| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | My most memorable childhood experience was easily our family trips to Florida. My grandmother lived there with my aunt, who took care of my grandmother until she passed away at the age of 89. We have a big family, so we could not afford plane tickets for everyone. The drive there was almost as fun as the stay in Florida. It was there I developed a love for the coast and the sun and the surf. I must also give credit to my aunt in Florida for encouraging my interest in health and fitness, which persists strongly to this day. Our trips in Florida developed traditions of their own; we spent nearly every day at the beach, which always entailed quite a bit of snorkeling and digging at least one big hole. It's hard to pick just one memory. Another one that had a sustaining impact on my life was going to my first professional baseball game. The park, when I was five, was the most incredible place I had ever seen. The field seemed enormous, the crowd endless, and there were always things to look at. From then on I would remain a die-hard fan of our home team, despite them losing on that evening. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I can't say I identify too closely with any of my siblings; after I left for the Marine Corps, we became somewhat distanced. I would have to say I most closely identify with my aunt in Florida; we share many of the same political, social, and philosophical beliefs. I see in her my same enthusiasm for life and a vigor not equally expressed in her peers. I visited her after I returned to America from my first combat deployment, and during that week we became significantly closer. I call her every year on Mother's Day, and we usually end up talking for several hours. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | In this day and age, I admire a person who is calm in the face of adversity and open-minded towards others. It is rare to see someone who can approach a difficult situation, especially in public, and address the situation while maintaining their composure. Speaking from experience, I view it as an extremely difficult thing to do, and I myself have struggled with it. I try to keep in mind the personalities of figureheads like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who exemplified this trait to an extreme level. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | I'm a great admirer of pranks. One Friday evening, my next door roommate and I decided to stay in. I went to a popular chat site called Omegle. On this site, users do not have screen names and are matched up randomly with another user somewhere in the world. I spent the evening on this site, and when I was matched up with a male who professed to be at least eighteen years of age, I would profess to be a nineteen year old female living in Los Angeles. After some small talk, I would flirt with them and eventually ask them for pictures with their shirts off. If they agreed (and mostly all did), I would give them my next door roommate's phone number. Some additional info is needed: this next door roommate of mine was a total goof; he was very socially awkward, very outspoken, a bragger, and extremely homophobic. You couldn't touch the guy without making him uncomfortable. Intermittently throughout the evening, he received multiple pictures from a variety of young men with whom he had no prior contact. Our two rooms were joined by a bathroom, so I could hear most of what was happening. I don't believe I've laughed harder or more consistently in my entire life. Several minutes after convincing an unsuspecting male to send my roommate a shirtless picture, I would hear from the other a long string of expletives. There were a couple times when I heard him call the males who sent him the pictures, questioning who they were. Every time I retell this story I cannot help but laugh. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I would most like to travel all over Iceland, spending as much time hiking and being outside as possible. I prefer warm climates, but the pictures I've seen of Iceland have always dumbfounded me; it's almost inconceivable that a place so picturesque is real. I would hike as many mountain passes as possible and sleep under the open sky as many nights as the weather would permit. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I would like to pass on to them, above all things, the importance of love. So many problems we currently face as a species would end if more people made the conscious decision to love others more than themselves. I know it sounds wishy-washy, but I believe it's something that is often lost. The importance of hard work is also high, but I view that as inevitable; either one will learn to work or one will die. Love seems to be so forgotten, mainly because of its abstractness. One could be a successful human being and be completely heartless, but one would not be so lucky if he or she was not a hard worker. I believe love is not prioritized due to its lack of necessity to survive. Maybe it's the innate quality of self-preservation, or maybe it's the selfishness of humans themselves. Either way, I hope to see my children carry a copious amount of love inside them at all stages of their lives. |
