College Update Pt. 2

Home sweet home. Boy it feels good to be back. I knew it was going to be good when the pilot said the evening in Long Beach was a "bit chilly", somewhere between 60 and 65 degrees. I should really apologize to the Southern California weather for having taken it for granted. Seeing snow again was a good experience but I've realized I would much rather admire snow from my window than navigate around it in face-numbing cold. Even the squirrels, which abound on campus due to the lack of natural predators, struggle to eat acorns because of their shivering paws. I must admit their suffering brings me some pleasure.

My first semester at Harvard, though, was pretty good all in all. I love the fact that all students I've met are full of personality and know how to have fun. They are intelligent and remarkable people, no doubt, but you know them for their quirks and their life outside the classroom. So even though people are settling into comfort zones and identifying their closest circle of friends, I've been trying to get to know new people, or at least reconnect with those who shared the first meals at Annenberg with me. In the process, I've learned that my memory serves me well for these encounters. Many times I've come up to a person, addressed him/her by name, recounted the occasion responsible for our meeting, named the two or three other students who had sat next to us, and recapitulated one of the topics that had surfaced during the conversation. Creeper status? Maybe. But if you tell me you are from San Antonio and not aware of Tim Duncan's existence or if you are a polite, mild-mannered Caucasian girl who listens to MF Doom, I aint gonna forget it.

Speaking of quirks, many people at Harvard have begun to identify mine as my high regard for Latinas. My mission to raise awareness of their beauty and charm is now in its fourth or fifth year, and my efforts have been rewarded by their increased presence in rap music videos, alcoholic beverage commercials, Yahoo! Personal Ads, and of course Brazil's winning the bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. So it is only appropriate that I now gain a bigger audience for my outreach in the Harvard student body. I have made conscious efforts to make it a topic in dinner conversations, and it's been a pleasant surprise to see the number of people who agree with me. But on a more serious note, the conspicuously small population of Latinas on campus is a bit troubling. Clearly, more work needs to be done to provide them the counseling and resources earlier in their educational pathways so they can get that college degree.

One of the four classes I took this semester was Japanese Culture & Buddhism. I picked it because I really enjoyed reading Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse) in high school; the idea that sexual encounters are necessary for enlightenment struck me as truly badass, and I was thinking I would give conversion to Buddhism a serious thought if I could confirm such tenets existed. Unfortunately I have found Buddhists are not unchaste at all, and they certainly don't believe hedonistic behavior facilitates self-awakening. Rather, they emphasize ridding oneself of all attachments to the world, whether they be desires for material possessions and social statuses or emotional attachments to people. None of the things we value truly has a "self", or its own identity, and we can only talk about them in relation to other things. It is only when we realize this "emptiness" of things - and their impermanence - that we can begin to embark on the path to enlightenment.

For some reason, these ideas really stuck with me and have dramatically changed the way I think about my life. For one thing, they cemented my desire to pursue a career in the non-profit sector, most likely an NGO that does international development or global health work. I've always thought there are two main ways to live life - find what makes you happy and do it or abandon your pursuit of happiness and help other people. I'm not saying that helping other people can't make you happy. But I'm drawing a distinction between helping other people because it makes you happy and helping other people for the sake of helping other people. Also, I think there are varying degrees to which we live out altruism. Most of us like helping others but also have other goals like raising a family, finding a job that suits their interests, earning enough money to support their family, and maybe buying a nice house or car. We all have priorities, and helping other people is not necessarily at the top of our list. In Buddhist terms, we are all invested in some sense of "self."

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what really matters to me, and I've decided that my goal is to further shed that sense of self and live my life for the good of others. This is partly because there are very few things that make me happy anyway, and I am lucky enough to have them already. I have food, clothing, shelter, computer with high-speed Internet, hip hop music, and access to free streaming of Laker games. But the other reason is that I feel morally compelled to help the less fortunate. Helping people doesn't make me happy but I find it unfair that out of chance, I was born into a healthy body with a caring family, reasonable government, access to education, and a full set of rights while some kid halfway across the world will never learn to read and write or suffer from malnutrition just because the world is like that. And yeah, shit happens, life is unfair, and the world will never be equal, but I think to myself what it would be like to be that kid. At the end of the day, the things that will make me happy won't really matter because I will be dead but maybe if I can raise the standard of living in a community, families and their future families will be better off. Yeah, I'm an idealist.

I haven't yet figured out how I can best help people. Get an advanced degree after college, try some field work, begin working for an NGO with a proven track record, and work my way up to management? Who knows.