forgive me for writing about your life

at my other work i work with teenagers in a gang, poverty, and violence affected area of los angeles. one of them handed me his college admissions essays to review. the first is about the three churches in his neighborhood, and how much their rites annoy him. after three scathing paragraphs about the inanity of religion, he concludes that he has become a tolerant person through having to put up with religious fools. it's nihilistic, it's blunt, it's not really the stuff of conservative college admissions committees. in the second essay he writes about a car accident that sent his father into a coma for two months, during which he was estranged from his family and sent to live with his aunt. in his own words, he was a nine year boy become a nine year old man. reading between the essays, one wonders if this is why he doesn't believe in god.

moments like these take me out of my own life, and into the amazing strength of others. success is relative to what you have to overcome, and so many of us are walking out there with eyes so wide we're blind to what we never had to experience. here in los angeles, where any value can become superficial and glib, i find myself drawn most to people who display the strength to survive through life--and survival occurs in the most unexpected and overlooked of places. it lives under highways, over gravel, and in the interstices between our two clasped hands. what does this mean for a world which seems to arrange its values otherwise--values such as intellect, creativity, entrepreneurship, none of which are necessarily bad, but somehow incomplete on their own? i don't know.

this is getting rather fiona apple about things. this world is bullshit, but this world is also pretty beautiful and amazing.