“With the basest of companions, I walked the streets of Babylon…”
St. Augustine
Confessions, II, 3
Ecclesiastes
“And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities”
1985-1990
I had always wanted to attend the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). I remember like it was yesterday at eight years of age shivering in freezing Milwaukee, Wisconsin on New Year’s Day 1976 watching the Bruins play against heavily favored Ohio State in the Rose Bowl in sunny Pasadena. I liked the blue and gold uniforms of the underdog Bruins as they went up against the villainous Buckeyes and their caustic coach Woody Hayes. And sure enough, the Bruins defied the odds and won! I remember feeling like I participated in their victory. And it looked so warm in California! Yes, I was a UCLA believer from a very young age.
Unfortunately, it took me more than a decade to finally end up as a student on the Westwood campus. My wimpy 3.66 G.P.A. did not get me into UCLA right out of high school, and therefore I spent two years at the University of California at Irvine (UCI).
I was satisfied with the education I received at UC Irvine; I particularly enjoyed the Humanities Core classes (interdisciplinary humanities classes) that weighed in at a full 8 units and covered both history and English graduation requirements. I remember a whole quarter studying in depth the Industrial Revolution, and another on the phenomenon of violence and another all about love. I read and learned so much! I also spent many hours practicing Korean martial arts and much of my social life revolved around that crowd. But, truth be told, Irvine was a pretty boring place to go to college. I had lived in Orange County my whole life and was ready for a change; having my own student apartment in Irvine was still too close (5 minutes driving) to my parent’s house in Newport Beach. I was driving the same old streets as always and doing the same old things. GET ME OUTTA HERE! So I tried to transfer to UCLA and was finally accepted. I was a Bruin at last!
I could have stuck it out at UCI and had a mediocre, relatively uneventful college experience, but instead I spent my second half of college at UCLA. The first two years of college: quietly reading political science while studying martial arts at a commuter campus in suburban Irvine. The second half of college: fraternity life at the dynamic Westwood campus and reading widely and omnivorously in the big city of Los Angeles. I paid my last year of college working full time for the campus police department in the UCLA Emergency Room and I learned more there (the stabbings, shooting, car accidents, drownings, burn victims psychiatric holds, etc.) than in all my classes put together.
My arrival in Los Angeles for my first semester at UCLA was a special time, in retrospect. I was so excited to be in this new place starting a new life (relatively) far from home. I used to walk across campus and feel overwhelmed by the profusion of scholarship, the promise of enlightenment, and the potential for learning something new! I would get the new course catalogue the day it was released and then sit down like a child on Christmas morning to review all the fascinating classes I could take next semester. This notwithstanding, the most important lessons life taught me occurred outside rather than inside the lecture hall, and I learned nothing more important at UCLA than this: if you take some care about your clothes and looks, smile a lot, and be nice to a woman, she will more than likely want to date you. And if you are a gentleman when you go out, she is more than likely going to want a little more than pleasant conversation from you later on. It was a glorious discovery!, and I viewed the society of women like an explorer looking out over vast unexplored territories – O brave new world! I had so many awesome experiences with my fellow co-eds at UCLA; I would not trade them for anything! I learned that, if you just shut your mouth and listen, a woman will tell you the most amazing things (abortions, first loves and heartbreaks, parent’s death or divorces, abuse, etc.) in the dark intimacy of a late night conversation. It was good clean ol’ fashioned fun in those days when God only knows what might happen late at night after having imbibed a cocktail or two. It was not the same after college – or better put, I was not the same.
At the beginning it was all so new and exciting and exhilarating! I would wake up in the morning and say, “Can you believe what happened last night…!” (“Did Greg really put his head through the drywall?” “Who wrote on my face when I was asleep?” “Where am I?”) But that all passed, and within a couple of years it was no longer so new or exciting and as I grew bored the scene turned harder. It became dispiriting to wake up after an all-night bout of debauchery that leaves only a fearsome hangover for a souvenir. It was time to move on.
Academically, I was a lackluster student, often not reading my assigned texts (or even going to class). Yet even if I was the despair of my professors, I was always seeking and learning at UCLA – I never was one to let school get in the way of my education. And I thank my professors very much for giving me the time and space to think deeply in college. Most of my learning in a huge, impersonal school like UCLA did not revolve around face-to-face encounters with professors — they were distant and involved in their own research. My learning was reading everywhere and all the time by myself. I was exposed for the first time to huge amounts of exciting new poetry, philosophy, and literature. The books I were passionately reading were rarely the ones I had been assigned in class. I delved through W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Dostoyevski, racked my brains against the ideas of Plato, Voltaire, and Kierkegaard, and studiously listened to the Well Tempered Clavier of J.S. Bach and marveled at what I saw as a near mathematical perfection. If I was not in my fraternity house or some campus bar, I was in a bookstore or the library.
My campus learning at UCLA melded seamlessly into learning about and exploring Los Angeles and getting to know the city. There was so much to learn! I lived in LA for most of the next 13 years; I could not get enough of the place. When I attended UCLA in 1987 I was enchanted by the City of the Angeles — I was in love (until I wasn’t). We would go dancing up in Hollywood at The Whisky a Go Go and meet Swedish girls in town as tourists at the Rainbow Bar and have adventures — it was a long way from Irvine and the suburbs.
Practically my last class at UCLA was a basic geography class and I could hardly force myself to open the textbook. Igneous and volcanic rocks? Why the hell would I want to learn about those when I was busy watching people die or have their lives saved, reading huge tracts of Western literature in down-time, getting in brawls, and even helping deliver two babies in the UCLA Emergency Room where I worked to pay my last year of school? Why would I want to learn about the differences between a plateau and an arroyo when I could seek adventure with another one of the 15,000 young women on campus? I needed this last class to graduate, and I got an “F” the first time I took it and a “D” the second time and graduated. All this during the semester in which I (a Pol. Sci./International Relations major) ghost-wrote all the papers for my roommate’s Bach music class in which he earned an “A.”
Even if I did not have the grades to show for it, my college years were a time of intellectual and emotional flowering for me. I was afforded the opportunity to think and learn full-time and my mind was young, open to new ideas, and absorbed concepts like a sponge. My female peers at UCLA – one and two of them, in particular – taught me more about the intimate joys and risks of love than I can detail in a few paltry words; the debt I owe them is huge. I remain friends with them to this day, even as we went on marry other spouses, pursue different paths, etc. It is this aspect of college I urge to my high school students: “It is a time to fall in and out of love, moving away from your parent’s home — the first real baby steps in adult life. Get away from the town where you were raised. Arrive to college with open eyes and learn as much as you can! Inside class and out!” A young person shouldn’t worry too much, in my opinion, about a career in undergrad but instead should read and talk and think and live and learn and drink it all in. Get a solid basic education and get your professional training in graduate school when you know better what you might want to do for a living. College should be a space to mature and learn about the world and one’s place in it. It scares me to think about how much shallower and narrow my outlook would have been if I had foregone college and gone right to work out of high school in the place where I grew up. My world would have been such a smaller place.
I made gains in my first two years at UC Irvine but I accelerated at UCLA and was launched into adult life, for better and for worse. I was grateful for being on the Westwood campus and sharing time with so many bright and talented young people — I feel privileged to have been there. But I didn’t feel much towards the older people at UCLA — the professors and the administrators. In such a large school, our paths did not cross much. But there was an energy on the Westwood campus which was electric. I thrived at UCLA. Being there in that environment was almost more important than the classes or the professors.
As a man ages he gathers life experience and perspective which is all, of course, invaluable. However, there is something special about a young person in the full bloom of enthusiastic learning and maturing. How I would dearly love to be an undergraduate gain! In retrospect, I took it all for granted. I can hear my father’s voice claiming, “Youth is wasted on the young!” These years were, in the end, some of the best of my life. No wonder I did not finally move away from UCLA and West LA until I was some 23 years old.
I finally graduated in the spring of 1991 and at my parent’s gentle but persistent urging departed for Europe. I was immersed in my job at the UCLA Emergency Room and all I was seeing and learning there, and I resisted leaving. But my parents, as usual, were right. Time for my world to grow larger still. Time to move on.
VITAE SUMMA BREVIS SPEM NOS VETAT INCHOHARE LONGAM
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
by Ernest Dowson
The Delt House 
View of backyard from third floor. 
A late night 
Jamie and me 
Phil and friends 
Pledge/Active Party 
Beno and Myself 
Tuxedos and dancing. 
Ran the 1989 LA Marathon 
Smile for the camera! 
Feeding Mike’s cat. 
Go Bruin football! 
We took “beer buses” to football games at the Rose Bowl. 
Good times! 
And the dip… 
Avenida Revolución in Tijuana 
Road Trip to Ensenada