Ryan's World

Okay, I've been tagged by Jose, someone I actually became friends with outside of the Opera Community.

Anyway, I'm lagging behind so I'm going to just do the quirks tag game right now. Maybe the jobs later?

Here are some of my quirks:

1.) I have obsessive compulsive disorder like no one else. Everything has a pile in my room and must be cleaned up before I go to bed at night.

2.) My daily life right now consists of nothing but school work. Luckily I've found ways to take breaks and actually socialize with other people. (Hint, hint...does the OC ring a bell?)

3.) I had a seizure about two months ago and was ambulanced to the hospital. I'm on medication now, and am doing fine.

4.) The first time I tried coffee was last November. My parents never drank it or even wanted to try it themselves, so I was left out of trying it myself. Now I'm addicted.

5.) I hope to be trilingual someday, speaking: English, Spanish, and Portuguese (see some of my previous posts about this one).

That's all I have for now. Check back for the jobs I would never want to do.

So now I finally get to the post I've been wanting to write for quite some time now...

I have fallen in love, not with a person, but with a country. It is a bit strange to admit, but my day to day life has started to revolve around how life goes on in a country somewhere in the southern hemisphere.

I listen to the music in what is the ultimate language of the world -- Portuguese (Brazilian specifically). I think of what it would be see the streets alive during Carnival when people from all walks of life celebrate happiness. I imagine myself in the rainforest, listening to the calls of birds in the canopy of trees. I paint a picture in my mind of multicultural collision, where the rules of society in the "normal" world get broken everyday; this place seems made for the future, constant change.

My picture looks beautiful, peaceful and full of life at the same time. But I know that there are problems I cannot see from afar; corruption and greed are magnified in daily life. Millions suffer in poverty, and it pains me to realize this as I sit here with all of my trappings of the developed, gluttonous world. I want to throw it all away and begin life again with absolutely nothing to my name.

Yet, I know this will never happen completely. I am too entrenched in my societal upbringing. However, as I have now started to understand as I go through college, I am gaining the tools to help develop society to a better norm--a norm of hope. I am majoring in environmental engineering, where I can not only solve problems of pollution, but problems involving the development of society.

I can offer the world a way to set down its arms and dig deep inside to build an infrastructure built on what connects us all -- the quest for love, personal and worldwide. This blog post is my first step to creating the change I seek. If I have the willpower, which I must find within, I can tread further down the path to a better world.

More immediately, I wish to continue doing well in school. However, I need to focus more on the problems that surround me. I want to volunteer more often at a homeless shelter, or anyplace so I can communicate more with the people who face more hardship than me.

Next, I want to actually get out in the world, outside of the cultural barriers of the US. I am planning to study abroad in Brazil for a semester. If I can go, this opportunity will offer me a glimpse at how people in the rest of the world face problems daily. I will have to learn Portuguese, which will be a difficult task, but I am taking steps to do so today.*** When I am in Brazil, I will try to see the favelas (slums) and keep note of what I saw when I come back to study in the US. If I can effect any change, such as offering clean water, I will try to see if I can find a way to do so.

A lot of what I write here may be just empty promises, but with the help of my friends on the Opera Community pushing me forward, I can get a jump-start. (Read: "I can be lazy sometimes given the chance, and might need somebody to annoy me enough to do something...")

Hopefully, something good will come out of my discovery of Brazil, the country that helped me find myself, and the world.

***Any Portuguese-speaking Opera Community members who want to help me learn the language?

(About the title to this post: it's basically speaking about going to a village with no suffering. Here's a Marisa Monte video that will help you understand. It's in Portuguese, but a set of pictures leads you through what the song is about. I believe we have yet to go to the village she speaks of in the song--we must create it first.)

I guess looking back on my previous posts here, I can seem to be a negative person. But what I write here doesn't give a total picture of my personality. I am really quite positive when it comes to the future and my faith in the world when we work together, but when something annoys me, you might want to move away.

Usually, I try not to show my anger toward others since something from their past made them do what they did (likewise with myself). I will try to voice my opinion when I can, but only when the other person is actually willing to hear what I have to say.

I hope that anyone who comes to read my blog (people like you I suppose ) will now know that what I write here is usually triggered by something that happened in the recent past.

And if you want to see more of my positive side, you can always go to the forums....

Today, I went outside and found that the sky was blue, a darker shade of blue than I like. So, I started yelling up toward it and everyone else asking them to fix it. But, you know what? Nothing happened!!!

Now, you may say I'm being a bit single-minded here, but that damn sky was just ruining my day. Especially since no one would listen to me. They needed to fix the sky--no questions asked.

Later on after this incident, I found a car parked two inches closer to mine than was necessary. Blasphemy! I could have hit that car when I pulled out. Such ignorance should be punished. I only wish I had written down that *&%$#@'s license plate number and called the police.

One other problem ruined my day too. It was the way people told me that none of this really mattered. What?!? It does! Their simple minds must not be able to see any of these vast mistakes! Ugh!!!

What do you think?