ajstravels.com > AJ's Bio

one journey.one world.one year

am approaching my 28^th year in this world. Until two years ago I felt I had my entire life’s path worked out. Like most kids, I decided what I wanted to do early on. Unlike most kids, I stuck to that plan religiously for the next twelve years. ‘The Plan’ was developed around the age of 13 and was remarkably adhered to with only a couple of tangents that were quickly brought into check. ‘The Plan’ went roughly like this: go to public high school for three years in Indiana – graduate early with honors diploma; apply to international boarding school in New Mexico; get accepted to and attend international boarding school for two years – graduate with International Baccalaureate (I.B.) degree and transferable credit; apply to top-flight college out East; get accepted to and attend top-flight college out East – graduate with B.A. in Political Science; apply to law school; get into law school; find prospective wife – get married by 26; graduate from law school; settle down in central Indiana; go to work for a law firm in Indianapolis; volunteer in politics; run for office by the age of 30; kids by 30; volunteer in community; work up political chain; The End.

‘The Plan’

As I said, for the most part I kept to ‘The Plan.’ I finished high school at the age of 16, was one of twenty-five U.S. students accepted into the boarding school where I completed my I.B. diploma, and got accepted to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland – not Harvard as I had been gunning for, but outstanding nevertheless. The first tangent from the plan was when I decided to leave the Academy at the conclusion of Plebe Summer when I realized during Academic Orientation that math, science and engineering were not at all what I wanted to study for 4-6 years. I had fortunately also been accepted into DePauw University in two of their ‘programs of distinction’ (the Honor’s Scholars and Media Fellows programs), so I went there instead for my college years. Then I was back to ‘The Plan.’ The second tangent occurred halfway through college when I decided to leave campus for a year and complete a series of internships in Washington, D.C. In the year and a half that I spent in Washington, I worked for lobbying groups, think tanks, a conservative training organization, the Speaker of the House’s press office, and a newspaper. I came back to DePauw and graduated two years later with a B.A. in Political Science. I applied to and was accepted into law school in Chicago, D.C., and finally Indianapolis – after I had paid my deposit to American University. My heart had been set on law school at Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis from the beginning, but my acceptance came later than the others and my frustration and approaching deadlines caused me to choose American until I was finally accepted to IU. In the part-time program of IU’s law school, I promptly found a girlfriend, decided she was ‘the one,’ and continued to follow ‘The Plan.’ I figured I had another year to decide if she was truly ‘it’ and we could still be married by 26 in keeping with ‘The Plan.’

On February 12, 2004 I literally woke up in a cold sweat. I had just seen my entire life play itself out in a dream and the boring, monotonous, predictable life that I saw had me terrified. It was as if something clicked and a slew of new opportunities presented themselves. These new opportunities, desires, and goals did not have a place in ‘The Plan.’ I did not like ‘The Plan’ anymore. ‘The Plan’ was a very bad idea. I panicked and called my mom. I truly had no idea what to do. Twelve years of completing Step 1 to get to Step 2 to get to Step 3 and beyond suddenly seemed like a very poor life choice. I found myself wanting to move beyond the borders I had set out for my life. I unexpectedly lusted to travel – whereas I had never been very interested in doing so before. The study of Law no longer appealed to me quite like it had before, nor did the idea of practicing in a large firm. I previously put stock only in certainty, now I craved creativity. I had lived my life without any ambition to step outside of ‘The Plan.’ Now I wanted to see the world, to create something new and not be confined by the legal establishment, and to not run through the motions. I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Mom thought this was a good idea.

On February 13, 2004, I scrapped ‘The Plan’ and decided to just live. This was one of the most liberating moments in my life. I realized that I wasn’t in fact losing my mind or suffering from a quarter-life crisis, but that I had been pretending to be someone else for so long that I had convinced myself that’s who I was. ‘The No-Plan Plan’ needed some immediate attention. I decided to apply to Kelley School of Business for the joint JD/MBA degree. I felt that this was important considering the lack of creativity I saw in the legal field. Business – though it was something I had never studied – appealed to me as something of a blank canvas with which I could work and make something my own. I decided that I needed to leave the country as soon as possible and travel around the world for a year before returning and finishing school. Though she was perfect in so many ways, I decided my girlfriend was a better fit for ‘The Plan’ than this new unpredictable world into which I was thrusting myself. I decided to put off the guitar until later.

I had every intention of leaving in August of 2004 and returning a year later with no real travel route other than a loose list of places I wanted to see and feats I wanted to accomplish. Two weeks after I had abandoned ‘The Plan,’ I received a call from the Deputy Secretary of State of Indiana who offered me an opportunity to become the Secretary of State’s Communication Director and member of his Executive Staff. All the excitement of setting a new course for my life had actually made me forget that I had released my resumé in hopes of finding a job to compliment my part-time studies. Any other offer would have been easy to ignore; however, this job was an amazing opportunity. I would be the youngest executive-level staff member in the statehouse and for the third-highest elected officer in the state. My boss would be somebody that I deeply respected as a leader and who was on track to become the head of the nation’s Secretaries of State. I would be getting unbeatable experience in an office that was at the center of law, business, and government. I would also have to give a two-year commitment – thus pushing back my travels at best two years, and at worst indefinitely.

Again after calling mom, I decided the risk was worth the opportunity that I had been offered and took the job with the Secretary of State. The next two years were anything but easy. Reflecting the reality of never taking a math or science class beyond boarding school, I got into Kelley School with an extremely lopsided GMAT score – twenty-something percentile in math and ninety-something in verbal. My day began at 6:00am, work until 5:30pm, run to the law school or business school with classes ending as late as 8:45pm, drive home, sleep, and repeat. I did this while managing the communications of a Secretary of State’s office that carried out two statewide elections, two legislative sessions, the nation’s first court-upheld law requiring voters to present photo-identification at the polls, and multimillion dollar campaigns to educate Hoosiers on smart investing and the new requirement to present ID when voting. I also volunteered on my boss’s successful reelection campaign which sometimes felt like a job on its own.

I left the Office of the Secretary of State in December of 2006 to return full-time to my studies and to finally leave and travel for my year abroad. Several months before that, I met a young woman who – completely unbeknownst to me – would later sweep me off my feet and to whom I would – as she likes to say ‘in a momentary lapse of sanity’ – later propose marriage. Sadly a mere few weeks before I was to leave for my trip, she informed me that my being away was too much and broke off our engagement. At the end of the Summer of 2007, I completed the law portion of my joint degree after finishing back-to-back study abroad sessions in China and Croatia, returned to Indiana for a few weeks to get my life in order, and left again for my eleven and a half months of travels.

In the last three years I have made some of the best friends of my life, met the woman I thought I was going to marry and then had her break up with me, successfully completed a dream job opportunity, drastically altered the course of my life, and completed more than two-thirds of graduate studies which will allow me countless career choices. While I’m not entirely sure who or what I will become on my journey around the world, that’s not such a bad thing. I know who I thought I was until a couple of years ago, and that was drastically wrong. Part of the goal for my 28^th Year is to really hash out the answer to who I am today.

‘What Shapes Me?’

I know a few things that work to shape who I am. I am extremely fortunate. Aside from leaving a great legacy in philanthropic donations to the San Diego, California community, my great-grandparents very generously helped pay for my education, my home, and so many experiences over the course of my life. My mother – who raised me as a single mom for the majority of my life – put herself through nursing and medical school to become a leader in her field of medicine. Before the passing of her grandparents, we lived an extremely frugal lifestyle as she worked to establish herself and her practice. Since then I have been able to have significant travel and educational experiences - all while being acutely aware that each opportunity has been a blessing. I can only hope to live up to the example my mother and great-grandparents have set for me.

I am extremely trusting. I approach every relationship I have fully trusting an individual until they give me reason not to. While I have certainly been burned on a few occasions because of this philosophy, I find it helps me have a far more positive outlook on life than many of my peers. Doing so allows me to make friends more quickly without carrying the burden of having to eventually ‘let down my guard.’ I also learn from the situations where an individual has exploited my trust, and know how to identify and avoid those types of individuals in the future. This continues to be a learning process, but I find it allows me incredible peace of mind when doing anything from meeting somebody for the first time to delegating responsibility and asking for help.

I am fiercely loyal. I will not blindly follow any individual or any group, but I will go to great lengths to be their strongest advocate. I have been told this quality is what made me such a good political spokesman and what makes me an attractive candidate for anything ranging from marketing to lobbying. I think of it more as common sense. If there is a product, individual, or institution that I feel benefits me or others I care about in some way, I will make every effort to channel business, references, or whatever else is needed to keep them around. This brings up another aspect about me: Who do I care about?

I care about everybody. As a teenager and in my early twenties, one of the hardest repeated tasks I ever had to do was break up with a girlfriend. No matter the reason behind the breakup, I still cared a great deal about them as a person. This is not to say I adhere to some clichéd breakup line, but the truth is that I carry an incredibly high level of empathy for everybody. As an offshoot of this, I feel as if I can never truly be content in a career where I’m not serving people directly in some way, working to enact some change that creates a better world or anything that can be viewed as money-driven in the sense of filling my pockets before considering the needs of others.

I have a love/hate relationship with politics. I seem to go on two-year cycles of an ‘on again, off again’ enchantment with that world. Currently I am in the ‘off again’ phase, but I already feel the twinge of excitement over the 2008 presidential campaign. I love governing, but I hate politics. I love being able to help people on a grand scale, but I hate the game that puts people in that position. I have worked in politics from every possible angle from volunteering and helping managing campaigns to lobbying politicians. I have worked in Washington think tanks that write policy papers, worked for the politicians to spin those policy papers to the media, and worked for the media that tries to see through the spin. I have seen how the lust for power can corrupt. I have seen the sleazy politicians and the compassionate statesmen – I aspire someday to be the latter if I am called to do so. Returning to ‘The Plan’ for a moment, I realized that I was pushing for something that I could probably get, but that in doing so I was losing something. ‘The Plan’ was definitely the track toward being a politician and not a statesman. I hope that one day I am able to gather enough experiences and show that I have a vision for my community, my state and my country that others not only share, but desire to be seen put in motion. I have seen the good and the bad in government as well as in business, and I feel I will have something positive to offer at some point down the road. I am an unabashed fiscal conservative, socially moderate, environmentalist. While I have fore some time affiliated myself with the Republican Party, no political party will ever dictate my beliefs.

I’m an optimist and an idealist. Possibly due to my trusting nature, I refuse to see any situation in a negative light. Certainly I’ve been down before and felt as if my world was in dire straits, but I’ve always also felt as if I would persevere and that life would go on and get better. I find that putting a positive spin on something can get anybody to at least re-examine or think outside the box on an issue that is unresolved. If I begin to sound like I’ve given up, that’s when you should start to worry. I love to make people happy and share in their joy. I often think owning and operating a restaurant would be my ideal job because I could put everything into serving public all of the time.

I’m a second-generation Puerto Rican born in the United States, and of Scotch-Irish heritage with roots dating back to the American Revolution. My father passed away when I was very young, and I lost track of the Puerto Rican side of the family for almost 20 years before finding them again last year. I’ve seen and dealt with racism due to my ethnicity from both sides and I feel that it has made me a stronger person and one that refuses to ever see race as a crutch or an excuse. While I feel that racism today certainly exists, I feel that it persists as a result of ignorance – not as an institutional effort to oppress any one group. I feel that we have reached a stage in our nation where we can and should begin moving toward a color-blind society, and divisive and accusatory speech no longer has a place on any side. I believe strongly in not letting race define an individual, but for an individual to define his or her race.

I have a strong sense of duty – duty to my country and to my fellow man. One of the primary reasons I applied to the Naval Academy was to serve in our nation’s armed forces. I still feel a void that I realize can only be filled by one day returning to the military in some capacity. I also feel the need to fight poverty and the oppressed, and in addition to smaller scale volunteer projects, I feel that the Peace Corps is not out of the question as an option for the future.

I honestly do not believe I can be content as a ‘cog in a machine.’ While I am fine keeping a low profile when necessary, making a career out of doing so simply is not a viable option for me. Being accountable to only me and having the buck stop with me is something I not only prefer, but something on which I thrive. I am not afraid to make big decisions, to take risks when necessary, and to take full responsibility for my actions when things go wrong. I know my limitations and where my knowledge and abilities can no longer carry me, and I am not afraid to ask for help.

I love my home. I truly love Indiana – the way summer smells, the sound of crickets, our fairs, and the people that I have met travelling the state. I love Indiana’s potential and its values. I aspire to help make my state reach its potential while maintaining those values. I love my log cabin in Morgan County where I grew up and where I hope my children can one day grow. While I feel a strong connection to Washington, D.C. and can see a life that includes working there – Indiana will always be my home and where I feel grounded. I am not me without my home.

My 28^th Year

I’ve resolved to leave the United States to travel around the world for my 28th year. As I’ve said before, I spent so many years trying to be somebody else that it’s difficult to say exactly who I truly am. I hope to find that this coming year – free from work, school, and loved ones. I know some of what makes me tick, but I don’t know how those things fit together. When I return in August of 2008, I hope to add a new chapter to this called ‘What I Discovered,’ and use that knowledge to further shape the direction my life will take. I plan to travel with my possessions on my back, sleep on couches of former classmates, write, dig trench toilets, volunteer at orphanages and legal clinics, rekindle old friendships, create new relationships, write more, challenge myself, and hopefully learn how to play the guitar.

Vital Stats

Name: Joseph Adamje ‘AJ’ Feeney-Ruiz

Nickname: AJ - Which stands for Adamje (pronounced: Adam - Jay), which stands for Adam Jésus

Birth Date: September 8, 1980 (Virgo - double Cancer Rising, Year of the Monkey, Three of Diamonds)

Hometown/Nationality: Indianapolis, Indiana/USA

Ethnicity: Puerto Rican (Taini Indian) and Scotch Irish (hence the flat face, tan skin, red hair and freckles)

Height: 6’1” (194cm)

Weight: About 180-190lbs (79-84kg) (depending on food and drink consumption and physical activity)

Significant Other: My guitar “Gracie”

Occupation: Currently “International Adventurer,” formerly Communications Director and JD/MBA Student

Education: K-6th Grade (St. Richard’s Episcopal School - Indianapolis, IN 1992), 7-8th Grade (St. Joseph’s Episcopal School - Boynton Beach, FL 1994), High School Diploma (Martinsville High School - Martinsville, IN 1998), I.B. (United World College - USA - Montezuma, NM 1999), B.A. Political Science (DePauw University - Greencastle, IN 2004), J.D./M.B.A. (Indiana University - Indianapolis, IN Expected 2009)

Heroes: My mom, Teddy Roosevelt, and Indiana Jones

Favorite Books: Not Fade Away, Travels, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff

Favorite Movies: Indiana Jones Trilogy, Saving Private Ryan, Batman & Batman Begins

Food: Pumpkin pie, Anything cooked on a charcoal grill

Drink: Milk, Apple Juice, Green Tea, Gin and Tonic, Mojito

Hobbies: Travel, SCUBA, Thai Kickboxing, Gadgets, Reading, Swimming, Guitar, Indianapolis Colts Football (American), Chicago Cubs (Major League Baseball)