Aug 10 2006
The 8-Year Old Entrepreneur
“Capitalists of the World UNITE!”
I took a survey that was included in the textbook I was using for my Business and Management class. It was as unscientific as it gets. In as little as 12 questions, the survey claims to measure my level of entrepreneurial spirit. Some of the questions were odd, like one if I liked spending time alone as a child and if I was a “first-generation American” (a what? How do you measure that?). But one of the questions was I thought right-on. It asked if I ever engaged in an enterprise as a child. Though, it actually asked if I had started a lemonade stand or had a paper route. I scoffed when I read the question. “Lemonade stand? How conventional!”
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Aug 09 2006
A Story about Karma
Not every baby is cute. That is a fact. Yes, some babies turn out to look like complete angels, but most babies are actually quite ordinary looking. But because of their innate babyness, with their big googly eyes, innocent smiles, and incoherent, but totally adorable gurgling, even plain babies are considered cute, causing adults to act all silly and go “Goo! Widdle baby, poo!” at them. But for some babies, the very unfortunate few, even being a baby cannot overcome their ugliness.
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Aug 08 2006
Childhood as a Mestizo
A young Jayel Aheram. He worries about many things, but race is not among them.
I am a half-breed. In fact, I am more than a half-breed, I am a mongrel. I was born to a Filipino mother and an American father. She was half-Spanish, part-Chinese, part-Tagalog, and part-Ilokano and he was Caucasian of indeterminate origins. Maybe he had Cherokee blood in him, too, or maybe not. I used to joke that I have the best of all worlds in me and that becomes apparent when people attempt to guess my ethnicity. Their guesses run the gamut from Arabian to French to Venezuelan.
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Aug 04 2006
The Games I Used to Play
Most of what I remember from my childhood was that of school and playing after school. The former was filled with classmates and friends and social things, the latter devoid of it. What I did in school usually stayed in school and it did not spill over to the home sphere (after school). A few times, my classmates visited me at home and it was awkward to say the least. I was not comfortable then in the idea of mingling my home life with that of my school life. Not that I was shy, hardly in fact! I was outspoken, talkative, outgoing, vivacious, and in trouble with my teachers most of time. This kind of dichotomy between school and home was voluntary in part, because I never needed to meld the two together. School was fine if it stayed in school and I was perfectly happy not having my classmates play with me out of school. This pattern of behavior (of separating school and those who make it up and after school) continued until high school, when the merging between the two spheres of my life became inevitable.
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