I wasn't part of a vast crowd of smiling automatons. I can safely say that without clouded perception. When I hear that the nation is at war, I feel the weight and resonance of sadness: when I see visible poverty while stepping 10 miles out of my own town, yet see that we only seem to care about spending $368.6 billion on an euphemistic defense that could be our medicine and education; when I read in the Yomiuri Online News that a Japanese photo journalist was battered by American servicemen for witnessing the destruction in Baghdad and see that this information never reached the States and never will reach here and an apology will never carry over the Pacific; when I discover that some care more about egotism than altruism; when I find that people can treat and part each other with malevolence; when I see the strange pompous patriotism that pollutes us with cultural and ethnocentric naïveté shutting us out from the rest of the world; when I remember my grandfather in Japan describing his experiences in the Siberian labor camps and uttering how he hopes this grim history will not repeat for his grandchildren - it is then that I see why I was not a smiling automaton. With too many conditions and events overwhelming my spirits and energy, I was deprived of my ability to function; I dropped out of school for a month during my junior year. I feel my summer before re-entering the high school for my senior year was a turning point for me. I met Broc, a poetry student from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, while attending the Iowa Young Writer's Studio for two weeks. He was my summer workshop teacher's friend, and I had lunch with him for a brief moment, talking about identity and writing. It was a brief conversation, but I felt it was a deep-rooted conversation. He was a tall and lanky man with cigar-stained teeth, Buddy Holly glasses, and arms tattooed all over with the...