THE HOOD SCHOLAR

In hazy reflection, I live life in the world of fly girls, diamond-cut ropes, peddlers of dope: All things known to the world as ghetto. Let me explain; my name alone is the reflection of an era - 1970s - when heroin was distributed through my neighborhood by Italians on Myrtle Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. This is where I am from, a place where children live in squalor and degradation and intellectual insecurity. The convicted felons, the police, the drug addicts - all serve their purpose in the cyclical devolution of the ghetto. To break the cycle, one has to make choices; to chill with people you have known all your life or chill with people you do not know well, to break the negative cycle of one's family by not dealing with one's family or to continue trying to save a dead family tree, merged with a chain link fence, you hope to God can be revived from a branch or two. Every accomplishment - scholarship, ivy-league acceptance, networking connection - does not satisfy my thirst for more. This is dangerous, but it is real.

I thrive off the sleepless nights, the four-hour commutes, the daily hundred page readings. Not because I want to, but because I am addicted to the game. This game of life.