In this fine month of April, I spent the morning of my Wednesday in my political violence class, as is normal. Professor Tong is quite adamant on encouraging student participation and good performance in class. At the end of every week, he selects four students who have participated in class the most. The rest of the class then votes on who performed the best. I won the prize last week, which was a Starbucks gift card good for five dollars. One week later, I am still gleeful and eminently pleased.

Of course, this means that everyone in the class knows my name now. It's not necessarily bad, because it's a potentially great networking experience. However, it did lead to a very unexpected situation when "Vera" came and talked to me.

I attended a private Catholic K-8 school in the Bay Area from fourth to eighth grade. Having transferred from a secular school that I had attended since daycare, it was rather difficult for me to integrate into a class full of kids who had known each other since daycare. Moreover, my family and I are not religious and so we did not attend any of the churches that the other families attended regularly. Combined with the fact that I was awkward to the extent of social incompetence as a child, this meant that I didn't really make any friends.

In sixth grade, Vera transferred into the school. At the time, I had a friend/enemy named "Mara" who would regularly take advantage of my friendship to borrow money and never return it. She was a compulsive liar, but she was the only one who invited me to have fun and whatnot. Mara and Vera quickly made friends and so I tagged along. My parents hinted at the fact that Vera was not the most stable of children: she regularly switched homes and demanded to be called different nicknames depending on her volatile mood. However, I was quite desperate for acceptance, in the way that most young adolescents are.

During this year, two girls named "Abigail" and "Christine" had also transferred into the school. Abigail had grown up without much parental guidance: her parents were not together at the time. The mother was a flight attendant and regularly away from home, and the father was distant. She was spoiled by her grandparents. While this is a story about my sixth grade, I'll preview the end: in eighth grade, she was expelled with another girl for sneaking vodka onto campus in the guise of a water bottle and attempting to drink from it no further than twenty yards away from one of the school's sisters. Christine lived with her grandparents, because her parents were drug addicts. She was often delinquent herself, and flaunted her breaking of school rules. Both girls, with the subtle encouragement of Vera and Mara at times, bullied me relentlessly.

At the end of sixth grade, Christine was expelled for her routinely terrible behavior. Vera's guardians had her transferred out of the school.

Sixth grade was horribly unpleasant, to say the least. I became very withdrawn for the rest of my middle school years and it took the first two years of high school for me to become comfortable with engaging with others on a more personal basis than light friendship. Even then, the deepest friendships I have made are the ones I have made in university. However, I am always a work in progress.

This brings me back to Professor Tong's political violence class one morning in early April. After I had won the prize, Vera came up to me in class. "You went to Notre Dame, right?" I had no idea that I would ever meet someone from my childhood again, because most of them I had long-forgotten and fallen out of touch with.

I could barely recognize her from middle school. It was obvious that we had both grown up to become very different people. I had gone on to have a successful high school career and went on to be admitted to UCLA as a freshman. I briefly flicked through Vera's Facebook after she added me as a friend: at some point, she had moved to Southern California and transferred to UCLA as a junior. At any rate, we had lived such disparate lives since sixth grade and still managed to end up in the same classroom, studying the same subject, taking courses at the same university. The oddness of the entire situation was due to the fact that it was entirely mundane.

In that brief conversation, I didn't bring up her actions from sixth grade. I don't emotionally understand people who remember past grievances and decide to enact revenge years later. I can logically understand its premises and the outcome, but I find it to be counterproductive. Science has shown that decision-making is fundamentally emotional, not logical.

Hence, let me explain the pros and cons not in terms of logos but rather pathos:

Pros of enacting revenge: visceral self-satisfaction at sticking it to the person who tormented one years ago, albeit quite briefly, potential resolution of issues that have tormented one for years

Cons of enacting revenge: side effects may include guilt stemming from developing a fully-formed orbitofrontal (also known as the prefrontal) cortex, not really getting to know the person one just blew off, potentially looking like "100% a dick," as Peter Quill puts it in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Scientific digression: The orbitofrontal cortex is a very important part of the brain that determines what an appropriate emotional response is to any given situation. It's not fully-formed until one's early twenties, so children and adolescents don't usually have sound emotional responses to the world around them, because their neurochemistry does not physically account for it. Interestingly enough, this part of the brain is also responsible for determining procrastination - everyone has a temporal cost-benefit analysis function built into them, and it's in that part of the brain. Hence, one's analytical decision-making skills and one's emotional response skills are literally tied together.

Bringing up past mistreatment during one's childhood years doesn't have any long-term benefits. One is deliberately cutting off connections with another person and casting them to be the same person they were over five years ago. Most of us are not whom we were even two years ago and would hate to be judged on the merit of our past mistakes. Unless the person I'm talking to is either a cult leader and/or mass murderer, it's prudent to reevaluate the person on how they are presenting themselves to me in the current situation. Yes, one can get that revenge, but is it really as satisfying as it seems?

I talked to Vera briefly about her life since sixth grade. She was pleasant to talk to, albeit we didn't have much to talk about. In the end, I felt better about my own life and choices. I don't particularly relish what she did to me, and I sincerely hope that no child of mine goes through what I went through, but I don't blame Vera now the same way I would point fingers at the girl she used to be. We all make mistakes in judgment in childhood and adolescence. Some will really suffer from it. I am simply grateful that I am quite resilient and didn't suffer too badly. The point, however, is that I still felt that measure of closure and peace regarding her treatment of me in the past, and I didn't have to be rude to anyone to reach that conclusion.

I learned that our happiness and peace with the events of my life depends on my ability to accept that there are bad things in the world, and that they will affect my life. My response to those events is what will determine how happy and satisfying I find my life. Smooth seas never made for skilled sailors, and all that.

I won't lie and say it was good revenge. It's a total failure in revenge. I promised myself in sixth grade that my revenge would be growing up to be a better person and living a far more satisfying and successful life than Abigail or Christine would have, ten or twenty years in the future. That was to be my comeuppance. Revenge can be satisfying, but I get far better mileage out of living a fulfilling life.