I’ve also started a petition in order to pressure Medi-CAL into overturning their  decision. It’d really help if you guys signed it and asked everyone you know to sign it and share it as well. Here’s the link: https://www.change.org/petitions/dhcs-director-overturn-medi-cals-decision-to-cut-my-funding

Thanks guys.

The following speech was delivered by Raul Carranza at a joint Occupy San Diego/Labor rally in front of the Social Security Administration building in San Diego on Human Rights Day, Saturday, December 10, 2011. He spoke with the aid of a laptop computer. After the rally, there was a march around downtown back to Freedom Plaza (the Civic Center.)

Check out the speech here:  http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/hrcr11/rc_99percent.html

I’ll post video of the speech by tomorrow.

“I heard he couldn’t take it.”.

“I heard it was too hard.”

I heard them in my head, the murmurs of faceless and nameless people. I couldn’t get away, it drove me crazy. I clutched my head and wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. Hot tears started rolling down my face. I couldn’t take the torment anymore, I wanted to take a knife to my brain and slice it into pieces. That’s when I woke up shivering in a cold sweat. I thought about how many times I had dreams like that. Too many to count. I don’t know when they’ll stop. Well, I know, but I hope I’m wrong. I’m afraid to go to sleep anymore, but at least when I’m asleep I’m there. Even if I am suffering.

Roseanne is playing on the TV. I remember that I have homework, I wonder what the point of it is. I don’t fucking care about my shitty community college classes anymore, even if they’re prerequisites for my major. Even if I need them to transfer back, I’m tired. I’m tired of everything. I just want to go back to sleep. I want to stop waking up in the middle of my dreams feeling like  I can’t breathe. Why can’t they just let me sleep? Why can’t the voices leave me alone? Why can’t they just let me sleep…

Like the original Madonna and child, the young woman on the Tube has her beloved draped around her, his head nestling on her shoulder.

Look at me! I can reference classical art when making vague references to some shitty television show while simultaneously using “cool” lingo. I’m hip and cultured, yo.

As he snoozes, she texts idly with one hand, while the other absent-mindedly strokes his arm, soothingly, maternally. But this is no serene scene of mother and son — this is a couple. A couple of adults.

How dare he look for comfort from his significant other? Real men don’t fall asleep on their girlfriend’s shoulder! They snort a line off their tits and then fuck them 55 times in two hours. REAL MEN DON’T SHOW HUMANITY!

If you are forced to use public transport, you see them all the time. Soppy young blokes in skinny jeans, hair artfully arranged to mimic a guinea pig in a hurricane, being mollycoddled by a domineering, post-Spice Girls vixen who, if figures released last week are correct, also earns more than him.

Wait, a hot girl takes care of you, fucks you AND maintains you? And all you have to do is not comb your hair and wear tight jeans? Finally! TRUE EQUALITY!   *Rolls hurriedly to Hot Topic*

If he’s allowed to travel alone, he’ll be reading Harry Potter or playing with his phone, spreadeagled like a giant baby in its cot, scratching his crotch and yawning so brazenly you fear being sucked into the gaping chasm of his mouth.

Who the fuck hasn’t read Harry Potter yet? IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS, ASSHOLES!

It’s not just young bucks.

Daggum whipper snappers.

Men who would once have been called middle-aged are behaving like teenagers, faces nourished by some male consumer-targeted unction (because he’s worth it),
Exfoliating is for fags. You’re not one of those are you?

huddled over their Nintendo Wii or iPhone, desperate to ignore the spectre of maturity tapping on their shoulder.

Real men use Droids and PS3’s.

Once the hair starts to recede, the only concession is to shave it all off — leaving a greying-templed baby-man with a risibly-outsized watch on his ickle wrist, lager bottle in hand, clad in a T-shirt that declares Get Your Coat, You’ve Pulled and drop-crotch, half-mast trousers that render him incapable of doing anything but stumble about like a toddler. Be still, my beating heart.

I’ve read this paragraph three times, I’m still not sure what the fuck she’s trying to say.

You’d think fatherhood would force these baby-men to grow up sharpish, but not a bit of it.

Let me back this up with something other than anecdotal evidence… oh wait.

Those who have acquiesced to their girlfriends’ demands and suddenly find themselves pushing a buggy fractionally smaller than a bus clearly struggle with their new role.

Real men drive miatas.

Just look at the success of the U.S. television series Mad Men. Aside from the sharp scripts and the faultless production values, what made it such a phenomenon?

Hey guys, you know why Mad Men is so awesome? I mean besides having all the qualities of a good show and good marketing.  
Dare I suggest it was largely because it recalled a time when we still acknowledged a gender divide? When women were women, and men were men.

If only Peggy learned her place. WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND MAKE DON A SANDWICH?

Call me old-fashioned, but can you imagine Don Draper on his daily commute, earphones plugged in, knees akimbo, playing virtual football on a Smartphone, pointedly ignoring the old lady teetering on a stick in front of him?

…yes. He’s probably drunk, though.

Would Ava Gardner have been irresistibly drawn to Frank Sinatra if she’d clocked him shuffling past in shorts and flip-flops, shouting ‘Laters!’ into his mobile?

Would Richard Burton have proved so addictive for Elizabeth Taylor if he were a simpering, feminised mess, confused about his place in the world?

Romeo and Juliet. HAHAHA WILD CARD, BITCH!

I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties, daydreaming of a future husband

Me too…

*goes on youporn, searches James Dean*

Strong, dependable, loyal — at least until another more pneumatic dame caught their eye…

Wait for it…

Ashton’s currently making headlines for allegedly cheating on his wife Demi Moore, a woman 15 years his senior. But the whole affair is being treated as if he’s a naughty schoolboy who’s disappointed his proud mum — not a man who’s betrayed his woman.

Holy contradiction, batman!

Women have a lot to thank feminist Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch for, but some lines have become catastrophically blurred since the Nineties rise of the Jack Daniel’s-swigging ladette.

What you got against Jack Daniels?

Remember the boyband East 17?

No.

I think the rot might have set in there.

You totally want to fuck them, don’t you?

What a weird century.

The 19th century was better.

Isn’t it time to man up, boys?

Suck on my dick and gargle my balls.

How’s that for manning up?

I wish they went away, these dreams. All they do is remind me of what I left and what I have to do. I know that I’ll never be able to continue living unless I go back and I don’t know how to make everyone understand why. Unless you’ve ever had something you had to do, you won’t get it. It’s not a rational feeling, I know this. And everyday  I wish it went away. But it won’t. It lives inside me and it’s become an essential part of my soul. Sometimes it’s the thing that gets me up in the morning, that keeps me going. Other times it’s what makes me want to kill myself. What reminds me what a selfish spineless coward I am. It beats me down mercilessly until there’s nothing but a shell left. It puts me to sleep with lullabies of hate and broken dreams. And then, once I can’t take it anymore… Once I start eyeing the sidewalk and wonder how fast I’d need to be going and what angle I’d need to take to maximize the impact, it asks me If that’s really all I have. Because if it is, then I should just do everyone a favor and finish it.

Do everyone a favor and make sure you do it right, it says. But if there’s even an ounce of fight left in you, then man the fuck up and do what you need to do. It asks me, is that all you have?

I haven’t answered yes yet, though I’ve come close a few times. But I have too much pride to do it. I don’t like failing and I like proving everyone wrong too much. I know not many people in my life will understand it, they’ll try to argue with me and some will even try and make it harder than it should be. But they’ll never get it and I won’t try to make them understand. Arguing is pointless now, I have to go back. I have to satisfy this creature inside me because I know that if I don’t, if I let it keep going through the cycle of beating me down and getting me back up, it will eventually break me. It might not be now or even three years from now, but eventually, it’ll ask me “Is that all you’ve got?” and I’ll finally say, “Yes.”

Grandma was always the glue in our family. She was the one that kept in touch with everyone, organized all the family reunions and brought everyone together. Mom looked up to her. She always viewed grandma as an example of what a good woman should be. I don’t blame her for it, grandma was a pretty good role model for anyone to follow. She was kind, nurturing, supportive, entertaining and funny. So when she died of cancer, my mom was devastated. Just like any child would be. But I guess that, when she died, the rest of the family looked to her to fill the role my grandma had. And that includes grandpa and our uncles.

She’s become sort of the hub of the family. If there’s some kind of family event, she’s usually the one planning it. She cooks for everyone during the holidays and she remembers everyone’s birthdays. Sometimes it’s stressful for her, having to deal with all of that plus me and my brother. Actually, it’s more like all the time. There’s rarely a time when she’s not stressed out about something. She doesn’t deal well with stress. She’ll get frustrated with something as small as logging in to a website and walk away from it in a huff. If I’m trying to tell her something and she can’t understand me she’ll just ask if it’s important and walk away muttering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t understand you.” if I say no. Sometimes she just blows up and has disproportionate reactions to dumb things.

Like last December when Rodrigo was visiting. I was trying to convince him and Pedro to go out, They didn’t really want to because I had lost my ID and it was 10:00 pm on a Sunday. She had gone to bed and she overheard us arguing about it. None of us were yelling or angry , maybe annoyed at worst. She flys out of her room like an angry tornado and starts yelling at both of them. Before you know it, she has Rodrigo by his shirt collar and is telling him he’s an opportunistic friend and ungrateful. The same Rodrigo that’s been flying here and spending either Christmas or New Year’s with us for over a decade. Saying she has a short temper is like saying Hitler wasn’t very fond of the Jews.

It’s hard for me to empathize with her when she does stuff like that. Even when she realizes that she was wrong and apologizes, I know she’s going to do it again. I’ve asked her to get help in the past. She tried seeing a psychologist  for a little bit, but she stopped a while ago.

I’m obviously not the only one that notices this, my sister had to deal with it a lot as a kid. She was expected to help take care of us at a very early age. She was often a sort of emotional tackling dummy, especially for my mom. She knows better than anyone how scary she can be. How she can be calling you the most horrible names one day and tearfully apologize the next. We both think that she’s bipolar at the very least and has some sort of personality disorder at worst.

It’s not surprising, really. She got pregnant with my sister when she was really young. Her and my dad got pressured into marriage by their families and then I popped out. Dealing with one handicapped kid is hard enough, but she also got my brother. It was too much, they were too young. My dad couldn’t handle it, he drank a lot. It’s not that he wasn’t a good dad, he tried very hard. He just wasn’t emotionally available for her. Some of their most vicious fights were when he came home drunk and plopped down in bed and watched TV. She almost broke his finger once.

I don’t think I ever saw them actually happy. By the time I actually became conscious of what was going on they were already staying together for us. They were very distant, they only ever kissed each other on the cheek. Their distance only grew as our conditions deteriorated. My mom dealt with most of it, my dad didn’t really know what to do. She had to deal with all of our emotional baggage plus her own baggage. I understand how she got this way, even empathize. But at some point you’ve got to take responsibility for your own problems, and she hasn’t.

I don’t think she realizes that she has issues. The other day she told me she loved me, but only because she had to. She said she wouldn’t if she didn’t have to and then she laughed. She didn’t see anything wrong with what she said, I just stared in disbelief and resisted the urge to tell her to go fuck herself. Then a few days ago I told her to shut up. I probably shouldn’t have said it, but I’d barely woken up and she was already yelling about not being able to understand me. The look on her face said, “I will eat you and shit on your brains”, it scared the shit out of me so when she told me to repeat myself I just told her not to talk to me that way.

That’s how she is, though. She’s driven by her emotions and reacts in the moment. That leads her to say really hateful shit. Like when I told her I didn’t like when she took care of me because of her temper. I said this calmly and said that I could find another person to take care of me. Admittedly, she’s calmed down a bit, but not nearly enough. She may say she doesn’t mean it,  but she does. And I’m sick of it.

I can’t live with that and I can’t have a relationship that uses taking care of me as leverage. Frankly, I don’t want to.

It angers me to see people my age have so much success. Angry at myself for not being at his level when I know I have the potential for it. I’ve been told that it’s ridiculous to compare yourself to geniuses like him, but I think that’s bullshit. I don’t think I have very much time on this rock and I have to realize my full potential.

Everytime I see someone even moderately successful around my age I get this unquenchable urge to be better than them. It doesn’t even make sense because “better” isn’t even clearly defined. It’s not some dollar amount or anything of the sort. I just want to be better at what I do than they are at what they do. I’ve always been that way, even as a kid. I hated the smartest girl in my class because she had slightly better grades than me. All she did was put in more work than me and I knew that, if I put in the same amount of work, I could do as well as, if not better, than she did. But I never did put in the work because I could coast by with perfectly good grades with minimal effort. I can still coast, but I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to be good anymore. I want to be great. I want to be on the same level as people like my friend. No, I want to be even better than that.

I think it’s because I care about what people think. Most people that don’t know me have this perception that I’m bedridden. Or that, while I may have goals and dreams, I know they are largely unattainable and have accepted my lot in life. Even my doctor is under the impression that I, “don’t vet out much “. The problem is that most people think it’s okay for someone in my situation to be that way. I see it with my brother every day. He doesn’t go to school, he doesn’t have a goal he’s working towards and all he does is watch TV and kill time on his computer. No one hounds him about it and no one pressures him to push himself. It frustrates me that society thinks this is okay and I have to remind myself everyday not to fall into that pattern. And that, to me, is worse than death. Because at least you have an excuse to not do anything when you’re dead.

Sometimes it’s hard not to fall into that pattern. There’s no grand societal stigma that comes with it, unlike normal people. A 21 year old in my situation is expected to be living with his parents, a normal 21 year old is expected to be graduating college or have a job. Yes, I have more challenges to deal with, but I don’t care. I know that I’m good enough to overcome all of them and surpass most people. I see people like my friend composing music and directing orchestras and my first thought isn’t, “Wow, I wish I could be as successful as him.” it’s, “I know I can be as successful as him… why aren’t I?”. The answer is simple: They put in the work, I haven’t.

Sometimes I wonder why. Part of it is laziness, I suppose. Sometimes I play games when I should be writing. The other part is fear of failure. There’s no safety net for me. I can’t fall back on some part time job. It’s not like I can work as a waiter if I don’t make it as a writer. There’s not many white collar companies that would hire me and it’s not like I can go work construction. Failing, to me, would mean that I’m stuck at home living with my parents or in some kind of government facility for the rest of my life. That’s just not an option for me. To me, it all comes down to simple statement:

Go big, or don’t go at all.