Statement of Purpose

For the rest of this summer, I will try to ensure that every blog entry is cancer-inspired, beginning with “MEMO TO MR. HODGKINS,” which was like my declaration of war (no more occupation!). That is, I will attempt to share experiences and thoughts that I do not think would have arisen in my mind, at this juncture in my life, without the help of Mr. Hodgkins’ (I am on personal terms with my illness; my description of him will come later) temporary residency. In this way, I suppose, you could call these entries a journal of my “cancer journey” (as people within the cancer community like to call this experience that I, like many, many others, am going through). I’m a little hesitant to embrace the term because of the numerous implications the word “journey” has; I admire the correlation between personal life and story (because we are all chapters within chapters of stories bound to other stories) that “journey” entails, but then it also sounds a little hokey, like the way Oprah would describe a novel in her book club; “journey” also almost sounds like a vacation, or an epic odyssey that one willingly takes. I know I am and will be further grateful for what I will take from all of this; I do know I will be stronger when I emerge, but it is not a “journey” that I would sign up for, especially since the specter of cancer will be one that will lurk around me for the rest of my life.

What I Think Chemotherapy Must Be Like

Imagine yourself on a beach, standing in waist-high water. A butterfly flutters over the waves and your eyes follow as it soars up into the cloudless sky. When you turn back to the sea, a large wave is rearing at you. You scurry up to dive beneath it, rather than having it crash on you. When you do, you pull a calf, grimace, and flop in the water as the wave crashes on you. While you grab your toes to stretch the knot out of your calf muscle, another wave, a much larger one, ten feet high, comes and crashes on you while you crawl toward the beach, to safety. Put the ocean pulls you further in while another wave builds up, this one even larger than the last. It pummels you, sending you tumbling and rolling out of control in the roiling currents. When the sea pulls back, leaving you coughing on the wet sand, you see another big wave rushing at you. With your tender calf you manage to stand up and limp toward the beach when the wave smacks you, sending you tumbling through the currents again. The ocean, ceaseless and remorseless, pounds you again and again as you lay there helpless, leaving you more exhausted with every wave that seem to grow stronger and darker. After a while, the ocean relents. Though depleted with the breath knocked out of you, you manage to cough and crawl back to dry sand where the ocean cannot beat on you any longer. You lie there, the sound of breaking waves not far behind you, until you’re able to stand and walk away.

This is what I think it will be like (eight sessions minimum, once every two weeks). I'll find out soon how right or wrong I am.

MEMO TO MR. HODGKINS
FROM MR. ALVARADO VALDIVIA
DATED 6/3/09

You fuck with me, you fuckin' with the best.

When "Being Unique" Goes Wrong

Being raised American, I was taught, again and again, that we’re all unique—like a fluttering snowflake or the fingerprints we have. In our culture, we’re encouraged to embrace, nurture our uniqueness. Well I’m here to tell you: it’s not always so great.

Observe! (with a sweeping hand, like one of The Price Is Right models) :

1) I’m an atheist: in the United States, that means I’m unlike 95% of the entire population. Within my greater family, which has 37 first cousins alone on my mother’s side of the family (that’s not counting those second and third cousins I keep meeting, everytime I go back), and over 30 aunties and uncles, I’m the only non-believer.

2) Within my big family, I’m probably the only one who has ever given vegetarianism a serious run (say, longer than, oh, an hour or a week).

3) I cannot roll my tongue, like an estimated 19-35% of the population. Additionally, I was born with what’s referred to informally as a “pigeon chest”, or Pectus carinatum, which, again, is an anomaly within the population.

4) Besides my primas Lita and Lourdes who live in Europe, I may be the only person within my family who has ever traveled to four continents.

5) And now, at the tender age of 29, I may very well be the first in my entire family to have what’s called a CT-guided needle aspiration of a "lesion" just off my right lung—which basically means that I’m going under a CAT Scan (which is short for Computerized Axial Tomography) in order to have a big needle plunged in and out of my chest to extract a sample for biopsy. In a family with no history of cancer, I maybe the first—at such a young age—to have some form of lymphoma.

Being “unique” isn’t so nifty right now.

How We Got Our Names, Not Pseudonyms

*this is an excerpt from a bigger piece I'm writing about my friendship with my good friend, J.J.


I think our names—first, middle, and last name(s) along with the names that we weren’t ultimately given by our parents—are significant in knowing someone. I’m not considering this from a numerology sense but in a melodic-spirit way. Perhaps it’s our minds, specifically mine, creating yet another distinctly human construct (such as linear time, malice, or God), but I believe people somehow or another end up behaving the way their names sound coupled with the way their faces look. It’s just one of my many unscientific theories of life, something J.J. and I excel in manufacturing. One of my favorite all-time J.J. Theories On Life is that you can’t trust a people, a culture, that lives in a peninsula, eats a form of soup yet doesn’t have some form of eating or soaking utility similar or equivalent to bread or a tortilla.

But back to names, J.J. and I are similar in that we were named after our fathers. It could be argued that we were destined towards a rebellious nature shortly after we were popped out of our mothers’ wombs once we were yawningly named after our dads—like we felt compelled, throughout our pubescence and young adulthood especially, to be that much more different than our spawners.

J.J.’s birth-given first name is Gerald (for his privacy, I won’t put out his full name). Instead of going by Junior, Gerald Jr. or Jerry Jr., his family chose to call him J.J.

My full name is Juan Manuel Alvarado Valdivia. My father, to his credit, did not want to name me after him but wanted to call me Huascar. In Quechua, the language the Incans and their Andean descendents presently use (my family es Peruano), the name means “Sun of Joy”. Huascar was the second to last Incan emperor, dethroned by his half-brother, Atahualpa, in a bloody civil war that occurred when the Spanish conquistadors landed on the empire. Huascar, being the last full-blooded Incan emperor, was said to be the favored ruler by the majority of the Incan peasants. It could be that these reasons were why my father wanted to name me after him. He was talked out of by my mom since it was an unusual name, even in Peru. Plus, my paternal grandfather was also named Juan so there was a sexy line of succession to continue (it ends with me). My cousins tell me I should be thankful because a popular juerga, a slang term in my ancestral homeland, is huasca, which means to be shit-faced drunk.

At times, I believe that even though I wasn’t named after the second to last Incan emperor, that I took and churn within me the spirit that the name would have entailed.

A New Year (or Tangy Titties)

The sun was sheeny past the windows that looked out over Judy and Carlisle’s backyard. The expansive view provided a glimpse of the backyards of at least four Victorians, each a different vibrant hue and picturesque with the clear blue sky behind them. “You’re not done with the tour yet,” Carlisle called out in his thick Southern accent as his shoes thumped on the wooden stairwell that led to the back.

With his gray Fedora hat a la Tom Landry perched on my noggin’, I stopped my petting and cooing of Rosie the pug and stood up from the rug. I stepped out into the sun and descended the steps that ran alongside an orange tree. Past the tree was a tiny fenced off area that appeared to be a forgotten garden, the leaves of some plants sagging and frayed at the ends, small red-orange tomatoes rotting on the lush soil.

Carlisle stood in the middle of the concrete patio beneath the tree. He grinned and held his arms out.

“Not bad, huh?” he asked as we peered up at the tree, its oranges and foliage glimmering in the sunlight.

“I’m gonna have to come out here when I’m high!” I replied.

“It gets better. Check this out,” he said before turning to open a door which led into a low-hanging garage, beneath his new home.

A fluorescent light flicked to life as I followed him in. He walked off to a corner and marched back, his head bent, with a five-foot long pole in hand. At one end was a cone-sized basket of sorts with what looked like a miniature rake protruding out on one side.

We stepped back into the warm blanket of sun as Carlisle turned a knob on the pole to extend it. With both hands firmly grasping it, he tilted it to the heavens. My jaw hung open in wonder as he negotiated an orange within the basket, then reared back to use the rake-part to pull the orange off its branch.

“And there you have an orange,” Carlisle said as he brought the pole down to ground level and allowed the fruit to roll off and onto the pavement. “Normally, you’d have another person on that end, grabbing them, putting them in a basket to speed the picking process.”

“That’s cool, man. What is that thing called?”

“A harvester,” he replied as he set it back against the house.

He walked back beneath the tree, plucked an orange from it and bent over to pick up the one from the ground. He handed them to me and picked one for himself.

We took a step to look out over the garden as Rosie descended the stairs. She took a rest at the bottom, licking her snout and staring at us in a lazy Sunday way. Carlisle told me that he wanted to eventually knock the elfin fence (it was about three feet high) so he wouldn’t feel so separate from it. For the time being, until he and Judy figured out what they were going to do with the space, they were keeping the gate that led out into the garden shut because Rosie would eat those rotting tomatoes. I chuckled since I remembered how fond she was of eating any crap we crossed on the sidewalks of the Mission, whenever I took her for a stroll.

We conversed about school, about how he wanted to cut back on his class load to have “more of a life” in the coming semester. I yacked about how I was trying to make the best of my vacation from classes by giving myself strict deadlines on finishing the books I was reading. While we spoke, Carlisle started to toss and catch his orange over his shoulders like a sideshow clown, his lips puckered and blue eyes bulging goofily. The juggle itch sifted into me and I started to chuck my oranges up in the air. A carnival tune began to toot in my brain. I couldn’t do anything nifty like Carlisle so in a move that recalled my pubescent years, I slipped one then both oranges underneath my Simpsons shirt to create pointy breasts which I would later dub "tangy titties". After I nestled them around for symmetricality, I turned to look up at Carlisle.

“Can you tell I’m sexually frustrated?” I quipped before we started laughing, the giddy sun and blue sky bereft of worry clouds getting to us.

my gift to mum

A young boy was bicycling down his street in Florida one January afternoon. The sky was overcast with dark clouds, their bellies full of rain as they obscured the setting sun. The boy lost control of his bicycle and fell hard, scraping his elbow badly against the concrete. The pain was terrible with blood flowing from where the skin had been scraped. He wailed and wailed. Once home, his mother soothed the boy, wiping the scrape clean, rocking him in her arms as she sat in a chair and told him everything was all right. While his cries turned to sniffles, their family watched on the television as the space shuttle exploded in the air, shortly after its launch. It was January 28, 1986.


In California on a sunny day, the boy, his shirt drenched in sweat, guzzled some water from his thermos as he waved goodbye to some of his teammates. He took a towel from his bag and wiped his forehead. In the parking lot, his mother patiently waited, looking through her wire-rim glasses for him. He put his towel away and swung the bag on his shoulder. He walked over to his soccer ball and nudged it along the field, then onto the pavement, as he walked to the car, his cleats tapping with each step like muffled heels. He opened the door and pounced in by saying, “Hi mom.” A yummy dinner she was cooking awaited.


Years later, the boy, now a freshman in college, sat in a hospital bed after a car accident. It was a rainy December morning when he lost control of the car. The accident mangled the car doors so badly that the paramedics decided the safest way to pull him out of the wrecked car was through the back windshield.

He sat in bed, his head numb and tingly, his neck wrapped with a heavy brace, when his mother stepped into the room. Her eyes were peeled open like saucers, a hand covering her mouth. She had been called from work and didn’t know what to expect. Maybe she knew then, before he told her what happened, that she had almost lost him. If a vehicle had been in the opposite lane of traffic when his car briefly hydroplaned into it, that would have probably been it for both drivers.


The sky over Arequipa that afternoon was a bland blue as the boy, now a bearded young man, entered el Cemeterio Apachete with his younger sister and their mother. They had come to pay respects to some of their beloved deceased with some fresh but dying flowers. The mother had already visited a few times on that trip and knew the women who worked by the entrance.

“Mamita, me haces un favor? Me puedes dar una jarra de agua para dar ha estas flores?” the mother, holding a bouquet of vibrant flowers she had just bought, said to a short woman in her late fifties. The woman must have worked at the cemetery, since she held a garden hose in her hand. She wore black pants and shoes, a blue vest over her maroon sweater and a gardener’s hat to protect from the sun. She told the mother that she didn’t have a spare bucket handy. “No te preocupes, mamita. Yo encuentro uno,” the mother replied affectionately.

The three continued on, walking towards the grandfather’s resting place. El Misti, the town's patron volcano, loomed over all the white adobe crosses, headstones, and mausoleums. The boy, now a bearded young man, still got humbled and amazed, after all these years, at the warmth, the gentleness, his mother was capable of giving to strangers. He has always wanted to be like her in this sense.


On Sunday, April 6, 2008, the boy, still a bearded young man, is riding his bicycle gently through the crisp air of Yosemite Valley. He had come to camp alone to celebrate his 29th birthday but his heart was brimming with love and good wishes from his family and friends. It was his last full day before driving back to his home in the foggy city. Even after doing the same act for three full days, the young man still couldn’t contain himself from staring up at the tops of the redwoods as they rolled past him, like nature’s own special effect. It was a wonderful privilege to be alive, he thought. At that moment, he was not sure if he had ever felt that happy, that contented.


In a few days, the boy, still a bearded young man, will take the BART train home to Fremont to be with his family. He will call his parents at the Hayward station to tell them where he is. His father or mother will assuredly answer by saying, “Okay, ya voy a salir a recogerte.” The young man will thank them and hang up, his work for that equation done.

In the parking lot, his mother will be waiting in her dark Toyota Corolla. She will be turned, watching the entrance for her boy through her thin-rimmed glasses, just like she did when she used to pick him up from soccer practice, from school, or from work (before he was given a car). The boy has always been beyond fortunate, even spoiled, to have both a father but especially a mother who never ceases to be there, like his very own constellation in the twinkling night.

And for this he will always be grateful.