Letrera a profesor Fleming.

Dear Professor,

I was taking a break from work today when I was on my old blog just
going through old entries. I stumbled upon this and felt very blessed:

“Why do you want to help others?”
Prof. says that the recurring theme that he says that we want the truth.

"One of the secrets to school is to enjoy it, when you enjoy it you do
better at it. The reason why I’m putting this up there is because I
want to challenge you all to see what defines you. It’s 6:41 PM, at
6:45, "you can redefine yourself." You can say that you felt this way,
saw something, and say that this is who I want to be. One thing that
is inconspicuously absent is money, I grew up poor and that’s what I
always wanted. The Nissan Z was big when I said that when I grew up I
was gonna buy one and I did buy a 350 Z. I do public interest work and
get paid pretty well, I’m not going to say that it’s not a part of
everything, it’s a part of it as well. You can ask yourself, who am I?
Do any of these apply to me, or you can choose to not care about none
of that as well? "

"In 7th grade I always ate lunch with two of my friends. My friend
Chris had two divorced parents. Chris’ family owned the only Chinese
grocery store in town. Chris would get fantastic food from the
cafeteria. Mike would have ding dongs, great stuff and never share
with anyone. I would have a sandwich of some sort. Chris would always
get French fries (which were really good). Every single day for a
year, I would ask Chris for French fries and he would always say no,
finally he gave in once and let me get two leftover fries. I always
told myself that I’d never grow up having to ask anyone for French
fries. People always ask how can you want to help communities and still drive
a sports car? (His experiences show that he wants to work for those
communities but it’s still ok to have some things that you like,
sheeit, you did happen to bust your butt to get to where you wanted to
be in your life!)"

I've been doing that post-baccalaureate program at CSU East Bay that I
told you about a few months back and honestly I have forgotten about
enjoying it. Honestly it's very difficult to for a few reasons. First
off, I feel that I'm in some strange purgatory-like state taking
classes at another school for something that will not confer me any
kind of degree and is more of a way to atone for my academic sins in
science classes at UC Berkeley. Secondly, I'm not very interested in
most of the classes that I have been forced to take, which mostly
consist of upper division science courses which mostly discuss very
specific molecular mechanisms describing how certain processes
function in nature. Thirdly, I feel disconnected from the bigger
picture and the people and communities I want to serve. Most of my
time is spent studying and trying to improve my GPA. At the same time
I feel that I need this discipline, to improve my study skills, and
drill the idea into my brain that sometimes you have to make
sacrifices like this in order to get to where you want to be and work
with the community you want to work with some day. It would have been
great to have some humanities classes integrated into the curriculum,
but then again that means even more money for tuition and
post-baccalaureate students get terrible financial aid.

I hope that I haven't rambled too much professor, I just had a feeling
that you might appreciate some aspect of my ramblings. I also just
wanted to let this blog entry that I recorded serve as a reminder to
you of the students' lives that you are impacting through your
teaching. It's much appreciated and I thank you again for the time I
had to take your course and dialogue with you. I hope all is well and
that you're taking care of yourself and finding peace and fulfilliment
with each day. Take care of yourself!

Sincerely,
Francis