Hey that's great! I'm glad that you didn't lie. I wouldn't want *anyone* to think that their age mattered too me, like they were too old or too young for me to relate to. Or to listen to (I do try to listen to people even when they're totally completely wrong!) or to treat with respect. But that comes from my sense of self-respect I have for myself and the ancient belief that one should do unto others as you would have them do unto you...or the great karmic wheel.

I think it's great that you're 15 and you care about things like vegetarianism or ethics or treating others with humaneness and compassion. You'll meet alot of scared, insecure, violent, aggressive, and strange people as you go through life; you've got to not let them bring *you* down with them. It can be hard, because you want to say something -- but sometimes you just can't.

In any case, when I was 15 I was a skateboarder in suburban Dallas, Tx, and a real know-it-all. But I was really jaded about school, about my future, about society, and about life in general...and I was very apathetic. After doing real well in elementary school, I became very cynical in junior high and went from having like a 3.9 GPA to like one in the lower 2's you know. I was sent home from 8th grade by the school counselor because they thought I might be going nuts. But I really wasn't...I was just trying to figure out my role in this crazy world...and I'd forgotten how to laugh at myself and at life. This was in Fairfield, CA.

Then as I was going into High School, my family moved to north Texas, to a little town called Rockwall. Here I was a kid from California seemingly among the yokels...and I guess I overcompensated. I skated. I listened to raspy, aggressive skate-punk music, and I had an attitude. I had read books before, such as "The Lord of the Rings", and "The Chronicles of Narnia", or books by Mark Twain, Frank Herbert ("Dune"), and even Nikos Kazantakis' "The Last Temptation of Christ"...but when I was 15 I stopped reading. I read a magazine called "Thrasher" all the time, even old issues. My vocabulary weakened. My grades never got back up over B's and C's.

Then at some point in high school, right before the end of my junior year, I flunked the *absolute shit* out of a term paper that I had tried to write about J.D. Salinger. My teacher said "Rob, you really should actually read one of his books over the summer." and I went ahead and bought myself a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye". Over the summer I read it, and now I wish I could tell every teenage alienated kid in the whole fucking world to read it...to bring to their attention the fact that they are not unique in their struggle to find their Indentity and their Selfhood in a world that encourages and promotes conformity at every opportunity. That *everyone* has within them a voice, an artistic, creative, even nurturing side and that life is a struggle, a constant struggle, of identities and awareness. And sometimes everyone has a bad day.

After reading that book, I read every book I could get my hands on that challenged the way I perceived the world, or tried to put things in different lights and different perceptions. I read Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, Italo Calvino, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jose Donoso, James Joyce, and everything that anyone recommended to me actually. I found my favorites, and books that really spoke to me, such a the fantastic "Master and Magarita" by Bulgakov, who was persecuted and mistreated by Stalin in Russia in the 1930's and 1940's, and who actually wrote a satire of Stalin's life as a teenager!

>
> I'm a fairly computer-litterate person but only to an extent. When people
> talk about Urls and stuff I usually just smile and nod and pretend i have an
> idea what they're talking about. Words like URL just confuse me, but
> address? Now there's a word i can handle. The Tasty Animals ADDRESS is:
>
> http://www.mtd.com/tasty/

Remember, technology is not an end to itself. Computers facilitate highly complex arguments and ideas to persist in a way that words alone (out loud) or paper books can not approach. And they make communication easier. I believe that 99% of people's hatred comes from not *knowing* -- really knowing -- anyone who seems to represent another culture, or race, or philosophy, and that with the Internet hopefully people will be able to share ideas and stories and solutions to one another in ways that have never happened before. We can build a community of incredible intellectual capital thanks to this technology. But it is up to each individual to seek empowerment and control over the media, and to learn how to accomplish tasks such as managing a database of information, and growing that database, and programming skills, or learning skills, or whatever. Shit, artwork, consulting, mediation...the list goes on and on. So if I was 15, besides being a KID which is what you should be doing (rather than trying to be an adult like so many kids do these days) I'd be preparing myself for a more wired, more interconnected and interdependent future...

>
> Now me, i'm usually content with webcrawler. Once i get there I type in PeTA
> and get PeTA pages along with shit like "Peaple eating Tasty Animals" and
> "PeTA sucks" and etc. Once you get there simply click on the link labled
> "HATE MAIL." i think you can figure it out from there.

I'm telling you that guy is a bastard. We have to ignore jerks like that because only *they* can really do the intense psychological work it'll take to fix his problems. Just like only *I* can do the work that will fix my problems, which thankfully I have precious few of BTW... Don't let people like that bring you or your friends down. Think about community, and justice, and harmony, and beauty. Talk to your friends about peer pressure, and how various chemicals affect your health, and how driving a car while intoxicated is unsafe and unfair to others on the road, and about what *you* would want your society to be like.

Because we *WILL* inherit the earth, and if we haven't thought about these things then we will be abdicating control of OUR LIVES to others, and there's one thing you should learn about the adult world it is you want to have as much control as possible.
I'm jealous BTW that you get to live in Oregon!

>
> Well, i have to go now but i will talk later.
>
> <3 ~ KELLI