If there is any one accomplishment, any one part of my life, that matters above all others, it is the moment when I made that choice. Many choices came before and many will follow after, but a chord resonates from that instant forwards and back explaining everything that I am.

To conjure up the true gestalt of that moment, I am afraid I must offer this brief synopsis of what came before that day during my freshman year. I grew up in Houston with divorced parents, went to the elementary school my mother administered, and then matriculated at the Kinkaid School. When I finished eighth grade, there was no question I would remain there for freshman year, and indeed no question that I would graduate from there. Such choices had already been made for me; nothing truly difficult had come my way. Once I learned how to write, school wasn't a problem. Once I realized I could wrestle, sports weren't a concern. I was set for three more years of relative complacency: cruise control.

In the beginning of 1996, things began to change for the worse. In early February I had to stop wrestling because the doctors found two hematomas in my nose; unbeknownst to me my nose had been broken numerous times. More disturbingly, I was almost happy when they told me I shouldn't wrestle again, even though the week after the operation was a painful codeine nightmare.

By March I knew I was leaving Houston. The temple day school where my mother worked asked her to resign in February. I kept thinking someone would come in to fix the situation--my mother had been with the school since nearly its beginning, and she had done nothing to be dismissed, especially this late in the school year. For a while I thought the school board would make the right decision, then I hoped the head rabbi would step in, and then I hoped that my mom would be able to find a job in Houston. But nobody stood up and nothing came through and none of my family knew where we were going that spring. I only knew I was leaving the school I had attended for four years, the friends I had known since childhood, the home I had lived in for most of my small life, and the religion I, now disillusioned, had once believed to be so good.

It was an incredible sham. I remember one Saturday being at a choir competition and sitting down and simply being unable to stop crying. I saw that all the people around me would never know me any better, nor I them, than we did that day, and I would soon be gone. I had never had to deal with such a departure and certainly not such a disillusionment as this. It was leaving everything I had ever known.

As the final straw in this odyssey, I somehow fell into doing props for a musical. This is one of the worst possible things for a freshman to do, but I did not say no when a drama teacher I barely knew asked me to help. I hadn't considered making a choice and as a result found myself sitting backstage at rehearsals until 10:00 or 10:30 at night. The singular most absurd thing I found myself doing that year was painting the black floors of the stage blue at 1:00 in the morning, as one of the confounded directors had requested, only to find out the next day that no one in the audience could really tell the difference. I felt pretty insignificant by the end of the production.

All these things did come against me that spring--the disillusionment of role models and institutions, the abandoning of my home, and the acute absurdity of getting home late and tired for naught. School stopped seeming to matter, and I was scared because I didn't understand why anything was happening the way it was. This was the wall I reached--there was no fixing the fact that I was leaving Houston, that my old school and temple had fired my mother, or that I was going to be stuck in rehearsals for another two weeks. I was somewhere between beating my brains over it and simply breaking down.

And then I arrived at spring break. I suppose I would have found myself in the same poor state the rest of that year and a goodly part of the next had it not been for what happened on the Saturday at the end of spring break. Vacation is probably the right word for what happened, not in the idiomatic sense, but in the sense of vacating old thoughts.

On Friday I had been at this imponderably large high school (Forgive me--as unfortunate as it may be, I am a product of the private education system, and any high school with more than 1000 students seems too much like a mass production of education), and had regrettably done well enough that I was still at the same French competition later in the afternoon the next day. Waiting for the posting of the finals schedule, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Even now, having read Robert Pirsig's second book and re-read most of the first a number of times, I still do not fully understand the idea that Quality exists before subjects and objects. What I did start to understand then was the importance of believing in Quality and not letting bad things get me down, and that most importantly, I could develop my own way of thinking. At some point I put up the book, walked across the football-field-sized courtyard, and looked up.

I've never felt like I understood what I was doing any better. I could even see myself as though I were looking down on me from hundreds of feet above, soon a tiny speck in some River Oaks neighborhood of which I still don't know the geography. And I knew, somehow, that everything I did was going to be fine. Looking back, I think I realized then that although things in my life had become increasingly worse, there always remained something intrinsically good about life itself. I saw that to let things other than my self control the quality of my life was wrong. It was my responsibility and no other's to define myself by making the best choices I could make.

There was no way to study for impromptu reading and impromptu speaking, so I just kept reading. I was still reading when the judges called me in for the storytelling, and after about five minutes of telling everything I could about a picture--I remember, there was a man leaving a bakery on a bicycle, with a baguette, and he was leaving his bakery for the last time--they let me go.

This is not to say that everything after that was easy, but it was always better. I can't remember all I won or lost from such competitions, but if it's at all informative I did win first place for the storytelling that evening.

After that it's been a number of choices with this self-certainty that has led me down the line to the present day. A chance for extra credit led a friend and me to begin on a computer tour. With much of our own tribulations it introduced both of us to design and programming web pages and programs, and today both of us run the computer systems at our separate schools. After I left Kinkaid I came to Saint Mary's Hall and found myself in a community far better than I could have ever imagined. I continued playing lacrosse and became co-captain of the wrestling team my sophomore year. I started going to confirmation classes at a new synagogue and finally decided for myself that Judaism, despite its shortcomings, has a good number of things going for it. I joined an Explorer post of which I am president now, and I went backpacking every summer at Philmont Scout Ranch. I spent one summer working on the school's solar car team, and spent a month living in Germany. (Alas, even so, my German is still very far from being impeccable.)

That sophomore year, my new principal offered to let me take Algebra II and Calculus at the same time. ÒWhat could it hurt?Ó I said to myself. Having started taking Calculus in mid-September, I was ecstatic when I passed the midterm. The next semester I worked my grade up and both my teacher, to whom I owe so much, and I were amazed with my results from the AP exam.

At the end of that same year, having never run for any office before, I ran for the school's judicial council, a student body that makes rulings on our honor code. I was a new student, but by then I understood that no bad thing could come of offering to do my best. This year is my second year on Judicial Council. The next year, after years of doing technical theater, I tried acting. I didn't make it the first time I tried out, but I kept trying, and at the end of the year, I had been in two extracurricular drama productions.

And now I'm a senior and enjoying it. Near the beginning of school I found out I was one of our school's three National Merit Scholarship Semi-Finalists. I've always been a real believer in learning as much as possible, since tuition is a flat rate and it's important to get the most out of one's money. Now, however, I've also started teaching students how to do web pages and servers on the internet. It's probably the most esoteric of circles I find myself in, but tempered with something more general like wrestling and the Eagle Scout project I am scheduling soon, a suitable balance arrives.

I guess I've said too much now, but it was only for fear of saying too little. Sometimes people have called me a renaissance man, but this comes across wrong; I simply don't know where I'm going yet in life and want to be prepared for whatever comes my way. At any rate, the rebirth of dead things is not what I seek to be about, nor am I so amazing as to be compared to the pioneers of the cultural movement known as the Renaissance. I would rather be creating life than blowing breath into dead bones--it is as Frank Lloyd Wright said, something of complete Naissance. Knowing nothing about where I am going in life except that I will soon be out of it and in death, I do my best nonetheless to live. Written above is that first moment of Naissance.

The rest of me is at best extrapolatable from my collection of writings online, or is at worst inexplicable entirely. As you do peruse through my web page, I must yet again ask forgiveness for the German in it--I simply have not yet the eye for it and must rely on my father's equally poor recollection.

over&out,

HJB

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