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exactly what I was doing, but more importantly, that I was going to be rich.
    My brother, Brian, changed all of that.
    I was seventeen. Brian was seven. He was in the kitchen sawing through a baseball with a steak knife. Like most kids his age, he was curious about everything. Brian wanted to see what was under the leather and stitching. He was slicing away at this thing when his hand slipped. He screamed. Blood everywhere. The knife sliced into his wrist and he started bawling, screaming, gripping his wrist while blood crept through his fingers. My parents weren’t home. I was listening to my seven-year-old brother scream as I called 911. I told them that my brother cut himself. Cut deep. I gave my address and told them to hurry, watching my brother yell, cry, bleed. I started to get light-headed watching the blood. The blood seeped through his fingers. It pooled on our kitchen floor. I watched the blood snake down his arm in deep red lines, dripping steadily from his elbow.
    The last thing I remember was blood.

    I had a phobia.
    If I saw blood I fainted.
    This would happen two more times in the form of a soccer cleat injury and during the dissection of a small pig in anatomy class. I had dissected a frog before, expertly making incisions with the scalpel and pinning its stomach flaps to the rubber bottom of the operation basin. All major organs were correctly identified. This gave me a bit of confidence back after the baseball incident with my brother. The pig, however, proved to me once again that I had a legitimate problem. Unlike the frog, it started bleeding when I cut into it. Gushing, actually.
    I woke up in the nurse’s office a few hours later.
    My plan was ruined. I couldn’t be a doctor.

    I graduated from Mission Viejo High School, enrolling in Cal State Fullerton with little to no direction. I picked a major: psychology. I joined a frat. The plan I had for the last twelve years had been botched, so my approach to college was keeping to the things that conformed to standards. Everyone wanted to join a frat. Everyone was doing psychology. Although my father continued to preach the advantages of going premed, psychology seemed like a safe bet, even though I had no passion for it. Psychology let people know that I had a plan. The frat let people know I was a part of something.
    The reality is that I was trying to find my way but I couldn’t. On the surface, it appeared that I knew what I was doing. Hooman had it figured out, people thought. He was on the path. Years from now, I was going to have a doctorate just like my father wanted. I would find that American dream. It even got to the point where I started setting monetary goals: first million by twenty-five. I’d be a multi-millionaire by twenty-seven. Psychology wasn’t going to allow me to do that, though. I wanted to get rich quick. I wanted to cut corners, and college seemed like the biggest corner of all. It was going to take at least seven years to earn my doctorate. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to devote myself to something I had little interest in. I had the same problem that most people my age had: I wanted to work very little and get a lot of money for it. It wasn’t an issue of being lazy. I was impatient, so I jumped at the first opportunity that came my way.

    My best friend at the time was in a band.
    The band was called Hey Stroker, and even though I didn’t particularly care for their music, I couldn’t deny that they were getting big in Orange County. They had a pretty decent following. Their shows usually sold out. They were going to make it; I knew that much. And I wanted to be part of this thing, but again, I didn’t like the music and I didn’t know how to play an instrument. What was clear to me was that being in the music industry was a hell of a lot more interesting to me than psychology. I enjoyed the scene. A lot of girls usually came out to see the band. It eventually got to a point where I was going to more