The Bookstore Kid
Before the internet arrived and made information frictionless, there were bookstores. I spent entire days in them as a child — not browsing, but inhabiting. My parents would give me pocket money and I'd disappear into the stacks for hours, reading things I couldn't afford to buy. Friends' houses were judged, at least partly, by what was on their shelves. We traded books the way other kids traded stickers.
Nobody told me to do this. There was no grade attached, no exam at the end. I was just a kid who found the world inside books more interesting than the one immediately outside — and who never quite lost that feeling.
How I Read
Widely, and without much strategic intent. I've never been able to force myself to read something purely because it was useful or improving. The moment a book feels like homework, it's finished. What I actually gravitate toward: science in its broadest sense — astronomy, biology, geology, chemistry, physics, the whole messy interconnected enterprise of trying to understand how things work. Finance and economics. Anything about time management, not because I'm good at it, but because I'm perpetually trying to be better.
What I don't read: literary fiction, which I've made peace with not enjoying despite feeling vaguely guilty about it. I genuinely admire people who can lose themselves in Proust. I am not one of them. Politics, for reasons of self-preservation. And languages — I have no gift for them, which is a humbling thing to admit for someone who conducts his entire professional life in a second language. Spanish is on the horizon, mostly for practical reasons: it would make traveling through Spain and Latin America considerably richer. But that's a future problem.
The reading happens at night, after everything else is done — paper books or Kindle, never a screen. One book a week is the goal. The reality is messier than that. But the practice of sitting down with a book, without notifications, remains one of the few parts of the day that feels entirely mine.
The Crisis Underneath
Here's the thing about being someone who reads: you develop a specific variety of anxiety that has nothing to do with career advancement or social status. It's the fear of not knowing enough. Of the world moving forward while you're stuck in the shallows.
The people around me worry about promotions. I worry about ignorance. Every book I don't read is a conversation I can't have, a connection I'll miss, a piece of the world that stays dark. The more I read, paradoxically, the worse this gets — because the more you learn, the more precisely you can map the territory you haven't covered yet. I've made my peace with the fact that this feeling never fully goes away. I've decided to treat it as fuel rather than dread.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
At some point, between work and a new baby and a mounting reading list, I stumbled onto a piece of information that felt almost too good to be true: West Valley-Mission Community College District offers free tuition to residents who live within the district boundaries. I live within the district boundaries!
I looked at the course catalog expecting continuing education basics. What I found was staggering. Outdoor skills. Diving. Cooking. Archery. Spanish. Field trips. And buried within it, two full academic programs that had my name on them: Park Management, and Ecology, Biodiversity & Conservation.
Currently In Session
Balancing a full-time job, a kid, two academic programs, and an attempt at a small business is, objectively, a lot. I won't pretend otherwise. Some weeks the schedule wins. But the motivation has never once wavered — because for the first time in years, what I'm learning is exactly what I want to be learning. Not for a performance review. Not for a credential that unlocks a salary band. Just because the material is genuinely fascinating and the world it's opening up is one I want to live in more deeply.
There's a saying I grew up with: Read Wide, Travel Far. The idea is that real education is both: the library and the road, theory and experience, the map and the territory. This page is the library half. The travel section is the road. Together, they're the education I'm actually proud of.