Essay - "Birthday Cake"

Cooking has always been an interesting activity for me. When I was younger, I prided myself on my great cooking skills. I loved being able to declare solidarity in at least one aspect of my life, because as a kid, that’s something that actually means something to you. “Putting on your big boy shoes,” as it were. I remember for my 12th birthday, I cooked my own birthday cake. I had my mom buy me the mix that I wanted, I looked up how to make the frosting online, and I painstakingly constructed my own cake. Not because my mom or dad couldn’t have just bought one for me, but I liked being able to look at a final product and claim total ownership over it. I mean, if I did that today it would be quite the novelty.

Anyway, I finished the birthday cake, put on all the decorations, sprinkles, frosting, the works. I remember that it was the white cake mix with the little colors throughout, the one that Pillsbury makes. I made gooey white frosting, I spread it with care over the top of the cake, I used the tube of frosting to write “Happy Birthday, Dave” to myself over the frosting that I had made from scratch. I used red frosting for that, because red was the “cool” color to use. I invite my friends at the time over for my cake and ice cream, as is customary, fully expecting them to reap the same benefits as I would from my cake-baking catharsis. My sixth grade friends come over, and it wasn’t one of the “big” type birthday parties where you invite your entire classroom, it was just my 3 best good friends and myself.

We gather round the table, my mom puts 12 candles into the cake, and we begin the grand old tradition of singing “Happy Birthday!” to me. There’s always that one part in the “Happy Birthday” song when it’s your birthday, and you have to sing “Happy birthday dear... meeeee!” Nobody wants to be the dickhead at age 12 who belts out that last “meee!” but it makes for an awkward situation nonetheless.

The song finishes, my three friends await with bated breath for my wish. They all are aware of the superstition regarding birthday wishes, that if I let slip what my wish is then it has absolutely no chance of coming true. So I heeded the unwritten law, thought up of a wish in my mind,  and with a terrible gust I blew out the candles. If you’re wondering what I wished for, you are out of luck - I’m still hoping this one comes true. It’s just between me, myself, and I. Nice try, though!

Now comes the moment of truth - my friends have to try my homemade cake. My mother cuts the cake, and I await the crowd reaction as the pieces are doled out. Although I feigned a sense of calm, on the inside I remained as nervous as a man waiting at the gallows. And in the same way as the dead man walking, I felt that the stakes were life or death on the opinion of my peers.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of the food pallet of 6th graders, but as far as humans as a species, 6th graders are about as picky as they come. Hell, I didn’t have chicken in non-nugget form until I was almost an adult. Nonetheless, this fact did not bode well for me. As my first friend was handed his cake, young Jake did not even hesitate to comment “I hate frosting!” Strike one.

Although I emplored young Jake to give my cake a shot, to try and scrape off the frosting, he would not budge. Jake’s opinion (of course) caused a chain reaction amongst my uninformed peers, and a vast majority of my cake remained uneaten. Though this wasn’t my best birthday, it taught me a very valuable lesson. Jake Green sucks.

Essay - "A Moment."

The students of my high school, like any high school, were given the same message as nearly every other high school kid is given; reach for the stars, because even if you fail, you’ll land amongst the clouds. The grand irony of this teaching is how far from the truth it is. Reaching for the stars for our generation is achieving impossibly attainable plans and somehow beating all the statistics for transfers, dropouts, unemployed students, defaulting on student loans, or death throughout college. Somehow, we’re supposed to be prepared to deal with life on our own at a place that we’ve visited at most twice or thrice, while still being able to study and maintain enough of a GPA to keep our scholarships. All this, while also following the lesson to “always keep yourself busy!” so we join a bullshit club or group just to have something to say to our parents when they call, so that we don’t look like we’re just sitting around waiting for an opportunity to smoke pot or drink, which is much closer than the reality I paint over the telephone lines.

I’ve always looked at my peers with a bit of envy. They seem to be able to make things happen easier, make less mistakes, perhaps they have things figured out more. Envy, however, is something different than respect. I’m not trying to say that I disrespect my peers. I do see myself on a bit of a higher plane than many of them. Call it arrogance, I suppose. The fact that I ended that sentence with ".., I suppose" probably indicates that it is pure arrogance. One thing I’ll give myself is that I’m self aware.

The worst part of it is, I have terrible self esteem normally. I'm not sure why I have an air about me, especially when I feel that I am inferior on many different levels to them. I'm in worse shape, I have less of a social life, I have worse teeth, but for some reason I still think that I'm better than them. But what am I to think when my friends constantly use absurd terminology and phrases like “bitches” for girls and “raging” for going out, etc.? My generation really doesn’t set the bar very high.

The words that my generation chooses for their actions and the people they interact with are pretty horrible. That’s probably the number one reason why other generations look down on us so poorly. I try to stay away from the pitfalls, using “mega” to signify something more important than usual (mega-test, mega-practice, mega-paper), calling girls “bitches”, “hoes”, “bitties”, “dime pieces”, and the list (sadly) goes on and on.

I’m a member of Generation Y, by literally the last year that was possible. In this way, I don’t really identify with other Generation Y members. They’ve already had their drinking problems and started AA meetings, whereas I’m still looking to the sketchy guy on my floor with a fake ID, who I have to tip $10 just to get his sorry ass out of his room. Nothing like that premium tax imposed on the customer, to borrow an economics term.

Whenever I see posts on reddit of Facebook about a random person who has done a random act of kindness for a veteran, I always think to myself: “Why do I give a shit?” Back in the “olden days,” i.e. the early 2000’s and before, people did nice things to veterans without expecting any sort of reward or like count or karma reward. They just did it. During World War 2, when veterans who came back home were missing limbs or had scarred faces, the people of the country had no forum for them to post (boast) their kindness to soldiers, but it was still expected of society to perform random acts of kindness to strangers in uniform.

It’s incredible how sometimes just the smallest visual clue can suck you back into a memory. Seeing a familiar face or a familiar location brings you right back, and the memory can hit you like a ton of bricks when you aren’t ready for it. Old, forgotten people who you maybe miss like hell. A lot of times for me, it’s people who I wish I could forget. People who taught you things about yourself that maybe you’d rather not know.

Through our experiences with other people, we can learn more about ourselves. Everyone knows this, it’s a fairly fundamental truth. But the most interesting experiences or lessons that we learn from other people often are the ones that we least expected. Someone who we had settled in our brain and you thought that their role was accepted in your life, until one day everything changes and they become something totally different to you.

It’s the simplicity of a single moment. One glance. One touch. One kind word or one unintended consequence can totally change a person’s role in our lives. You become comfortable with them, you are able to identify your role in their lives, until this one moment comes crashing into your life and completely turns everything upside down. For better or for worse, it’s these climatic moments that end up defining us as human beings, and individuals. Without these moments, these slight shifts in our path, we would be completely different people. All of our values, likes, dislikes, our appearance, our mannerisms, are totally defined throughout this spectrum that we exist upon.

These are the moments that your mind refuses to forget. They keep being dug up from the depths of your conscious and you can’t ever really be granted reprieve from them. Some bad, terrible moments in our lives end up defining us. For some, their defining moments come at their finest hour. They step up to a challenge or face an obstacle that changed them forever. We can look up to a person like that. Us whose lives are defined by our worst hour try to live up to that, and blindly hope for it. But we take great comfort in our delusions.

One of the fundamentals of economics is the idea of scarcity. As a human race, we will always desire more than we can have. No matter what we currently have, it will never really be enough for us.

Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to the blog. I'm not entirely sure what this will entail, but I would like to be posting somewhat regularly on here. At first, I'll be posting some personal essays and other things I've been working on, and I'll progress from there. Come to expect some thought provoking analyses of entertainment and the like, and some creative pieces as well. I hope you all enjoy it!

Also, a small disclaimer that if you know me personally, you might recognize yourself. Names will be changed to protect identities, and some stories have been altered for the sake of the narrative.

Alright, here we go!

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