This decade the internet and I grew up together. In 2000 we were just kids. I was still drawing pictures with crayons and Google wasn’t even a verb yet. But by the time I was 11 I had my first cell phone, at12 I had my first computer, and I snuck onto MySpace at 13.

By the time I was in the ninth grade, technology and I were going steady. My Oakland public high school gave us laptops instead of textbooks. I loved that because I could quickly email my teachers for help, and instantly send my homework.

I have been struggling to get people to see the urgency of environmental action since my freshman year in high school. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Copenhagen, Denmark as one of the Sierra Club’s nineteen youth delegates to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And after all of my activism at home, I won’t accept any more delays on the road to an effective climate treaty.
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"Sign here and here," the notary public said to me after we reviewed yet another page of loan information. It was August, a month before my 21st birthday, and after signing the final page, I handed over a check that wiped out my bank account.

Three days later, I received the keys to my first house.

I feel like half my life I've been preparing to be a homeowner. Because I have.

I was eight when my family emigrated from El Salvador and our first financial obligation in the U.S. was to pay off the coyote who took us across the border. My dad set a goal -- he would pay the debt in two years, then buy a house. In a year and a half, we were living in our new home in the East Bay.

Purchasing that home was the beginning of my dad’s “school of real estate” -- and I was already enrolled. I remember sitting with Dad as he talked to the real estate broker. "Make sure you understand what this man is saying," Dad said.

Here’s a snapshot of my Saturday nights as a freshman at UC San Diego. My suitemates are all glammed up to go clubbing. My friends next door get cozy around the couches to watch a marathon of “The Office.” And where am I? I’m in my room with the door closed, doing…absolutely nothing. Ain’t college life grand?

That was the story of my life last year. My friends would ask me to come out with them, and I’d make up bogus excuses to stay in. Pretty soon, I got fewer and fewer of those invitations.

On my last day of school, I was laughing really hard at something a classmate said. My first instinct was to call my mom and tell her the joke. It didn’t hit me until I pulled out my phone -- there wouldn’t be an answer when I pressed send.

My mom died four months ago. At first, I didn’t know how to handle life without her. I wasn’t able to cry even when I saw her in bed after she had passed away in her sleep. It wasn’t until her funeral 10 days later, when the music started playing and the congregation lined up to see the casket, that I shed my first tears for her.

But after that, I felt blank. “What happens next?” I wondered. Who’s going to take me to the doctor’s office? Or to shop for back-to-school clothes?

But those are just the practical questions. What made my mom’s passing so difficult was that I didn’t just lose a loving parent. I lost my best friend – the person I talked to about everything. So here I am facing the hardest thing that’s ever happened, and she’s not here to help.

In the weeks after my mom died, I kept thinking about the only time she was depressed. Her mother had died and for a full month she acted like a different person. I was in third grade and I remember coming home every day and finding her crying in bed.

“You can’t grieve halfway,’’ she told me, “You’ve got to let yourself feel all the emotions when a loved one dies, or you won’t get over it.”

But when I was older and we’d talk about death she would give what seemed like the opposite advice. “When I close my eyes, I don’t want you crying over me,” she’d say. “‘Cause I’m G, and dying ain’t nothing but a G thang.”

G is short for gangster. It’s not like my mom was a gang-banger. But she was tough and strong. And after she died, she wanted me to be the same.

To me she’s still alive because she’s living through me. I know it’s going to be hard, but I’m taking her lessons and putting them to use. For my mom, I’m going to grieve all the way. Then do what Gs do, and keep on steppin’.
 

We met Joseph Rocha at an anti-Prop 8 rally in San Francisco back in May. Little did we know at the time that his story would prove to be so compelling. This week we asked Joseph to share his story with the audience of KQED-FM, and he produced the following Perspective.

By: Joseph Christopher Rocha

By Venus Morris.

Dear Mr. Superintendent,

by Lauren Silverman

I've been ducking and dodging the unfamiliar economic terms since the first financial bailout was announced, hoping phrases like "credit default swaps" and "short selling" might disappear. Well, they haven't; in fact, those pesky financial terms are showing up everywhere from Vanity Fair to Star Magazine (although Star chose to talk not about lost assets, but lost "cashola").

I’ve been an outcast since childhood. In school, I was either the skinny kid or the only black kid or the free lunch kid. In 6th grade, there was only one kid as bad off as I was—my friend Bobby. We were on the playground when he said, “I have something to tell you. Please don’t stop being my friend.” He told me he was gay. Me too, Bobby, me too.

Every crazy day, we had to stand up for ourselves and each other. After all, we couldn’t change who we were.

I’m a long way from 6th grade, but I still have the same struggles.

I am one of 45 seniors in my graduating class, and we’re the fourth class to graduate from my arts-centric charter school. With college around the corner, I started questioning if I should have gone to a larger, more traditional high school.