First, The Game itself. The Game is difficult to describe, but once you're playing it, you know it. I could provide infinite quotes from various people discussing the ins and outs of The Game, but I think this wikiHow article on entering the rap game (lol) does a good job of covering the basics:
• [Your hustle] strengthens your mind. The longer you keep at it, the better you will be.
• Get ideas from books on your particular hustle. If there isn't one, write it.
• Be real. Rapping about your own life gives the song credibility.
• As long as your song makes the point you're trying to convey, length doesn't really matter.
• Be inspired by those whose hustle you respect.
• Rap does not have to be written; many rappers also freestyle. Be creative.
• Keep your rap original. Never copy someone else's style.
There's a lot more to The Game, of course, but those points sum it up nicely.
Now for the re-introduction.
I was literally born into The Game, having come from a long history of game players. The rules have been passed down from generation to generation in my family, and they haven't changed much over the centuries. My first and most important teachers of The Game were my parents and my grandparents. Of course, my entire family--and there's many of us--has had a hand in my ability to play this game. We do it very well individually, but together, we are quite the force to be reckoned with.
From the very beginning, it was a fight. I was born a few weeks earlier than I was supposed to have been. According to my mom, I was one of the tiniest babies on the floor: all of me, from head to toe, fit entirely in her hand. Luckily, I gained enough weight to be released from the hospital in less than a week's time. The Game was already in full effect by this point.
Fast forward two and a half, three years and I'm in preschool: reading books, writing my name on stuff, tying my own shoes. The tying-my-own-shoes bit even got my fellow preschoolers' moms noticing. One lady asked my mom to get me to help teach her son how to tie his shoes; he was a year older and still wearing those Velcro strap-on shoes.
these monstrosities. Baby swag.
I didn't think shoe tying was remarkable at all--the reading or writing, either--but it sure made me popular with all the preschool moms.
It was around this time that I realized I was different from the other kids. The teacher gave us an exercise one day: cut out paper shapes with kid-friendly scissors. Simple enough. But for the life of me, I couldn't get any of the scissors to work. It was incredibly frustrating for a three-year-old. After calling the teacher and teacher's aid over for help, they finally came to the conclusion that it wasn't the scissors fault: I was left-handed.
Left-handers' brains are wired differently. A 2006 study from the journal Neuropsychology suggests that left-handed people's brains are faster at processing multiple stimuli than right-handers. What that means is: left-handers typically have the upper hand in sports, gaming and other activities where players are forced to juggle large volumes of stimuli coming at them quickly. Left-handers more easily use both hemispheres of their brains to manage that stimuli, resulting in faster overall processing and response time. Like a computer!
Fascinating stuff. But anyways, that incident with the scissors in preschool was the first time I realized something was up.
Next: The School Years
