The Ray

Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself!

2011-07-13T13:15:00.001-07:00

Well a lot has happened since I last posted. A heck of a lot!

I graduated from college in May, with honors and all that jazz. I stayed in the apartment with H until very recently, when I found out she was cheating on me again, this time with a friend of mine.

Betrayal bites. But I learned my lesson, I can't be so trusting. And My UHaul days are behind me haha.

Now for the big big news: I am going to SEMINARY soon! (Future) Pastor Rachel in the haus yawl! This is a very exciting, scary, anxiety producing, but mostly exciting, time in my life. I am so blessed, so happy to have these last few weeks with my friends and family before going off to school (another 4 years, but I'll be home off and on).

I have a lot of thoughts on seminary, and on everything that has been going on in my life lately, and this blog is simply too outdated for me.

I've grown up so much in the last few months, probably most especially ever since I graduated in May. I've learned a lot about life, relationships, toxic people, my true friends, and most importantly I've learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of. I am so much stronger, and wiser, for everything I have gone through. When I get to seminary I'll probably send H a postcard thanking her for being the heinous c u next Tuesday that she is, lest I would still be the innocent and naive little girl playing house, giving up my dreams so I could stay with a treacherous snake like her.

Moving on.

All that being said: I am going to start a new blog, and probably link it back to this one but we shall see. I need a nice clean slate. Moving hundreds of miles away, fresh start, fresh city, and a fresh blog for me to write all about my new life.

Hope all is well out there in blogland, sorry I have neglected this sad old blog. But I am so happy now, so content, so grown up and ready for life to truly begin.

Amen.

Finding Love and Acceptance

2010-10-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

The coming out process is often very difficult for the individual identifying as GLBT or Q. Sometimes (and in fact, more often than not) it is also difficult for that individual's family and friends. I have been blessed with family and friends who could not care less, and who truly desire only that I be happy. Many people, when coming out, hear family members or friends say that they only want their happiness, but in the end if they cannot conform to their family/friends' picture of their happiness, they become unhappy (or at the very worst, insane trying to conform).

It is a struggle to accept who one is, particularly if one does not fit the bill for the "normal" person (obviously depending upon one's culture, gender, upbringing, etc.) That struggle is only compounded when one can't truly be oneself around the most important people, or when family or friends are perpetually of the belief that in time, one can change. Sexuality is fluid, but not so fluid as to completely alter one's mindset.

What I'm trying desperately to say is that, if you have ever come out, you know how terrifying it can be. You know how lonely is can feel, even though so many people have done it before you and so many will follow. If you haven't come out, or you are struggling, don't isolate yourself from the people around you. They love you and they want the best for you. If at the end of the day they don't make you feel good about yourself, let them know. If they make you outright feel bad about yourself, cut them out of your life as best you can, and make sure they are aware that they are loosing you, you are not loosing them.

The phrase "all you need is love" is only partially true, and perhaps misleading. We all need love, yes, but we also need to love ourselves. If you don't love yourself you cannot POSSIBLY love anyone else, and if you don't respect yourself you cannot respect anyone else. Certainly love and respect come from within, but they are taught from without, and a great deal of learning is necessary when one sees the lack of love and respect in one's life. If you have no love in your life, find it, and find it within yourself before you go looking for it with someone else. We are all very good at something or another, and when you find what it is, cling to it with iron talons.

I'm so grateful to the people who love me, and I know if I told them that they would be glad to hear me say it, but also sad that it is necessary to be thankful for love and acceptance when both of those things should be given freely. I hope that everyone who is struggling to accept themselves can come to find love, acceptance and peace with themselves.

Much Better

2010-09-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

I just needed some time. Obviously things aren't 100%, and who knows they might not be for a very long time, but I'm thinking right now I'm at around 50-75%. I can't let it get me down because I need to focus on my life, my studies and my future.

I can't just sit around and wallow all day, nor do I want to. Tomorrow night I'm going out drinking with one of my best friends, Thursday night I'm probably doing the same, and this weekend is going to be a shitshow (the Berlin Fair in CT, if you're in the area you should go, it's a little on the hillbilly side but it's fantastic). I'm 21 years old and I have to do me, and if others try and get me down I just have to cut them out of my life. It's hard because we live together, and because I want to be her friend and so much of me wants to go back to being in a romantic relationship with her, but I can't force anything right now. The only thing I can force is the smile on my face, whether faked or genuine. There are people in my life who need me to be strong and need me to keep trudging uphill, and so that's what I'm going to do. And some day I'm going to get back to the top of the hill, look down and say "I made it home."

For right now I feel like I'm three people trapped in one person's body (not like dissociative identity disorder or anything), and it's kind of funny because it took this huge blow out break up to make me see it. I feel like the person I was before I studied abroad, the person I was when I was abroad, and the person I am not (post-study abroad) are all battling it out to see who will get to control me. I grew up so much when I was abroad, enough to see that some things matter less than others (especially at 21 years). I learned that when you fall, sometimes the only person who can pick you up is you, no matter who tries to grad your hand and pull you up. The person I used to be though didn't know those things, was very dependent and immature. When I was abroad I shined it on like I was brave, but inside I was terrified more often then not. So now I have the kid, the coward, and the adult fighting for the claim over my personality.

The only thing all three of those people have in common is that eventually, maybe not right away but eventually, they all accept what is happening and learn to deal. And if that isn't a blessing I don't know what is.

So life isn't great right now, but it is good and it is real and here and everything wonderful. I believe I've said before that to feel anything, be it pain, anger, joy, fear, or any of the multitude of adjectives to describe human emotion, is not truly the "point" in life. The point in life is to feel anything and everything and appreciate the gift of emotion for what it is. If we are feeling, we are alive.

Cheater

2010-09-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

So Hillary has been cheating on me with her ex boyfriend. She cheated on me "five times" between "February, 2010 and July, 2010."

I am absolutely devastated. I thought she was the love of me life, I thought I would marry her. She is my first real love, and I still love and care about her so deeply. She says she loves and cares about me, too, and that her cheating "wasn't a personal attack on" me but that she was "confused" and didn't think she was "gay enough" for me. But how can someone cheat when they truly love and care about the person they are in a relationship with? Why couldn't she talk to me about how she was feeling instead of sleeping with her ex?

She always told me not to worry about him. He was her first love, the only guy she ever really enjoyed sleeping with, but he never had an interest in her after he broke her heart in high school, and she pined after him like a lost puppy. They were "just good friends" who talked frequently enough. I never met him, she wouldn't allow me to meet him, even though she talked about him enough. So last night she told me that they have been fucking, for lack of a better expression, in our bed, in our apartment.

I am completely at a loss. I had every opportunity to cheat on her, when I was abroad and when I was home, and I never did. AND an ex is an ex for a reason, as I say, and once that drama is over it's over for good.

I haven't slept in over 30 hours and I haven't eaten anything. There was a period of time that I couldn't stop crying. I just kept saying "no, no, no, tell me you're lying." It brought back so many different memories. It reminded me of when my father died, losing a huge piece of myself that would never be replaced. It reminded me of when I was 14 and I was sexually assaulted and I lost my innocence. I was totally violated, and this situation makes me feel dirty, violated and wrong.

Just last Saturday she was holding my hand at a party, trying to pull me into the bathroom with her. She didn't seem too confused then. Why has she been stringing me along all these months just to devastate me now? What if we had gotten married and I learned the truth too late?

She wants my forgiveness, she wants to try and rebuild this relationship and repair my heart. I don't know if I will be able to do that. I am so enraged right now, and so depressed, and so lost. I love her and care about her, but I am entirely unsure as to what to do.

Any advice?

A History of Immigration

2010-08-05T09:18:00.001-07:00

I read a lot of blogs focusing on a wide variety of issues. I read a pro-choice blog, an anti-conservative blog, and anti-racist blog, an anti-tea bagger blog, etc. Mainly they are just ways to pass the time when I'm not busy, ways to have a good laugh. More and more frequently, however, reading these blogs has become very disturbing, for a number of reasons. First, the amount of suggested violence on the part of the "bigots," "right-wingers," "anti-choicers," "tea partiers," etc. is very unsettling. Though I have never seen a "liberal" (or rather a "non-vitriolic conservative") suggest violence on or against anyone, I am sure it has happened. It alarms me that we as a country have apparently completely polarized ourselves. Either we are extreme liberals or extreme conservatives, there can be no middle ground. To me it reeks of civil war, which I am sure many conservatives would be pleased with (go ahead, Texas and Virginia, break away from the Union). When I think of the modern two-party system in America, I have visions of a World War I battlefield, with trenches dug on either side of a muddied field, with decapitated trees and lifeless grass laying immobile surrounded by the rigid bodies of young people sent far from their homes to defend an intangible cause.

It truly scares me, to know that there are people in this very country who feel enough hatred of gays, liberals, pro-choicers, non-Christians, non-whites, etc. that they would put their lives on the line. Often in the name of Christ.

It's really terrifying, if you think about it. I want to move to Canada so badly some times, but the process of becoming a Canadian citizen (while easier than becoming an American citizen) is daunting, and only if you have a job offer or a family member petitioning for you can you begin the citizenship process. I looked into going to seminary in Canada, but the Lutheran Church of Canada only ordains males and is one of the few Canadian organizations that openly does not acknowledge the Canadian ruling to allow same-sex marriage. As someone who is strongly considering seminary post-undergraduate graduation, and unwilling to switch denominations, it seems as though a move to Canada is out of the question.

Thinking of these things got my blood boiling regarding immigration in the United States. The other day I read an article about a young illegal alien who, driving drunk, killed a nun and injured two others. The nuns' order is ashamed that the killing of this nun by this young man has caused such a political debate surrounding immigration. The young man had MANY infractions against his driving record, he had driven drunk many times and it was not his first drunk driving accident. In 2008 a judge was set to rule at the closing of his deportation hearings, but the ruling has apparently been in limbo for the past two years, as he has not been deported. We religious folk are commanded to be forgiving (hard as it is almost all of the time), and certainly those three nuns would forgive this young man, if they could, though they would also likely want him to pay for his crimes (grant under Caeser what is Caeser's, after all). But the fact that he is an illegal immigrant complicates the situation, to the extreme.

So I got to thinking, aren't we all technically illegal immigrants, besides 100% Native Americans? If you look back on the history of this hemisphere, North, Central and South America have always been populated by native peoples. During the shifting of the continents the native people were separated and lived nomadic lifestyles of hunting, gathering, fishing and worshipping. While in Europe, the Middle East and Asia technology began to rapidly expand (as a result of all of those civilizations being so close together), the indiginous peoples of the Americas survived and thrived in their own ways. In Central and South America the Aztecs and Mayans flourished, creating technology that to this day is neither understood nor appreciated. Spain, in its lust for gold, conquered South and Central America, under the guise of wanting to "Christianize" the heathens they murdered them with disease, raped them and diluted their gene pools, made them slaves, sent them back to Europe to be palace pets for the King and Queen, etc. Much earlier, in the far north of present day Canada, Vikings began exploring the American north-east. To this day there is a native tribe in Northern Canada that bears the lasting effects of the Vikings (recessive blonde hair and blue eyes), though the Vikings ostensibly did not rape and pillage these people but rather integrated themselves with the already existing culture.

England and France, feeling that Spain should not be the sole benefactor of America's gold-rich soil, sent ships to what is today North America. The clash with the Natives in North America was not as violent at first as it was with the Spanish, who more of less destroyed everything in their path. In present day Canada the tribes were preserved by their ability to move across the snow and ice, leaving the settlers without access to their villages, hunting grounds, etc (at least for a short while). The United States, though, was perfect for building, colonizing, stealing resources and land. These "explorers" were no more than murderers, killing anyone or anything that got in their way. Never once did they pass a security check point, where they were forced to present proof of citizenship, or even a passport. No one questioned their authority or identity.

Today if you are driving along the highways of Utah, Arizona or Nevada you will likely see the remanents of the rape and pillage of the American Indian. One room cement and mud shanties, with tin roofs and a dusty yard. Alcoholism, casinos, drug use, a much much much higher statistic for the number of women and girls raped, almost rampant illegal activity, all as a result of "illegal immigration." When someone with brown skin attempts to cross the border into the modern day United States, they might be shot, or deported, or they might live for a few years in their new country, then fall victim to drugs or alcohol and kill a nun. Not many years ago, this was not the United States, Mexico was not Mexico, and Canada was not Canada. There were no borders, besides tribal borders. Individuals were bound to their tribes and their peoples. With the "illegal immigrants" from England, France and Spain came a lack of respect for brown skin, a lack of appreciate for neighbourly love and respect and a complete lack of concern for the sanctity of human life.

Catching Up

2010-08-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in a long time, so I'm gonna.

Summer is going by EXTREMELY fast, hence the lack of blogging. I was offered three jobs at the beginning of the summer, but then I found out that I got an independent study in Cambridge next year and my honors thesis proposal for the English department was accepted, so I declined one of the jobs so that I could work on getting ready for both of those things. Needless to say, I'm poor, but I'm not unhappy. And if and when I get into graduate school next year, I will be even more poor. So it goes.

So much has happened since I last blogged! I went to the conference for my church, and it was really really awesome I had a wonderful time. Lots of worship, food, time to hang out with my pastor, voting on resolutions (including a resolution to denounce the Arizona immigration initiative).

I turned 21 on June 12. It's not as much fun as it's cracked up to be, but I LOVE being able to buy myself alcohol when I go to the grocery store or the liquor store. In college when you're under 21 you're pretty limited to Bud Lite (if you're lucky) or Mich lite (if you're even luckier), but there are so many more varities to choose from. I'm becoming a beer snob. If you're ever in the Massachusetts area try Wachusett Mountain Blueberry beer, so good.

I'm house sitting for one of my employers while she is on vacation for a month, and she has a pool so it's pretty freakin sweet. She's a really wonderful person on top of having a pool and a yard (I miss having outdoor space, so it's amazing for me to be able to go to her house and just hang out outside), I'm really lucky that she found me and we get along.

We went to see Dave Matthews a few days before my birthday, the concert was really good actually. I thought Dave might suck live, for some reason, but he was really good. Boyd Tinsley, however, Dave's violinist, definitely stole the show. I'd go straight for Boyd, what a looker.

Last weekend was my family reunion weekend, which got ever the complicated by the fact that Hillary and I were going to see Brandi Carlile at the Casino Ballroom in Hampton, NH Friday night, the reunion was Saturday in the Catskills in NY (and my whole family was there from Friday to Sunday at the campground), and we were going to see Lilith Fair in Hartford on Sunday. Brandi was awesome, per usual (if you ever have the chance to see Brandi live, do it!), but we ended up leaving NH around 11 pm, and we drove straight to NY and ended up pulling into the camp site around 4:30 in the morning. We woke up Saturday around 11 and did the reunion thing, which was a lot of fun as it always is (it just always goes by so quickly). Sunday morning we left around 10 am or so and drove to my house in CT, got there around 1 and had to turn around and grab some lunch and head over to the Meadows in Hartford.

I'm going to be real for a second and say that I was a might bit disappointed in Lilith Fair. I guess I just always had this perception that it would be this amazing eye opening chick rock experience, and to an extent it was but on a SUPER small scale. When I think chick rock I think Brandi Carlile, Indigo Girls, Alanis Morisette, Sarah McLachlan, Sinead O'Connor, Sheryl Crowe, Tegan and Sara, the Dixie Chicks, Ani Difranco, Cyndi Lauper, to name a VERY few. As much as Ingrid Michaelson, Cat Power and Sarah Barellis were good (Cat Power to a lesser extent), they don't strike me as timeless the way any and all of the aforementioned artists do. In any event, the Indigo Girls were fantastic live, everything I hoped for and so much more. Sarah McLachlan kind of disappointed me, I won't lie, and 'Ice Cream' almost made up for it, but not really. She just didn't sound the way I expected she would, whereas the Indigo Girls were up there singing dancing and playing their instruments like they were standing in a recording studio.

I'm pleased with my summer, and hopefully I will be in the right frame of mind to blog more frequently between now and September, since I fear that I will drop off the face of the Earth come the beginning of my senior year (I can't f**king believe it).

Hope everyone out there enjoyed June, July and has a very lovely August!

My Awesome Week

2010-05-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

I seem to be having the best luck lately. I s'pose I'll start with the beginning of last week.

My college, like the rest of the world, is very low on funds. It is an extremely small college, and therefore tuition/room/board have all gone up. Faculty and staff salaries have been cut and cut and cut. Finally, they made the decision to let some faculty members go. They did this without consulting or even notifying the students.

My involvement with this bull**** started way back in February or March when one of the Sisters, formerly the president of the college, died, and no one notified us (the only way I found out was because Hillary got an email about it, since she is a staff member). I was so rip**** thatI bitched and bitched until they sent out a student and alum-wide email (I felt particularly strongly about this because this particular Sister, besides being a sweet woman whom I had seen many times in the gym and the cafeteria, was the president of the college when my mother attended). Then the Dean of the School of the Arts and Sciences resigned, to move on to a new position elsewhere, and students again were not notified. This time I did everything I could to spread the news and alert students to the fact that we were all, basically, being lied to by omission. Then I found out about the professors being laid off and s**t really hit the fan. Last Monday I helped organise a student run protest/forum to start spreading the information that was being with held. I really pissed a lot of people off, but I feel that, we are paying enough money to go to college that we should be told the truth and kept informed about decisions made regarding our education and the college itself. One of the people who helped organise it with me got fired from his on-campus job and lost his housing. Another person was threatened that, if she attended to event, she would not receive the award she was schedulued to receive at baccalaureate. Another person was told that if she wanted to keep her position as president of the senior class, she would not allow the event to go on. They tried to get to me through Hillary. These people are monsters, and I will do everything in my power to make their lives miserable. Threatening 20 year olds, really mature. The event was very successful, and we are well on our way to open communication. But as long as the slimeballs who run this college are still employed, I still have work to do.

I connected with an alum of the college, who lives in the same town as the college, who also has beef with the "big 4" (the big admins of the school). She's very intelligent, and also very funny, and she graduated a year after my mother, which is really cool. She offered me a job this summer helping her out with office stuff and working with the GSA in the town, which she started and runs. I am SO pumped! This happened on Tuesday.

I've been applying to tons of jobs lately. I recently got a call from one place, and I had my interview yesterday and I basically have the job. It's in retail, and I have no retail experience but I'm pretty friendly and it will be great to have something to do this summer (and to be saving money for grad school).

I got a call the other night from the new pastor of my church (she's the temporary pastor, but she's a really nice lady) and she wants me to be one of three representatives (voting members) of our church who attend this year's Synod Assembly. It's basically this huge church meeting that takes three days. I think churches from six states will be attending (the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America), so there will be lots of people and it's a really big deal. I am so honored, and unfortunately it's the weekend right before my 21st birthday so I won't be able to have beers with the rest of the New England Lutherans, but I will totally be there and it's going to be amazing.

Tomorrow is my last final exam, and then at 5:30 tomorrow night I'm flying to Florida. I'll be there until Saturday, enjoying the 2010 Flower and Garden Festival in Disney. We're going to see Dave Matthews Band on June 8th, Brandi Carlile on July 30th and LILITH FAIR in HARTFORD on August 1. And, of course, I turn 21 on June 12, which happens to coincide with the Boston Pride Parade. Oh it's going to be a great summer.

Hope everyone else has had a good week!

Sister Act

2010-04-14T17:28:00.001-07:00

I was talking about the future with my friends at lunch today, and it occurred to me...

I've always wanted to be a Nun, but I've never been Catholic. I've always wanted to go to graduate school and eventually get my PhD. I want to teach at university.

Everyone knows all nuns are closet lesbians, and if the nuns walking around campus at my college are any testiment the validity of that fact... well let's just say it's accurate. (I go to a Catholic College founded and run by nuns.) I would totally fit right in.

And so it hit me: I should become a nun, have the Catholic Church PAY for the rest of my education (masters degree, PhD, etc. etc.), PAY for my living situation, and GET me a job! And then if I feel like it, I can stop being a nun after all that's taken care of. I like doing good deeds for the underserved, I love helping people, and I LOVE being in college. Being a sister would just be awesome, I don't know why I haven't thought it of before...

But I'm not Catholic. And I'm living in sin with another woman (and our two cats). This could get complicated.

If all else fails, I will just have to take our crazy amounts of loan and be in debt until I'm 200.

Hypothetically Speaking...

2010-04-12T16:28:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to stop in and clear something up really quick, for anyone and everyone who might stumble upon this most humble and neglected blog.

If a man (say he is an American, mid thirties, well-educated, well-connected to the community, with a respectable job, living in a major metropolitan area) molests/rapes a child (the sex/gender of the child is not important), he immediately becomes a pariah, shunned from the community and very likely his own family. He will most likely loose his job (and his income), custody of any and all of his children (when his partner divorces him), and he will be sent to prison for a period of time. When news of the crime begins to spread, he will be ostracized to the highest degree. When he is released from prison, after much therapy, he will be on probation for a term signifantly longer than his prison sentance (depending on the severity of the crime, the number of children, state laws, etc.). He will still receive death threats in the mail. He will fear for his life every second of every day until his life is no more.

And that's the way it should be.

But if a group of men (say they are between the ages of 25 and 100, all well-educated, well-connected, prominent members of their respective communities, living in many towns, villages and cities across the world) collective molest and or rape MILLIONS of children, they get a slap on the wrist and are allowed to go about their work.

It seems to me as though when we are talking about an organization doing evil dispicable things, the organization is never corrected or held responsible. Individual people are held accountable for the actions of the organization. An organization is only as powerful as its weakest member, and the weakest members of the organization of which I speak are the innocent children who were raped by the aforementioned men. Every time a priest laid a hand on a child, the Catholic Church was virtually molested.

And now they blame everyone but themselves for the actions of... THEMSELVES!

If you are a Catholic, I pray that you find peace in this time of great distress for the Church. If you are a Christian, I pray that you know that the actions of the Catholic Church (and yes, by this I mean the entire Church, NO ONE is blameless) do not reflect the teachings of Jesus Christ. And if you are a human being, I pray that you work with your fellow human beings to create a better world, where children can go to Sunday School without fearing for their innocence.

Hypocritical?

2010-03-10T16:44:00.000-08:00

I get hit on occasionally, it's never really anything to write home about and for the most part I keep it to myself. I'm in a committed relationship (the term "committed" makes me think of padded walls), living with my girlfriend of one year and four months and our cats doing, the domesticated thing.

The last time I reallly got hit on I was buying a new pair of hiking shoes at Eastern Mountain Sport. I walked over to the wall-o-shoes looking for the pair I wanted and this chick descended upon me like no one's business. If I had been single (or a lesser person) I totally would have flirted back. There is a girl who keeps coming back to my work (I help students at my school with papers) and signing up for my time blocks and sitting realllly close to me when I'm working with her. When her fingers brushed my hand one time it was everything I could do to not fall straight out of my chair. That was less being hit on and more being bashed over the head, in my opinion (in that there was nothing subtled about that action).

I usually tell Hillary when I get hit on, I don't know why. Maybe it's a subconscious desire to make her jealous. Maybe it's a subtle hint to her that she best appreciate what she has (because if she doesn't someone else will appreciate it for her). For the most part we have a good relationship, certainly better than average. The fact that we enjoy cooking together and cleaning together (most of the time) definitely helps, and being able to sit quietly and read or write or do homework without disturbing each other (again, most of the time) is good. A lot of the time we bicker like sisters, and then I wonder to myself "is this really what I want?" I don't know if this is really what I want. I don't know if I want to be twenty years old and in a committed relationship, I'd love to be able to go out with that girl from my job. Sometimes in the morning though, when the orange morning sun is peeking through the curtains in the bedroom, the glow will land just right on Hillary's hair and I'll see more clearly how beautiful she is, how beautiful she always is. I'll remember all the good times we have and have had and will continue to have, forgetting all the rough patches and all the (really) bad times. I'll reach my arm around her waist and pull her in to me really tight, and when the alarm clock goes off at 7:30 she'll wake up in my arms and it will be the start to a better, brighter day.

I've been home in Connecticut since last Friday, and Hillary has been alone in the apartment. I bet she is lonely, and understandably so, but I needed some time to spend at my house with my mom and my friends and my animals over my spring break.

Today Hillary called me and told me that some guy who she had a meeting with yesterday (a big meeting of the big shot college admission counselors) flirted with her today. I think it's funny, Hillary is so goofy it never even occurred to me that someone else would think she is attractive. She's a very attractive person, but she's just so darn goofy, and she's not a stereotypical pretty girl. She loves her job and she does it well, she's not out there to meet a man (or a woman, for that matter) so I guess I am kid of surprised at how presumptuous this guy was.

Apparently he emailed her asking her about something from their big meeting yesterday and they emailed back and forth about work stuff for a bit and then he asked her for her number (although, I have to wonder, why would you give some near-stranger your phone number?) and she gave it to him. He started texting her and initiated the flirting with something to the effect of "you should be happy that you have a cute guy's phone number."

Hold. the. phone (literally). Did he just compliment HIMSELF? Bold. Homeboy's got balls.

She texted him back something to the effect of "not really, I don't think my girlfriend would be too happy about it."

Annnnnndddd in comes the stereotypical "girlfriend??" and the wonder at the fact that yes, a woman MIGHT choose to be with another woman because there are guys like you (addressing this gentleman who made the decision to flirt with my girlfriend) out there.

I can't wait for him to text her asking about a threesome, because that's all lesbians live for obviously.

College is a strange world, not quite high school (where heterosexuality is the ONLY sexuality) and not quite adulthood where (at least on the East Coast of the U.S.) sexuality and "love relationships" are left to the adult's choosing or inclination.

Boys still assume girls want them, even if that girl is a lesbian. Girls still assume boys are going to drool over them if they come to class with their tits hanging out, even if that boy is gay.

If I were a man, in a heterosexual relationship with Hillary, I would have every right to be pissed off at this guy and to be protective of my girlfriend. I feel like, since I'm in a homosexual relationship I don't have the social ability to be pissed off and to be protective. I'm supposed to just go belly up to any advances made on my girlfriend. She's not my property and she has the ability to make her own decisions and defend herself, but I still feel kind of... I don't know... hurt?

Not hurt I guess... but funny. People don't usually hit on Hillary because she's goofy, and that goofyness is part of what I love the most about her. I also love it when she laughs because she has the FUNNIEST laugh. She has a cute nose and a beautiful face. Anyone with two functional eyes could see that about her and love her for it, so I can't really blame this guy. But he doesn't know that she's a really good cook and a really fun cooking partner. He doesn't know that she'll slip her hand into yours when you least expect it when you're meandering the grocery store. He doesn't know that she loves gummy candies (especially those fruit slice candies) and watching Greys Anatomy on her laptop instead of reading files on Thursday nights. He doesn't know anything about her, and the fact that he thinks he knows her and he thinks he has the right to know her is what pisses me off the most. I don't even know this guy and I know he's not good enough for her, and he never will be. And that's what really bothers me.

Conservatives Beware

2010-03-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin admits to crossing Canadian border for health care

That was basically the best thing I heard all day. Thanks to the array of liberal blogs that I read daily, I am a very happy camper today.

I keep getting in fights (over facebook, no less) with one of my cousins. He is ten or so years older than I am, he dropped out of college and joined the Navy for seven years when he was my current age. He couldn't hack it at college, and he knew he couldn't hack it as a pilot like his father was in the Air Force and he didn't want to go to the front lines with the Army or the Marines, so he joined the Navy. Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. The bottom line is, he didn't join the Navy because he is patriotic or felt a sense of duty to his country. He joined up because he didn't want to get shot at, to learn new skills or have to really do anything. He joined the Navy and worked in the boiler rooms as someone who keeps the ship running because he just could not hack it in the real world, either finishing college or getting a job.

He dropped out of college because they asked him to leave because he is/was an alcoholic and never went to class or did his work.

And he's a conservative bigot who thinks that, because he is a white heterosexual male (with a wife and three little boys, who will all be brainwashed by their good for nothing father) he is entitled to put others down and his opinion is always right.

We fight about everything, because he is "extremely right" and I am "extremely left." He thinks socialism is the worst idea he's (n)ever heard, and I think, after extensive reading and studying the matter, that socialism is one of the best economic systems imaginable.

He doesn't want to do his research, he doesn't want to hear what the other side has to say. All he wants is to spout off his opinions and for everyone to hear him and tell him how right he is.

Well I'm simply not going to do that. I'm not going to go belly up to him because he is a white heterosexual American male with too much free time and not enough common sense. And that pisses him off to no end.

If, at the end of the day, I can sufficiently piss off a conservative, I have done my job, and it will have been a good day.

The only word of advice I have for conservatives: do your research. If you're going to say this that and the other thing about socialism, make sure you've actually read the Communist Manifesto. If you say that socialism and communism are the same thing, you sound like a dumbass so go back to middle school. I read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in the 7th grade. Now, I know that many conservatives didn't make it that far in their education, since they were too busy worshipping idols and preparing for the rapture, but there is no excuse for talking about things that you haven't researched.

If you come to me spouting off your ideas and telling me that I'm wrong (unless, of course, I am wrong. There is nothing wrong with being wrong, there is something wrong with being wrong AND STILL trying to impress yours wrongness on others), I will ram you into the ground with knowledge and vitriol so hard that you'll have to go crying back to your mommy.

Nothing would satisfy me more than to know that I've made my 30 year old cousin go crying to my aunt because I schooled him over facebook.

Ed-you-ma-ka-tion

2010-03-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, I'm twenty years old.

I'm a public high school graduate from Connecticut and a junior at a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I'm the daughter of a woman who has worked all her life, the widow of a victim of cancer (my father, one of the most wonderful human beings to ever walk this Earth), who will hopefully be able to retire in fifteen years or so in her early seventies.

Next May I'll be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in English. This time next year I will have applied (and hopefully have been accepted to) graduate schools in both counseling or clinical psychology, PsyD programs or MA or PhD programs in English. In the next ten years I hope to get either a PsyD or PhD in counseling/clinical psychology or a PhD in English Literature.

I wonder if every college junior gets as worried as I am now. I'm painfully aware that I'm a type A personality (though most people don't use that classification anymore) and that I get stressed out very easily, but this just seems like so much to be dealing with at one point in time.

Not only do I have to worry about my school work, about my job and about getting jobs and internships lined up in my fields, but I have to worry about graduate school and post-grad and where I want to be in the next 3/5/8/10 years.

I worry so much that in ten years, when I'm thirty and my mom is in her mid-sixties, I'll (hopefully) finally be in a financial position where I can have children and my mom will be too old to enjoy her grandchildren. I worry that with all this education and all the money I'm spending on this education I'll never be in a position where I can support a family financially. I'll always be paying off loans and living in a one-bedroom apartment with screaming babies in the hallway.

I'm just worried I guess, stressed out about everything. Everyone always reminds me that they're XX years old and they still don't know what they want to do with their lives, and that's perfectly fine but I am so worried that if I follow my dreams of getting my education and my PhD and wait another 10,15,20 years to start a family my mother and my aunts and uncles are never going to be able to enjoy my children the way they enjoy my cousin's children (my cousins are mostly significantly older than I am).

It's a lot to think about it so I guess I should just try to worry less, but that's hard to do when you're me.

Been a While

2010-03-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I last posted a blog. I've been pretty busy with getting back to school in the states, adjusting to the apartment, moving two of the cats here, dealing with a whole bunch of shenanigans which I will get to in a minute, and just living my life, basically. I mean to come back to blogging, but it's hard when you feel like you don't really have anything constructive to say. It's been an incredibly rough 2010, and I put on a brave face but mostly I am becoming increasingly aware that everything is not okay, and for all I know right now things may never be okay again. But I'm hanging on to the hope that things will get better soon.

So as anyone who has read this knows, my rabbit Buns died at the beginning of January. He was the best rabbit ever, but not only that he was a good friend too. I relate better to animals than to people, because animals just listen. They don't give you their advice or choose sides. Buns was like that in many ways, I could just talk to him and stroke his long golden-red ears and he would just sit quietly twitching his nose and staring up at me. The thing I miss the most about him, I think, is that whenever my mom and I would argue and raise our voices Buns would stamp his feet as if to say "enough!" I realize that he was probably very sensitive to loud noises and shouting, but I like to think that he was the voice of reason in an unreasonable environment. The voice of reason is gone now. In a lot of ways it just feels like everything is falling apart.

We went to Disney World as a family a few days after Buns died. It was my mom, me, my aunt, my other aunt and my uncle, her two daughters, their husbands, their total of five children, and my mom's friend Naveen and his wife. Naveen was the cause of the drama at my birthday (the reason why I wish I could forget that I even have a birthday), and he managed to cause drama at Disney too. There was a huge fight in the Magic Kingdom between my mom and my aunt, causing my other aunt to come outside brandishing her cane at the two of them. It was really very funny, but on a deeper level it was disturbing. My mom is willing to be cruel and violent (she pushed my aunt, her older sister, in the Magic Kingdom of all places) to the people she proportedly loves over this person whom she has known for all of four years. I don't want to spend time with Naveen, and I particularly don't want to spend time with my mother and Naveen because I will always lose when it comes to him.

My Pastor retired on Valentine's Day. It was one of the most pathetically sad days of my life. Pastor could barely get the sermon out without crying, and I was practically sobbing in the back of the church. I got some really good pictures with him but no picture can capture what he truly means to me. As far as I am concerned, Pastor is the person who saved me from myself when I was a lost 15 year old girl, struggling with a whole slew of issues that no person, much less a 15 year old, should have to deal with. He sat and talked with me once a week for a year before I was ready to be Baptised and confirmed, but sitting and talking with me and listening to me and giving me his undivided attention was exactly what I needed then. He never felt sorry for me, and in truth I never told him half of the things that were on my mind, but he gave me a new life, which is something I can never thank him enough for. And now he is out of my religious life and I am so afraid that he is going to be out of my life for good, in that I no longer live in my hometown and I can barely keep in touch with my best friends.

We sold my car, Rhonda, the girl of my dreams on Saturday. She's such a beauty that car, and I love her with every ounce of my being, but I have a new car now that is reliable and won't blow the radiator for no reason. We sold her to a father and son, the father wants to fix her up so that the son can use her to drive to college next year. Nothing would make me happier than to know that someone is driving her and loving her, but I will miss my first car, just like I miss my first rabbit and my first Pastor.

So it's been a pretty rough 2010 so far. I'm hoping things start to look up soon, but I'm not terribly optimistic. Well I take that back, I am optimistic that things will start to improve, I just know that things can always get worse, and knowing that just makes this shitty year that much shittier.

So happy March everyone, I hope your year has been better than mine thus far. May we all see vast improvements in the outlook of our 2010's.

New Apartment

2010-01-12T17:51:00.001-08:00

Hey! Sorry it's been a while, good ole blog, but I have been busy.

I recently moved into the apartment with Hillary. It's pretty adorable, it's a one bedroom with slightly off white painted walls, parquet flooring, a built in bookshelf with an antique pencil sharpener screwed into the wall (the building used to be an office building). We're getting heat, hot water and electricity covered with the cost of monthly rent, and cable and internet (which we had installed today, hence the blogging) for $55 total a month (for the cable and internet, not the whole place hah). So basically we're living cheaply, but it's wonderful.

I might be a little bored though, I just organised my 40 Disney DVDs in the order that they were created, starting with Snow White and ending with Wall-E. I have about 100 more DVDs to organise tomorrow. I got the Wii for Christmas, which will be fun to play around with.

Moving into the apartment was stressful, and exhausting. I've been going to sleep between 9 and 10 at night and waking up between 7:30 and 9 am. I'm looking forward to getting back to classes starting next Tuesday, and I have a pretty... interesting schedule, to say the least. Getting up and awake and ready in time for a 9 am two days a week is going to be trying, particularly because I'll be up late studying and doing homework. Getting back into the swing of things will be good though, I feel like last semester was just a vacation from reality.

Living with Hillary is fun, so far at least. Cooking together and doing dishes together are good times. I'm looking forward to having some weekend mornings where we can "sleep in" until 9 am and have pancakes and mimosas.

Just kidding about the mimosas. Mostly.

I hope everyone out there is doing well, lots of prayers and good thoughts for the people in Haiti after the earthquake today.

Home

2009-12-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

After a relatively debacle-free day (despite our flight from JFK to Logan being canceled due to the "blizzard" and having to be picked up at JFK, which is the same distance from my house as Logan so it's whatever), I get home to discover that my beloved rabbit, Mr. Bunnykins aka Buns, the greatest rabbit who ever lived, is dying. He is having some type of neurological issue, which is always the hardest to watch in animals (and in people). He doesn't appear to be suffering at this point, except he can't get up. We feed him and help him to his water and give him as many yogurt chips as he'd like and cuddle with him until he falls to sleep, but it breaks my heart when I open his cage to help him do something and he tries to get up to come over to the opening to the cage so I can give him the kiss I always give him every time I get him and every time I put him back, but he can't get up for his kiss. So I melt into a puddle of tears and kiss him and hold him until he is practically drenched in my tears.

I've had Buns since between the fifth and sixth grade, and I'm a junior in college now. That would make him about... ten years old or so, give or take a few years. He's on the high end for the life expectancy of an indoor rabbit, he's been treated well his entire life with us (we adopted him from the Humane Society, his previous life is a mystery), allowed to roam around the living room and to play with the cats. I never even scolded him for all the things he's destroyed, like blankets, shirts, shoe laces, or the time he chewed through the electrical cord for the lamp in the living room (this rabbit must have nine lives).

He's mostly just one of the best friends I've ever had. He always greeted me when I got home. A lot of the time my cat wanted nothing to do with me, my dog is too flighty to care, but Buns always cares about me and comes right up asking for a kiss on the nose, and he always gets it, and I always scratch him in the soft spot right between his ears.

I feel like I betrayed hi by being gone for four months when I knew he was old, and I knew he wasn't terribly well when I left. He apparently just got really sick in the past week, since Friday. I hope he isn't suffering, and if he appears to be suffering we will not allow that to continue. He deserves so much better than to suffer anything, he is such a good friend and a gentle soul.

Now my cat is laying on one side of my legs as I'm lying in my own bed typing these words and my dog is laying on the other side, eyeing me to make sure that I don't leave ever again.

My mom and two of my very best friends picked me up at JFK, which was just too wonderful. I was so happy to see them.

I'm so glad to be home. I wish Buns could live forever, but I know that's an impossibility. Soon, and hopefully with little pain, he will be with my daddy and Candy and Kashi and Ducky and all the little creatures that went before. I firmly believe that God has a special place in Heaven for animals, and I know that Buns will have an endless supply of yogurt chips and enough newspaper to rip up for ever.

Going Home

2009-12-19T04:58:00.000-08:00

Today is my last full day in London. We just got back from Belgium last night. Brussels, Bruges and Ghent are all very beautiful cities, full of history and absolutely spectacular architecture, but they had a horrendous snow storm while we were there (on a walking tour, no less) which put a damper on things, so to speak.

Disneyland Paris was really cool, but it was no Disney World. The food was terrible and the service was pretty awful, but it was really cool to go to Disney in France. The experience itself was worth it, but I wouldn't voluntarily go back again (at the very least, I wouldn't pay money to go back again).

I've been MIA on the blog for a while now because of finals and last minute traveling and such, and I assume that once I get home I'll be pretty busy with the holidays and seeing friends and family, so this may be my last post for a while. Finals are over now, and home is less than 24 hours away.

Everybody cross your fingers that the snowstorm predicted for Saturday-Sunday isn't as bad as they're saying it's supposed to be, so everyone can get home to their families for Christmas. Gosh I can't even wait to get home!

Dear Mother Nature,

2009-12-02T05:12:00.000-08:00

To my dear and beloved friend, Mother Nature, how are you? I know we don't speak that often, as I rarely get sick.

But please, I'm absolutely begging you, don't give me the flu when I am going to Disneyland Paris this Friday. Don't give me the flu when I have two papers to write, four exams to take, two more trips to go on and my life to live.

Take my appetite, I'll drink tea. Give me a sore throat and a hellish-cough, I'll take cough drops and sudafed. Give me aches and pains and make it near impossible to get out of bed, I'll take advil. But don't give me all of the above combined, and more.

Hope you're having a good laugh at my expense, Mother Nature.

Sincerely,
Rachel

p.s. we're fighting

And if I'm Gloomy, Please Listen to Me, Till it's Talked Away

2009-11-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

Paper writing makes me gloomy. I'm one down, two to go at this point. I finished my paper on Leonardo. What talent, too bad there is barely anything on this Earth left from his genius hand. It was between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and I have no doubt that Leonardo was the more genius of the two, and that Michelangelo was probably a psychopath and definitely a narcisist, so he doesn't really deserve my words.

I've been in a Billie Holiday mood ever since Hillary left yesterday. I'm just about the most pathetic creature there ever was. I was not at all homesick until Hillary got here, and now I can't stop thinking about home. Everything about it makes me giddy.

I'm going to miss London though, it's such a dreamy place. I'm going to miss the way the lights in Piccadilly Circus reflect in the glittery pavement after a gentle London rain. I'm going to miss meandering through the halls of the National Gallery, or sitting on the steps of Trafalgar Square, staring out over Parliament, Big Ben and the Eye. I'm going to miss the plays and the musicals and how you're never too far from home in London. I am far from my home though, my real home, my creaky hardwood floors and my soft mattress, with the permeating smell of cats and rabbits and dogs and people all intermingling, with a warm cup of tea sitting beside the green chair in the living room. I miss traipsing into the house with my best friends at 10 pm, greeting my tired mother and taking over the living room of the basement, having tea parties or hot chocolate parties or pizza or everything in sight. The house feels so right when all my friends are there, because they're like a family to me. My family is so small, just me and my mom, and my best friends really make me feel like I have bunches of other sisters (and my brother Rob of course).

There's nothing in this world more pleasant to me than to be sitting in my living room, surrounded by my friends and my mom, drinking tea and talking or watching a movie.

I think when I get home, I'm going to hold on to those last few days in the house with all of my heart and all of my soul and make it last forever before I move to the apartment and everything changes. I'm ready for change, I just hope I remember what it feels like to be in my little brown house, surrounded by the best friends in the world and my mom, and to know that there is nothing better.

2009-11-29T13:13:00.000-08:00

"Depressed" doesn't even begin to describe how I'm feeling right now.

Hillary left this afternoon to go back home to Boston, and oh how jealous I am of her. I can't wait to get home, I'm probably going to kiss the ground, the customs officers, the baggage handlers, everyone. I love it here in London and I've had such a great time but:

I. am. ready. to. get. my. ass. home.

I haven't been homesick this whole time. I've been sick of traveling, sick of being "on" all the time, sick of not being near my animals, sick of being around strangers 95% of the time and sick of not being with my family and friends, but none of that even compares to how sick, physically and emotionally, I feel over Hillary leaving.

I had to write about it because I can't just lay in my bed and cry all night, so I need to get this out.

Twenty-one days feels like an eternity. I'm just about ready to throw in the towel, but I know that would be ridiculous since I'd miss finals and fail all my classes. I just want to go home so badly at this point that it's the only thing on my mind.

Hillary brought me four of those easy mac in a cup things where all you do is add water and microwave, and I ate one for dinner tonight and I nearly cried with bliss, it was so delicious. I can't handle the food here anymore I think it will drive me insane. I miss my mom's leek and potato soup, I'd even take her crumby tendony chicken right about now. My roommate's family was here this week also and they fed me a homecooked dinner one night and I just about died.

At least when I'm missing Hillary when I'm home I can go for a drive in Rhonda and clear my head and blast my music, or wind down the streets of my town to the park, and hop out and smoke a cigarrette with my friend, or fall asleep in the green chair in the living room with my cat on my lap, watching the food network. But now I sound like my mother, which makes me even more miserable.

My roommate doesn't get back until tomorrow afternoon, so until then I am alone in this big old room. Loneliness is setting in.

I just hope Hillary knows how much I love her, and how much it meant to me that we could spend our one year anniversary together, and that we could start a new year together in Paris. As soon as I get home and we move into the apartment things will be absolutely blissful. I'm just hoping I don't feel this despondent for the next twenty-one days.

London, Paris and the Adventure of a Lifetime

2009-11-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

What a city. Paris is beautiful! It's like London, only in French!

We stayed at the Best Western Nouvel Orleans, and if you're ever in town you should definitely check it out. The accomodations are small and cozy, but the beds are comfy and they have typical Parisian balconies overlooking the rues.

Showing Hillary around London made me so terribly happy. I do love London a lot, and I'm going to miss this town when I leave (in twenty-one days, can you believe it!), but I absolutely cannot wait to get home. I miss my cats and my puppy and my rabbits. I can see it now, I'm going to walk through the front door and be smothered by a big old blind kitty who is going to give me scratchy tongue kisses all over my face (especially my eyelids, because she's weird) and she is going to make me carry her 15 pound self around for an hour or so and when I finally get her to calm down and realise she isn't dreaming I'm going to be pounced upon by a slobbery dog, who is then going to make me carry her 40 pound self around for an hour or so. The rabbits won't slobber, pounce or smother, they will just see me and jump all around and give me those big rabbit eyes and silently ask me for yogurt chips. Buns will request that I give him a kiss on her twitchy nose and that I rub him between his eyes.

Gosh I'm such a sucker.

But back to London and Paris. London is a fun town, and it was awesome to be able to share it with my most favourite person in the world.

Paris is just amazing, and fortunately they have very effective public transportation. We saw the Eiffle Tower at night, all lit up and glowing. We went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa, which was okay but I've seen better art since I've been here (and there are better Da Vinci's elsewhere).

Walking around Paris was by far the best part of the little trip. Walking through the streets and little cobbled alleyways, arm in arm or hand in hand. Notre Dam was impressive, but the little Sant Chappelle across the street was better (but not free). I hope to get back to Paris someday, and to get back to France someday as well, just like I hope to return to Spain and Barcelona, and Norway and Oslo.

We had dinner at this little Italian restaurant (if there is one Italian place in a 5 mile radius, I can find it simply by following my nose, trust), both nights. We had the same waiter both times, and he remembered our orders (and laughed when I got the same meal and said 'I'm not very adventurous'). On the second night we had our glasses of chianti, our still water, our pastas, and then our desserts (she had the fruit tiaramisu and I had this DELICIOUS sorbet with fresh fruit with CHAMPAGNE, ugh it was like I literally died and went to heaven). When they brought our dessert out the waiter comes over to the table and hands us to LARGE glasses of amaretto (and the two cups of tea we ordered, post dessert) and said "from us" with a smile. They totally knew it was our one year anniversary, and they made it so entirely special.

When we got back into London last evening, we were starving and exhausted, so I brought Hillary to Marleybone High Street, where all the cute little restaurants are (and the best gelato in London, if I didn't know better I'd swear I were Italian), but we were so hungry that our eyes were bigger than our stomachs and we barely ate any of our food. We stopped at a bar on the way home, after sharing a 1/2 bottle of red wine at dinner, and I had a double shot rum and coke and she had a double shot vodka cranberry and then we shared a pitcher of a drink called "purple rain" which is basically vodka and lemonade and anything else they feel like throwing in. We stumbled home in the rain, got ready for bed and passed out.

I got her to the airport today with 70 minutes to spare (they close the check-in for flights 60 minutes before departure, so we were sincerely hustling), held her hand and played with her soft brown hair the whole time. When we kissed goodbye while she was running to get to security I felt the biggest pang in my heart. I miss her so much, I miss home so much. It's like taking someone's heart and ripping it right out of their chest, and then sending it over 3,000 miles away.

But I'll only be here for another twenty-one days, and then I can go home and everything will be perfectly right with the world.

Hope everyone in the States had a very happy Thanksgiving!

Alt for Norge

2009-11-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

It's 5:40 am here in London. The sun doesn't rise until 7:33 am, and (hopefully) Hillary will have been here for about 30 minutes by then. I leaving for Heathrow shortly to pick her up and bring her back to school with me, then going to my class then showing her around the city for the rest of the day (and letting her get some sleep and shower at some point).

Norway... was... AMAZING!! I always wanted to go to Norway, but it always looked a little too much like New Hampshire to me. But truly it is an absolutely beautiful country. Oslo is such a wonderful city, the architecture clearly has some very Eastern influences, the people are all so friendly and willing to help and it's easy to get around on public transportation or even just walking.

And it wasn't even that cold.

Our hostel was in the red light district, but it wasn't even that bad. There was a strip club a few doors down that we had to walk past every night, but everyone was friendly. Even the prostitutes on the corner were friendly. One night we saw someone passed out in the crosswalk right in front of the hostel, and promptly ran up to the hostel to watch his friends and passers-by get him into an ambulance. Practically no one goes out during the day in Norway, everyone waits until the sun sets (and it sets early in the winter) and then they go out and get pissed beyond recognition. We stayed away from the bars and the clubs, because Norwegians can get pretty wild when they've been drinking.

I've honestly never laughed so hard in my life. My stomach is literally in pain from laughing at my friends so much. There were seven of us, and we would go back to the hostel and sit in our room, which was this narrow hallway of a room with two bunk beds (we had two rooms all together) and just laugh and laugh for hours.

On Saturday, which was our only full day, we went to Vigeland Park, which is the statue park with the huge fallice. We got up early and it was a very crisp morning, but when we were there the sun was just coming up. The roses are still budding, some are even blooming, just like they are here, making me think maybe the flowers are just confused because of the bizarre summer weather we all had.

We saw Akershus, which is the old Castle and Fortress right in the middle of Oslo fjord. We watched the sunset from the battlements of Akershus, taking in the beauty of Norway. We also saw the Nobel Peace Center! It's so cool to be able to say that we've been there!

We went to the Oslo National Gallery and saw Edvard Munch's The Scream among many other very famous pieces. I believe that the National Gallery is the most robbed art museum in the world, and if you even breathed on a painting the wrong way an alarm went off. My friend actually TOUCHED a painting, because it was "shiny," like a fool, and the security guards came running like she was actually going to walk off with it.

Norway (particularly Oslo, and I'm guessing the other major cities like Bergen) is an extremely expensive country. It's one of the wealthiest countries in the world (who says socialism doesn't work?), and also one of the healthiest with one of the highest standards of living. They tax the hell out of you though, and don't even get me started on kroner. I nearly wept when I went to the ATM as soon as we got there and my options were anything between 500 and 2000 kroner (which is approximately 50 and 200 USD).

This is us, getting ready to leave Norway, taking our last picture in front of the Opera House

The inner view of the Viking Ship

A ship from The Viking Ship Museum

Oslo at Sunset

Sunset

Sunet over the docks

The Nobel Peace Center

In front of the Royal Palace

The Royal Palace

Vigeland statue Park

Being a creep

Angry dancing baby?

My obsession with flowers

And again

It was nice to see the country my father's father left behind. I hope I get to go back some day soon.

I may not be back here for a while (or I may be back every day, it depends on what we do). Hillary and I celebrate our one year anniversary this Friday, in Paris. We leave Thursday afternoon and return Saturday evening, then Hillary leaves back for the states on Sunday. If I drop off the face of the Earth for a week, have a great week, everyone out there!

Another Letter I'll Never Send

2009-11-19T14:04:00.001-08:00

As I'm leaving for Norway tomorrow, and I will be there until Sunday, I feel compelled to write something that I have been giving a great deal of consideration for a long time now.

Dear Daddy,

On Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 5:05 pm (Eastern Standard Time) it will be twelve years since you lost your battle with cancer. It will be twelve years since my big, strong, courageous Daddy gave up his last breath. Sometimes it feel like you took me with you when you went. Sometimes it feel like I can't even go on another minute for the sadness of the whole thing. And then I remember how badly you wanted to live, how desperately you loved life, and clung to it with every fiber of your being.

Life was a gift for you. You never took it for granted, even before you were diagnosed with cancer. I remember when you scooped the little baby cardinal out of the pool one summer and cradled it and quickly fashioned a make-shift nest to stow in the pine trees so that its mom would her it calling to her and she would come rescue it. You had such respect for life, and such an understanding of nature. I miss playing basketball with you, when you would lift me up so high so that I could make a dunk. I remember the time you let me ride my bike by myself on the sidewalk around the neighbourhood for the first time, but you had to drive alongside me the whole way. Some woman pulled over and asked me if you were bothering me and I casually replied "no, that's just my dad."

I loved everything about you, your thinning grey hair, your blue-yellow eyes, your bright smile. You were all legs, just about the tallest man I've ever met in my life. It doesn't seem fair that cancer could come and steal such a healthy and wonderful person.

I was in the flower garden on the side of the house when you told me you were sick. The tulips had just come in and the air was fresh and rich with spring. We had just moved to the new house, it didn't seem fair that you should get sick.

I remember being in the kitchen, many months later, when mom told me you were dying. No one ever candy-coated the issue for me, no one ever treated me like a child. I would go up to your bedroom every day after school and lay with you and Candy, reading or watching videos or just talking. I was so scared to let you out of my sight.

When you went to the palliative care unit at Hartford Hospital, we all knew you were very near the end. Ducky and Candy took it the hardest, they loved you so much. Ducky died within a week of you, she couldn't bear to live in a world without you. I know Ducky is curled up on your shoulder, I bet you can hardly get the darn cat off of you. It took Candy eight years to follow you home, but I know she's sprawled out across your lap right now, like any giant overfed black lab.

It's a lot easier to pretend like it doesn't hurt that you died, as I imagine it's easier to pretend that a lot of things in life don't hurt. But it does hurt that you died. It hurts every single day of my life. It hurts every single day of mom's life. It hurts every single day of Becky's life. We miss you so much.

Twelve years is too long for a daddy to be away from the people who love him. But I know that someday, when it's our time, we'll all be together again, and there won't be pain or fear. There will just be boundless love and happiness.

I'm blessed to have had a father who loved me more than the sun the moon and the stars. I'm extremely blessed to have had two parents who loved each other more than oxygen, and loved their child with every fiber of their beings. I'm equally blessed to rest easy knowing that my mother and father will love each other into eternity, and my parents loved me and wanted me. I only wish that my daddy could have been there to see me walk across the stage at graduation. I wish you could have been there to give me flowers when I performed in orchestra concerts and competitions. I wish you had been there to carry me home when I broke my arm (roller-blading on the ice) when I was ten. I wish you had been there on my sixteenth birthday to hand me the card you had made and the beautiful pearl necklace you made sure to get for me before you passed away. More than anything I wish you were there when your three beautiful grandchildren came into this world. I wish you could carry them on your shoulders, cradle them gently in your strong arms, walk with them wrapped around your legs.

Life would be so different if you were alive today daddy, who knows if it would be different for the best or for the worst. I often say "I would not give just anything to see my daddy again," but the older I get, the more I believe that to be a lie. I would give anything to see you again, to smell you, to hug you, to hold your hand.

My last memory of you alive is curling up alongside you in your hospital bed, two nights before you died. We both fell asleep alongside each other, you with your arm as my pillow and me with my arm wrapped around your stomach. I have the best memories of you. Thanks for being the reason I can honestly say that I had the greatest dad ever.

Love you forever,
Rachel

British Museum

2009-11-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

If there is any one place in London that would cause me to want to stay here permanently, it would be the British Museum.

I remember going to the National Gallery every day for the first few weeks we were here, like I was trying to become one with the paintings or something hah. The whole time everyone kept telling me I needed to get over to see the British Museum.

But it's "the British Museum." Sometimes I don't even know why I'm IN England. The English weren't particularly nice to my ancestors, and quite frankly they weren't very nice to anyone's ancestors. I really have no interest in learning about the history of a people who managed to rape and pillage and decimate entire populations of people on almost every single continent (and who continue to do so even to this day...). Moving on though.

Eventually I made my way to the British Museum. Let me just say, it is NOT a museum about everything British. It's basically a HUGE building filled with random collections of artifacts, sarcophigi, pieces of architecture, totem poles, tribal dress, etc. etc. from all over the world. When you first walk up to the building, you are immediately awe-struck by its sheer massiveness. It looks like an ancient Greek temple, it doesn't look at all like it belongs plopped in the middle of London.

This is the top of the entrance, I need to try to get it at a better angle, I took this picture the first time I went and I was all fumbly with excitement.

Then you get inside and you're confronted with these massive triagular windows on the ceiling. It's simply incredible, the amount of light flowing everywhere. It is HUGE, both inside and out. It's not a museum you can see in one day, so good thing it's free! This is the main area, which apparently used to be a green but is now a lot of things (anything but green though).

These are some bearded men. They look kind of like the statues with the glowy eyes from The Never Ending Story Shows you how much I paid attention whilst walking through the museum. It's a knowledge overload.

I do remember that these were taken from the Parthenon. The Greek parts of the museum are ASTONISHING (not that the rest of the museum isn't...)

And this is the Rosetta stone! Cool huh??

We went to the British Museum today for my Renaissance Art class to see the Prints and Drawings room where they have the sketches of such famous Renaissance men as Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, etc. It was AMAZING to see their sketches up close, not behind glass or anything. They're very protective of the sketches, don't get me wrong, but the room is intimate, only something like 10-15 people are let in at a time, and it's a HUGE library-like room, with lots of workers bustling around cataloguing things, but it's so quite and it's like it's just you and the Renaissance. It's really very beautiful.

I do love it here, a lot. I was walking home from the museum today, alone, and I thought to myself "Self, I don't think I've ever felt quite so alone in my whole life," but it's not a bad kind of alone. It's like being totally and utterly alone on a distant planet, away from all other people and life, but it's okay because you have you and your thoughts and your imagination. I probably feel like that because the people in London are so unfriendly, they can't even be bothered to say "hello" or even to make eye contact. But it's nice, this alone-ness. I think I might just miss it when I go home.

This is my "I'm so happy to be in London" face :)

If I don't post tomorrow or Friday, have a lovely weekend world! I'm off to Norway to become one with my inner Viking. I think I'll start going by Rachel the Red hahaha

Healthcare Reform

2009-11-17T08:57:00.001-08:00

I'm not buying it. I've been a socialist since the day I was born, and I just plain am not buying this crap.

Now... the United States is one of the most backwards countries in the world (admittedly, there are POCKETS of backward-ness throughout the country). I was watching Religulous last night (it was a great film, I definitely recommend it, but more on that later) and Bill Maher said that the U.S. is one of the most profoundly religious countries in the developed world (on a list of thirty of so developed nations, we rank right before Turkey, which is the "most religious" "developed" nation). We're still shoving religion down everyones' throats, including our own country-men.

So tell me why the Catholic Church has such a big hand in this Healthcare Reform (oh, and why the Catholic Church has the right to send millions of dollars in the effort to make sure that I don't get my rights?). Don't we hate the Catholic Church? Wasn't that the biggest issue in electing JFK, that he was a Catholic? His allegiance is to the Pope, not to our country.

Sometimes it makes my head spin.

My cousin is a neo-con (*puke*), and he's just about the scariest person I've ever met in my life. He's always battling me over facebook status etc. saying that Obama is a communist, a marxist, a socialist (because those words OBVIOUSLY scare me?) and that Healthcare reform will be the END of our great nation.

No... it won't. In fact, it would be AWESOME. Yes, please, for the love of God, REFORM THE SH*T out of healthcare. Reform it till it can't be reformed anymore. Then maybe people wouldn't have to die from treatable conditions. Then maybe people with conditions (for example, chronic asthma, of which I am a sufferer) wouldn't be denied healthcare due to a pre-existing condition. I can't help that I live in the U.S. and my industrial nation gave me asthma as a youngster.

I also can't help wanting to just grab naysayers and take them to Canada, or the UK, or ANY of the Scandinavian countries, etc. and show them what a country with universal healthcare looks like. It is r.e.a.l.l.y. OK.

I have a feeling this is going to be the start of a new "red-scare" if this Healthcare reform doesn't pass.

And if it passes with the abortion measure, well, welcome back to the 1950's and 60's of back ally abortions and coat-hangers. We never liked our women that much anyway.

This whole argument about "well I don't want my children to have to pay for someone else's healthcare" sounds a lot like classism to me.

I have private healthcare (care of my mother) and when I graduate college, I'll need a job with benefits or a spouse with a job with benefits (or both!). I can honestly say that whatever needs to be done to fix the compeletely messed up (and murderous) insurance industry, needs to be done. Increase taxes (let's start with the upper "class" though), do whatever needs to be done. Just make sure that no more innocent lives are lost simply because they can't afford it. They're Americans too, they're human beings too, and they MATTER. We all MATTER, and in the end, that is what this whole argument boils down to.

2009-11-14T04:37:00.000-08:00

This boy is a hero

Will Phillips, a 10 year old elementary-schooler from Arkansas, is exercising his Constitutional right to stand in silence while the Pledge of Allegiance is recited. He refuses to recite the pledge because, in his belief, it does not apply to all Americans, namely GLBT Americans.

God bless this young man, and take care of him too. It's hard to fight for what's right, but he is 10 and he is standing up to his peers and his teachers and his administrators and saying "Something is not right with this country, and this 'pledge' does not apply to all Americans." When I was 10 I thought about art class and what I would make today, I thought about playing my squeeky and shrill violin, I thought about playing on the playscape and avoiding getting splinters, about petting the horses behind the elementary school during recess. I didn't much think about things that were bigger than the immediate future, much less things that were any bigger than just me. We need more adults (and kids) like Will Phillips, what a brave young man.

Well You'll Never Find It, If You're Looking For It

2009-11-13T14:15:00.001-08:00

My mom is leaving for India this evening at 10:25. 10:25 on the East Coast is 3:25 am in London. I'll be sound asleep.

I had a nightmare last night that my mother died. I'll spare you to morbid details. It was so scary that I opened my eyes abruptly and stared at my ceiling for hours, wondering... what would I do if something were to happen to her?

I couldn't handle being an orphan.

Sometimes I feel orphaned in this whole thing with my mom's friend Naveen. It's not fair that he has two parents, a brother who has a wife and a son, a sister who has a husband and a son, dozens of cousins with families and children, all of whom he considers to be his immediate family. It's not fair that he has taken my mother from me, the only person I have. Sure I have aunts and uncles and cousins. I have a sister and a brother-in-law and two nieces and a nephew. All those people love me, but no one loves me like my mom. We've been through so much together, it's impossible for anyone to truly understand our relationship. It's impossible to articulate how much I love my mother, despite all of the terrible things she's put me through (I know I put her through a lot in the not too distant past, as well). It's like loving someone or something so much that your heart might rip open.

But then Naveen came into the picture, and slowly took her away from me. I feel so helpless, like I'm standing on the beach, and a riptide has come and swept my only parent away from me.

It's like having my father die all over again.

November 21st will be twelve years. I have no anniversary for when my mother was taken away from me. And I can't even mourn her loss without being called crazy, but I do mourn for her. She's going to a strange country, not even to a major city but to a tiny village. Naveen's parents have never even left their village. My mother will be treated as a woman, which means she won't be respected at all. She will be respected even less because she is "unmarried," even though she was once married. She will be treated, effectively, as a teenaged girl: worthless. And she is willingly going to this country. She is getting on a plane for 18 hours to fly to a country where she will be treated like an outcast, like a stray dog.

She'll be there until December 5th. I feel like I will have many nights of laying awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, unwilling to sleep when sleep only brings dreams of torturous things.

I feel completely and totally alone. No one understands, no one tries to understand or wants to understand. It is utterly heartbreaking to have this happen and be unable to prevent it. I'm powerless. This is my least favourite feeling in the world.

I hope she has a safe flight, a comfortable journey, and that she comes home safely.

Veterans Day

2009-11-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below

We are the Dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Field.

- In Flanders Field, John McCrae 1915

This poem was written in World War I by a Canadian solider serving for United Kingdom. Sophomore year in high school we had to choose a theme and find poems related to that theme. The theme I chose was war, and naturally I came across this poem. I've never been able to get it out of my head, and I hope I never do. It is so poignant. So beautiful. So well-written. And so simple.

Peace.

Thank you, veterans, for serving your countries, for fighting valiantly and giving your youth, your talents, your lives, your all. It's a job I could never do, and I give you all of the credit in the world for fighting old men's battles for them. God bless everyone who serves, no matter what side you are on. And one day, when old men no longer run the world, when we aren't plagued with old thoughts, old deeds, old wrongs and old rights, we can live in peace, and we can all lay down our weapons, and there won't be any more fighting. Until then, though, I'm praying for everyone who takes up the quarrel, with any foe, and hoping peace comes sooner rather than later.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

2009-11-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

We're home from Ireland. It was lovely, it rained all day Saturday, but it was incredibly beautiful (despite the rain). I love me some old country, it feels like going home for some reason, but it makes me miss Newfoundland like crazy (not that everything doesn't make me miss Newfoundland... but everything about Ireland reminds me of NF). I can't stand how isolated Ireland is though, and how small everything is and how quiet it is and how friendly everyone is...

Hah well at that last part, everyone is very friendly in Ireland (once you get outside of Dublin) for the most part, which is something you RARELY find in London. It's nice to having someone treat you with politeness, it's just very strange (for me, someone who spends the better part of her time being treated like the lowest of the low in my baggy jeans and hoodies on the streets of London. Just because I don't wear Gucci and Versace doesn't mean you have the right to treat me like sh*t, it just means I'm not as tacky and flamboyant as you).

But now onto bigger and better news.

Oh so so so much better.

I can barely contain my joy.

Okay Rachel... breathe...

I'm going to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Hillary in 15 days (15 days tomorrow night, I'm jumping ahead a little out of sheer excitement).

But seeing that play isn't the most exciting part. It gets better.

It's staring... JAMES EARL JONES!! Mufasa... Darth Vader... Oh how exquisite it will be!!

But wait... it is about to get even better!!

It's also starring... PHYLICIA RASHAD!! Now, I know I'm in love with an average of 50 billion women at any given moment, but to be completely honest, Phylicia Rashad is probably the hottest woman I've ever seen (if not at least she is in the top five). She is so hott, with her BA attitude on the Cosby Show, not to mention how drop-dead, breath-takingly GORGEOUS she is. I'm probably going to melt into a puddle in my seat and Hillary is going to have to carry me home. I know I won't be able to take pictures in the theatre, but rest assured my mouth will be gaping open the entire time and I will have palpitations.

Hope everyones' weeks are off to fantastic starts. Tomorrow is Tuesday... ugh... my worst day. My architecture professor runs us all over the city on Tuesdays. Wish me luck please!

Take care out there!

Julie Andrews Jr.

2009-11-05T06:21:00.001-08:00

My baby is getting spayed today. Poor little Julie. Wish I could be home to nurse her back to health (though I'm sure she'll be just fine, she's got her namesake's unwavering spirit).

Tomorrow we head to Cork, Ireland, to visit our friend who is also studying over here for the semester. She came to visit us early in October (with two of our friends from Uni in Northern Ireland), so we've had plans to go and pay her a visit for a while now.

I love my heritage, but let me tell you I thoroughly dislike Ireland. As far as I'm concerned, it's dirty as hell (at least the cities, particularly Dublin), and it's a God-forsaken rock of an island, with nothing but sheep as far as the eye can see.

It'll be great to get some nice fresh air out of London for the weekend though.

Hope everyone has a safe, healthy, wonderful weekend. Happy Guy Fawks day to you Brits, as someone whose ancestors you persecuted, I don't happen to be your biggest fan, but you guys sure do throw a hell of a party.

To Whom It May Concern

2009-11-04T12:46:00.001-08:00

If you're reading this right now, I mean anyone at all, whether you've commented on my blog before or if you're just passing through...

I have a question for you.

If I moved to Canada, would that be giving up and admitting defeat?

I love my country, my country that hates me. I love Canada too, but it's not my home.

I'm giving strong consideration to finishing off undergrad, applying to graduate programs in Canada and applying for permanent residence in Canada.

Is that giving up?

Please, I need an objective opinion. You may not know me (though if you read my blog, you certainly know a great deal about me), and you may not care to know me, but I need you advice, as an objective party.

Thanks in advance.

- Rachel

Maine... I Can't Believe You!

2009-11-04T01:57:00.000-08:00

Epic fail in Maine yesterday. And across the country, as far as I'm concerned.

How can we continue to deny an entire population our rights as human beings, our ability to live freely and pursue happiness?

How can the Catholic Church throw MILLIONS of dollars into the hands of BIGOTS, when there are hungry who need to be fed and naked who need to be clothed? HOW CAN THIS BE?

What the HELL is going on in this world and why the HELL are gay people so scary??

Just because we want to be happy too?? Is that why we're scary??

Well a big F YOU to Maine and everyone who threw their money at the bigots and everyone who voted against equality, because gay people have money too, and we WON'T be spending it in your effing state. We'll go to Vermont, or Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Canada, where freedom rings and rings and rings and won't be silenced.

We WON'T be silenced. Last summer was the LAST time I paid a visit to Maine, the absolute LAST time. I'm never going back to Maine until EVERYONE is equal and until my rights are as important and valued as any heterosexual.

I'm so angry I could just about spit.

My Girls

2009-11-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

This song and video is addictive, consider yourself warned.

This evening was the street lighting for all the Christmas lights in London. We went to Oxford street, braving the throngs of humanity who would smoosh us rather than allow us room to breathe.

Jim Carrey was there, though, it was neat to see him. I don't think I've ever been that near to a celebrity before, or that I have a desire to be that near to one ever again hah. People are absolutely rapid.

The lights weren't very impressive, I was thinking they would be something like the Osborn Family Christmas Lights that go up every year at the Disney Studios in Disneyworld, which are absolutely amazing, but alas. It's really not even worth putting up pictures of it.

Today is Hillary's birthday! Happy birthday Billary, three weeks today and we'll be together in London :)

Spain

2009-11-01T04:06:00.000-08:00

We had a wonderful time in Spain. I absolutely loved Barcelona and would go back in a heartbeat (and once back, it would be very hard to force me to leave, it is just so entirely beautiful there).

Madrid... however... was a living breathing nightmare. I will NEVER go back to Madrid. Furthermore, I will NEVER fly Iberian Air, EVER again.

My mother had an early flight on American Airlines yesterday morning, so my friend (who had been in Spain with us) and I took the transfer to the airport with her. We got up around 6 am, finished last minute packing and showering and breakfast, etc.

We said our goodbyes to my mother when we dropped her off at terminal one. The transfer brought us to terminal four, five miles away, and we then tried to check in for our flight back to London.

The time changed while we were in Spain. Spain was six hours, then five hours ahead of home, and London was five hours, then four hours ahead of home. You guys on the East Coast changed your clocks back this morning, so now we're five hours ahead of you in London (again). It's all very confusing.

We walked into the 20 minute check-in line empty handed, thinking it wouldn't be a problem since we had our passports and they could just look us up on their pretty little machines. Oh how wrong we were.

We got to the front of the line and, I kid you not, four of the desk attendants got up to go on their breaks. At the same time. So we waited about 10 more minutes and finally someone freed up. But she was on the phone, having a personal conversation might I add, and she had no interest in us.

I don't speak Spanish very well, I have a very heavy American accent and I don't like speaking Spanish because of my accent, particularly around native speakers. But I do understand Spanish almost word for word. I hate it when people assume just because I have white skin and red hair and blue eyes that I only speak English, that I am a dumb American and that I can't understand what they are saying. Molly, if you're reading this, it's like people assuming that you're not Cuban when you totally are, and that's not right at all. Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

So she was on the phone and we gave her our passports and, because of the time changes and our confusing, we knew our flight got in to London around 2:30 but we had no idea what time it left. I knew it was about a 2 hour flight so I said it either left around 11:30 or 12:30 (major confusion). The woman looked at me and said the only flight to London was leaving through British Airways (an affiliate of Iberian Air and American Airlines, for your future information) at 12:30. I looked at her, perplexed, and explained that we had a round trip from London to Barcelona and Madrid to London. She didn't understand what I was telling her, since we flew Air Europa to Madrid. She was pretty much a c*nt and I could have reached across the counter and smacked the smug look off her horse face.

She said she checked every single flight on Iberian for that day and that we weren't on any of them. She said, because we didn't have a flight to London, it would cost us around 600 euro (that's roughly equivalent to $1100, which is roughly 2 times what we spent on our round trip tickets from Boston to London and then back). Tears were already welling up in my eyes at this point, while I frantically tried to call my mother, who had turned both of her phones off. We were on our own for this one.

She directed us to tickets and sales, where we gave the girl our story and she said she checked all the flights as well and we were on none of them. I could have died on the spot, but she told us to go to information and customer service, which we did.

When we got to customer service, we gave the woman our whole story. At this point we had been enduring this process for the better part of an hour. After we told her our story, her exact words to us were "So?" in the snottiest voice ever. "What do you want me to do about it?"

In my head I was screaming "Hello! We are your customers! Serve us!" But outwardly I was just welling up with tears and trying not to burst out crying, successfully might I add. I held it together very well, actually.

She directed us to British Airways, since the general consensus was that we were probably just confused about which airline we were flying. We got to the queue at British Airways and the woman at the top of the line, who was directing people here and there and everywhere, looked at us and asked us if she could help us.

We said "We don't know, we think we're flying Iberian, but everyone thinks we're flying British Airways, and we don't have a flight and we have to get back to London..." and basically we were about to burst into tears in front of this poor woman, so she told us to go right into the line and they would help us.

We got to the front of the line and went to the desk of a man named Constantine. God bless this man. He was confused about our story at first and thought that we were flying from Madrid to Barcelona and Barcelona to London, but eventually we helped him understand. He said "No you're not on any of our flights."

And then, with a nod and a smile he found us on Iberian Air, the 1:15 flight to London.

All the people we had gone to beforehand who had told us that they looked everywhere and couldn't find us had been lying to us. They had looked us in the eye and told us we needed to pay 600 euro for tickets to London, that we weren't on any of the manifests and therefore weren't booked to go to London.

I am so. fucking. mad. about all the shit that happened yesterday. This man was the only one who bothered to help us. We told him everything we had been through and all the different people we spoke to and he told us that it is a common problem with Iberian (we had a similar, but much less devastating experience on our way from London to Barcelona with Iberian) and that he was sorry that his co-workers didn't do their jobs. An apology from him meant to world, I just wish all the others hadn't put two twenty year old women through such hell, apparently for the sheer fun of it.

So we got on our flight, at last at last, and headed back to London. We were seated in the emergency row on the plane (and because of our bad luck that morning we were pretty terrified that we were going to be the cause of the misfortunate of the entire plane), but it was really nice to have some extra leg room.

We went through customs and got our luggage and got on the Heathrow Express to Paddington tube station. We were so emotionally exhausted (and my friend had developed a nasty cough) and just wanted to lay down and sleep, but we had to soldier on and carry our heavy bags all over God's green earth and all through the stations, etc.

An Australian man ran up to us at Paddington, apparently in distress, with tears welling up in his eyes. He was short, with grey hair and very bad teeth but he was kind and very sincere. He said he was headed home to Australia with his family and they needed 13 pound 50 pence more for the Heathrow express to Heathrow. We couldn't overlook a fellow traveler in distress, so we handed him 30 pound and went on our way. He offered us his camera, anything we wanted in duty free, but we declined. He took my friend's email address and promised us that God would bless us.

The way I see it is, God blessed him for giving us a miserable day and causing us to have pity on a traveler in distress. Everything happens for a reason, the reason we had such a terrible day yesterday was so that we could help that man and his family to get home to Australia. I don't even care if I'm out my last 10 pound because of it, and I don't even care if he didn't really need the money or if he was just going to rob us and say he was going to get in touch with us and repay us, he looked sincere and I'm not one to judge.

I'd want someone to help me if I were frantic and just trying to get home.

Other than yesterday, the trip to Spain was very lovely. It's good to be back in London, though. So good to be back.

Doesn't Anyone Understand?

2009-10-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

We toured Toledo today. The city is very beautiful, very old but very very beautiful. We saw the oldest synogogue in Western Europe. It's no longer a working synogogue, but now more of a museum. For a long time in Toledo there were three groups, Jews, Christians and Muslims. The three groups lived in relative peace and harmony, as far as any records can tell.

Then Queen Isabella came and ruined it all and had all the synogogues torn down and all the jews basically converted or killed. Very unpleasant times indeed.

The Spanish didn't take part in WWII (from what I recall from high school history lessons), because they were dealing with their own civil war at the time. Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain from the 30's until relatively recently, being a facist, let Hitler use his country and his people for target practice for testing out bombs and weapons of destruction. That's where Picasso's famous "Guernica" comes in (I'm seeing it tomorrow, I hope I don't weep). Joan Miro, my most favourite artist, has some very insightful pieces reflecting on the civil war and the years of tumolt for Spain. We went to the Miro museum in Barcelona, which was such an astonishing experience for me. The first time I saw a Miro first hand was in Hartford in 2004, I believe, at the Athenium (if you're from Connecticut you've probably been at one time or another, it's very small but it's a cute museum and I believe it's the oldest public art museum in the United States, but I could be mistaken). He is a contemporary artist, and most of his works seem very primitive and unrealistic, but what you really must do is look beyond the figures, the paint, the frame, the palet, and make the painting something for you. I like art that becomes whatever you want it to become.

But this wasn't meant to be a rant about Miro.

In Toledo today, I noticed there to be a lot of graffiti of swastikas. I don't understand how anyone, particularly someone in Europe, particularly someone whose country suffered under a fascist dictator for decades, could possibly promote the fascist way. Don't they know how their parents and grandparents suffered? Don't they know how all the people of Europe suffered? Fleeing from bombs falling here and there, shrapnal everywhere, air raids, no food, never knowing if you'd live to see tomorrow or if your children would live to see the end of the war. Or worse, if you were one of the direct victims of the fascists, if they stuck you in a ghetto and then huddled you into a cramped box car and sent you off to never be seen or heard from again. Spain is a Catholic nation, don't they know what the Nazis did to the Catholics? Don't they know, don't they understand? How can anyone draw the swastika without silently killing their soul?

Sadly those aren't the first swastikas I've seen in Europe. There is a little shrine, with candles and swastikas in chalk on a stoop near my school in London (in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in London, might I add). I got so angry and sad when I saw it, that I blew both the candles out, and I don't even care if CCTV saw me do it. They're English, the Nazis tried to wipe London off the map of the world, don't they understand?

On a MUCH happier note, I just got word that Obama signed the Hate Crimes Bill into LAW! How awesome is that?

Perhaps there is hope after all. Yes, I'd say there is a lot of hope. Things are getting better all the time :)

http://www.hrc.org/13699.htm

Miro, 1973, "The Smile of a Tear" very appropriate for today

Eleven Months

2009-10-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

We are in Madrid this lovely warm evening. It's been a very long day of traveling and touring and eventually eating, so now we are resting for the night.

Today is my eleven month anniversary with Hillary, and it is sad that we have to spend our anniversary apart.

However, we'll be together next month for our one year anniversary. We'll be in Paris then, it will be que romantico.

I can't believe it's been eleven months, it feels like just yesterday we were driving home from Ani, got hungry for Wendy's and spent the better part of an hour sitting in a dark parking lot eating and talking about life, silently telling each other that we couldn't put on this facade anymore.

Love happens and it knocks you right off your feet. It's the best, most stupifying feeling in the world, to be sure. Perhaps numbing is a better word for it. I don't know if I like the feeling of numbness, or fluttering about, but I do love being in love with a wonderful person and I am very glad that we found each other in this big scary world.

There is no one out there who would climb mountains with me on a whim, who would stand by my side from 3,000 miles away, who would so thoroughly entertain me while simultaneously captivating me. I fall in love with every pretty face I see, but I have never been so completely in love with not only a pretty face, but a wonderful mind and a beautiful soul.

Here's to Madrid and eleven months with Mogli.

Barcelona

2009-10-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Barcelona!

This city is AMAZING! I wish I had come here to study abroad instead of crumby old London. There is so much here, and the weather is beautiful and there are palm trees everywhere.

And the food... magnificent.

Tonight at dinner we shared our meal with a little black cat who was walking amongst the tables. She was a skinny little cat so I dropped her some of my salmon. But she wouldn't eat any of my salmon, which was curious because she looked hungry. Then she disappeared. A little while later she returned, followed closely by a kitten, who proceeded to consume all of the salmon I had dropped for his mother. I stroked the cat while she watched her kitten eat, and I swear she was smiling at me. I fed her some salmon so I was certain she had eaten, and she ate every last drop. Then another kitten came, and it all got too crazy and we were leaving the restaurant but it broke my heart to part with the cat, she was such a sweet cat, and she knew exactly how to make me fall in love with her (it's probably because I miss my Kitty).

Earlier this evening, we were walking down to the beach so my mother could put her feet in the Mediterranean Sea, when we came across a man on a bike. Not just any man on a bike, though, a man on a bike wearing... only a bike. He was completely nude!

I got pictures. It'll take me a while to figure out whether Americans are sexually repressed (in that we giggle at nudity and think it's obscene) or if Europeans are too sexually liberal.

Barcelona is amazing, we've walked all over the city so far. This morning we went to Monserrat, which is this really interesting old Monastery in the mountains outside of Barcelona, but it's more like Disneyland in the mountains, with music and dancing and food and liquor. It was awesome.

My internet isn't working (I'm writing this on my friend's laptop right now) so I will upload pictures when I get back to Londontown or if the internet in Madrid works after Tuesday :)

Mr. Obama and the Human Rights Campaign

2009-10-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

I watched this for the first time tonight.

Despite my feelings regarding the president at the current time (call it disillusionment, all the hype from the election turned into a huge post-election let down, but everyone can identify with that, within and without the LGBT community), I think the man did a good job. Whether he did a good job of pulling the wool over our eyes or whether he sincerely meant what he said, it doesn't really matter.

The fact of the matter is, there is progress. It is slow. Much slower than it should be. Much slower, I think, than anyone expected it would be. Perhaps even in my lifetime there will still be mountains to climb.

But as a hiker, I suppose, I have to admit that the unclimbed mountains are far more alluring than those which are climbed daily. The unchartered waves are more daring than the warm bay waters. The forest is more tempting than the field.

We can all feel this movement heating up, swelling around us, becoming bigger with every pulse in every vein in every crowd at every rally.

And in the end, we know that love wins. Love always wins. Love wins in Revelations, oh you who would quote God's word. Love wins in every story ever written. And if you would argue that no, love does not always win, I would tell you to read between the lines, and perhaps then you would see that yes, in fact, love does win.

This is about the pinnacle. The peak. Triumphing over hate. The journey there is long and arduous. Dangerous, perilous, often sorrowful. But some day, in some sleepy little down in America, a little child is going to read in their history books about how LGBT individuals were persecuted, and with the hard work, dedication and compassion of LGBT individuals, leaders and supporters, they overcame and are now treated as equals.

And that little child won't be afraid to be who they are,

because love always wins in the end.

Everyone Deserves a Chance to Fly

2009-10-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

I saw Wicked the other day here in London Town.

It was absofreakinlutely phenomenal. I love love loved it. It made me kind of sad and nostalgic, though, because (although it was my first time seeing the musical) my friends from school and I (my best friends at school) would after get together at night and sit around and sing songs for Wicked. I remember sitting in my car, my baby Rhonda, blasting Defying Gravity, my friends all around me shouting the words and trying to keep up with Idina Menzel and just laughing and laughing and having a wonderful time just being together and being utterly silly.

I wish I weren't a grown up, almost constantly.

Yesterday we walked around Camden Market. The place reeks of incense, in fact the smell still lingers on the clothes I wore yesterday. Incense reminds me of high school, coming home after a long day and lighting a stick of incense and just relaxing.

Tomorrow I have to get up super early to meet my professor at the train to go to Cambridge for an out of class field trip. I like to sleep in on Fridays (or travel), but it will be nice to get outside of London for a bit.

Then next Friday we leave for Spain where we'll meet up with the Madre and have a wonderful time, to be sure. I'm excited to see my mom, I've missed her. I wish my sister and the kids could come visit, but I know that's impossible. I feel terrible that my baby niece will be five months old, almost six, by the time I get home; and about 10 days after I get home my oldest niece is turning seven! Where does the time go?

I also feel pretty bad that the thing I am looking forward to the most out of this whole trip is seeing Hillary. I've been trying to convince myself that I don't miss her, that I'm fine without her and that four months isn't that long to go, but it truly is. I can't wait for her to get here so I can show her how amazing London is, walk her along the lake at Hyde Park and take her into the little used book shops near the British Museum. I'm looking forward to Paris, too, eating good food (hopefully!) and drinking great wine. But mostly I'm excited to see Hillary, and I might not even care if we did anything the whole time that she is here (besides the fact that I want to show her around and for her to see as much as she possibly can in the short time that she is here).

It's strange, I never thought I'd be in love. I certainly never thought I'd find anyone like Hillary, she's perfect for me.

But no more of that mushy stuff. Hope everyone has a productive Friday and a wonderful weekend :)

How Do You Cope?

2009-10-09T04:45:00.000-07:00

No one has ever asked me that question before, until last night.

Basically my story starts out with a bunch of twenty-year olds drinking and having nothing to do. But the drinking and nothing to do part is unimportant. The debauchery was only the bridge from polite conversation to indepth conversation.

We started the night out with five of us, sitting in our dorm room, drinking and talking. By the time we left the room we were all feeling good. We went to a bar and I had a few drinks, and by the time we left the bar I was almost too drunk to walk, but I did all right. I can still remember everything clearly, and that's all that matters.

We went back to our room, five of us had become six by this point (we ran into one of our friends in the dorm lounge). We all went back to the room and listened to music and talked (loudly) into the wee hours of the morning. I was trying to stay awake to talk to Hillary at 2:30 am my time this morning anyway (9:30 pm her time), so it was nice to have some company while I waited. We never got to talk anyway, but staying up late was worth it.

Eventually the numbers dwindled and six became four. We were all sitting around in true college fashion, drunk and wrapped in blankets to keep warm in these chilly London nights. We were also playing truth or dare, and since we are all too lazy to accept any dares we all chose truth. The main topic was, naturally, sex, because what else is there to talk about after all?

So it is understandable that I was very taken aback when my friend (a new friend, might I add, who I only just met a month ago) asked me how I cope with my father's death. Thankfully I was sober enough to not cry in emotional drunken sadness, but too drunk to give her a concise answer.

So I rambled on for the better part of fifteen minutes about how people who didn't watch their parent literally waste away and die before their eight year old eyes are clueless as to how I feel, and that it is an incredibly lonely place to be. I have so much pressure on me to be the best, to never cry, to never show weakness because I'm my mother's rock, I'm her one constant. And she's my one constant, so she feels compelled to be strong for me. We have to be srong for each other and neither of us can ever cry or ever grieve or ever shout out in fear and sorrow and anger.

But I mess up, I'm human, and sometimes I'm not constant and sometimes I'm weak. All the time I'm messing up and I am disappointing someone because I can't be what everyone wants me to be.

The hardest part of having to cope with my father's death is that my father was my best friend. The strongest love I've ever felt for another living thing in this life I felt for him. He was amazing, one of the greatest people God ever put on this Earth, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sprung from his loins. He was truly amazing, and a definite blessing to everyone he met. No one on this Earth can compare to my father, my love for other people can't compare to the love I still have for my twelve-year dead dad.

The saddest part of his dying is that his grandchildren never got the chance to meet this man. This man who would have loved them so much.

I don't really cope with it. I don't cry about it and I don't talk about it (unless someone directly brings it up, ordinarly). I still feel like a trapped eight year old, lost and alone searching for her daddy everywhere and never finding him because he is long gone. I guess I'll always feel like an eight year old, lonely and heartbroken and wishing God would have taken me instead of smashing my heart into tiny pieces of jagged glass that can never be repaired.

And that's what I told them, in a long drawn out soliloquy of no tears and no other noise besides the hum of my soul coming out of my mouth.

I don't know if they heard me, or if they know how sad I am and how fragile I am. But I do know it felt so so so good to be asked how I feel about my father's death. No one has ever asked me that in twelve years. No one has ever wanted to know how I feel before. And finally someone asked, and it was the most relieving experience I've ever had. Finally someone cared about me and my ability to handle something no eight year old should ever have to handle. I just felt so good.

HRC Gala on Saturday

2009-10-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Can I just say that I am sooo GLAD that the gays are going to be picketing the HRC gala on Saturday in DC.

I wish I could be there to fight the good fight with them.

I've got some choise words for Barack Obama, he's just about my least favourite politician right now. At least the Conservatives don't SAY that they are going to do a damn thing for our rights. But Mr. Obama, you lied. I'd rather gouge my eyes out with hot pokers than vote for a Republican, but you can rest assured I won't be voting for Mr. Obama again. Fool me once...

So, to everyone who will be picketing the Gala, I salute you, and wish I could be among your ranks. Godspeed, maybe Obama will get the message that we're here, we're queer, and we vote and pay taxes too.

Fall

2009-10-05T09:32:00.001-07:00

It has become apparent that fall has, at long last, arrived in London.

Much to my dismay, might I add, since I enjoy wearing short pants all year for the most part. The air is getting damp, the leaves are sweeping to the ground in little orange and red puddles. The evenings are chilly, and the bottoms of my jeans are often wet and grainy from being dragged all over the city.

It's almost not fair to have to sit in rooms and read about people who are very much alive in the pages of hundred year old texts, people who did things and loved and lived and lived, and we are cooped up and confined to a classroom and a white board, or a power point slide show or a visit to a museum where the professor will butcher a piece that otherwise would have brought a tear to your eye.

Fall always reminds me of walking to my house after school. The bus dropped me off a block away from my house, and I always remember the sudden surge of excitement at the end of the day when the last bell would ring and then that feeling of disappointment, sitting on the bus and bouncing up and down up and down and knowing it would all have to be done again tomorrow.

Walking home in the fall is particularly vibrant in my memory, probably because there are so many smells in the fall. I think there are far more fall smells than spring smells even. There's the smell of leaves, leaves that you couldn't smell all spring and summer and now that they have made their way to the ground you finally get a good wiff. And then there is rain. It rains a lot in the fall, at least in the Northeast (and in London, it is very very damp), and the smell of the rain falling from the sky, clinging desparately to the bare tree branches and the few remaining leaves. It's all very romantic.

I remember walking home and having nothing better to do than to have conversations with myself (this was before I had a car and I would just turn the stereo on high to drown out the thoughts in my head). Inner conversations of course, I'm not the crazy lady who talks out loud to herself (not yet anyway). I'd think about everything from algebra to charlemagne to why life was so hard to how I didn't think I could do it all over again tomorrow. High school was such a drag.

Sometimes while I was walking, I would look around and notice that I was all alone. I live in a bedroom community, my friends and my teachers and my mother know me, but none of my neighbours even know my name. I would feel so utterly alone. And then there would be a gentle breeze, and the leaves would all start to rustle. The leaves would be swept up with the wind, and they would kind of march alongside me, the breeze pushing them along.

The leaves walking alongside me in the gentle fall breeze always made me feel like I wasn't alone, like it was worth it to get up and do it all again tomorrow. I would cut through my backyard, which opens out onto a side-street, and slosh through the muddy grass. The leaves wouldn't roll alongside me in the grass, but it was okay because the gentle breeze remained and, not unlike the warm hugs of summer, the cool breezes of fall are also friendly and gentle in their own way.

It's strange to look back on times like those and think of how insignificant they felt then, and what lasting memories they have become.

I never feel alone in the fall. I feel like someone is watching me, a lot of the time, specifically in the fall, and I can't help but wonder if it isn't my daddy watching me, knowing that these months are the hardest for mom and I to get through. This year will be twelve years since he died. I always say I wouldn't give anything to see him again, to hear his voice, to touch his scratchy face, to play one round of basketball with him, but secretly I would. I know he's in the leaves, he's in the trees, he's in every raindrop and every muddied blade of grass. He's everywhere I am, everywhere I've been and everywhere I'm going. But it doesn't make me miss him any less.

I know it's just me being wishful and hoping that my daddy is watching over me, but I know it's just my heart and my mind playing tricks on me, hoping to see him walking up the path, open the door and catch my eight year old self flying into his waiting arms.

But it's just the breeze, and just the leaves rustling in the gentle changing of the weather. The sky is getting grey and the days are getting shorter. Soon it will be winter, and there will be frost on the bare tree limbs and the flowers will all be long dead.

I do miss being alone and introspective, I hope that there are still lonely and introspective teenagers out there, and that they don't feel so alone when they feel gentle breezes or rain drops that fall on bare cheeks. I hope no one feels so lonely when they hear the leaves rustling in the wind, and that everyone has a marvelously beautiful fall, wherever you are.

Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

2009-10-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

One day an expert on Moses' laws came to test Jesus' orthodoxy by asking him this question: "Teacher, what does a man need to do to live forever in heaven?" Jesus replied, "What does Moses' law say about it?" "It says," he replied, "that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you must love your neighbor just as much as you love yourself." "Right!" Jesus told him. "Do this and you shall live!" The man wanted to justify (his lack of love for some kinds of people), so he asked, "Which neighbors?" Jesus replied with an illustration: "A Jew going on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes and money, and beat him up and left him lying half dead beside the road. "By chance a Jewish priest came along; and when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Jewish Temple-assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but then went on. "But a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw him, he felt deep pity. Kneeling beside him the Samaritan soothed his wounds with medicine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his donkey and walked along beside him till they came to an inn, where he nursed him through the night. The next day he handed the innkeeper two twenty-dollar bills and told him to take care of the man. 'If his bill runs higher than that,' he said, 'I'll pay the difference the next time I am here.' "Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the bandits' victim?" The man replied, "The one who showed him some pity." Then Jesus said, "Yes, now go and do the same." (TLB, Luke 10:25-37)

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday, and that everyone has a wonderful week.

Everyone Jump Upon the Peace Train

2009-10-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

Now just tell me this song doesn't bring a smile to your heart :)

God bless all you who crave the Peace Train, who ride the Peace Train, who conduct the Peace Train into tomorrow.

And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true :) God bless you Yusuf Islam, may every last person on this Earth hear the call of peace.

Happy October!

The Boys Wanna Be Her

2009-09-24T02:24:00.000-07:00

We're seeing PEACHES... TONIGHT!

I am so effing excited I can hardly stand it. I love Peaches, and I hear her shows are absolutely out of control. She's probably the coolest chick who ever lived and if I go home with her, Hillary totally can't be upset with me.

But no, for reals, that would never happen.

But I am VERY excited about seeing Peaches and dancing and being up until 3 am. I hope I get a picture with her, she's doing a DJ set so it's not like she'll be up on a stage or anything. Totally going to get her autograph :)

If you're in London tonight go to the Bath House and see Peaches!

Love Dares You to Care For the People

2009-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is our selves... under pressure

I always idolized Freddie Mercury (who doesn't, though?). Ever since I've gotten to London, "Under Pressure" is on repeat in my brain. I feel like this song is a great characterisation of this city (or any city for that matter). Everyone is doing their own thing and they forget that they aren't the only person on the face of the earth.

You should check out my other blog: Across the Pond and comment on my posts! I'm having a fantastic adventure in London so far :)

You Can Hear the Whistle Blow a Hundred Miles

2009-09-17T04:34:00.000-07:00

Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary has died at the age of 72.

It's a very sad day for folk music, for the generation of peace loving individuals who sprouted out of the 1960's, and for people like me who were raised with the tenants of peace and love and grew up listening to artists like Mary Travers.

She was not only radiantly beautiful, but she was kind, and courageous, and she had a damn good voice.

If I Had a Hammer

I'll always remember listening to her on tape, riding my bike around the neighbourhood, or watching Peter, Paul and Mary on the television and feeling completely connected to the lyrics they sang.

The saddest part of the death of such an icon for the peace movement is that there seems to be no one taking up the torch for the cause. I have no power, or fame, or money or really very much talent, or else I would have taken up the cause long ago. People with power, with sway, with the funds to do wonderful things and the talent to command people to listen just simply are not using those gifts for the right purposes. I hope someone comes along, sooner rather than later, who will remind us that justice, freedom and love are the three greatest gifts. I also hope that before any more wars start, that we might be reminded of where all the flowers have gone.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

New Blog

2009-08-30T22:26:00.001-07:00

I've created a new blog where I'm going to compile all of my pictures, thoughts, adventures, etc. from London over the next four months or so.

The blog is called Across the Pond

I suspect I'll do a great deal of blogging from that one, so things might get kind of dead around here for a while. However, I do like to come here and rant and rave so I suspect if I ever feel the need to do that, I'll come here.

This is basically my way of saying that, if you want to keep up with what's going on in London, or what's going on with me, you should probably look up my new blog. But don't forget about The Ray! 201 posts later and still going strong! Check in every now and then here to see if anything is going on, but definitely check out the new blog, I think it will definitely be worth your while!

On Pet-Dumping

2009-08-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

I was browsing Craigslist (I frequent the pet section, because I'm hopelessly addicted to animals and I always convince myself that somehow I can help the person out who is looking to rehome their cute little bunny) when I came across this post and it really resonated with me. Pass this along if you feel so inclined, and be sure to give credit where credit is due. I take no credit for the following, I simply say bravo to you, M. Clark (whoever you may be) for saying so eloquently what I feel every day of my life. A commitment is a commitment and a family member is a family member and it is our responsiblity as higher forms of life (as it were...) to care for the lower forms of life, and to treat them with respect and dignity.

On Pet-Dumping

I recently read an online article called "Why You Can't Afford a Dog." The author encouraged families facing financial difficulties to consider the money-saving move of giving up their dog. After all, feeding a dog and providing veterinary care cost an average of $800 per year, and times are tight. The author encouraged dog owners to find temporary foster care for their animals – though what sort of temporary foster care she imagines exists for dogs, I don't know - or to surrender them to already-overcrowded shelters where euthanasia is common.

I was horrified.

I was a dog-loving child. The emotions I felt for my dog were, in my tender years, akin to the emotions adults feel for their babies. I recall two primary fears in early adolescence: the premature death of a parent or sibling, and the inevitable death of my dog. I would have chosen to move to a smaller house, share a bedroom with my two sisters, and never buy another record album before I would have chosen to give up my dog. Fortunately for me, my parents understood that. Once, in my adulthood, my mother said, "I never understood people who would take their children's pets away. What message does that send?"

I can't imagine a parent who wants this to be the message they teach their children: that family members are disposable; that when they become inconvenient, we just throw them away; that material things are more important than living things.

Thinking about taking your dog to the shelter? Consider this before you go.

Things You Should Give Up Before You Abandon the Pet You Promised to Love and Protect:

1. Premium cable TV: $100 - $150/month
Standard cable TV: $39.99 per month.
Cheapo, local-only cable: $10.40/month.
No cable: $0.00 per month.

What you can buy for your dog with your savings:
Taste of the Wild Grain-Free Kibble (high-end!): $38 for a 30-lb bag, which feeds a medium-sized dog for 2 – 3 months.

2. Gym membership: $480/year
Walking up and down the hills of your local park one to two hours per day, plus tossing a stick, playing tug of war, and wrestling with your dog: $0

What you can buy for your dog with your savings:
"Basic Manners" and "Beginning Agility" classes to help him become a better doggie citizen.

3. Cell Phone Plans: $600 per year (low-end) to $1800 per year (high-end, with texting, etc.)
TracFone service: $60/year (Low-end, minimal calling – seriously, that's what I spend, with minutes left over.)

What you can buy for your dog with your savings:
Average healthy-dog veterinary care: $300 - $500/year.

4. Music for your two teenagers:

300 downloads from iTunes: $387 X 2 = $774
Medium-quality iPod: $100 X 2 = $200
Total = $974
Allowing the teenagers to baby-sit and rake leaves until they can afford their own music: $0. (And actually, let's throw in a net gain of, say, $500 for the invaluable lessons about delayed gratification, hard work, and knowing that it's a tough, cold world where Mommy and Daddy won't bail them out all the time.)

What you can buy for your dog with your savings:
Emergency surgery, stitching up, antibiotics, and follow-up care for a hypothetical dog - not my dog; he's not that dumb! - who hypothetically runs into a stick while frolicking in the woods, stabbing himself in the chest: $800.

5. New Honda CR-V: $23,500; use for 5 years = $4,700/year
5-year-old Toyota Corolla: $8,995; use for 5 years = $1799/year.

What you can buy for your dog with your savings: Wow! You can take in grandma's Yorkie, and make him a friend for your dog. Then Grandma can still see him sometimes, even though she's moving into an assisted living community. That will make her so happy!

6. Your Credit Cards: Cost on a $10,000 balance at 10% = $13,777 over 16 years
Cost on a 10,000 balance at 20% = 22,241 over 25 years.
Cost of buying something with $10,000 cash: $10,000.

What you can buy for your dog and Grandma's dog with your savings:
Fur coats, caviar, manicures, and spa treatments.

If you love your children, show them that you honor your commitments. Teach them that we care for the less powerful gently and with compassion. There are always smaller houses, smaller cars, and less expensive food. There is never, never another family member to replace a pet carelessly tossed away.

Copyright 2009 by M. Clark

A Giant Leap for Equality

2009-08-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

I was at church this evening for my last service before heading across the pond. I gave my pastor a great big hug, knowing how much we're going to miss each other and how much I'm going to miss the church community. Pastor is a wonderful man who has taught me so much about living my life as a spiritual person, his retirement in February is going to be one of the hardest losses of my life. He can't step foot in the church for five years after he retires, which is a church rule in order for the new pastor to become familiar with the congregation. I sure am going to miss him though, but when I get back from London I'll be church shopping near the new apartment. Hopefully I'll be lucky enough to find a congregation as warm as the one I am leaving behind, but no one will ever be able to replace pastor.

It took me a while to get out of church tonight, as everyone was talking with me about London and wishing me well and I was saying my goodbyes. Mom said she thought pastor was getting a little misty when he was saying his goodbyes to me, and I wouldn't doubt it because I was too. I cried like a baby as I drove myself home tonight. I haven't gone four months without going to church since I was baptised.

However, I wasn't so much crying because I am going to miss pastor, the congregation, the feeling I get when I sing a hymn or look up at the cross in the pulpit. Pastor told me, as I was leaving, that the church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) recently (this week!!) voted to stop discriminatory practices in regard to sexual orientation. That means that gays and lesbians are now able to be married in the church by an ordained Lutheran minister, gays and lesbians can serve openly as ordained ministers AND be in committed relationships with their spouses. Previously, gays and lesbians could serve as ordained ministers BUT they had to be abstinant, and church policy was that gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies or weddings wouldn't be church sponsored.

This is the. best. news. EVER! I'm so happy for the church, it literally made me weepy, so my tears were a mix of sadness at leaving and happiness that the church is finally entering the 21st century (they skipped right over the 19th and 20th and moved right into the 21st! big steps for a conservative, old fashioned organization). This bodes very well for my interest in becoming a pastor, something I need to discuss with my pastor when I get back from London. I love research and psychology but I've always felt called to serve God and it's not something I can deny. I'm just glad I no longer have to choose between serving God as an ordained individual and being true to myself. I'm also relieved that, if I want to, I can be married in my own church by my own pastor and have a marriage recognized by my church.

It's a wonderful feeling to be accepted. Somewhere in heaven Jesus is saying "now stop persecuting the homos and start feeding the hungry!"

A Sad Loss for Human Rights

2009-08-26T21:00:00.001-07:00

I'm not the biggest fan of the Kennedy family, for no reason other than the fact that they are alarmingly wealthy and powerful and alarmingly wealthy and powerful people/entities scare the sh*t out of me. That being said, it is too bad that Ted Kennedy lost his battle with brain cancer (a particularly atrocious type of cancer, no matter how young, old, accomplished, unknown you are, it just plain sucks) and that the U.S. senate lost such a champion of human rights. It's also very unfortunate that Obama and those working dilligently on a health care reform bill won't have the advice and knowledge of Ted Kennedy, and also that Mr. Kennedy won't be able to witness health care being provided to all Americans.

It's hard to get by Ted Kennedy's past, and even harder to get beyond the fact that he comes from one of the wealthiest families this country has ever known, and one of the most politically active. It is evident, though, in many of the Kennedys and the way in which they live their lives, that though they were blessed with emerald spoons in their mouths from birth, they know that the only way one can get in to Heaven is to take care of one's neighbour and that he who has "most" has least in the eyes of God unless he shares his wealth with others.

Oh, and happy anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Next year will be the 90 year anniversary of women's suffrage. It was a long time coming. It's ironic that Ted Kennedy, a champion of human rights in general but a fierce advocate of women and our rights would die on a day like today. So it goes.

A Week and Five Days!!

2009-08-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

Finally some good weather! It took freakin long enough for it to get here, but it's here and it is glorious, but it is going away on Sunday so I'm hanging on to it with every fiber of my being.

We're going to... you guessed it... PTOWN! this weekend! I'm so excited. I love nowhere else on this Earth the way that I love Provincetown. I'm sure there will be pictures after the weekend.

Two weeks from today I'll be in London, and I will have been there for two days! It's so surreal... I can hardly believe that just a few months ago studying abroad was a fleeting thought and now all of a sudden it's here and it's real and my suitcases are empty and glaring at me from across the room (they're saying "Rachel, you really can't put off packing us much longer..."). I'm going to miss everyone from home so much, and all of my college friends. A lot of my friends are seniors this year and I'm missing one whole half of their senior year. I'm missing four months of my little kitten's young life. I'm missing my one year anniversary with Hillary, apartment hunting and quality time.

I'm not too concerned about missing our one year because Hill knows that I love her and that every moment we have together is a gift, months and years don't matter, rather the most important aspect is the amount of love and happiness that fills those months and years. I'll miss her sleep breathing and setting the alarm clock fifteen minutes later and pulling her in to my arms for just a little bit longer. I'll miss playing with her hair on car rides while she drives. I'll miss climbing mountains with her and visiting my nieces and nephew with her and going out to dinner and holding hands under the table and going to the movies and putting my arm around her and letting her head rest on my shoulder. I'll probably even miss arguing with her over trivial things, things I only pick fights about because I know in the end she will still love me, if I thought for a minute she would stop loving me I would never argue about anything. She's a one of a kind kinda girl, and this is a one of a kind kinda love.

I'll miss all my friends from home, but I always miss them anyways. Kate and Natasha are so wrapped up in school and their new lives that I hardly ever see them anyway. I feel kind of like they don't appreciate the fact that I'm going to be 3,000 miles away for nearly four months and that they won't see me or likely talk to me for that amount of time. But I supposed, at this stage in our lives, I'm really only of use to them when they're home from school (if I'm home from school at the same time). I'll send them a postcard or two, but they won't understand that I miss them and that I love them, because they don't miss me and I'd venture to say that they don't love me anymore. It's all growing up though, I s'pose.

Molly and Rob and Jaime are all different stories. Rob and Jaime work all the time, and it's difficult to coordinate hanging out with them. I do feel, though, that they miss me when I'm not around and that they love me and that they appreciate the distance and length of time I will be away. Molly is the one person out of all of my friends from home who I am sure will miss me and appreciates that I will be gone for a long time and that I will be virtually unreachable a great deal of the time. If I retain a relationship with any of these people, I believe Molly will be the one with whom I still have a strong relationship in the coming years, even when I move to MA.

I'll miss my family, even though I don't see them as often as I would like, at least I know that if I need anything they are a phone call away for the most part. I visited my grandmother on Nantucket last Friday, and even though my grandmother remembers me as a 13 year old, she does recognize me (although she is shocked that I am as tall as I am, since the last time she remembers seeing me I was in rollerblades and overalls, speeding around the parking lot in her retirement community), but it's incredibly depressing to have a member of your family with Alzheimers. I needed to see her, though, because the last time I saw her was Thanksgiving two years ago, and if she were to die while I was in London I would never forgive myself for not seeing her in two years.

My mother will be the one who misses me the most, I am sure. She likes to pretend that she is okay without me, and she is, but I know she misses me and my crazy antics and she will find it strange that I don't call her in the afternoons when I know she is headed home just so we can shoot the breeze for a few minutes. She'll have difficulty not driving to my school on Saturday afternoons to pick me up and take me out to dinner or to take the T in the Boston with me to go to a museum. She'll worry about me constantly until my feet are planted safely on the ground on December 20th at Logan. It makes me feel good to know that she cares, but at the same time I worry that I am the cause of her suddenly more grey hair.

I'll try to blog often while I'm in Europe, and I'll try to have significantly more pictures than I usually do. This is the chance of a lifetime, I'm so glad to have this wonderful opportunity and I can't wait to share my experiences with everyone!

At Least I'm Enjoying the Ride

2009-08-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

Lots of stuff has been going on since I last blogged. I s'pose I'll begin at the beginning (as Julie Andrews [the human, not the cat] would say: let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start...).

A week ago Monday Hillary and I climbed 98% of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. Apparently it's the second most climbed mountain in the world, right behind Mt. Fugi in Japan (totally going there at some point in my life). It was absolutely beautiful and so worth every ounce of sweat and every curse that slipped out of my lips the following day when my knees felt like they were going to give out. We couldn't finish climbing because there is a sheer rock face about, maybe 200 feet from the summit, and I knew I could get up, but getting down is the hard part.

You gotta get up to get down.

So we were content with getting as far as we got (and we made it sooooo far) and then climbing back down. We also didn't have enough water, which was a major concern. I actually ended up filling up my bottle at a stream (despite Hillary's warnings that I would get parasites. It's been a week, still no parasites and that water was darn good).

That's the trail... oi vey

A rock in the shape of a heart :)

Nature

A breathtaking view, even if it's a few hundred feet from the top

Later in the week we had to bring some family members up to upstate New York (we're not talking Albany or Syracuse here, we're talking borderline Canada, where some of the towns speak French) to retrieve their vehicle which had been being serviced for over a month. No one else in the family would do it, and what's family for if not to be there when you need them most? It was an extremely long day though, we started the journey at 8 am from where they were staying in MA and didn't get off the road until close to 11 pm that night. We took breaks for meals and stretches but mainly we just drove and drove... which is entirely too exhausting for my liking.

Over the weekend, Hillary and I went up to Maine to visit with her friend and her friend's boyfriend. It ended up that her friend's boyfriend's family was headed to the family cabin in the woods that weekend, so we tagged along and had a pretty awesome time. The cabin had no electricity or running water, it was mainly a place to sleep. There was an outhouse a bit away from the cabin. The cabin was entirely in the woods, surrounded by trees and a huge beautiful crystal clear lake bordered by mountains and rolling hills. There was no one around, no other campers and no cabins at all, just us, the sound of the water hitting the pebbles on the shore and the loons calling to each other. Hillary and I stayed in a tent in the woods and fell asleep to the loons and the crickets. It was wonderful to be unplugged for a while, to just enjoy being together and being surrounded by new friends and just relaxing for a bit. AND on the way home we stopped at LL Bean in Freeport, which was very cool, though super overwhelming. Still, a very cool store and definitely worth the experience. Give me the catalogue anyday though.

Now I'm mainly in London mode, trying to figure out what I need, what I have, what I can get when I'm there and what I should bring, etc. No big trips this weekend, except up to see my grandmother on Nantucket on Friday (which I'm not very comfortable with at the moment, since the Kennedys will be swarming the place and we'll have to avoid heavy traffic times at all cost) and to see some fireworks with Hill Saturday night. Summer is really starting to wind down now, and I can't say as though that makes me sad, though this is my last real summer of freedom. I'm so excited for adventure and the unknown, London will be a great adventure, I can hardly wait.

Scraping By

2009-08-01T17:09:00.000-07:00

I get really scared when I hear a lot of my classmates, friends and peers suggesting that Sarah Palin would be a better president than Barack Obama. These are the same people whose parents voted for George Bush twice, so I can only imagine the brain washing that went on in their households. Probably had Fox News on 24/7 for eight years.

It's just scary to think that these kids, the future of America, the future work force... have these insane notions about leaders. Leaders who have shown their true colours and proven themselves to be useless and worthless as public servants.

I was there was an island somewhere, where there were no politics, no one in charge and no power struggle. Everyone just did their own thing and got along and if there was ever any trouble there was punishment to be decided by the local people as a collective unit. No war and no death or destruction, just people trying to scrape by, like we've been trying to do for thousands of years.

When I think about the future of this country, I get so scared it almost makes me physically ill. Here's hoping my generation can get its act together, or that I stop caring.

A Visit From The Stork

2009-07-30T11:05:00.001-07:00

The family reunion was this weekend, and it actually went very well. No major issues and everyone put on a happy face and avoided ripping heads off.

So on Friday I was packing my things to get ready for the weekend. We were scheduled to leave my house when Hillary got here from work (a 2 hour drive for her) and then be on our way, taking separate cars because there wasn't enough room in one car for everything. I get a phone call from Hillary half-way through the day saying that one of the feral cats at school (Hillary works at our college now) had kittens and the maintenance staff was giving them away. So I called my mother to see if we could bring one home, if and only if she could look after the kitten until January and we would bring the kitten to the apartment with us when I got back from London. The madre agreed, so Hillary went and got a kitten.

Possibly the worst mistake of our lives, though also the cutest investment ever. This was the tiniest kitten I had ever held. She is a calico, who loves to run around like a banshee and things fingers and toes are the coolest chew toys ever. We took her to the vet on Monday and they determined that she was between 6-8 weeks old, so the bottle we had been feeding her every 2-4 hours since Friday evening was unnecessary (she seemed to really enjoy the bottle though).

We didn't get very much sleep at all the first few nights with her in her pink rubbermade bin complete with blanket and catnip mouse. She wanted to be fed, then she wanted to play, then she wanted to go to the bathroom and then she wanted to sleep, but she wanted to sleep on our chests. So we took her to the vet and they determined her age and told us what we should be feeding her, so we started her on a wet food/formula combo in a bowl and she took to it pretty much right away. I put her in a litterbox that same day and she did her business in the litterbox immediately, she's so damn smart.

Little did we know that when the vets gave her the de-wormer (fearing that, since her mom was a feral cat, she would have worms and fleas and earmites) she would have explosive diarreah for two days straight. She actually didn't have worms, she was just bloated with a big baby belly, and she didn't have fleas or ear mites either. She got a clean bill of health and she is a perfectly healthy and happy little kitten.

At this point, she is eating dry food and loving it, drinking water by itself (finally!) and going in the litterbox to do her business instead of all over the cat carrier where she sleeps. Right now she is attacking my laptop. It'll be sad to leave her in September, just like it will be sad to leave my cat and my dog and my rabbits. Hopefully she will quickly be able to defend herself against my five cats, the dog loves cats and will probably just lick her and annoy the hell out of her.

In January, she can move into the apartment with Hillary and I and we can be a happy little family. The kitten, whose name is Julie Andrews (as my six year old niece exclaimed when I explained who Julie Andrews is: "Fraulein Maria!") will be spayed probably sometime in midwinter, she'll be an indoor cat and she'll never be declawed as long as I have a say in the matter because small animals need a way to defend themselves. Hopefully she'll be a good pest-hunter in the new apartment.

Don't Look Back in Anger

2009-07-20T20:39:00.001-07:00

I can't stand this volatile relationship my mother and I have. I just plain can't stand it anymore.

As I get older I'm able to piece together and reflect on the damage she's done to me over the years (being a psychology major only makes my introspection worse).

A few weeks ago she accused me of not liking Naveen, which she does on a regular basis. I love Naveen, like a brother (or at least I did before the whole dabacle on my birthday), and so naturally I defended the fact that I do like Naveen, it's their relationship I have a problem with. I'm sorry but my 50-something year old mother should not be doing a 20-something year old man's laundry, giving him her brand new laptop, making his lunches for him, etc. etc., it's not a friendship it's her babying him, but that's a long story for another day.

On this particular occasion I guess my mother decided she needed to get a good jab in and take me down a few pegs, so she said something to the affect of "you don't like him because he is Indian (obviously I'm racist, and if that wasn't offensive enough), or maybe it's because he's a man. The only people you care about are gay people and the only things you care about are gay issues."

It's taken me some time to reflect on this, because it cut me REAL deep. If my mother bothered to get to know me, she'd know I'm not really big into gay issues. I'm more of a big picture kind of girl. I'm really into human issues. I care about everyone who takes a minute to talk to me, if I've met you there's a good chance I care about you. I don't really have any gay friends, most of my friends are straight (by choice for the most part, because gay kids in college are filled with drama, and I, clearly, get enough drama at home). My first best friend from college is a guy, he's a great guy and I love him a great deal. Almost all of my friends are girls, but that's only because my school is predominantly female. But I guess the fact of the matter is I shouldn't have to justify myself in terms of my mother's hurtful remark. She wanted to get a good jab in, and she did. I'm not sure if she can even comprehend the amount of damage she did to me by saying that.

Ever since she said that I've been wondering to myself about being gay. Do people assume that since I'm gay all I care about are gay things? I can't care about anything other than being gay? I mean, I started the GSA at my school, but I did that honestly because I firmly believe that the school is better off having a safe and welcoming outlet for GLBTQ students rather than having to deal with depressed/suicidal students who have no outlet and no way of expressing themselves. It's all about student retention. But I'm not all about being gay. I'm all about being me, and doing well in school, and getting into graduate school and figuring out what the heck I want to do with my life. I'm pretty normal and boring when you get right down to it.

But what if people think I'm just gay? What if they don't see that I'm Rachel too, and I like to play the violin and I'm happiest when I'm surrounded by my friends laughter. What if they think all I am is gay, and they don't know that when I get cut I bleed too. That's the scariest part of all of this. Does my mother think all I am is gay? That I'm nothing more than a gay kid now and I am so uninterested in the rest of the world that it might as well not even exist to me.

It makes me so sad. To think I might mean nothing. To think I might mean nothing to the woman who made me something. It helps me understand why so many GLBTQ kids kill themselves. When the people you love the most in the world make you feel worthless, what else is there?

I wonder if she'll ever know how much she hurt me, or if she'll ever care.

Just have to keep moving I s'pose. Chin up and all that good stuff. Hope everyone else is having a safe, happy and productive week. This weekend is the family reunion, wish me luck.

And Keep Your Eyes Wide the Chance Won't Come Again

2009-07-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm kicking myself because Bob Dylan, THE Bob Dylan, the one and only the man himself, is PLAYING, RIGHT NOW, down the street from my house. I can HEAR HIM from my upstairs bathroom, clear as a bell.

Clearly I dropped the ball and missed the fact that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Michael Mellencamp (whom my high school health teacher taught back in Illinois, see I was listening Mrs. D!) would be in CT tonight. I feel like a fool. Now I'm scrambling to see if I can afford tickets to the three remaining shows near me in either Vermont, NY or Rhode Island, all within the next few days. Ugh, it seems hopeless, but maybe someone will want to go with me.

Harry Potter et cetera

2009-07-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Life is quiet at home for the most part, and it's nice to be around my friends (and Hillary when I can) and spice things up a bit.

Last night we went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince.

SPOILERS AHEAD: for those of you who haven't read the book(s).

I am not necessarily an avid Harry Potter fan. I enjoy the movies and there was a time when I enjoyed the books, but I was always more of a Narnia kid and when I discovered Lord of the Rings I was in heaven. There's just something about those books and movies. Harry Potter is a little too... realistic for my taste. The first few books and movies were fantastic (in the truest sense of the word) and magical, but as the kids get older I get less interested in the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. I guess maybe I am attracted to the innocence and mystery present in the books when Harry and his friends are young, just like the Pevensies in Narnia, and the perpetual innocence of Middle Earth (though that's a debate for another day). I don't like the hormonal teenage crap in the new Harry Potter movies and if I had read past book 3 I'm sure I would have eventually been turned off by it.

That being said, though, the movies are very well done and for people like me who crave to be taken to another world when we step into the pale darkness of a movie theatre, the Harry Potter movies deliver. I don't like the darkness present in the movies, but I understand that Harry is experiencing darker and darker stuff as he ages.

SPOILER: Though I haven't read the book, I was aware that Dumbledore died in the 7th book. Personally, I'll be more sad to see Hedwig the owl die in the 8th movie, but there was this sense of "what now?" when Snape killed Dumbledore. The tears and sniffles in the theatre definitely speaks volumes for how attached the fans are to the characters, both in the book and in living colour on the screen. J.K. Rowling and the actors and filmmakers responsible for the Harry Potter craze did a wonderful job creating a fan base and giving their fans what they want and what they crave.

So I can't really say "Oh the movie was true to the book, it was awesome!" or "The movie completely went against the plot of the book, terrible," but I can say that, for a movie, it was very well done and if you're going to see it and you're a die hard Harry Potter fan, be sure to differentiate between the books and the movies, they are two separate art forms in their own rights and deserve to be looked at as such. I heard far too much negativity last night, just enjoy the movie.

Or stay home and watch Lord of the Rings (cause it's soooo much better :D).

Save The Animales

2009-07-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

A lot has transpired whilst I was away on my leadership retreat at school:

- My car broke down immediately as I pulled into the main parking lot at school. Huge bummer, I was without a car for threeish days and my mother had to drive up from CT to pick me up, only to find out halfway to get me that my car was ready (if she had known, I could have easily gotten a ride over to the garage to get the car myself). AAA towed my car to a garage 10 miles away that I am (very) familiar with, and the fixed Rhonda up real nice and she's back to purring like a kitten... $600 later... It's better than the grand they originally estimated, but still, it makes me swoon just thinking about it. And I'm leaving for London in a month and two weeks...

- We discussed my club's E-Board, and how a certain individual on the E-Board (executive board: presidents, vp, etc.) needs some mediation and there needs to be intervention. Long story short, this guy thinks he's the bees knees and knows everything and has been so cruel and callous with his fellow E-Board members that he has caused tears and has desecrated the sacred name of my baby the GSA. It's an extremely long story that I can't explain here, but basically this person took playground bullying to a whole new level. Playground bullying is worse, I think, when you're 20 and you're still pulling the girl's hair and kicking sand in their eyes, literally or figuratively.

- I got to meet a bunch of wonderful new people with whom I would ordinarily never interact! It was an awesome experience and I'm so glad I had this worthwhile opportunity.

- Hillary and I went to Walden Pond and explored the trails around the pond. We didn't have our suits, unfortunately, because it was an absolutely beautiful day, but we dipped out feet in the water and it was sooo nice. I did get sneezed on by a statie's horse, though. I was just minding my own business, talking to the horse while he was moseying around in his pen, and he walked up to me and sneezed all over the new shirt that Hillary had just given me. That's why God made leaves though, to wipe horse snot off of new t-shirts.

I'm sure there is more, but basically it was a great and highly eventful weekend.

While my mother was bringing me to the garage to get my car she told me that the Stoneham Zoo and the Franklin Park Zoo are both closing (unless the state of Massachusetts intercedes). Now, if you've been to either of those zoos, you will know they are nothing special and that they probably should have closed their doors long ago. The Franklin Park Zoo has a petting zoo, bunnies, a flamingo, some ducks, and lions. However, I was beside myself when she told me that an estimated 30% of the animals are going to be euthenized because homes won't be able to be found for them. I can't even begin to understand why. Most of the animals at the FP Zoo are livestock and could be sent to farms to live out the rest of their days, and I'm sure some zoo would love to expand their horizons with a new lion, or to add a lion to their already existent pride. There has to be a way to save those animals, it just seems to terribly cruel to euthenize animals when we're done with them and can't find anything else to do with them :(

Hold On... What??

2009-07-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

The title of this article should be: Ridiculous Racist Bastards Try to Thwart Youngsters Summer Fun: Succeed at Being Racist, Fail at Thwarting Fun.

Just... read the article. It's probably one of the most disturbing things I've read in a VERY long time. It's just... so impossibly dumb... I can't even stand it.

Are we seriously living in 1956? Sorry little Johnny, your pigmentation is a little darker than mine so, here, you can use this drinking fountain and I'm going to use this one over here. Wouldn't want to catch your tan or anything.

These pool patrons actually took their children out of the pool, for fear that these kindergarten-7th grade camp-goers were going to... do what? Melt into the water and turn their pasty white kids into black kids? They actually had the nerve to VERBALIZE their disgust with these kids trying to enjoy some summer fun, to the kids themselves! That's the worst of it. These poor kids who were just trying to enjoy the pool had to get a harsh lesson in reality, a lesson in reality that quite frankly doesn't need to be learned or taught.

The people who are truly loosing in this situation, I feel, are the children of the patrons who are being taught at a young and impressionable age that there is a difference between black and white children and that black children don't have to be treated with respect.

It's easy to teach a child, it's next to impossible to unteach that child.

Let's all give a big welcome to the next generation of bigots, racists, homophobes and wife beaters. I'm so so so sorry for these little kids who just wanted to swim, please teach these morons that you're more than a skin tone. It's boggles the mind.

I'm not white, I'm Rachel, just like you're not white, or black, or brown, or tan, or polkadotted or rainbow. We are all who we are, and if we keep people down simply because they aren't as fair skinned or as dark skinned or whatever it may be, it becomes a self fullfilling prophesy. People who are kept down will become exactly what you want them to become: subhuman. It's our responsibilities, all of us, as adults, as friends, as Americans, as students and teachers and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers and so on and so forth, to teach our children that equality is the ONLY way. Everything else is just a dead end.

The View From The Top

2009-07-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Molly and I climbed Talcott (sp?) mountain today all the way up to the tower, quite not meaning to do so (we were searching for a farm in Bloomfield where we start volunteering next week and happened upon this nice looking mountain...). It was exhausting to say the least, but it was so beautiful and so worth the view from the top. Watching the mountains and rolling hills kiss the foamy grey clouds. The splotches of sunlight sreaming down into the green open fields, pooling on the earth like liquid gold. Reaching the top is always the greatest feeling in the world, and I think it's quickly becoming something I crave as I hike more and more this summer. Conquering Connecticut and Massachusetts one mountain at a time. There's nothing like relying on yourself, your own legs, your own lungs and your own will power to accomplish anything and everything.

Tomorrow I pack my things up to spend Friday night and Saturday day with Hillary, Saturday night, all of Sunday, and Monday day at school (we're having a team building retreat for the executive board members of multicultural clubs... yippee). I'll most likely be blogging up a storm since I'll be at school, all by my onesies, bored out of my mind and hating my life.

Oh and by the by... I GOT AN A IN BUSINESS STATISTICS II!!!! Suck on that former stats prof from my real college. YESSS!

I (Don't) Wanna Be Sedated

2009-07-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

So I went to the oral surgeon yesterday and we discussed my options:

Option 1: No surgery, but I have to have a full head X-ray every 2 years to make sure that nothing is infected and the tooth on the bottom left isn't hitting a major nerve.

Option 2: Have surgery, take a xanex prior to surgery (to "put me in a good place" as the Dr. put it), no food or non-clear liquids past midnight the night before, have nitrus oxide and novacane during surgery and intense pain killers after.

Option 3: Have surgery, have an IV, nitrus oxide and novacane.

Option 4: Have surgery, go to hospital and go completely under, monitored by an anesthesiologist.

I want option one, but after discussing it with mum and the oral surgeon we decided upon option 2. I told her I'm a psychology major and I am morally opposed to drugs like xanex (if I weren't I would be pre-med right now going into psychiatry) and she said she'd be more than willing to do the surgery with just novacane, but my mother seemed to think that was insane (and I'm inclined to think it is too) so we're getting the insurance quote with all of the bells and whistles.

My surgery date is December 22 at 9 am, two days after my return from London, two days before Christmas, and a week and two days before I move into the new apartment with Hillary. Hopefully I'll be able to con some of my friends in to helping us move into the new place because I have a feeling that, although I am going to put on a brave (albeit swollen) face, I am going to be borderline useless in moving heavy furniture or doing much besides complaining. Good times will surely be had by all this coming Christmas and New Years.

This is me holding my new baby niece for the first time *heart swells with joy.* I like to call it "Safe in Auntie Rachel's Pasty White Arms in the Dead of Summer," it has a real ring to it.

This is Hill holding the new baby for the first time :) loveee the gay shirt Hill. Should get a onesie for the new kid "I <3 my two Aunties" next time we're in P-Town.

And to give any of you who don't reside in New England (more specifically Connecticut and Massachusetts because I'm relatively unfamiliar with the weather patterns in the other N.E. states) an indication of what we've been dealing with lately in terms of weather, this is what mother nature was giving us while it was raining, right after it had stopped torentially downpouring, right after it had been a foggy evening, right after it had been a beautiful sunny skied afternoon right after it had been a misty overcast morning:

Let's hope for warmth and sun so Auntie Rachel can go swimming and start working on that farmer's tan. That sunset is very deceptive, though. Almost makes you want to like the place :P

For When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

2009-07-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

Met the new baby today, she is absolutely gorgeous and hopefully pictures will be coming shortly (I forgot my camera and had to rely on Hill and she can't upload them until tomorrow, alas). She's such a good baby too, she sleeps all the time and she isn't very fussy (unlike her brother and sister were when they were infants, oi). The other kids seem to be doing well with her, so everything is right with the world for the time being :)

I have a consultation with an oral surgeon regarding my wisdom teeth tomorrow. They aren't really coming in (that we can tell) but they are a bit painful and the one of the top right is coming in at a funny angle (it's jutting out to my cheek, bad news bears) and both of them have no tooth opposite them to stop them from taking over my mouth, so basically they have got to go. The concensus is, they should probably go in this country and not when I am gallavanting around Europe for a semester. So tomorrow the surgeon will hopefully say, no worries no surgeury you'll be fine, cross your fingers for me at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon please.

This was one of the readings from church last week, I thought it was particularly appropriate because the "thorn in the flesh" that St. Paul references can be taken in many different contexts. However, the message is the same no matter what your "thorn in the flesh" might be. God gives us thorns in order to make us weak, because when we are weak He is most strong and most relied upon. If we were all strong and happy and unquestioning, God wouldn't need to exist because everything would be perfect. God exists to make sure that we can handle our weaknesses, and to become better people as a result of our weaknesses. Embrace your weaknesses, they are truly what make you strong.
2 Cor. 12:7-10 "And because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, in order to keep me from exalting myself. Concerning this I entreated the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.' Most gladly, then, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Thus, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong."

Baby Numero Tres

2009-07-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted in a little bit, but...

I'M GOING TO BE AN AUNTIE AGAIN SUPER IMMENENTLY!!

I am sooooo so so excited. I freakin love kids and I freakin love my niece and nephew so baby number three will most definitely have a very special place in my heart.

This might rearrange some of my plans for the weekend:

Going to the Utica Zoo on Friday, going hiking at Gillette Castle (Connecticut people will know) on Saturday or Sunday, bumming around whichever day we're not hiking, and sleeping in on Monday.

But Hillary loves my niece and nephew and she's pretty excited about being an auntie vicariously through me and potentially rearranging our weekend so we can maximize our time with the baby.

So excited. I'll post pictures of my beautiful niece (who will no doubt be beautiful because she is sprung from some pretty good looking genes if I don't say so myself) at some point in the near future.

Church

2009-06-25T20:42:00.001-07:00

So I went to Church tonight, as I do every Thursday night in the summer (it's much cooler and less crowded than Sunday morning) and Pastor was starting up and he said something along the lines of the psalms and the hymns have been "gender neutralized."

To which I had to say... since when has the church ever tried to make anything gender neutral? I had no idea that there was any attempt at gender neutrality, in fact I was under the impression that it was the exact opposite. Of course, my pastor is a good man, he isn't sexist or any of that crap and to Pastor, God is completely gender neutral. I simply did not know that the church made any attempt at gender neutrality. I guess when I say church, I mean the Christian community. When I said church, pastor thought I meant the Lutheran Church (big C). Apparently there is a big movement in the Lutheran Church toward gender neutrality in the Bible and the Psalms and the Hymns. Who knew?

Personally, I don't think we should tamper with peoples' words, as much as we might want to tamper with them. I also don't think we live in biblical times anymore and I think we should all get over ourselves and move on.

I just thought it was an interesting little fact that yes, the church (or at least the Lutheran Church) has made great strides towards gender neutrality. Of course, we can never escape the inherent sexism in the Bible, but we can sure as hell try right?

Today was my last day in my summer course, so now I am free! And I'm volunteering, hopefully starting next week, cause I'm not going to deal with job bullshit. I have a job at school that I love and I don't want to deal with job crap at home when I'm only here for a few more weeks really.

In other news, my mother started seeing a therapist today, which I ordinarily wouldn't blog about and which I won't blog about from now on, but I thought something she told me was really funny. She said she was telling the therapist about me and he asked "Does Rachel have a boyfriend" and my mother said "No, she has a girlfriend" and he gave her a look and she said "But that's not why I'm here."

I just thought it was funny, and I'm glad she doesn't think my gay-ness is cause for a mental collapse, if that makes any sense. Too bad I can't blame her mental collapse on teh gay, it might make things easier since it's not something I can change or would ever change for anyone.

Happy Father's Day

2009-06-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

It's a day late, but happy Father's Day to everyone out there.

Please please pleaseee hug your fathers while you can, you never know when the last time will be.

Twelve years ago I said happy Father's Day to my daddy for the last time (well, truly I tell him happy Father's Day every year, but he, unfortunately, isn't here to hear me). I'd give almost anything to hug my daddy, for him to play basketball with me again, for him to have a cup of tea with me and my sister, for him to be able to hold his grandchildren.

Just please, call your father, talk to him, hug him. Hug him tight.

Updates

2009-06-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged all week because I haven't had much to say or very much on my mind. I got an A on my computer project (one out of three) and next week is my last week or my summer course. I'm pretty excited about passing statistics II and moving on with my life and sticking it to my bitch of a former professor.

I guess it's hard for me to move on from things that have happened recently, and I've been thinking about it a lot and unfortunately probably letting it affect my relationships. I guess the answer to that question is that moving on is in everyone's best interest and just letting go would do wonders for the current and future situations. But how can I move on when I'm so terrified that it's going to happen again? When I've been promised that it won't but I don't know because my trust was destroyed. I have never experienced such hatred in my life, from someone who I love so deeply.

It's hard to not blame yourself when things like that happen. Things changed in a minute and they will never ever be the same. I can't wait to go to London in September and go crazy in Europe and come back and move out for good. I'll never ever let myself be put through that again, I'll never ever let the person I love be put through that again and I'll never ever put the people I love through something like that. Ever.

I'm spending the weekend with Hillary up in MA. Hope everyone has a great weekend, if you're from around here let's hope the weather starts looking better.

The Weekend From Hell

2009-06-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

This was truly the worst weekend of my life and the worst birthday of my entire life. Worse than my ninth birthday, which was a terrible one because my father had died the November before my birthday and he had promised me he would make it to my ninth birthday. But I'm not bitter.

So I was home Friday afternoon when my mother and Naveen came home from work. I had been having a pretty horrible day, mainly because I was just down in the dumps and really would have rather been left alone. So I was carrying my dog downstairs, because Naveen is afraid of dogs and Puppy would have jumped all over him, so I had my arms full and I didn't really say hello to anyone, just because I didn't really care too much.

So I did my stuff, fed the dog, changed my clothes because we were going out to a fancy dinner, and went back to the living room. Then Hillary pulled in to the driveway from her 2 hour drive to CT straight from work and I went out to greet her. I wasn't being especially friendly with her just because I was feeling not myself. So I went inside then Hillary went inside and then we went up to my room so we could change (I wanted to change my shirt for the 15,000th time) and my mother followed us up and began berating me for being "rude" to Naveen. She basically told me that the people at work are rude to him and he felt as though he didn't belong here and that he was unwelcome because of my attitude.

So I went downstairs and my mother was still yelling about it, even though I wasn't being disrespectful of Naveen I just wasn't being myself. When I got downstairs my mother put Naveen on the spot and made him basically tell me how he was feeling. So I got up and went outside for a thought. I was just sitting out there when my mother went outside and continued to bitch at me more. I told her to go to dinner without me.

Then Hillary was sent outside to retrieve me, and I told her I just wanted to sit there and to be left alone, that was all I wanted. So my mother went back outside and I could smell a fight so I told Hillary to make herself scarce. So my mom and I fought some more, and she went inside, but not before telling me that if I didn't go inside in 10 minutes, Hillary had to leave. So Hill went outside so tell me my mother was making her leave, and I said fine I'll go with you. So we went inside and started to pack up our things when my mother burst into my room and screamed at Hillary to "leave her house" and Hillary quickly escaped from my room with her things. My mother slammed the door behind her and I was trapped in my room. I tried to get passed my mother, and I eventually did but not before my mother had broken one of my fingernails in half causing me to bleed everywhere and had choked me so I had red marks all around my neck and I was gasping.

So I grabbed my asthma meds and ran outside to find Hill sobbing on the phone with her mother. We got in her car and drove to a parking lot where my best friend met us and we told her what was going on. Hillary's mom was adament that Hillary drive home immediately and leave me. So Hillary drove me home and she and Kate waited on a side street while I talked to my mother.

My mother apologized and realized what she did was incredibly wrong, too little too late but an apology is an apology. I called Hillary to try to get her to come and discuss things with my mother but she refused and promptly drove away.

At this point I was beside myself because I had no clue what I had done to deserve any of this. I met Hillary in a parking lot with Kate again and I begged her to just hear my mother out, but she refused and said that until my mother and I got help for our issues, we were threw. And she left me there, sobbing. When I needed her the most, she wasn't there for me. The most unforgiveable and devastating part of that night, my twentieth birthday, was that the person I love the most couldn't even be there when I needed her.

So I went home and curled up in a ball, on my twentieth birthday. I couldn't sleep at all that night, and then Hillary called me at four am. We talked and decided to meet at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA (a little over two hour drive for me) at noon. So we did, and Hillary apologized for abandoning me when I needed her most. We made amends and decided we do love each other and we are willing to do whatever it takes to be together.

So we decided to go get some lunch, and we drove back to school where we would consolidate cars and continue on from there. I guess on the way to school Hillary called her mother and told her we had patched things up and everything was okay again when Hillary's mom said that I am not allowed at their house, she is not allowed at my house and if she finds out that we are seeing each other Hillary would be kicked out of their house. Hillary was obviously devastated.

So she went home and went to a friend's house for the night. She went back today and her mother gave her the same ultimatum (backed up by her father) and she decided to leave her home, to take her things, and to move in with a friend until January when she and I are supposed to move in together.

Where I am right now:
She is adament about my mother and I getting help to resolve or come closer to resolving our issues together. What Hillary will never understand is that my mother and I love each other very much, and we have many unresolved issues (as many child parent relationships tend to be).

At this point in my life, I am living under my mother's roof. I am leaving for London in September and when I come back I will be home for a week before I move in to my own apartment, where I will be living until or beyond graduate school. I will never be living in this house again. This house is a crazy environment for me and I dislike it very much here, but I love my mother more than oxygen. This house is no longer my home, it is simple where I was raised and where I have to stay if I want to remain financially afloat for the time being. My mother and I get along much better when we aren't under the same roof.

There is a lot of history between my mother and I, we have many unresolved issues regarding my father's death and a lot of issues regarding me growing up and fleeing the nest so to speak. Hillary seems to have no compassion for the fact that my mother is having a hard time dealing with everything right now.

But she is my mother and I love her and I will stand by her to the death.

I can find another girlfriend, I can find someone else to provide with love and affection and happiness, but I can never find another mother. She is mine and she is all I have in this world.

I will not be told what to do and I will not be handed ultimatums or bullied into making decisions. That may work for Hillary's mother but it does not work for me and it does not work on me. I am my own woman, and so is my mother.

And so I am here, heartbroken, because the whole world is seemingly against me and I did nothing to deserve the treatment I received this weekend. I really truly wish that I could curl up in a ball and just be left alone and never have to face any of this mess that I did nothing to deserve.

Perhaps I'm not cut out for this. I suppose only time will tell. But until time tells, I am here, and I am devastated and alone and lost. If there is ever a time I needed to get down on my knees and pray for an answer, it is now.

I am far more realistic than Hillary's mother in that I know that bad things happen, and sometimes for no reason, but that life always goes on and forgiveness makes the heart so much healthier than to harp away and continue to be angry. I'm not angry anymore.

Twenty

2009-06-12T08:40:00.001-07:00

I'm two decades old today.

Twenty years ago I was twenty years younger than I am currently.

I'm going to see Up today, hopefully it will be uplifting cause this whole getting older thing is really getting old.

Tonight we're going out to celebrate the fact that I have twenty fewer years to live.

Commence quarter life crisis. I'll have to go out and get a sports car and a bad hair piece.

Hope everyone else is having a wonderful June 12 :)

Edit:
Up is a very cute movie, and made me cry like a baby with how adorable it is. However, if you're feeling self conscious about age, don't see Up. Score one for the nursing home, 0 for Rachel. le sigh.

One

2009-06-11T11:56:00.001-07:00

It's just one of those days I s'pose, one of those days where you have a song stuck in your head and a thought stuck in your heart and there's no sense fighting the feeling cause fighting gets you nowhere (silly). Now if only the weather would cooperate with my mood, everything would be golden.

I've just seen a face - Brandi Carlile

Where are We Going?

2009-06-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

I got an A on my first STAT II exam of the summer session. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it, she who is to remain nameless (my ex-stats professor from my real college where I don't have to pay a grand per course d;lsfhd;rfhdsfs *obscenities*).

Rachel Maddow looks really tired tonight... le sigh. I'm pretty tired too. Tired of people hating each other and people fighting and killing peoples' fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and friends. God bless that man who gave his life at the Holocaust Museum today (I'm well aware that he likely unknowingly gave his life, but he died defending the lives of innocent people and that's a hero) and God have mercy on the man who killed him.

I guess it's my opinion that, if we raise our children to be understanding, accepting, forgiving and embracing human beings (kind of like that being we are constantly killing and fighting and dying in the name of), the world will be a significantly better place than it currently is. In Catholic school when I was very young they taught us "do as I say and not as I do" (they also taught us "children are to be seen and not heard" which is probably the most traumatic thing anyone can ever say to a child), well it simply doesn't work that way. I learn from what I observe and I mimic the people I consider to be infallible.

So long as there are people in this world who will kill people simply because they disagree with a group of people, or for no good reason at all, this world IS hell, and these people continue to make it that way.

Where are we going? I guess I don't understand what extremists want, do they just want everyone to be as miserable and hateful as them? Don't they see that, even if their fantasies did come true and the world was rid of the people who make them tick, that they would still be hollow human beings searching for something to make them whole?

On a lighter note:
Maddows dead straight people and live gay people joke just totally threw me off, she's a real hoot that one is.

I'm turning 20 on Friday... oi my knees are already killing me. This getting older thing is really getting old. I know I'm full of shit but I'm so darn cute, and modest too.

Just live for today

Truly I Tell You

2009-06-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

I wasn't a Christian all my life, in fact today is the four year anniversary of my baptism into the faith.

I'm not a born again, though I suppose you could say that I was born again in Christ. I'm a Lutheran.

I believer wholeheartedly in God (in whatever form you choose God to take), I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, I believe the Bible was written by individuals who heard the Word of God, through whom God spoke to the people and continues to speak today.

I also believe the Bible is the single most misinterpreted piece of literature in the history of the world, or perhaps more accurately the single piece of literature that has caused the most strife and bloodshed in the history of the world.

When I read the Bible, my heart feels full because it's like I am talking to God. God is telling me how much s/he loves me. I have a similar experience when I am hiking or when I am swimming or when I look into the faces of children. The Bible gives me a sense of being overwhelmingly full and at peace, knowing that everything is going to be okay because God, the most powerful being ever, loves me personally. You may disagree and say that God does not exist, and that is your prerogative to believe or not believe or to believe something different, it is a wonderful free country we have here. But every time a rain drop falls on my cheek or I look into my niece's bright blue eyes I know for a fact that God exists, and s/he is good.

But some people don't feel full when they read the Bible. Some people feel so empty that they feel the need to make other people empty, and so they tear others down, they tell others they are going to hell, they fight and they kill and they do it all in God's name. They read the Word, and they see that they have sinned, but they forget that God loves them and they will be forgiven, so they take all of their regret and all of their anger toward themselves and they turn it out into the world. These people are in our churches, our schools, our offices, our neighbourhoods. They are our uncles, our sisters, our mothers, our best friends. They are the ones who feel a deep shame within themselves when they read the Word, and take that shame and do harm to others with it.

Well I won't be shamed by you anymore, nor will I let my friends and loved ones be shamed by you either. From this day forward I pledge that I will love and be loved by God and I will believe in Jesus just as He believes in me because it's my right as an American to believe what I want and it's my responsibility as a Christian to spread the Good News, take it or leave it. I will go about my life, freely and honestly, and I won't make anyone feel bad about themselves just because I am insecure and I won't use the Bible to sway the opinions of others or as a code of law for my country, "free of the bias of religion."

It's been four years, and it took me four years to learn that I'm not doing anything wrong by living my life. So long as I mind my business, give back when and where I can, love everyone I possibly can and always believe, I'll be saved.

I hope those people who would damn me or say that I am a sinner will see the light of reason before it is too late for them. I have faith.

John 3:17 "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him"

Wisdom

2009-06-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

I think one of my wisdom teeth is coming in... mmm not cool. I'm not sure though, because my far back molars hurt sometimes, which I just attribute to the fact that I have two wisdom teeth (one on the top on the left and one on the bottom on the right) and they're just chilling. Le sigh, I fear this may be the real deal, so to speak.

I've been wanting to say something about the Air France jet that apparently was lost at sea between Brazil and France. Well, I was praying really hard for those poor people, as I'm sure most people were. It's such a tragedy. People who did nothing wrong, just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I'm a firm believer that when your number is up, your number is up. But it just doesn't seem at all fair. I guess nothing is fair, but their families didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

I hope they're all at peace and their families can find peace, it doesn't get easier when a close loved one dies but the pain does dull over time.

Peace to everybody out there, happy Thursday!

Turpentine - Brandi Carlile

Urrrrggg

2009-06-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

I had no idea what I would find when I went into my gmail account today.

I haven't even looked at the thing since probably July or August 2008. And lo, mountains of email.

Henceforth I shall check my gmail account daily.

Wish me luck on my first statistics exam of the summer course (1 out of 2, not including the final) tomorrow at 10:15 am!! eee

June

2009-06-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

Didn't realize this but I totally missed the one year anniversary of blogging, yay. It's been a great year, pretty eventful, a complete learning experience, but that's what life is all about. I hope you've had a good year too.

So we're back in June. June is probably my favourite month (though it's quickly becoming my least favourite month due to the fact that I somehow magically age one year every June... fml) because it's the start of summer and it's glorious. The pool is opened and we started hanging out outside more often and I'm free from the confines of the classroom (save for this summer... another fml).

This will be my first year of truly taking part in any pride events (besides starting and running the GSA and all that entails, going to Disney for gay days, going to P-Town on the regs, prop 8 rallies, etc.) because this year I'm going to Hartford Pride (next Saturday) and Boston Pride (June 13, the day after my birthday!). Hartford should be a good time because it's close to home so I don't have to drive a long distance, it should be small enough that I won't feel overwhelmed, and it will be a good opportunity for me to get a feel for real pride events.

Boston Pride is going to be huge, overwhelming, and probably a little scary, but it will be totally awesome because I love Boston and I haven't been out there in a few weeks. Boston Pride is one of the major pride parades so it should be really... insightful. Oh, and Melissa Etheridge is the celebrity marshal for Boston Pride 2009!?!?!?! Well, I don't think that means that she'll be there, but she's pretty freakin swell and I'd do basically anything for her so I'll totally be at Boston Pride.

Hope everyone is having a productive Monday thus far! Happy June!!

Ten Things Ten People Meme

2009-05-31T11:42:00.001-07:00

Got this from my roommate's facebook. One of them was clearly about me, and it was very honest (almost brutally so). I love her to pieces, and I love her all the time, but I don't always like her. We have a sisterly relationship, and I hope we can at least remain friends despite our differences and falling out. She really is the best roommate I could have hoped for and I'll always think fondly of her.

Post ten things that you would like to say to ten different people, but never actually would or could. Do not say who they are.

1. It's hard growing up, and it's even harder to grow apart from the people you once thought you could never live without. We're really growing up and outgrowing each other. Every time we talk I can tell that there is less and less to say. I can no longer honestly say that you are my best friend, or that I even have a best friend for that matter. You will always be my best childhood friend, and a lot of me wishes that I could still say that we are best friends. Such is life, it's not your fault as much as it's not mine.

2. I haven't known you the longest, but I know you very well, and I like to think you know me too. You aren't easy on me at all, in fact you're very honest and sometimes it hurts, but it's nice to not skirt around the issues. I wish you would quit hurting yourself. For a long time you've been one of the most important people in my life, and I DO miss you when you aren't around (and as much as you say you don't, I know you miss me too) and if something were to happen to you, I'd miss you so much that I wouldn't be able to stand it. You have so much promise, you could do anything with yourself and your talents. I wish you would stop wasting your money and your health and start improving yourself. Love yourself, please, because you're so worth it.

3. You've been a great friend to me for something like eight years now. I'll always be there for you when you need me because you're one of the best friends a person could have. I think you're brilliant. Scratch that, I KNOW you're brilliant. You could do anything with your life and I have so much confidence that you will. You just need to find your niche, find something that interests you, and pursue it. The sky is the limit with you. Have faith in yourself and you can achieve anything.

4. I think even though we practically live in the same city, we're not at all close anymore. I always put such a high price on my friendship with you and the other two and in the end, we grew up, and there is nothing we can do about it. I hope you're happy, I think you are, and I hope we stay in touch throughout this long journey through life, but I'm not optimistic. All I can hope for is your happiness.

5. I'm pretty upset about the way things ended up with you. No one understood our relationship except for us. I'd give almost anything to lay in the dark talking until four am with you on a Tuesday night again. I always went to sleep first, and I regret it, because you always have something unique and important to say, even if it is cloaked with sarcasm and a dirty joke. You're probably the most interesting person I've met in my life so far, and I can't wait to tell my kids all about you. I hope I can call you when I need a shoulder to cry on or a place to stay when I'm travelling by. Please love yourself and stop listening to what those awful doctors tell you, you're fine, you just need to stop blaming yourself for the things going on in your family. I don't like your boyfriend and if I were you I'd trade him in for a newer model, but that's just me. Be good to yourself.

6. When I met you, I could tell we'd be friends, but I could also tell that you had a lot of work to do on yourself. Unfortunately, not much as changed since I met you some five years ago. You need to get out of that unhealthy environment, which you're doing now. You need to be happy with yourself and love yourself before you start dating anyone. I think you need to get help because there is a lot going on in your life and I don't think you can handle it all. I'm here for you always, just a phone call or a two hour drive away. If you ever need to escape for a while you're always welcome wherever I am.

7. I'm so glad I met you last year, and that I fell in love with you this year. I disagree with some of the things you've done since I met you (that situation with your roommate last year, etc.) but I also have the time of my life with you, literally, and can't imagine my sophomore year without you. You really helped me to mellow out and start to appreciate college for what it is: a learning experience. You believe in me, and I know you can do anything you put your mind to, and I mean anything. You taught me how to truly love another human being, something I've never experienced before, and one of the greatest lessons of my young life. Thank you for going on adventures with me, enjoying good music and good food and loving me for me. I loved myself before I met you, and I'm glad I could help you love yourself, because you are so worth every ounce of love on this earth. I'll love you forever no matter what, because you are my first love.

8. If it weren't for you I wouldn't have played last year, I wouldn't have had the strength to start the GSA and stick with it all year (and thanks to you I'll be sticking with it for the next two years). You're the best friend I've made at school, and probably the closest thing to a best friend that I have right now. I'm so glad we're going to London together in the fall, I wouldn't be going if it weren't for you. You're the funniest person I've met, and the only person I want to ditch Hillary for to go sit in an empty room and eat cheesecake and gossip. Sometimes I worry that we're drifting apart, but then I remember that that could never happen because you know me for who I am and what I am and you love me for it and I love everything about you. If I'm sure of anything in this life, it's that more than likely, you and I will be friends forever.

9. I worry about you and how you treat your family. Daddy loved you, as much as he loved me, and there is a lot you don't know about the situation between your mother and daddy and my mother and your mother. I've always loved you and looked up to you so much, but you never gave me the time of day. I was 17 when your son was born, just like you were 17 when I was born, and I'm not going to treat him the way you treated me. I love your daughter more than life itself. If you don't treat the little one right, and based on your remarks to me and other regarding the new one (you don't want another baby, you're not prepared, etc. etc. IT'S CALLED A CONDOM USE IT) Hillary and I will have no problem calling the department of families, and don't think we won't. We love those kids more than anything, and I love you too but I won't sit around and watch them suffer or be mistreated. I've seen the change in L since H was born (and the change in your interactions with L, and how H gets almost all of your attention and affection), and she's not a dumb little girl. She's very bright and she has two eyes, she knows she's been displaced. This new little one is going to need love too, you just remember that. And be an adult.

10. I love you and think you're marvelous. Don't ever doubt how much I love you and care about you. Even though I'm moving away from town, and moving for good for that matter, it doesn't mean our relationship has to change too terribly much. You know me the best in this world and you have my best interest in mind, and even thought you might doubt it, I know you very well too and I do have your best interest in mind. But I can't be a child forever, and now I have to move on, grow up, take care of myself. I don't love you less just because I fell in love, I just love someone else. But I could never love anyone the same as you.

On Such A Timeless Flight

2009-05-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

Hillary graduated from college in mid-May. Such a scary thought... graduating from college...

I guess (at least in the academic world) we live in a world where every four years there is a change over, a shift of everything we once knew. At five or so we enter kindergarten. My public school system puts the fifth through eight graders together in the middle schools. Nine through twelve is in one building, and then if you continue to pursue academia you are stuck in higher-ed for four years and then...

Well then I suppose it's up to you. I can't even imagine how it must feel to be graduating from college in a recession. Hillary has to worry about health insurance, paying for her car, paying off student loans and feeding herself all in the same thought. I'm nervous just thinking about it.

But I know she can do it, and I know all of the graduates can do it. It will take a lot of strength, maybe a few tears shed and a few days filled with worry and "what-ifs" but what days aren't filled with a bit of worry and uncertainty? Uncertainty is what makes the world go round, lest we would be completely certain of the future and therefore we would sink into complacency.

I worry a bit for Hillary, and a bit for myself frankly because in two years time I will either have to continue on my educational pursuits or find a job with benefits and start to pay off the cost of breathing.

I know she will be okay, I just know it.

Congratulations Hill! I'm so proud of you and so glad that you believe in yourself, because if you believe in yourself you truly can achieve anything.

Hill and a pal from lacrosse, big bad college grads

Grad Schools in Canada

2009-05-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

My Uncle on Newfoundland always told me that if the U.S. reinstated the draft, I'd always have a place on the rock where I could go hide. I'm not one for hiding, but I'm also not one for participating in unjustified conflicts, and unless someone is waving a gun in my family's face there is very little that could provoke me to use violence. Besides the fact that I'm an avid pacifist, I also don't believe in fighting for a country that doesn't allot the same rights to me and people like me based on inconsequential circumstances.

I guess I had a lot more faith in Mr. Obama, that he would do more for the community. Takes our votes... then forget about us. Sickening really. I wouldn't get the chance to fight for this country even if I wanted to, because I can't be who I am. I'm sure I could tote a gun just as well as any other person out there. A friend of mine in the Army told me that I should join up and go into the ministry in the Army, that they had a shortage of ministers and they needed more (she was drunk when she told me this, and I had to chuckle a little because... well the Army wouldn't want someone like me. If you tell me the sky is blue, I'm probably going to argue that's it's really more of an off-purple hue. Not to mention the fact that I'm queerer than Christmas). Long story short, I could preach the Word out there probably just as well as the next guy. I'll tell you all about Yahweh and God and Allah and Jehovah (all the same dude) and help make your journey through life a little more peaceful. I'd love to give back to my country (even though they hate me for some reason?), but I can't because I can't enlist and remain an out individual.

I have this vision of a country where everyone is free, where we as taxpaying, country-loving, flag waving, American Idol watching citizens aren't forced subscribers to religions that we never chose to be a part of.

And, like I said to my mother when she asked about the "California thing," this country was founded by queers, you can't even tell me the founding fathers weren't a bunch of homos (no offense intended at all, I happen to be a proud American and I know my history very well, I also know that, more often then not for the better part of the history of most civilizations: men prefered the company of men and women, the company of women).

I guess what I'm trying to say is, this country is really cutting off its nose to spite its face, for lack of a better expression. I don't want to raise a family here when I could pack of my little car and haul it off to Canada where my rights are the same as the heterosexual next door. But I don't want to leave the country where I was born and raised, where my family lives (mainly), where my friends are and likely will remain.

I'm glad Connecticut and Massachusetts (the only two states I give a crap about, sorry to the other 48) have granted marriage equality, but it's just not enough. When my rights are different when I travel to Florida, something is not right. When my relationship with the person whom I love is not equivalent to a heterosexual relationship simply because I can't procreate with my partner of choice, something is not right. When my country tells me to get lost when I try to live my life the way I choose to live my life, hurting no one (in fact, I try to help out as much as possible in order to make life better for people), something is not right.

I just want to graduate from college, go to graduate school, become a Licensed Mental Health Clinician and eventually get my PhD (or PsyD as they're calling it these days for us psych geeks) and just... help people. I want to get married to a nice, soft spoken, warm hearted, charming girl who will make me laugh every day and who I can make laugh too. I want to have a kid or two and watch them learn new things, make mistakes, learn to love this beautiful world and this wonderful life. I just want to be as financially, emotionally and physically secure in my relationship with another human being (and eventually bringing more human beings into the picture), and I don't think that's too much to ask of this life or this world, or particularly this country where we're supposedly "free."

Sorry this is long and probably very disconnected, but I needed some time to process the "California thing" (as my mum calls it).

Newport Folk Festival 50!! Oh, and six months :)

2009-05-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

Imagine, if you will, the most ear piercing, high pitched squeel of glee you can possibly imagine. That's the story of my life right now. I got an email saying I can get discounted tickets to the Newport Folk Festival, the first weekend in August, where JOAN BAEZ WILL BE PLAYING *insert another shriek*.

I just... I think I may have died when I read that Joan Baez, Pete Seeger AND Judy Collins will all be there. Just thinking about it gives me palpitations. I'm totally going, whether I go by myself or with other human beings. Probably the closest I'll ever get to utter, pure bliss in my whole life.

Oh, and today is my six month monthaversary with Hillary, heres to many more monthaversaries to come :)

Those are our serious faces... for serious.

Because I'm Mushy Now (yuck), Couples Meme

2009-05-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Found this on my friend's page on Facebook, thought it looked interesting. Also, my boredom at being home has to be utterly apparent by now.

♥ Who asked who out first?
Well, we decided we were dating on November 27, but we had effectively been together for like a week or two prior to Thanksgiving. I guess since I was the forward one I asked her out, but I'm definitely not the kind of person to ask someone else out, I like to try to convince myself that I'm tough and not getting attached :P

♥ How old are each of you?
19, almost 20 (me) and 21, 22 in the fall (Hill).

♥ Whose siblings do you see the most?
I guess that'd be my sister, since we hang out at her house and play with the kids from time to time. Hill has three older half siblings, two of whom she doesn't speak to and one whom she is very close with, but I have yet to meet him on account of her parents told her she shouldn't "come out" to the family (besides them) yet.

♥ Who gets embarrassed more easily?
Hillary is super klutzy (example: we went out to breakfast with her parents and her roommate a few weeks ago and Hillary shook her bottle of iced tea... after she had already removed the cap. Got iced tea all over herself, it was brilliant.)

♥ Which one likes to go shopping more?
We both like to shop, but I think I'm more wasteful when it comes to money. We go grocery shopping together a lot, raspberry sorbet :)

♥ Are there wedding bells in the future?
Ummm... Well I'm 19... I know it's cliche and probably sending up red flags with anyone who reads this... but I do love her a great deal and I can see myself spending the rest of my days holding her hand, missing her when she's not around, eating raspberry sorbet (50% sorbet, 50% whipped cream) at midnight, going to the Peace Abbey on our days off, blah blah blah mushy stuff. But definitely NOT before I graduate from undergrad, and probably not until I at least have my LMHC.

♥ Do you have any children together?
Yes... her name is Alycia... :P

♥ What about pets?
That's my department. When Hillary sleeps over she has to fight off Kitty for a spot at my side (at least when she sleeps over I make the dog sleep outside of my room... or else Hillary would probably be sleeping at the foot of the bed). At the moment I have five cats (my beloved Kitty is the only one I really care about, but I'm pretty fond of Baby too, she was my first kitten), one dog (her name is Puppy, she is eightish, and I've determined that she has ADHD), and two bunnies (Buns, the gentlest soul I've ever known and Russel, the least gentle soul I've ever known). When we get the apartment in 2010 we're planning on getting some type of animal (I've been forbidden from bringing Kitty or Puppy, and Buns is too old and Russel is too much of a handful) because I can't function without animals.

♥ Did you go to the same school?
We went to the same school, I s'pose, now that Hill is a big bad college graduate.

♥ Are you from the same home town?
No, Hillary comes from East Jesus Nowhere, MA and I'm from a suburb of Hartford, CT. About a two hour drive if traffic is cooperating.

♥ Who is the smartest?
Well, Hill graduated cum laude and she was in three honor societies. We're both very intelligent human beings, but I don't often use "intelligent" and "smart" in the same thought, because I personally feel that intelligence is more important than whether or not one is "smart." Smart is subjective, intelligence is lived.

♥ Who is the most sensitive?
Me, totally totally totally. I give off the tough guy facade but I get all weepy about... well... pretty much everything.

♥ Where do you eat out most as a couple?
I'm disgusting, I know, but this question is just so hilarious to me that I can't answer it. It's just too priceless.

♥ Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?
Florida to Disney over spring break '09. We drive long distances a lot, like when we went to Maine to see Brandi Carlile and when we went to P-Town in late April.

♥ Who has the worst temper?
Me, unfortunately. But we fight because we love each other and we spend a lot of time together (actually, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I am leaving for London in the fall and we're not going to be together for a long period of time until January). We get along very well though, and the "worst temper" isn't really that bad at all in this case.

♥ Who is more social?
Hillary is. I'm reserved (see shy) and quiet whereas Hillary lights up an entire room when she enters. She just has one of those personalities that draws people to her.

♥ Which one is more optimistic?
We're both very optimistic, perhaps too optimistic for our own good (perhaps that statement in and of itself is a sign of pessimism?).

♥Who is the neat freak?
I have OCD when it comes to things like bed sheets (I tend to have a meltdown if the sheets aren't up to military standards), the arrangement of the clutter on my desk, etc. which doesn't qualify me as a neat freak, but it does make me a freak. Hill, on the other hand, likes to keep things neat and tidy, but not overly so.

♥ Who is the more stubborn?
Me. Le sigh.

♥ Who wakes up earlier?
Well now that Hillary has a big girl job (with her own cubicle!) she has to get up at 6 am in order to leave the house by 7 to make the 2 hour commute. However, during the academic year I am in the habit of getting up an hour and a half before my first class (usually that means getting up around 7:30-8:00), something Hillary was appalled by when we first started sleeping over each others' dorms.

♥ Where was your first date?
The Peace Abbey :) We're old hippies at heart.

♥ Who has the bigger family?
Me in the regard that I still talk to and regularly see most of my extended family. However, my immediate family is just me and mum, whereas Hill has two parents.

♥ Do you get flowers often?
I don't think I've gotten flowers... except for Valentines Day when Hill cooked me dinner and I got to keep the flowers that she used in the table setting. I give her flowers pretty regularly (sunflowers, and live flowers because I feel like giving dead flowers is purposeless). Hill knows I have enough flowers to care for (the garden is going to be so pretty this year!).

♥ How do you spend the Holidays?
Which holidays are we talking here? I suppose when I get home from London, since the plan is we will be living together, we'll probably be holidaying together also.

♥ Who is more jealous?
It's a pretty even mix. I'm a little jealous of people from her past (I also revel in the fact that she chose me and she wants to be with me, I win), however Hillary is jealous of some of my friends (straight girls who like to flirt with gay girls... aka gay girls) because they like to make her jealous (and always succeed).

♥ Who sleeps more?
Not sure, maybe me? I dunno. Hill would sleep like a cat if she could though.

♥ Who eats more?
We both came to the conclusion that we were meant to be because we absolutely LOVE food, so I'd say it's probably about even.

♥ Who does the laundry?
Depends who has money on their laundry card when we need to do laundry. I find laundry to be very therapeutic (because I'm deranged. I also enjoy dishwashing, seriously. I should have been a housewife) so I do the laundry whenever I get the chance.

♥ Who’s better with the computer?
Probably me because I have a lot more patience than Hillary does. She'd probably throw it out the window or have a meltdown before she stopped to figure the problem out.

♥ How long have you been together?
Six months tomorrow :) but I've known her for almost two years. She's my best pal, my confidant, my strength when I need it. I truly believe that, if she isn't the one, she is the greatest friend I'll have ever found on this earth.

Schools (Not) Out for Summer

2009-05-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of my summer statistics course, and it actually went very well. It's two hours a day, four days a week, for a month. Not bad, not bad at all.

If I want to graduate in May 2011 I need to finish the statistics course that I already started. It's kind of a long and convoluted story, so I'll give you the brief version. And please, don't judge me because I know that a lot of students use the excuse that the professor is bitch or the professor hates them, and in this case both of those things are true and did happen to me. It's not an excuse at all, it's simply a fact.

I took AP statistics during my senior year in high school. Now, to get into an AP course you need permission from previous teachers, often you need to take an entrance exam, and you need to have taken all of the pre-requs. I did fairly well in AP stats, but I didn't score high enough on the AP Stats Exam for it to count as my statistics requirement for my college. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because I need stats for my psychology major and a lot of the research aspects of psychology draw heavily from statistics. Anywho, moving on.

I took Stats I Fall 2008, and did fairly miserably (but well enough to move on to Stats II). I got As on all of the exams (all 3 of them), did the homework assignments, etc. but absolutely bombed the final (which speaks volumes for my ability of lackthereof to take finals). Such is life, so I moved on to Stats II.

As it turns out, the professor got the impression that I was, more or less, taking up space and air in her classroom and proceeded to ignore me (when she would address psychology majors, of which there were only 2, myself included, in a class of about 15, she would purposely not address me), to take points off of exams and assignments for arbitrary reasons (I didn't "word" an answer to her liking so she would take an automatic 20 points off my exam, when my answer was similar to the answers of other students and my math was completely correct).

So I sent her an email and basically told her how I was feeling, that I felt like I was being treated unfairly and also that I felt that my situation was hopeless. She emailed me back and confirmed that she did think I was "unresponsive" in class (she cited some occasions during first semester when my eyelids would get heavy and I would look like I wasn't paying attention, for example THE DAY AFTER OBAMA WAS ELECTED sdf;ldhrewnc;welfdsfsdlf) and that she was sorry that I took it to heart.

So I emailed my advisor, at this point we had taken 3 of 4 exams (not including the final) and asked her what I should do, seeing as my situation was borderline hopeless. I had a 100 on the first test and a 50-something on the second test and a 50-something on the third test but I hadn't done the makeup test yet so the grade might have changed. My advisor informed me that it was the last day to drop the class, that she was out for the day but she has informed the psych department, my class advisor, the student success center and registrar to be looking for me (basically it was her suggestion that I drop the class immediately).

So I scrambled around, crying because I felt like a failure, and got the drop class form signed thanks to the speedy work and kindness of the staff at my school, no thanks to my c*nt of a professor.

I'm taking the second section of statistics at a university near where I live, totally different scene than I'm accustomed to but I'll get over it (I go to a college in the woods, 12 miles out of Boston, where I know all of my classmates names/majors and probably what kind of trouble they were getting in to last night, I don't know anyone in my class in CT and none of them know me... ahh the freedom of anonimity). At least my professor doesn't hate me yet, so maybe he'll grade me fairly and impartially and I'll be treated with respect this time. For the most part, though, this class will be a review for me because I've now taken statistics for almost 2 full years, and I basically know it like the back of my hand by now but now is my chance to prove that I know it, I can do the math, and I can give the professor what he wants (because he doesn't overtly disdain me).

So that's where I am today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday until June 25. I at least have some things to look forward to, like Hillary's grad party this weekend (Hill graduated from college May 17, poor dear), Hillary visiting next weekend, my 20th birthday (oh my GAWD) June 12, me visiting Hill the following weekend, my baby niece is predicted to be born the first weekend in July (here's hoping for July 4!) and so on and so forth until I get on a plane bound for London on September 2. Should be a good summer :)

Just a Thought

2009-05-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Home brings out the worst in me.

Literally and figuratively. Just sayin.

Day six of poison oak, still itchy and rashy. Probably going to amputate all affected areas, leaving me with two intact feet.

Food for thought (literally): Rubbing the inside of a banana peel on the affect areas seems to help with the itch and I think it's helping to dry it out. However, I now smell like rotten fruit. A scent to match my personality :P

Home Again Home Again

2009-05-22T12:17:00.001-07:00

I haven't even been home for a week and I (with the help of the best pal ever, Molly) have laid fresh mulch (9 bags so far, still need about 10 more), dug up all the brush from underneath the trees and bushes in the front yard, moved all the brush to the far back yard (not the easiest thing to do) and put together a new fire pit.

And I managed to get head to toe poison oak.

Now, I was a girl scout, I know what poison oak, ivy and sumac look like. I saw them all as I was moving brush into the back, I even saw the rouge poison ivy in the front, nestled behind the rhododendron. I took special care to avoid them. And I am still covered in poison oak. I guess I just have to chaulk it up to fate. I get poison oak probably twice every summer, never especially bad (though I have had it around my eyes before, no fun), but always spread all over my body. I guess that's my lesson for not using gloves when I work outside, alas.

I did manage to finish off my sophomore year with a 3.6 (I got a B+ in Research Methods, holy crap!), and now I can look forward to coasting through fall semester in London, with my two art courses, Shakespeare and dundundunnnn Cognitive Psych.

It's nice to be home I s'pose. My cat and dog are cuddled up together on the couch while I watch tv and do nothing for my last week of freedom before I start a summer course. I think it's funny that if I want to graduate with my class, even though I take more courses than I need to (last semester was the exception) and I'm technically more than a junior (but not quite a senior) I still have to take a summer course and if I weren't studying abroad there would be no way in hell I'd be graduating on time, simply because my school isn't offering the courses I need for my psych major and it's not even pretending to offer the courses I need for my English major.

Well, everything is going to fall in to place I'm sure. For the time being, I'm just itchy and uncomfortable, but glad to be home :)

Oh Hey There!

2009-04-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in a dog's age it seems, and something just isn't right with that.

So I'm back! I may be writing sporadically, but sporadically is better for me than never. Also, summer is rapidly approaching, and if this summer is anything like last summer I am going to be migh-tee bored (considering that no one is hiring... oi).

So it's the end of the sophomore year in college, next semester I'll be in London from September 3 until a few days before Christmas, taking two classes in art, one in Shakespeare and one in cognitive psychology.

A lot has happened since the last time that I blogged, but I can't really get you up to speed in one blog, so I'll just give you the basics:

The demands of my courses were such that I could not play lacrosse this year, which was a huge mess that I spent many hours weeping over but in the end it just could not happen.

I eventually had to drop statistics (I will be taking it closer to home this summer) because I wasn't getting along with the professor and it was either drop the course or risk failing. The situation is still very new and the wound is very fresh for me so I'm just taking it in stride right now and being happy with the fact that I'll just be taking it elsewhere and I'll have the time and energy to give it my all this summer.

I'm still with Hillary ("still" probably isn't the right word choice there, because we are both very happy together and basically everything is right with the world). Today is our five month anniversary, actually. We took a trip out to Ptown last weekend and we're going to see the Dalai Lama speak next weekend, so we do a lot of fun and new things together. It's going very well, she's effectively part of my family and I couldn't be happier to have her in my life.

I decided that I'm not living on campus when I return from London, I'll be getting an apartment off campus with Hillary with spring semester and potentially for the next few years (as I plan on attending graduate school in the Boston area). It was a huge decision for me, particularly because my roommate and I are (or were) so close up until now, but I think it is for the best both in terms of finances and in terms of growing up and moving on.

My roommate and I are still very close and very good friends but she had a more or less psychoatic break recently and that has severely damaged our relationship both as friends and as roommates.

Tonight I was inducted into Alpha Lambda Delta, the National Honor Society for college freshmen who were in the top 25% of their class freshmen year (we recieve the award in the spring of our sophomore years).

So life is going well for the most part, some bumps in the road but that is to be expected, particularly when you're me and you're always finding ways to get yourself into trouble. But I always manage to find a way out, and that's what matters. I'm glad to be back, and I'll try to STAY back this time :)

Hope all is well out there and that I haven't missed too much!

Though I've Tried...

2009-03-02T08:38:00.001-08:00

The weekend started out wonderfully. I spent Friday doing laundry, watching Indiana Jones and napping (I never nap! It was fabulous!). On Saturday my mother and Naveen came up to school to visit us and to celebrate my acceptance to the study abroad program and Naveen's visa extension.

NAVEEN'S VISA WAS EXTENDED! How awesome is that?? Everyone is super happy about it and I couldn't be more glad.

We went out to the macaroni grill for linner, and then we went to a Boston Blazers (MLL) game at the garden (they won!) and proceeded to check ourselves in to the courtyard marriot. The beds were so comfortable and it was probably the best sleep I've had in a very long time. Needless to say, it ranks in the top of the best weekends ever (the weekend of Tegan and Sara is number 1).

We got back to campus today and did homework, etc. until a GSA meeting at 9 pm.

As Hillary and I were entering my dorm, where the meeting was being held, a girl (a former very good friend of mine) burst out of the front doors, weeping bitterly. She was on the phone with her mother and I went to open the door for Hillary when I heard the words "Mom, one of my friends just hung himself."

Why do people do such senseless things? Don't they know that there are people who love and care about them? Don't they know there is help for them?

I held this girl in the snow and the wind while she sobbed into my shoulder. I moved her into the lounge while Hillary made sure we weren't interrupted by club members filing down to the meeting. She kept sobbing and wondering and repeating "Oh God." I've never had a friend commit suicide before, and I don't think I'd be able to handle it it ever happened.

Tears were streaming down my face as I walked her up to her room and made sure her roommate was there to take care of her. Luckily we had a snow day today, or perhaps not so luckily, since she won't be able to have her mind taken off of the present events.

I went down to lead the GSA meeting but I quickly found myself unable. I got up at the beginning of the meeting, walked out of the doors, walked down the hall to my room, opened the door and burst into tears. Hillary was there to catch me and hold me and tell me it was okay. She thought I knew this kid too, why else would I be so upset?

I was upset because people shouldn't hurt themselves, in any way. Why do people have to take their own lives? Don't they see how much it hurts the people who love them? Why do people have to be sad? Can't everyone just be happy to be alive, be thankful for every moment, good or bad?

I was crying because I can't save everyone, no matter how hard I try.

Updates updates updates

2009-02-21T18:58:00.001-08:00

I'm going to London!! Fall semester '09 I'll be studying abroad in London! I got the paperwork in earlier this week and I found out yesterday that I've been approved to study abroad! Now all I have to do is get my course list approved by my advisor and I'm all set. Move in day is September 3, and the last day in the dorms is December 20. I'm so excited!!

I go to Disney with my friends in 15 days. We leave March 8 and come home March 13. It's probably going to be the best time of my life. My beautiful girlfriend, my best friend at school Alycia, and a bunch of my other friends from school, all in the happiest place on Earth causing a ruckus.

I have, unfortunately, somewhat quit lacrosse. Quit isn't the right word because I still hang around with the girls and play whenever I get the chance, but I can't show up regularly because I have far too many commitments as it is. I still love to play, and there is nothing like running around with balls and sticks, but it can't be my main focus.

Running the GSA has turned into a full time job. We're selling t-shirts (which I helped design along with my co-partner Alycia and our advisor) and I decided we should decrease the price to $5 so that people would actually buy them, but we need to make up the difference, so we had a bake sale at a dance show on campus this weekend. The grand total comes to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $430, which is much more than I was anticipating. And I've been baking all weekend (well, since Wednesday actually) so I'm pretty exhausted. But I think I can claim the title Domestic Goddess at this point in time, so I'm pleased. I've never helped bake so many brownies, cookies, and cupcakes in my life.

I've been recruited to help start a Psychology Club at school. I was straight forward and told the club advisor that I would not be president, but if I have to have a position because I'm helping to start it, I'll be treasurer. I over extend myself too much and I need something easier and less demanding in my life.

I've also had a slight change of heart in terms of my career goals. I want to be a psychologist in some capacity, and I want to get my PhD, but I am at this point thinking that I will be going to seminary straight out of undergrad. I need to begin the talks with my pastor regarding ordination (which would be my ultimate goal). The only issue I see is that the Lutheran Church, although we are tolerant of the gays and openly ordain the gays, homosexual pastors must abstain from homosexual relationships after ordination. That's gonna be a huge nay, and I'm hoping there is a loop hole I can discover. I'll figure something out, or I'll become an Episcopalian. Or I'll get my doctorate of divinity and teach religion and philosophy courses. I suppose we'll see how things go, but at this point in time I feel very drawn to service in the church, not that I haven't always but it feels particularly strong right now.

So my life is pretty chaotic and exciting right now, but most lives are chaotic and exciting, right? Hope everyone is doing very well out there in this great big world.

Valentine's Day

2009-02-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

Since Valentine's Day happened to fall on the long weekend this year, and I had big plans for Saturday, I decided Hillary and I would go home to Connecticut for the weekend. So right now I'm sitting in my green chair in my living room after having held my rabbit and played with my dog. I miss those things so much at school, it's going to be heartbreaking to leave tomorrow. But I'll start from the beginning of the weekend, it's mainly adorable so if you don't appreciate adorable things you should avert your eyes.

Friday night Hillary called me to come over to her dorm around 5, as she was making me dinner and she was lonely in the kitchen all by herself. But I was explicitly told to not go into her room. So we hung out in the kitchen while she cooked me my Valentine's dinner (which was a surprise up until that point). Now, Hillary is no cook mind you, so this was a HUGE deal. She made pasta alfredo with chicken, and the alfredo sauce was home made (by Hillary!). She did an amazing job and it was probably the best pasta alfredo I've had in my entire life, without exaggeration.

Then we hung out and nursed our food babies for about an hour and Hillary went to the fridge and brought out a plate full of strawberries dipped in chocolate that she had made a few hours earlier. It was so sweet because when we go grocery shopping she knows that I immediately go to the berries and get strawberries and raspberries (my absolute fave!). She told me she almost got raspberries to dip in the chocolate but that she was advised that they wouldn't be conducive to being covered in chocolate. It was so cute, and they were absolutely amazing, and it was especially appreciated because Hillary doesn't eat chocolate (it makes her sick or something or she is revolted by it, I dunno she's just weird) so she made them entirely for me.

We spent the rest of the evening watching Chocolat, which was SUPERB! We loved that movie and definitely recommend it.

Saturday morning we got up early and drove to the destination of my part of the Valentine's Day planning. Over Thanksgiving when I told Hillary I was going to the National Zoo she told me that she loves zoos but she hadn't been to one in a very long time. I love zoos and the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence is probably my favourite zoo ever (for sentimental reasons). I hadn't been there in a year or two (my parents had been taking me to that zoo basically from birth) and I figured she would enjoy it too. So I took her to the zoo, which was about an hour from school and two hours from home, and we had an fantastic time. A baby giraffe was born there in late December, so the little guy was still very little and sooo cute.

And we saw the gibbons, who I always sort of gravitate too every time I go to Roger Williams. They had a jouvenile male who was so active, such a crazy. He kept running up to his dad and hitting him and trying to get him to play, but dad was having none of it. I got a really good picture of the boy and his dad together.

After we were done at the zoo we went to the merry-go-round in the park. There was basically no one there, and a ride on the merry-go-round only cost a dollar. It was a lot of fun, we really enjoyed ourselves and it was by far the best Valentine's Day I've ever had.

We had dinner at Cracker Barrel and took the long drive home. When we got home we hung out with my mother and Naveen for the rest of the evening, playing Monopoly and drinking. Eventually we stopped playing and started chatting and we talked until 2 am. We talked about everything from our uncertainty over the fate of our college, the economy, the inequities between the genders, etc. We finally went to bed after a fun filled two days of awesome, and were woken up this morning to cinnabuns and tea because my mother loves us dearly.

I really love Hillary. I love her because she's sitting in the same room with me right now, on her lap top, and we can be contented to just do our own thing for a little while. I love her because she sneaks up behind me when I'm brushing my hair and wraps her arms around me. I love her because she lets me sleep in while she showers (and doesn't hold it against me when I tell her I'm just going to be that kid who doesn't bother to shower). She's the best, and like I told her last night, she's my best friend and such a great love. I'm so happy.

Another Letter I'll Never Send

2009-02-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

This is another letter I'll never send. It's not that I don't want to send this one, it's just that it is impossible for it to be delivered.

Dear George,

On Thursday it will be two years. Three years ago I laid my bow on the strings and my fingers against the neck and my violin sang into the ceiling. Four years ago I smiled at you when I walked into the bandroom, and we told jokes and laughed and you made silly faces at people who weren't paying attention. Five years ago we were getting ready to compete in Toronto, and I had already learned a great deal from you in less than a year.

I remember the first time I met you, vividly. It was at summer music the summer between middle school and high school. I rode my bike to the middle school, to surround myself with the music program that I had dedicated myself to for four years. You were sitting there while the first violins practiced, holding your baby girl in your lap. You made me laugh so hard and I didn't even know you, but I knew we would be fast friends.

On the first day of high school I was terrified, but orchestra was an immediate home for me. Kate and I plopped ourselves down in the most comfortable chair in the bandroom and listened to you talk about the rigors of orchestra, knowing you were probably the least serious person we'd ever met. We took playing tests as freshman and sophomores, to determine our seating assignments. Kate and I were last stand first violins, a definite honor for freshman. I remember our playing exam sophomore year. When we finished you sat there with paper in front of you, pen in hand, looking at us. All you said was "And you're only sophomores." I could have cried with how good you made me feel about my abilities. I felt like I could do anything, play anything, be anything, because of you.

I went to Ireland over April vacation junior year, when the music department went on the annual music trip. That year you went to Boston, and orchestra placed second in the competition. We placed second my freshman year, and first my sophomore year. You were always so proud of us, and you always told us to ignore what the judges said, that we sounded great no matter what. And we did, we sounded like a team. If I could go back and change anything, I would have been there for the trip to Boston, so I could have spent a little more time with you. So I could have been there with my orchestra, with my team. I'm sorry, George.

You looked terrible on the night of the spring concert junior year. You had recently been told you would be taking over heading the band in addition to the orchestra. Your responsibilities were mounting and the music department budget was shrinking.

After the concert you went to the doctor, with fatigue. Nothing scary, right?

The doctor told you that you were sick. Very sick. You had leukemia.

They told us you had leukemia. I never panicked. Everyone was all over the place, terrified that you were going to die, trying to be hopeful that you would make a swift recovery. Everyone prayed. The "paper cranes" phenonmenon swept the school, and everyone wishes and hoped that you would be all right. Everyone loved you, George. You never made an enemy of the students, and you made dozens of great friends of the faculty.

You left the school to get treatment, and a less capable person filled in for you while you were gone. No one liked him, no one trusted him. He wasn't you.

The winter concert went smoothly, we sounded great, and we all played for you. We wore our blue and gold "Jammin' for George" wristbands, and all of our parents clapped and cheered for you when you sat in the front row. We played a benefit concert for your family and your expenses a few weeks later. Your eyes were deep and sunken, your formerly bald and shiny head was even balder. Your skin lacked its natural healthy glow. You were so skinny. You stood to conduct us for one song at the winter concert, but that was all you could handle. We cried so hard during that song. I turned to one of my friends, tears streaming down my face, and asked her if this was the last time we would be conducted by you. She told me not to say that, that it would be okay.

They told us you weren't coming back to teach us. They told us you were dying. They had ever single counselor in the band room, every single available staff member on hand. Tears streamed down my hot cheeks as I heard the words traveling out of their mouths and into my ears. You were dying. We finally had confirmation of our worst fears. You were dying.

I went into the practice room area and fell against a wall. Kate caught me and held me while I wept bitterly. It was the first time I ever really cried. I never cried when my father died, never really cried anyway. I feel, in a lot of ways, like your death was a continuation of my father's death. Like cancer was killing all of the important men in my life. It was a great release of emotion, of all the pent of rage and sadness from my father's death and all the feelings I had over you, George.

On February 5, 2007 I was sitting in second period cafe study, my books piled in front of me on a cafeteria table just high enough that I could rest my tired head. The principal's voice mumbled over the intercom that, after a long and hard fought battle against leukemia, you died. I felt like the battle that we had all been fighting was lost, like what was the use of any of it? It was the first time in my life that I realised that love isn't enough. Love isn't enough to keep someone in your life, it's not enough to keep friends from fighting, lovers from leaving, fathers and mothers and friends and teachers from dying. Everything I thought I knew was gone.

And so you died. I left cafe study and wandered down the long hallways to the music wing. I found Kate in the hallway, dropped my books and grabbed her in my arms. The teachers quickly ushered us to the music wing where we hugged and cried. I couldn't even stand to see how devastated we all were. I went home and lay in my bed for hours, just crying and wondering.

The violin felt different in my hand after that. The strings didn't have to same pang as before. My heart was completely broken. Love wasn't enough to keep you alive, George. It just wasn't enough.

And so you've been dead for two years now, and I miss you as much as I did a year ago, and two years ago, and as much as I will miss you three, ten, twenty years from now. The pain never goes away, it sometimes changes and sometimes it gets easier to get through the day without crying, but it never goes away. Sometimes I remember your smile, your laugh (you had such an amazing laugh!), your bald head, the love I know you felt for your students and music, and I cry. I'm not crying for me George, and maybe I'm not even crying because I'm sad. I cry because I knew you, and you touched my life. I've known many angels in my short experience here on Earth, and you George were certainly one of them. I cry because I'm so grateful, so very thankful that I knew you and that my life will never be the same.

If you see my daddy, play him a song for me. But NOT Duffy's Cut :) Play something happy and full of life. When I play my violin, run my fingers over the strings and grip the bow loosely, I see you on the pages in front of my eyes. I see my father, who never got to hear me play. I'm playing for you, George, and my daddy, and me. Put in a good word for me.

God, I miss you so much.

Yuck

2009-01-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged in a little while, not because there has been nothing to blog about but because I've been bogged down with school work, meetings, club work, etc. The only reason I am able to blog today is because I have the flu, and I'm spending the day in bed with my laptop, my cell phone and my television. The last time I had the flu I was nine years old, it was the winter after my father died and all I remember was laying down on the couch and not being able to get back up for a week.

Yesterday morning I woke up to a snow day, and an illness. All day I was mopey and headachey and then just achey and tired. I came back to my dorm after dinner and did homework, and then Hillary came over when I was finished and rubbed my back and told me that I was on fire, even though I was absolutely freezing. I've never experienced such chills before in my life. So my roommate and Hillary put me under the covers and stocked the fridge with water and made sure I had water and tissues next to me. Al gave me her flannel blanket for my feet and Hillary got me nyquil and sudafed (for the morning) and I conked out sometime around 11. I've never had nyquil before and it was a very trippy experience. It might have been interacting strangely with the other medicine I take for asthma and allergies, or I might have just been tripping out on nyquil in a flu induced delirium.

Lacrosse was supposed to start last night but as a result of the weather the kick off was postponed until tonight. I wouldn't have been able to play yesterday, and I certainly won't be able to play today. I can barely walk, much less run or hold a lacrosse stick.

School has been going well, other than this recent illness. I dropped psychopathology, which has already made my life much easier and my time much more manageable. It seemed like it would be a great class, but I can take it at some other point and I really need to not go insane this semester.

I recently got the paperwork and I am applying to study abroad in London fall semester '09. I'm very excited and hope that I get to go.

I'm a little too under the weather right now to add much more, but I do hope that all is well with everyone reading this and I'll try to get back on a regular blogging schedule as soon as I can. Times are chaotic right now because the semester just began and I haven't quite gotten back into the swing of things (and I lead a somewhat crazy life) but I'll be back for good eventually.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm back at school, glad to be back, but I think the events of today take precedence over anything going on in my personal life.

It's really cool, I think, that a nation can come together to celebrate the entrance of a new leader, and the departure of an old leader. As much as any of us may disdain George W Bush, I think it's fair to say that he did lead us through a great deal of tragedy and turmoil. Though he has more or less left us high and dry and in an economic downward spiral, he led us and we are wiser for it, I would say.

God bless the Obamas and the Bidens, let today go off without a hitch. God bless and protect our great nation.

Definitely a sign of hope. Great things to come I think.

The Best Days of Our Lives

2009-01-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

On Friday we piled into Jaimes car and headed on the two hour journey from Connecticut to Boston, complete with sleeping bags, pillows, blankets, and scrabble. I can't do a step by step of what happened, because although it would be thoroughly entertaining, it would be about a year long. So, I'm going to highlight some of the most hilarious things that occured on this little trip to Boston.

Kate and Molly sat in the back seat, while Jaime drove and I sat in the passenger seat (because I'm the coolest and I always get shotty). As soon as Jaime started driving, the two in the back whipped out scrabble, not travel scrabble but legit scrabble, and proceeded to open the board, distribute seven letters each, and play. It was just... too funny for words. Every time Jaime changed lanes or tapped the brakes the pieces slid all over the place.

We went to Barnes and Noble near the Pru and I went to get a cup of tea at the coffee shop in the store. The chick behind the counter told me I could get a discount if I used my B&N card, which I didn't have on me, so I asked if she could look up my card. So she looked it up by phone number, but she didn't use the area code so obviously it wasn't going to work (freakin dumb) and then she tried my email address. I told her the address, and "at cox dot net" and she looked at me with a super perplexed face and said "How do you spell cox?"

*cue laughter*

She turned so many shades of red when I said it was spelt c-o-x and she was like "uh uh uh we don't have it on record uh uh uh sorry uh uh uh I don't know of any other way you would spell cox." It was so funny.

There was a woman in the science museum who looked exactly like Kate (Kate is super Asian), like exactly like her. They could have been twins, it was actually kind of scary. We were all wandering around in different places and I guess Jaime went up to this woman, thinking it was Kate, and started talking to her. The woman looked at Jaime like she had three heads and Jaime was like "Oh.. you're not Kate." Too funny.

They have a part of the x-ray exhibit at the science museum where you feel boobs to see if you can find the lump. Like... you feel these anatomically accurate boobs. The science museum was awesome.

There were baby chicks in one of the exhibits, and eggs that were hatching! It was beautiful and I definitely was tempted to steal some of the chicks cause they were adorable.

Kate couldn't reach the handrails on the T so she had to hold on to Natasha, and after that we referred to Kate as abuela (actually we called her al-bu-la in reference to the fact that my mother, everybodys favourite of course, can't pronounce abuela and it's funnier that way) and walked around Boston saying "Grandma you're gonna be late for mah-jong!" It makes me weepy with giggles just thinking about how much of a ruckus we cause everywhere we go.

Those girls are the greatest. Sleeping on Natasha's floor wasn't even that bad, it was actually the most comfortable floor I've ever slept on before, and I was surrounded by my best friends in the whole world. We stayed up until four am reminisching about the past... fourteenish years we've shared together. I hadn't forgotten what a big part of my life these girls are, I just needed to be reminded. I never realised how much of my life I've shared with them, how many memories we have together. I really love them a lot, and I miss them when I'm at school. But our relationships with one and other are changing and it's okay, as scary as it is it's okay. We won't always be able to drop everything and go on roadtrips, or pile into cars and visit each other wherever we are in this country or this world. Someday soon we'll have families, and real jobs, and real responsibilities.

It's wonderful, for now, to be able to be with them, and to be reminded of how important we are to each other.

Ahh!

2009-01-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

Help! I have fallen off the blogging bandwagon and I cannot get back up!

Being at home is not at all conducive to blogging, or doing much of anything really, because... well... nothing happens. Talk to me in a week when I've been at school for four days and I'm already ready to throw myself out my window (luckily on the first floor).

I decided that I need to cut back somewhere this semester, because although I do well academically, and I survive, college should not be about surviving but about living. Since I was at my wits end last semester, and I'm adding in somewhere in the neighbourhood of three activities this semester, something needs to be modified.

I'm telling my coach that I can't commit to lacrosse this season. Lacrosse is already on my resume for grad school. He already knows that I'm a double major in the honors program with something like 3 scholarships that I need a good GPA in order to maintain. So I'm going to be straight up with him: I'll make it to practices that I can make it to, I'll make it to every single game, but I can't commit 100%...

I'm trying to get myself psyched up for this conversation but it's totally not going to work at all. I'm super tough in my head... but in real life I'm a push over. Oh well.

And I'm dropping psychopathology, that leaves me with four courses and instrumental (which, amazingly enough, I am getting a credit for, this semester, after four....). I'm in a state of bliss just thinking about it... four courses... it's like a dream come true. This will be the first time that I'm taking four courses... I feel like such a rebel.

I've been "solicited" so to speak by my school to work at a Boys and Girls club in the city, by work I mean volunteer. I'm so excited, and so ready to do this. I feel like it makes more season for me to commit to this program than to commit to lacrosse again because I want to work with kids in my profession, and this will put me working with kids, potentially making an impact, bettering their lives and mine. It's very exciting, and next to impossible for me to juggle volunteering and lacrosse.

And working, I still have a job that requires that I tutor other students, and it's a big responsibility when you are more or less the deciding factor between an A and a B, passing a course or failing a course. And I am expected to do well in the four classes that I am retaining. And I have a life, I like to go out, and I barely went in to Boston at all last semester because I didn't have the time. I am going to stop letting everyone else run my life and start running it for myself. I am doing the things that I want to do, and no one is going to get in my way.

It feels good to think that, let's see if I will actually be able to do it.

This time next week I'll probably be taking five courses and instrumental, volunteering and doing lacrosse, working and maintaining a 3.5, knowing me.

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping I grow a spine between now and when I go back to school on Monday :-P

Prayer Request

2009-01-08T17:37:00.000-08:00

Two years ago if you had asked me how I felt about outsourcing I would have told you exactly what was in my head: it sucks, it shouldn't happen, and American jobs should stay in the hands of Americans. I, like most Americans, felt anger and betrayal when I thought of the American coporations eliminating hard-earned American jobs and handing them to foreign coporations and individuals who would do the job for less. I felt the fear when I thought on the direction of our country, of the future of my family, whether I would be able to go to college, if I should even bother.

Thankfully, my mother's job was never eliminated and it likely never will be. Many of her friends, however, found themselves jobless, replaced by a new coporation headquartered in India. The new company shipped many of their offshore employees onshore, to work side by side with the company that has employed my mother for the last... nearing thirty five years now. No one was pleased, and many of the people my mother has worked with for years showed their true colours when young people with a different complexion, a different accent, and a different background, walked through the revolving doors of their office building. Some searched for different employment, others ignored the newcomers, and others were truly ugly and hateful human beings, welcoming these young people to this strange new country with dirty looks, sneers, inordinate workloads and never a helping hand.

When my mother found Naveen and Sara, I was just getting ready to leave for college. They would come over to the house and cook with my mother, they taught her how to cook Indian food (and how to cook it well!), they watched movies with her, gave her books to read. They went shopping with her, asked her to bring them to their apartments when it was too rainy to take the bus, went for walks with her by the river in the spring and summer, held her arm when she needed help going up a curb, laughed at her jokes, talked to her when she was lonely. They were always there for her, even though America had been so cruel to them, so unwelcoming. Naveen's mother and father call my mother his "auntie," and she has a place beside his family at his wedding in India (as soon as they decide who his bride is... a story for another day). Sara's boyfriend (also a story for another day) in Texas sent my mother a coupon for a huge turkey over Thanksgiving, and emailed my mother, Naveen and I his gratitude for taking care of Sara when he couldn't be here for her. Sara and Naveen are like siblings to me. They are far from home and they don't have any family here to hug them when they are scared, to tell them jokes, to reassure them when work has been unbearable.

My view on outsourcing changed drastically as I got to know Sara and Naveen. They are people too, just here trying to do their jobs. They were sent here by their employers, and if they had refused they would have been without employment. They don't want to raise their families in India, they want to stay here and live and work and just live. They love this country, despite all of the trials her people put them through.

We took Naveen with us to Washington over Thanksgiving. I sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with him, looking out over the reflecting pool, the WWII Memorial, and the Capital Building, and told him about a country ripped in two not too long ago by a disagreement over the value of a man. I told him about a nation that would send its babies off the war, to kill more babies in a country no one had ever even heard of, as I ran my fingers over the names of the friends of my parents on the Vietnam Wall. We stood in front of the White House and discussed the irony of the homeless people not 1,000 feet away from the most powerful man in the free world. I told him of the millions of people who died in a war much too recent, for no reason other than their faiths, their backgrounds, the people they loved. He had never even heard of the Holocaust, he didn't know that slaves were used in this country based solely on the colour of their skin, he didn't know about our Revolutionary War. He knew nothing about our country, or about the history of Western Civilization at all, but he is learning, and he is eager to learn.

If he is going to live in this country, and raise a family here, he needs to know about the United States and at least the important events in our history.

Sara went back to India over the summer and was transfered to work in Texas so she could live with her boyfriend.

We just found out last night that Naveen's visa will not be renewed, and he has a week to leave the country.

I held my mother in the kitchen while she wept, while she repeated "I'm loosing all three of you" over and over, sobbing. It's hard to not be steaming mad when you have to hold your mother in your arms because you're afraid she'll topple over from a broken heart. It's hard to not want someone to pay, it's hard to not want to be able to make everything right, so so badly. To be able to tell her that he can stay, that he can be her adopted son, as he has become, that he will still be here when I go back, that his life will be all right and nothing will be scary anymore.

But I can't tell her that. INS isn't renewing visas these days because of the outcry against outsourcing, from people like the person I was two years ago. Naveen is a hard worker, who deserves a chance to make his life better, just like my ancestors got when they left the slums of Dublin and the pastures of Poland and boarded ships bound for a strange land they had heard whispers of, promises of a better future for their babies and themselves. He is a hard worker, and a good man, and he deserves to be able to stay in this country, if only for as long as he is needed on shore. His employers are fighting to keep him on shore, because there is work only he can do.

I'm praying he stays on shore, if only for a little while longer, just long enough for them to figure out what we can do to keep him here indefinitely. I love Naveen because my mother loves him like a son, and anyone who my mother loves like a son or a daughter is a brother or a sister to me. The colour of his skin doesn't matter, his accent doesn't matter, his birth doesn't matter. He is my brother, he is my friend. We share this world, we share this country, we share this state, we share this woman who loves us and cares about us. I will do anything and everything to make sure he stays here, and lives a long and happy life in this country.

Sometimes the people of this country infuriate me. If you can see where I am coming from, and I hope you can, please pray that Naveen's visa is extended and he isn't put on the next flight to India from JFK. And if that can't happen, please pray that I can figure out how to heal my mother's breaking heart.

Running

2009-01-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

I don't like to run very much (which makes me wonder why I love lacrosse so much, you never stop running in that sport), but I like to work out, ride the bike for half an hour, do the rowing machine, leg presses and lifting. I get very stressed out when I'm home because I don't have a gym readily accessible, I have nowhere to just escape to. Sure I escape in my music, but it's so much easier to be physically active and release your energy that way than to release it through music. (I'm on a sort of... creative hiatus, so to speak. It hurts to be creative, more than helps. I have been in a funk when it comes to music ever since George died almost two years ago. Just something not right about the feel of the bow on those strings or the low cries of the violin these days). So I run up and down the stairs, do leg lifts and crunches and push ups until I can't do any more. The gym is a place where I can escape for an hour or so a day at school. There's no school work, no distractions, just sweat and my ipod and breathing in and out.

I feel like I've been running a lot lately, and I'm pretty exhausted from it all. I'm running from how afraid I am of the future, of even what tomorrow will bring. I had this, this really weird epiphany. I'm so close to the future that I've always wanted. Maybe not so close, but close none the less. Closer than I was a year ago, two years ago, a decade ago. I didn't even know where I was going with my life a year ago, and I might not still, but I have a better idea now and I'm so on the right track and I'm going to get there and it just feels so... scary. I'm scared because it's all going to happen, it has to happen and I believe in it.

I run from responsibility a lot, as much as I might like to deny that, I do. Sure, I take responsibility for my actions, but if I don't have to act, I won't. There has never been a driving force in my life before telling me that I have to do something or else my dreams won't come true (never might be too strong of a word there, after all there is always that driving force telling you to inhale and exhale or else your dreams will certainly not come true).

It's not just running from responsibility. It's running to keep going, to get to the next square. Going through the motions and then some, only resting when fatigue sets in and then running more. It gets exhausting after a while. Hours of classes, hours of work and papers, meals only when readily available and next to free, tea and cheap wine, lacrosse, work for five or six hours every week, volunteering when they need me, running clubs, giving giving giving and never receiving. It's why I love Hillary so much, I think, because finally after all these years of giving to my education, to my friends, to my family, to work and music and sports and life in general, there is another human being out there who doesn't need to be in my life, but who chooses to be there, and who loves me and wants my happiness and has a vested interest in my being sane at the end of each day. I don't feel like I have to run when I'm with her, I feel safe from the past, present and future. The grade police aren't going to get me, my coach isn't going to hunt me down and make me run suicides, I won't have to play my violin in a concert that truly doesn't need me, I don't need to do anything or be anyone who I'm not. I can just be me.

The future is such a scary place sometimes. But I'm so looking forward to getting there, and being able to stop running from all the things that have forced me on this treadmill all my life. Someday, I'm going to graduate from college, go to graduate school, get my masters in clinical psychology, get into a doctoral program and get my PhD, and until then I am work and live and be happy and healthy and keep running because I can almost taste the sweetness of accomplishment. I'm at the edge of something big here, and some day all of my dreams are going to come true and maybe then I can finally stop running and rest.

Flagpoles Are Serious Business

2009-01-06T12:27:00.001-08:00

I can't recall if I've blogged about the infamous flagpole incident, so I'm gonna do that right about now.

We've all seen A Christmas Story when the whimpy little boy gets dared to stick his tongue to a flagpole and the fire department has to come and Ralphie feels terrible about it for all of two minutes. For whatever reason, a lot of people still don't believe that sticking one's tongue to a very cold flagpole will result in one's tongue becoming frozen to said flagpole.

Alas, if only I were not such a skeptic and a researcher by nature, I might have been spared the agony and the shame of being that girl. You know, that girl, the one that no one wants to be.

So it was a dark and VERY cold January evening in Connecticut and we were driving around, looking for trouble. This all took place last year over winter break.

All of a sudden I got it in my head that it would be a fabulous idea to put the old flagpole myth to the test. Brilliant.

So we drove to our old elementary school, hopped out of our cars, and prepared ourselves for laughs. Not believing that it would work, I stuck my tongue to the icy flagpole with no fear. When I tried to pull away, I felt the tug of the icy metal at my tongue and my lower lip which had also become frozen to the pole. Tears began to stream down my face and I begged my friends to do something. They ran for water, which would do nothing in the below freezing temperatures. We were not close enough to run home for help, and I was in too much panic to be left alone. Finally, I braced myself, put all my muscle against the pole and ripped my tongue off the flagpole. My friends looked away with terror and I wrapped my arms around my head in excruciating pain and walked blindly back to my car.

I rested my head on my car as my heart started to calm down and stop racing wildly and my vision began to go back to normal. I didn't care about anything in the world except that my tongue was no longer an extension of the flagpole (I'm a psychology major, not a chemistry major, I had no idea that when you stick your tongue to a frozen flagpole that there is a chemical reaction). My best friend Kate came up to me and asked me if I was alright. I looked over at her and opened my mouth to speak, but when I did that no words came, only blood splattered out of my mouth. I spat into the snow and tried not to look because I can't handle the sight of blood at all. I decided we needed to get out of there, and we needed to figure out how to take care of it without involving my mother. We drove home in silence. I was driving, with the window rolled all the way down and my head sticking as far out of the window as possible so that the blood dripping from my mouth wouldn't get on my car or my clothes.

So we got back to my house and we rushed past my mother and into the basement. I think Kate went and got hot water or something while I sat and tried to keep talking to my friends. I kept saying things like "It'll be fine I think" "It's totally fine" but eventually I couldn't speak anymore because my tongue had swollen to at least 2 times its normal size. I couldn't even breathe out of my mouth.

I told my sister, who told me I was stupid, who then told my mother that I was stupid (I had told her by then, and begun rinsing my mouth with salt water), but my mother in her infinite kindness does not believe I am stupid, just that I am strange and too curious for my own good.

I couldn't eat solid food or speak (and be understood) for two weeks. I still have two scars on my tongue, and I have no feeling on the tip of my tongue, and that will likely be the way it will be for the rest of my life (since it has been almost exactly a year now since that fateful evening).

So the moral of the story is: Tongues really can get stuck fast to flagpoles, and it sucks, so don't do it!

P.S. Molly I hope you think this is accurate. I'm glad you and Natasha and Kate were there, even if none of you tried to stop me :-P

Back on Planet Earth

2009-01-05T10:31:00.001-08:00

I feel like I dropped off the face of the Earth for a while there. My friends may or may not agree with me, that's a matter of opinion I s'pose.

Disney at Christmas is fabulous, if you ever have the chance or the desire, definitely go at that time of year. It's so beautiful, and the decorations are lovely. The only two things I regret about being in Disney for Christmas: Not being in church for Christmas eve/morning (particularly because this is my pastor's last Christmas with our church) and also the fact that none of the guests of Disney seem to comprehend the joy of the season. Everyone is still as pushy and blood thirsty as ever down in the good old Mouse's House. They'd knock you over as soon as look at you if they thought you would get on a ride even just a person before them, or get a better vantage point for the fireworks. Christmas spirit indeed, and all good Christians I'm sure. Disney brings out the worst in people, I swear, myself included. I don't mind tripping people who look at my family wrong, and I'll get into a screaming match with you if you hit me one more time with your stroller or your wheelchair cause you're too incompetent to be pushing it. Which, by the by, DID happen. My disabled aunt and my disabled mother were walking in front of a person in a wheelchair, who didn't need the wheelchair but who was too lazy to be bothered with walking. I saw that the person pushing the wheelchair was not paying attention so I put myself in between my aunt and my mother and the wheelchair and braced myself and wham, she slammed right into me. Wheelchairs are not designed to hit people (like they design the strollers in the parks these days because they know parents are the worst when it comes to paying attention to where the hell they are going) so I had a deep cut on the back of my calf, but I didn't want her hitting either my aunt of my mother, because then they would have been out of commission for the rest of the trip and I would have been in jail awaiting trial for causing bodily harm to the chick pushing the wheelchair. So I turned around and told her to watch where she was going, as she apologized profusely, which I appreciated, but it still did not make the blood stop trickling down my leg or my limping onwards any less noticeable. Anywho, Disney has its ups and downs. You just have to put on a brave face and go with it if you really love it, as I do.

So Christmas was nice, but not normal. I'm all about normalcy so it threw me off a bit, but we had Christmas morning complete with presents, cinnebuns and being in your pajamas until 1 pm the first morning back. Hillary was with us from the day we got back until New Years Day, and then I drove her home and I stayed at her house from New Years Day until yesterday. We went to the aquarium in Mystic (Hill assured me it was much cooler than the New England Aquarium, which I've never been to, but I can't fathom anything in Connecticut being cooler than anything in Massachusetts), did the whole New Year's Eve thing (which at one point in time meant going to New York City to see the ball drop, but was quickly vetoed, and the end result was staying home with my friends and baking cookies and watching movies all night) and went out to dinner with the madre on our way back to Massachusetts. My mom really likes her, which is awesome cause I really like her. She's still convinced that this is a phase ("no one wants to date a 19 year old boy") but I think she is at least happy that I am very happy, and I'm eternally grateful to her that she let Hillary stay with us and let me go spend time with her in her neck of the woods.

When we were in MA we went to Northampton and saw Milk, which was really good, but I feel like it was lacking something maybe? It was more of a political movie than a gay rights movie, I feel. It just chronicled the political process and the trials and tribulations of being in the political spotlight. I wasn't disappointed in it, but generally I like movies with more... suspense. I'm realistic enough to know that everybody knows Harvey Milk was killed, so there could be no suspense there. Maybe this just wasn't my kind of movie, I dunno. Hillary liked it though. She cried at the end, it was cute, and I made fun of her for it for hours (I'm the best). We visited with her friends and family and played scrabble and watched movies and it was very nice and very relaxing. Her mom was talking about needing the roof to be done and stuff and I mentioned reshingling the house and she totally did not believe that I can do it, which only makes me want to do it more so reshingling the house has moved up to the number one spot on things to do this summer (well, number one behind finding a kick ass job).

So now I'm back home in CT, enjoying my break but looking forward to getting back to school. I did well in my grades last semester, though I could have done better but it was a tough semester and it's over and I'm glad. Lacrosse will start oh so very soon, so I need to seriously get to the gym every single day. I had a dream my problem with my knee caps came back and I was in excruciating pain every time we ran again and it was terrible (my problem with my knee caps will never go away, it just comes and goes sort of). I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things cause all this suspense is killing me.

Hope everyone had a very merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year!

Secret Santa

2008-12-23T19:59:00.001-08:00

Tonight was secret santa with my friends from home! It was a lot of fun, we made way too much food (and also consumed way too much), opened presents, ate more food, and then sat around and did nothing (which is what we do best). I had my friend Jaime and I got her a Wall-E thingy that you build which she loved, and some cello music (because I know Jaime and Sarah through orchestra in high school and I played in the orchestra with Natasha in middle school and Kate and I played in the same orchestra together from basically birth until high school graduation). Kate had me and she got me a nerf crossbow (to add to my collection mwahaha) and play-dough, because she knows that when I am taking final exams I would much rather just be playing with playdough, and she loves me dearly and I love her for it.

Natasha and Rob had to point out the fact that people from Connecticut have an accent (WHICH WE TOTALLY DO NOT! you can't fool me), at which point in time I dropped a delicious cookie that Molly made right out of my mouth in shock and horror. Hilarity ensued.

My doctor is concerned that I have high blood pressure. But honestly, maybe my blood pressure is a little higher than usual because it's now been six days since I've been home and I am already ready to go back, finals were stressful as all hell this semester, and only two minutes before we pulled into the doctor's office parking lot she and I were having a rather stress inducing conversation about Hillary coming to CT to spend some time with me over the break. I wanted to be like "sir ma'am sir ma'am, I lead a stressful life. Get back to me in a week when I have seen the mouse and I am all in my happy place." So that's that, I have to go back when I get back from Sunny Florida and get my bloodpressure taken. I'm nineteen, I'm active, I'm always doing something (except when I'm home), I eat healthy, I exercise every day. And I'm nine fucking teen. Gosh maybe something is wrong with me. I don't feel like I am super stressed out all the time, but maybe I am, and I just don't want to admit it to myself. Well whatever, it is what it is. I've felt myself slowly developing a Type A personality over the years. I just need to chill.

So the madre and I talked about Hillary coming to visit when we get back from Florida. Well, basically the conversation went something like this:
Car silence
Me: "So... do you want to hear about my life, or are you happy with things the way they are?"
Madre: "What do you mean?"
Me: "I mean, do you want to hear about my 'romantic life'?"
Madre: "I figured if you wanted me to know, you'd tell me."
Me: "Oh. I figured if you wanted to know, you'd ask. So do you want me to tell you about the girl I'm seeing?"
Madre: "Well I assumed it was your friend Alycia"
At which point I would have spit anything out if I had been eating or drinking, but luckily I was not so it just came out in a series of cackles and wheezes
Me: "Oh my gosh no, I'm dating Hillary."
Madre: "Oh... so what do I call her? What's the politically correct term?"
Me: "Girlfriend is fine. She wants to come down when we get back from Disney, is that alright? And she wants me to go spend some time with her up in Massachusetts."
Madre: "Oh that's fine, she can come here and you can go there. I guess.. I don't know I'm just confused. Where will you two sleep? I had to sleep in a separate room from your father whenever he spent the night at my house or I spent the night at his parents' house."
Me: "That's up to you, but ma, honestly, I'm not planning on marrying her. I'm nineteen."
Madre: "Ohhhh... right."

It was kind of an hilarious conversation for me, but at the same time nerve wracking because she and I don't talk about things like that. And it was good for the two of us to just talk, freely. And now she knows, and I am very relieved, and I am also very happy that I'll be getting to spend some time with Hill when I get back from Disney. The madre still thinks this is a phase and that "no one would want to date a nineteen year old boy" (which I completely agree with, but that's besides the point), but she is okay with it. And she promised me that she will be there if and when I get a broken heart, no matter who breaks my heart. And I LOVE HER SO MUCH for that.

This is turning out to be a fabulous Christmas!

Looking For Suggestions

2008-12-21T13:34:00.001-08:00

So everyone is giving me suggestions about what to do about my insane life, and I feel like they all kind of have their own motivations in what they suggest.

MY predicament is that I am signed up for five classes next semester, not including instrumental ensemble (which I decided I can't give up on instrumental because I have a vested interest in that class and I can't live without music). My classes are: Statistics, Research Methods, Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Medieval Vision (religion and English) and Changing Familes (sociology). I only need to take four courses to be a full time student and to become a junior, and I don't need to take any more psych courses this semester. I have to take statistics and research methods, but the rest are electives.

I also play lacrosse in the spring, and pre-season should start just around the same time that we get back to school. Once February rolls around it will be lacrosse, school, sleep maybe, and nothing else. I'll be lucky if I even get to see any of my friends outside of team awesome.

So I know that something has to go. That something cannot be Hillary, it cannot be lacrosse, it almost definitely cannot be instrumental, and it cannot be Research Methods or Statistics. As a double major, I should be taking Medieval Vision as my English course.

So should I drop Psychopathology, or Changing Families? I know both professors and they are both happy that I'm taking their course. I am not very fond of the professor who is teaching psychopathology, but she likes me and I do well in her classes. I have never had a course with the professor who is teaching changing families, but we've been emailing (because I didn't take the pre-req for the class and I wanted premission to skip the pre-req, which I got) and she is a very nice person, we've met once and she told one of my best friends that she's looking forward to having the two of us in class together. If I don't drop one of the classes, I'll look into taking one or both of them as pass fail.

My problem is I overextend myself, and I think I can handle more than I really can. I can handle a great deal, it's just a matter of my becoming a huge stressed out monster or being a normal human being with a normal work load.

Lacrosse will be good, it's such a stress reliever and I love my team and I love playing. But it's hard to enjoy the feel of the grass beneath your cleats or the way the ball whips into the net or the tension of your fingers around the cold metal when you know you should be studying for three test the next day, or writing ten page papers. Gosh, I love life and I love living and I love being alive, but it's so difficult to remain in love with life when you are being pulled in so many opposing directions.

Thurs a Storm A'Brewin

2008-12-19T13:16:00.001-08:00

(That's Bryce Canyon, definitely worth the trip if you ever get the chance. I found it more impressive than the Grand Canyon.)

I feel slightly guilty about this weather... It's totally all my fault.

I left Massachusetts blanketed with snow yesterday, ice everywhere you stepped, hard snow crunching beneath your sandals (everyone wears sandals in the snow, right?). Today, Connecticut is being pelted with winter storm Austin. I know Connecticut, it's all my fault, I am eternally sorry.

Personally, I am indifferent to snow. It was fun when I was younger and I could run outside and roll around in it and build snow people, and my big black dog Candy would jump through the snow piles and chase snow flakes (she had a few loose nuts and bolts in the attic). Now it's just... work. Well, at home it's work, because although my mother assures me she can do it herself (and she does and can, as much as that pains me), I like to be useful. And so I shovel, in my sweatpants and my sneakers because I haven't owned snowpants or boots since middle school.

Good luck to everyone in their shoveling pursuits today and tomorrow! If you could, say a prayer for my friend on his way home to Ireland (his flight is this evening out of Boston and I doubt that he'll be leaving on time) that his flight isn't terribly delayed and that it is safe.

Oh, and say one for Hillary and her family and friends too and everyone out there in East Jesus Nowhere, Massachusetts. A lot of them are still without power as a result of the ice storms, and it's a terrible time to be without heat. If there is anything you wish for for Christmas, wish that everyone can be happy, safe and warm.

Commence Winter Break

2008-12-18T19:52:00.000-08:00

Today was move out day, the official end of Fall Semester '08. Next stop, Spring '09! It's very bittersweet, because I've wanted to be home so badly for so long, to be with the animals and spend time with the madre and my friends. But I have a life at school, I have friends who I will miss dearly and who I can't call up at any given time and tell them to meet me at the starbucks in the centre of town. I have a girlfriend who I won't see for several weeks, if not a month, because she lives close to three hours away. I'm very torn in different directions.

Alls I know is, I'M GOING TO DISNEY NEXT WEEK FOR CHRISTMAS! We're taking the madre's friend from India and meeting my aunt and uncle down there and spending 5 days there around the holiday. I love Christmas in Disney. If there is any place I'd like to be to celebrate anything, it's Disney World. Except, I like celebrating the birth of Christ at Church, and I'm sad I'll be missing it this year because it's my pastor's last year here, but Disney will be nice.

This time last year the entire family was gathering itself together and meeting down in Disney (at the beginning on January, not over Christmas, that would have been chaos) for the 10 year anniversary of my father's death, and a super huge celebration of his life. His grandchildren were there, his daughters were there, his wife and former wife was there, his nieces and nephews and their children, his brothers and sisters in law. It was epic. I miss those days.

I feel like I have two lives, two lives which converge every so often, but for the most part remain in their separate spheres. It's a strange feeling, but I'm going to miss it when it's gone.

So now I'm home, in CT, pondering my naval and doing nothing but job hunting, going to Disney, and missing my absent friends, and missing Hillary even though it's only been a few hours since we said goodbye. But, I am LOVING the fact that I don't have to deal with statistics or research methods for a whole month. Absolutely loving it.