Late Sundays returning home from one of the parents’ homes as I prepared mentally for Monday Mornings wondering what would the next day entail? Completed wrinkled homework, over packed backpack held together by over worked sticking zipper that was Pee Chee™ filled and 3-hole subjectively organized with a plastic pressed pocket place for pencil sharpeners, plastic right handed safety scissors, and erasable pens that leaked on my impatient palm side that was eager to get out for recess and Ding Dong Liverwurst or leftover Meatloaf sandwich snack time. My papa ran schools since the day I was born until his retirement in the year 2004 after he left an adult school and decided to be a retired adult in a heavily populated San Gabriel Valley ChineseViet town. I had the adventure of EDUCATION by attending 15 schools ranging from a mountain pre-school held at a high school at the Rim of the World, to receiving an international business degree with an emphasis on Supply Chain Management at a university founded by Jesuits on a hill looking over Sea World Mission Bay. In between was LAE for my K year, a 2 year stint at the Catholic OLQA, and then enjoyed 3rd grade and one third of 6th with a Harbor View of the Pacific Blue near the man made Bay of Balboa and Playa de Newport . I was then shipped north to my papa to finish the year in uncomfortable judging St. Roberts school yard and with George Washington as a wallaby. I continued onward fighting my overweight eating out diet with my Straight A’s puberty along the trail of John Muir Junior and Middle School. There was one semester with frosh football and 1200 manboys at Loyola for the my first high school experience while ending up Jesuit again at Providence back in my hometown. Opened up my mind near the beach for a year and half at the Bishops School with my only circle of buddies that was ended by forced rehabs by parents (not mine though) and my failure in front of the disciplinary board giving me the boot by my peers, but gifting me an extra week long Spring Break in Ireland to get my first forearm wolf tattoo thanks to red bearded Buddy, his wife, my dancing sister in Limerick, Ireland, and my mama who provided the budget. Home school aint all that fun as it might seem teaching Me American History from Civil War through the JFK Assassination and overcoming Reaganomics. Looked into boarding schools, but they required minimum two years so I was back at papa’s at John Burroughs High where he handed me my diploma drunk on Mickeys 40 and nitrous balloons att Memorial Field where I ballboyed for the football team years before witnessing a bitter windy (70+mph) defeat in the CIF Finals in ’87 versus Arroyo Grande which ended in a brawl. On that same field I battled in the trenches as a 165lb senior lineman (center) to beat our cross-town rivals the Burbank Bulldogs against all my John Muir Middle Schools buddies in 95’.I wanted a metropolitan city for college so I went to the first school I got into. It was one of very few I applied. I wasn’t into the college fever, but scored near Stonestown at San Francisco State where the GE world was filled with culture, variety, and more exploring openness. Life transforms when you take risk, and those were surely taken as I boarded a ship to take a voyage from Nassau Bahamas to Seattle Washington for a 100day experience that still and will be a part of me today and forever. Semester at Sea (sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh) provided 4 continents and 10 countries and brought me gifts with memories that allowed me to respect more the beauty of culture, cuisine, open water horizon travel that was vast oceans, tight bottom of the boat quarters, and amazing lifelong passions to see and feel the world in the most unique RVB way. Wouldn’t be here today sharing without those experiences that linger within me and my passionate dedicated heart. Shiplife was gone, San Francisco one more semester, and I finished back down in San Diego on top with Franciscan architecture from Spanish past and a world ahead of me after graduating and completing my degree.” Major in something Major,” my papa always states. Understand your life’s passions while educating yourself about life. How was your path of schools? Where were changes made? How did you adapt to your learning environment? Did you make the best of all the opportunities? How can you re-connect to the process of learning? What skills were you granted with? What skills do you desire NOW to grant yourself? What are your priorities of education? What is something you learned new today? How can you let others in and share with them all that you have gone through? Teach, Uplift, Set Example, Inspire, Motivate, Listen, Follow, Lead? Are the people you surround yourself with allow or provide you those actions? Bring newness into your life through optimistic knowledge and give yourself truth that lies within and beyond on this vast place we sit and call Earth.
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