to 100 is a bit pretentious and punishing because who wants to live mummified or as my grandfather use to say defleshing.

The most impacting aspect of aging is that it has arrived much faster than I expected almost as if I cannot stop the clock even if I wanted to.  When I was a child I remember the clock moving too slow and wishing it did now I am trying to slow it down but I can't. I am reminded of it as the gray sideburns have become apparent, the weight which is slower to come down, the diabetes, the aching feet and the lack of attention from women.  Fortunately, I have not bald but if I did, I would not keep the wig as my grandfather use to tell my tio Pocaluz who had a ponytail but was hairless on the top.  Nino Gus would tell him, "straighten your wig you are wearing it upside down". As they aged the elder grandfather laughed at it and the silliness of holding on to being young and looking ridicously.

The men now have all now passed and did so young while Nino Gus died at age 83 in 2005 and as the oldest male nobody is really there to guide just relying on my own wits and defensiveness.  So I spend alot of time observing older men, how they dress, walk, appear, if they look good in shorts with white socks or not even their shoes, sunglasses and what they drive.  I tell myself that is my future and then wonder about sex because the biggest difference with my early 30's is the lack of attention from females.  In my early 30's my sexuality flourished as females showed much more interest than they had in my early 20's and wondered if it was because I did not live in the South Bay area in LA County where White females showed zero interest and I find myself feeling resentment and anger because I knew I was being racialized.  By my early 30's I was living in the east side city of Montebello where Mexican Americans were the majority and I felt I was respected as a man and it did not matter if I was manual labor or professional, I felt wanted by Mexican American females.  However, I took it for granted though and did not appreciate enough the attention I was getting because I was enjoying what I felt women always got which was attention.  I felt that circumstance would continue but to my surprise it did not and began to end around age 37 and it hasn't.

Now as I look at those older men and myself with all the attention going to women and feeling that women are not as interested in the purity of sex plus the real reality that women have always chosen when to have sex aging is difficult for the older men.  Call it a change in biology or the skin defleshing but I understand why older men seek cultures where they are valued even if it cost them money at least money is the great equaliser but that wouldn't seem equal as women benefit more for they get financial and physical pleasure.  Aging is now a way of life, just learning to live with this phase in my life.