prelude to my life in bullet points, in bullet points

• April 26, 1990. I was born at 8:42 pm. This is completely irrelevant.
• July 2-30, 2006. This was Genesis. Sort of a summer camp, sort of a community building experiment, sort of an accelerated college program. My response: Whatever. Pluralism, tolerance, self-awareness, spirituality, diversity--my new code of living. Fuck the Bible. I have an identity. I have friends. I have confidence. Now, at age 16, I feel like a respectable person worth whatever amount of square inches I take up on this planet.
• November 8, 2006. I am in high school. We have just ventured to a miserable, isolated campsite where a particular Orthodox Jewish has congregated about two hundred yeshiva high school students for a leadership conference. In other words, I have just spent four days in a state of complete misery surrounded by people taking lots of digital photos of their new "bff 4 life!!!!" while also pretending to participate in some useless programming intended to strengthen our "leadership skills" in our schools and communities. I leave the conference having collected the following pieces of information:
• There is no such thing as "leadership skills."
• Charity begins at home and stops at your college application.
• Judaism is not a religion. Nor is it a code of law. (Consider the aforementioned remark "Fuck the Bible" actualized.) Nor is it a culture. It is a community, but more like the communities I've read about in books by George Orwell. I decide to opt out of the structured Jewish community that in retrospect seems to have been built upon a foundation of brainwashing-produced bullshit. I also decide to opt out of any further brainwashing my school offered to me in the form of a classroom, a college guidance office or the term "headmaster." I will challenge everyone.
• April 26, 2008. The first time I got drunk, my 18th birthday, the sixth day of Passover. My family is entirely responsible.
• April 28, 2008. The eighth and final day of Passover. I spend the entire day crying hysterically because I am terrified. I am terrified of knowing. I have always planned to know it all, but I have never fully known, and I have never tried. It seemed disrespectful. It seemed too blunt, too inconsiderate, too damn sensitive. Gotta respect everybody's sensitivities. Especially the old people. I will never know directly from them, my grandparents, where I came from, since they won't tell me, I must use alternative means toward self-discovery.
• April 30, 2008. I fly to Poland.
• May 1, 2008. I'm home.