I’m an Aquarian by birth, but I’ve never been one to put too much emphasis on astrological signs. However, I am a water baby. I was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I learned to swim before I could walk, I learned to fish before I could talk, and I learned to ski before I was riding a bike. I can’t remember a time when water wasn’t a part of my life. I grew up canoeing the bays and lakes and tubing the rivers and creeks. I even took up surfing for a few years until I got cracked in the head and almost drown. I learned a lot about myself because of that environment, and I believe it truly shaped who I am today.
I graduated high school in ‘93 with hair down to my waist and no vision, so I decided to take a year off to “find myself”. I didn’t actually look too hard. It turns out that I was right there the whole time smoking weed. I did somehow manage to enroll in the local junior college by the fall of ’94, but that’s only because I was getting a little pressure from my folks. Looking back, I think I started before I was serious enough to make an effort. I really wasn’t able to get my head into it. I did do well in the classes I liked, but I wondered through the rest of them in a self induced fog.
Time marches on, so a half dozen girlfriends and two years later I was still spinning my wheels, and I wasn’t even close to my associate’s degree yet. Back then, I spent my nights slinging sandwiches. Since I was only clearing a couple of hundred bucks a week, I decided I may as well start looking for a “real job” that didn’t require a degree. Although $90 a month for rent wasn’t bad, living with 3 roommates truly sucked. I needed to make some money fast, so I started browsing through the want ads.
One fateful Sunday I caugh...
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...amount of money. Luckily, on our own, we proved them wrong. We stumbled across a diamond in the rough, closed 30 days later, and have been living there happily ever since.
Now, I’m a first time dad, and that is truly what my life is all about. We were blessed with a son in March of 2005. By the time he was born, he had already managed to squeeze in a couple of tube trips in his momma’s belly. He took his first boat ride in his little life jacket when he was just two weeks old. Now, he’s an old pro. He was only 3 months old the first time he went swimming, and now he’ll shrivel up like a prune if you let him. With any luck, I’ll have him holding his own fishing pole by this spring, and I’ve already got my eyes on a little pair of water skis. Who knows, maybe 20 years from now, he’ll be writing an autobiography about how growing up on the water help shape his life too.
I have many things that I love in this life, one of those things is wrestling. I have been wrestling for seven years and I have developed quite the passion and love for it. Wrestling has always been an interesting sport for me. Growing up in Oregon I watched my uncles wrestle in high school. I watched both of them win their state tournament in their respective weight classes, this is one of my fondest memories of my childhood. One of them went on to wrestle division one, I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. I looked up to my uncles and wanted to be just like them. I did not always wrestle though. The process of pursing my dream as of becoming a wrestler started of with basketball, then went to a rocky start, then being on Worland High School wrestling team.
The constellation Aquarius is one of the Zodiac signs. It is universally associated with water. The translation is "The Water Bearer". I chose this sign because I really like the ocean and swimming and just water in general. The stars in Aquarius are: Sadalmelik (Alpha Aqr), Sadalsuud (Beta Aqr), Sadalachbia (Gamma Aqr), Skat (Delta Aqr), Albali (Epsilon Aqr), Ancha (Theta Aqr), Situla (Kappa Aqr). Sadalsuud is the brightest star in the constellation.
My mom always told me about the story of my birth. It was the cold, blizzardy night of January the 4th. She had been in labor for nearly 24 hours, and when I was finally born, she was happy to have a son. Up to this day, she jokes that I have been stubborn since before I was born. That was the first story of my life, and you can bet that there were many more to come.
From the first day I entered high school, I was greatly influenced by the activities I saw my fellow peers and even older students engaging in. Who weren't smoking marijuana, were drinking liquor and or even having sex on the compound. From that moment onwards, all the plans I entered high school with in executing , immediately took a turn for the worse. I had plans of becoming elected for the principal’s list and working my hardest on receiving an high grade point average at the end of the year. As the days passed and time progressed, I found myself starting to skip classes for they seemed unimportant. When I try to enter a classroom - I was alw...
The feminist theory, the idea of gender inequality, still exist in our society. Gender, just like race, structures the world, yet women are treated unequally in most aspects. Women are seen as a minority group compared to men. They are expected to be sensitive, weak, supportive, and passive. In the other hand, men are seen as dominant figures that obtain roles that are highly valued. They are though as strong, independent, and competitive human beings. In addition, gender is biological. Each gender one is born with, either man or woman, later on leads one to adopt a gender identity early in life which creates a development of gender-role performances in society’s view. Therefore, in society, each one of us are created to find our own self-discovery.
I will always remember the effect of a civil war in Nigeria that left hundreds of thousands of children malnourished. Tens of thousands of the rural population were afflicted with different types of diseases. Malaria fever was prevalent, and it was the main cause of death among children and infants. I can recall vividly sitting in an empty room after the end of the civil war in 1970, and assured my self that I must go beyond the confines of my continent – Africa to seek knowledge so as to assist in alleviating the suffering of my people. After I had graduated from high school, my dream of coming to the United States of America was far fetched reality. At that time in my life, coming to America was almost impossible. My family lost everything during the civil war. The civil war forced my parents to abandon their properties in the northern group of provinces, and returned to their ancestral home in the southern region. The soil is sandy and porous – the region suffers from soil leaching and soil erosion due to torrential rainfall. Harvests from our farms after six months of toiling under the heat of the sun were scanty. We barely eked out a living. Life then was harsh, and the future was blink. In spite of the odds confronting me, I was determined to forge ahead no matter what.
Of all the topics in The Guinness World Records, nothing delighted me more than the chapter on humans, specifically anatomical anomalies. A carnival of superlatives: the stretchiest skin, farthest eyeball pop, heaviest man, and longest fingernails incited a gross fascination. Some of the best hours in my childhood were suspended within the bright holographic hardcovers of this series devoted to the magic of human achievements. The book offered a global snapshot of life in all its glory- from the ridiculous and peculiar to the unsavory and grotesque.
Songbirds whistling melodies on the treetops. Windows misty with condensation. Car engines rumbling at a steady frequency; usual characteristics of a dreary September morning symphony. Around this time, an average elementary schooler would be cuddling under their blankets, chowing down on their morning cereal and listening the theme song of Curious George. Not for me, however, as I had to attend school early to have a chance at participating in the before-school band program. Little did I know, walking into that classroom was the most important decision of my life.
When I was a kid, I had a guitar. I also had a piano; I played violin, viola, and cello. I played the recorder and briefly remember playing the xylophone. Though I loved music, I had dreams of being a singer. That is until my childhood crush told me I couldn’t sing. We were in the 3rd grade and I started attending this school in the 2nd grade. He said I didn’t sound good in the 2nd grade, but I got better. From that day on, I never wanted to pursue music again.
We had finally done it! We were good enough to play on stage. We had sold all our tickets, which 100 initially felt like such an unreachable amount. Archaic was finally going to be playing the Battle of the Bands at Peabody's Down Under in Cleveland.
Sports have always been my passion, from playing in middle school to managing in high school and college. My family has always been very sports oriented, and when a knee injury halted my plans of playing sports in high school, I turned to something that could keep me involved without the ability to play: managing. I started out managing my high school volleyball team when I got cut sophomore year due to my inability to play well because of my knee. Keeping stats during the matches became a fun activity for me, but I also was able to stay a part of the team and make some friends that I will keep for the rest of my life. Junior year of high school, I was approached by the varsity boys’ basketball coach. He asked if I would be willing to manage because he had heard great things from the volleyball coach and was in need of a manager. After talking to my parents and looking at my daily schedule, I agreed. This turned out to be the best decision of my high school career.
For a year, I danced to polka music every night. I was a preschool student at the time, and after a long day of coloring and napping, I would cut loose on the dance floor that was my living room. I would often put an expression of awe on our parents’ faces with the physical absurdities I was capable of. It felt as though every facet of my life as a toddler was brought together in these moments, and the music perfectly represented this phase of my childhood. While this emotional agreement with a piece music was somewhat coincidental, the result is something that I have consciously pursued throughout my life.
About four and a half years ago, while I was attending Branford Hall Career Institute to
I grew up as a Southern Baptist. My family has always belonged to the same church and to this day my parents and my brother’s family still attend First Baptist Church in Forest City, North Carolina. One of the reasons Baptists are given this name is because they are not baptized as infants, but when they are old enough to understand the full concept of Jesus and the sacrifice He made for us. I accepted the Lord as my personal savior when I was thirteen and made a public profession of my faith by walking to the front of the church one Sunday morning. Many factors in the past have influenced my relationship with God and continue to do so daily.
Two-thirds of children who participate in extracurricular activities are expected to attain at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas only half of children that do not participate do (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995). Childhood is a very important time in our lives, a time when we develop many vital skills that follow us into adulthood. Some people laugh or scoff at us parents that keep our children to busy schedules. Those same people would also argue that our children should be allowed to have a childhood, to not be so tightly scheduled in their daily lives. Before jumping on that bandwagon, I would suggest doing a little research. Participating in after-school activities has shown to benefit children in many ways. Children should