Of course not. But it’s never so cut and dry as that, though, is it?

In reality, the question asks, “Are you set apart from the masses or are you just another member of them?” Also, “Do you dictate to others or are you dictated to?” – and if you are dictated to – God help you if your “dictator” is anything other than benevolent as you are, by nature, bent to the whim and whimsy of others.

I think we can all agree that no one is a leader all of the time. Or at least in the static sense of the word. That is, no one is domineering and controlling in all situations – one should hope. Without making a final judgment call on my own character, I know that the majority of what I want to say about myself (without that being the end result) I want to be consistent with, or even indicative of, my actions. “Leading by example” might be the closest way to describe my leadership style.

I’ll be honest. I find that people who talk about being a leader and how exactly to be a leader – just the mere act of the discussion on how the one best way to BE that one type of leader – annoy me to no end. It’s cliché. It assumes that there is:

1. only one way to achieve the end goal of leading others, of inherently being ahead of them, and
2. the ultimate end goal that everyone should have of controlling others, or of getting what *you* want.

As if there’s a self-help book out there that’s the end all and we’re to undermine any notion of individuality of our own. In the end, there’s tons of grey matter in the topic. There’s varying degrees of influence that each person carries in different areas. There are so many different, desirable qualities that fall under both leading and following (the latter of which should not be confused with weakness). Grace is a good thing. So is the act of listening. Besides, when people begin to sense that your main motivation is so that you – not the collective – benefit the most in the end, they lose trust in you. Ask yourself, how do you know when the goal is achieved? Is the end goal concrete or is it actually about notoriety, fame and the realization of the hunger for power?

And there I go – not answering the question. So am I a leader? I’d like to think I’m a leader in areas I’m suited to lead in. I don’t need to be designated as such to try and serve the best way I know how. I don’t need to make all the cues or even figure out the direction that is ultimately taken in the project to feel as if I’ve led a little. So no, I’m not a leader at all times but other, if not most, times I believe I am. No matter what my experience, I try and do the best I can, learn from it, speak up if I question or object, and improve the best way I know how.

I think that for so many of us, not only during school, but our entire lives we are trying to answer this question. That is, we’re providing evidence that are we valued as people – that I should be valued as a person.  And sometimes – let’s be honest – this means proving that above all others, this is what sets me apart and therefore I deserve to stand apart from or even above the crowd.

It extends to what possessions we have. Now in L.A., all you have to do is look at the traffic and half the cars on the road cost as much as it does to buy half a house anywhere in Middle America. But money is money, and having the ability power to attain such possessions is definitely a race we all run in one way or another.

Once time when I was in middle school, we had a family friend who visited from Hong Kong. He gave my mom a watch and she in turn gave it to me as she already had one. I didn’t and it was a pretty attractive watch, so I wore it. I wore it to school, I wore it to violin lessons and piano lessons – I wore it everywhere. I still remember it. It had a metal band and was gold and silver-striped.

Then, my friend asked to look at it. She said, “You have a Gucci watch??” I said, “I dunno.” It’s not as if the name on the face of the watch was one I had recognized. Well, ever since then I did. Eventually, word got around that I had this Gucci watch. When I look back, this was probably my most dramatic introduction to [the conspiracy of] branding. The lesson that some names are worth more than others was an interesting concept in and of itself, but whatever it was I was glad to have something notoriously good spread about me around the school. “Let me see your watch!” people would say. I started to bling it out, show it off. (Okay, “bling” wasn’t in pop vocabulary back then but you get the idea.)

And then came the time when a guy who asked to look at it declared that it was fake. “The second hand doesn’t move smoothly around the dial,” he explained. What was awesome about this in hindsight was that only in Wisconsin in the ’90’s can you get away for three whole weeks showing off a fake Gucci watch in middle school before someone can actually spot that it’s not authentic.

Easy come, easy go.

Not five years later would I meet people at UCLA who spoke of wearing Armani Exchange to high school every day in the affluent neighborhoods and using their parents’ money to pimp out the Audis they also bought with their money. What a complicated adolescence I was spared, in one respect – that is, one subjected to class status wars. But in other respects I had my fair share of issues racially and emotionally.

I wouldn’t trade my past for anything, though. No one ever grew as a person from living posh or comfortably. If you have everything you want, there’s no reason to figure out what’s most important to you. In retrospect, being of Asian descent in a city full of -ski’s (Poles) and -mans (Germans) enabled pushed me to figure out who I am and I’m not. Follow that up with five years at a school that is half-populated with Asians and that theme is ever more honed.

So in the life game of worthiness derived from uniqueness, we all have our own bag of issues. Love ‘em, hate ‘em or loathe ‘em – what do you make of them?

Sometimes that includes writing about myself and sometimes the only component in a post is that it is my opinion coded in html. Then again – that’s a pretty big component – coming from me and all. And so, if I haven’t already, I present this to you: My personal blog. Completely scattered in subject matter and incomplete thoughts flying in, left and right.

The “quofda” is a good question (even a fundamental blogging question) and provides a good occasion to pause and examine my own place in the blogosphere. Why do I write here? And now I will proceed to prove myself wrong.

It’s interesting that I had never kept a journal until short of a year ago and even then I had already blogged at least intermittently for 3 years. If you think about it, there’s a lot more you can put in a journal; it’s not under public scrutiny. In fact, for me, it’s a place where I can enjoy my own handwriting – the construction of each unique letter form is a cathartic act of fleshing out my unique thoughts in their present place and time. A tactile experience, if you will.

And so, the act of writing only for myself by blogging is probably untrue and more fulfilled in keeping a journal. (Well, perhaps if I derived great joy from typing for some reason this would be another reason why I love to blog. I have capped out at 110 wpm before – so there might be the additional perk of expediency.)

So it follows, then, that I write for my readers – whoever they may be. Well, you, of course. Not just myself. And I do enjoy the comments each of you make, while putting out the hope that what I’ve written has provoked some thought not reflected in your feedback. And the little notoriety that comes my way as a result is – I can’t lie – a great perk. I am just conscientious 100% of the time to not make it the aim. But let’s face it – if I were to say I write for myself and damned be everyone else, that would be a flat-out lie.

Once upon a time while in grade through secondary school, I was especially weak in the area of reading comprehension. Because I’m Asian, I was good at math. I was also good at most subject areas like history, science and in writing. But when it came to reading comprehension, I was weak. It came up in the diagnostics and standardized tests. There was a incongruency in this because this meant that I could make the output (writing) and quite beautifully in fact, but not process the input (reading).

It became an epiphany recently that this weakness was a result of my environment. I disassociated myself from a lot of the world around me in order to “deal” with the hurt feelings that I wished not to feel anymore. Now don’t get me wrong, here. I’m not looking to place blame, only to understand that which I came from so that I can address it, get even better and move on. This condition with which I was accustomed to was a very closed-off, fearful, protective place.

Once I came to a place where it felt safe to open up, I was able to process that input and I could effectively work on that weakness. In turn, it enabled me to become that much more skilled at writing (the output) because I was able to come to terms and embrace everything that was going on inside, not be afraid, ashamed of or closed off to it. To really embrace the person I was created to be. For that I am eternally grateful.

And it is not only for me but for so many others whom I write for. Everyone whom it is enjoyable to interact with as it is entirely a 2-way street. I feel as though I’m interacting with all who may enjoy my writing at least once in a blue moon even though I may not know it because somehow I still feel that our thoughts are connecting – I love being open to that. I work on my comprehension (the input) by reading some of my favorite blogs and I can appreciate all the ideas floating around the infamous blogosphere. That openness was not always there because I was made to feel afraid of it so now I can truly appreciate it because I’ve worked so hard for this.

The fulfillment of myself is the meaningful relationships with others. So if you have a blog, I invite you to link yourself below. I may or may not put you in my blogroll but please know that I wish that you may write for me … because I certainly write for you. And I’m honored you came here.

To explain my circumventing the question a bit, I think we all have a different reality. At the same time, one’s reality doesn’t invalidate another’s. They are all “true,” in a respect, because we are all real humans. What is your reality? If it got turned on its head, would you be able to cope? Or might you even be relieved?

It is a truly revealing experience having one’s frame of reference completely turned around. I’m not saying it’s easy, because it is everything but. It’s really hard work, in fact. But it’s something you have to do when you realize that your foundation is largely not, nor was ever, reflective of reality. That there’s something better outside and inside of us, outside of the world we were conditioned to accept and adhere to. That we were all meant to enjoy a new kind of liberty – a world that we reconstruct inside our own minds because we were each created uniquely, to be nurtured uniquely and to live uniquely.

And there goes, by the wayside, everything as we know it. Maybe it’s a result of the realization that things and people are more complicated than is easy for us to swallow. That when you group things or people in order to fit them inside our tiny brains, maybe – just maybe – we put them in the wrong group, or even a group that if we were truly all-cognizant beings wouldn’t even exist. That maybe we don’t know the answers to everything and pretending as if we do hurts, not helps, others.

Maybe it’s about understanding that treating others better than ourselves ultimately helps us all get ahead, not lag behind. It’s about truly believing and therefore living that we are all valuable; ultimately, the goal is to not run that race of propping ourselves at the expense of others.

We need to step outside the lie that not being right means we are worth any less. That even changing our minds and moving on doesn’t mean people should believe in us less because we were wrong in the past, but they should believe in us more because we’re taking responsibility for ourselves and dare to develop as changing beings.

Further than that, the world in which we grew up happened to us for a reason – and it’s about not being stuck there for the sake of being right and dragging whomever we can down with us, it’s about how we move forward from here. This doesn’t mean we won’t make any mistakes, or that we won’t revert back to our old ones. It’s about truly embracing that we’re human, not masking it. Habits. Culture. They all develop for a reason, but once we use them as excuses for not looking beyond things, not questioning the rules, we’re only stunting ourselves.

Like many, one of my favorite things to do is travel. I’m always taken aback by the wonderment and awe of being a part of a world that is so unfamiliar. I’m so happy to be absorbed by the new environment that I try to take in as much as I can. Even more fulfilling is the here and now of this new place in the context of its history.

So, I lick up as much as I can – sometimes by way of audio guides. I will get completely lost in them – the stories they tell about the placements of artifacts, the ornation and details in the art and how they got there, the culture, traditions and customs of the people at the time of its creation.

Sometimes, it comes back to me. Particularly in Europe, when natives after inquiring are surprised to learn that my origin is not Asia but a colorful American city called Los Angeles. In (non-boondocks) America today, Asia would be the offensive assumption to make. But to me the benevolence in the exchange lies not so much in the failure to assume, but the pure investment in learning about others past what they can do for ourselves. That there’s a simple respect we hold towards others, especially others we don’t already know anything about.

So although it’s a really annoying habit to answer a question with another, this is one of those few times where I think it’s necessary. Do we really believe that the world is bigger than us, or is it just easier to believe that it’s not?

This is mainly because the way I look at the question, it’s almost as palpable as a felt board presentation in sunday school. “Ambition” and “life” could each be represented by felt circles of varying sizes, one could be contained inside (engulfed by) the other. Or they could overlap, side-by-side. The mass of one might be identical to or completely different from the other.

I choose life over ambition. The amount of felt material used for “life,” I would feel, far surpasses that used for “ambition.” Do we not see value when our lives speaks to many facets? Ambition is good for motivation, y’see, but there is no perspective within which to enjoy the fruits of that ambition without the context of life.

To me, blind ambition is like willingly putting the side blinders on (rather literal, I know) to effect tunnel vision. Or putting all your eggs in the wicker basket which is something I’ve never been keen on doing (whether it’s because I can’t hold focus on one thing if my life depended on it is a whole other matter). It’s like being known for going all in on a bad hand.

Ambition is a good card to have in your deck, but if it’s the only one you will eventually get called out for not having more in your arsenal.

When you live your life, you gather tools along the way which you perfect and sharpen to be used later. You develop a skillset, hone it and perfect it over time. Ambition is static and when everything is centered around that, you will undoubtedly become better at that one thing but you become closed to other opportunities, even if it’s better for you. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to recognize it because you’re so focused on this one thing as an end all to rule your life.

For what will it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? (Mark 8:36)

After all, a golddigger has ambition.

I’m going to spare you guys the whole “right here right now, hell if I would ever go back” bit because God knows I wax philosophical enough about my current issues as it is. The year of 2007 really has been my best and hardest year yet because there have been an infinite number of personal truths uncovered. And, having been blessed with that, I am so excited for what the future holds.

So all that being said and excepted, I have to say that the best years have been 6th and 12th. Basically, with the exception of middle school, they were the years in which I was top dog grade-wise in the respective school. College was pretty great, too, but again when it comes to my adult years I would say that the real-world learning and responsibilities that come with it trumps pure bliss, and then the years just start blending into each other. Age is no longer an issue and it becomes one long journey…

It’s more fun to talk about an era when the biggest possible worry was your homecoming date (and actually? I attended only one high school formal, total).

It was in 6th when a boy first liked me and also when I had my first kiss. [Ba-BAM!! Two quofda's in one!!] It was on my cheek and immediately afterward the Puerto Rican fellow sent another note to clarify that he wanted to do it on the lips “the next time.” Mind you, even then I was not a girl to play games and clarified it was only going to be on the cheek going in (*cough* Scrivs) via our messengers. But what definitely had set it up was his answering of my note, which had been of the Q&A variety. I even made checkmark boxes to facilitate the ease with which he could answer each question:

1. Do you think I’m cute?
   [] yes [] no [] maybe
2. Do you like me?
   [] yes [] no [] maybe
3. Do you want to skate together at the school skate?
   [] yes [] no [] maybe
4. Do you want to hold hands?
   [] yes [] no [] maybe
5. Do you want to go steady with me?
   [] yes [] no [] maybe

It really was bliss. The “yes” box was checked in response to each question and the fate of who would be our first boyfriend/girlfriend in our entire lives was sealed.

During Field Day, a sporting day of sorts in which we competed in track and field type events, I beat Cory Rogers in the first leg of the 6th grade relay. Cory was notoriously known as the class bully, and at a third of the size I had handed off my baton to my teammate before he. I think it was because having made a habit of bike riding with my Dad through the parkways almost every evening after dinner, I had built up decent leg muscle strength.

Can’t forget, I was a popular kid and teacher’s pet. Yeah, it wasn’t necessarily uncool to be teacher’s pet in grade school. Looking back, what further emphasized that experience was the traumatizing, uncool, self-loathing period to come with middle school immediately after.

I don’t remember particularly what was all that great about 12th grade except for the fact that it set up the time in my life where I began to taste opportunity despite a sheltered upbringing. Can’t forget that being a senior is automatic royalty over 75% of the rest of the school. But inherently, you learn the way high school society works by your 4th year in.

In the summer before UCLA, I toured with my youth symphony doing concerts in Spain and Italy. With the drinking age being 16 in Europe, I drank my first glass of wine in Spain. I had caroused the streets with fellow musicians because we needed to find our way back to a certain coliseum. We chanted to a local lady, “el toro?” while making little horn gestures with our fingers to the top of our heads. She had a riot while talking and laughing to herself, walking us to our intended destination.

The fact that I even got accepted into the UC system as an out-of-state applicant took me aback. I hadn’t expected it and had a full music scholarship to the University of Wisconsin as a “fall-back.” When word spread that I would virtually be the only kid going outside of the Midwest for school – and to Cali, no less – it made the last 2 months gravy. It really was the year of potential and promise.

It’s an answer to the lack of blog posts on here, lately, since it has become just the inspiration I needed.

If I were a Brit, I would imagine I would answer something to the effect of, “… because complacency is bloody bullocks” in an accent better than Madonna’s.

But like Madonna I’m not a Brit so you get this bloody blog post.

It goes so many ways, really. You can take it from the perspective of a pessimist’s, which comes from a place of envy. And let’s be honest: when you look at what you don’t have, it’s only because you envy what someone else does have. Your negative reaction is the equal and opposite to their action.

In this case, you consider the grass greener “on the other side of the fence.” Glass-half-empty sort of stuff. And let’s not kid ourselves here; it’s the kind of thinking any well-adjusted human would remember in the very least during the awkward days of junior high or middle school. Okay, maybe continuing through high school.

Or even now.

In my case the focus of that fence belied my being one of two Asian kids – an angry one, at that – in my entire grade, every single year through secondary while wishing I were like everybody else in the Midwest: White. Thankfully, the older I got, the more I embraced my identity thanks to the fact that it got to marinate and I was able to adapt. Okay, honestly? Eventually, I got outta Dodge. But would I trade that glass-empty experience for anything? Never. Because I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate my glass-full perspective now. Actions and reactions, again.

And that’s the healthy kind of greener. The grass is always greener because if even for survival’s sake, we all want to believe that it only gets better in the future. That there are other things to look forward to than the not-so-/dismal state we’re in right now and there are things that we can do to get to that (even) better situation.

The unhealthy type of greener is represented by the fence, with which we’re fooled into believing we’re boxed in. It justifies paralysis because we buy into the fact that since the situation we weren’t given = happiness, there is nothing we can do to hop that so-called fence.

Time for another personal example. For instance, I could totally take advantage of that “‘Nam syndrome” that’s going on right now. Because I hear that Asian chicks are suddenly really hot, unlike when I was growing up. That whole non-assuming, submissive thing we got going on, it’s really “in,” I hear. (And, about that, boy do I have a surprise for you.) And it’s interesting being on both sides of that fence … you get the luxury of really figuring out what’s important. And what I figured out was important to me was that I need a man for which race is not important – favorably or unfavorably.

You don’t focus on that fence, but for the reality check you recognize where you would like to be that you presently aren’t and work on the steps in order to get there. Not that you can change race, mind you, nor am I advocating running away from your problems. (They always catch up to you.) Then again, it includes changing your perspective or your situation – or even a little of both. Regardless, every once in awhile you look behind you to express gratitude about where you used to be. Everything is progress and a process. A journey.

The grass is greener because there always exists greener pastures. Get there. And there, and there…