A Pilgrimage of Non-Religious Affiliation

Paralyzing Phear

2012-01-07T19:19:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I have this paralyzing fear when I think about myself in the future. Fear that I won’t live up to my own standards, fear that I will have wasted time, fear that I will have missed out on opportunities. When I do this, my mind freezes, I can feel my heart beat in my throat, my knees tighten. It’s not that I don’t think I will be happy wherever I end up; it just freaks me out to imagine myself there.

Recently my family has been hinting at their age; a brother with a bruised knee, the oldest player on the alumni basketball team, my mum thinking she is losing her memory because she forgot an appointment and a sister gone, not around to fall asleep next to. I am reminiscing because it’s the New Year, 2012, it makes me remember where I was last year around this time. So sick and tired in Nepal that I wanted to quit, and might have. It was the only time in my life when I actually wanted to go through with it.

Permaculture farm i stayed on after New Years outside of Kathmandu

Taken from the roof of my host families house, Kathmandu

I think fear is a very raw emotion that drives people. I am happy to live with this kind of fear in my life so that I can overcome it. I listened to a TED talk about the emotion of regret and decided to take on the last message of the talk that, “regret doesn’t remind us of what we did badly, it reminds us what we can do better”. The processes of these emotions are valuable; so here’s to another year of fear and regrets, bring it on!!!

I have been reading about a Korean feminist poet in this article: http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/3358/williams_kim_1_1_12/ And loving everything that she says:

Kim Hyesoon "We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become “the paper made of human meat,” we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play. It is not possible to explain women’s poetry until you sympathize with how women painfully go through the experience of having these tattoos carved on their bodies. At this point, women’s language is the butcher’s language who sells his or her body. It is grotesque and miserable. Female poets can finally step into the world of language after crossing this river of the grotesque; the words cannot gush out of their mouths until they cross the river of screams where you witness death like everyday affairs.”

Moving onto another year in another country (Greece), a new diet (Paleo), and different classes (Native Americans of the NW + Advanced Poetry + Vagina Monologues).

These days my bike is a ghost and I sleep like a mummy

2011-10-28T14:35:00.000-06:00

Listing my life:

What work looks like

On good days work looks like this

and

List for Padeen (naturopath doctor)

- Where to get another Netti pot

- IUD (no hormones?)

- HPV Vaccine?

- Acne medicine

- Ask about irregular bleeding

- Do leaky gut test

List of what I couldn’t eat on my FOUR week cleanse

Sugars (yes, this meant no chocolate even high fructose corn sugar and agave!)

High Glycemic Fruits (don't ask)

Grains (this proved to be the hardest thing about the cleanse because my body is so used to being full from starch that it took me a while to actually be satisfied after eating the food that i did)

Gluten Containing Compounds (no soy sauce to go with the rice that i can't eat)

Dairy (mooo wasn't hard, except no EGGS! what the heck?!)

Soy

Alcohol (super bummer)

Lectins (what no nuts, beans, potatoes, tomatoes)

* oh and no coffee, processed food, canned foods.

NEW DIET

is called the Gaps diet http://gapsdiet.com/Home_Page.html

....you don't want to know

List of classes I'm take at PCC

Second year German

Creative Writing (Poetry)

Printmaking

Humanities & Technology: Exploring Origins

German things

Schnurrbart - mustache

Die Hexe - Witch

Die Spinne - Spider

Heute trank ich ein Tasse Kaffe mit Frühstück. (practicing imperativ tense!)

Dann ich ging ins Bett und schlafen gut, Gute Nacht!

Poetry things (more whining)

Waking Up Is Putting On Your Shoes (1st draft, revision due next class..)

I wake up to a cold September morning and start on my ten-minute walk to the bus stop

56 minutes before this moment

I lay vertical, face down, in a queen size bed, mouthing my dreams out to the empty room

I dream about places I wish I were, the people I left behind

My heart torn from every time I’ve said goodbye, a patchwork of those moments

Even in this condition it’s forced to be worn around all day

It is still dark outside

An arm outstretches to turn off the alarm at 6:25

Usually not right away

I don’t want to wake up, so I don’t

Two feet land on the stale carpet

The rest of the body has no choice but to follow, sitting upright

Hands rub still closed eyes

In the bathroom face and teeth get clean

The mirror is ignored

Feet follow each other up 16 steps away from the bed

To the kitchen, tools like blenders and saucepans make the breakfast

Once the body is fed clothes are draped over the torso and hips

Pack is packed

Lastly I put on my shoes

They are red

Made of canvas

Dipping into them the backs cup my heels tightly

The edges of the soles are torn

These shoes look worn

I call them my heartache shoes

As if it were a choice whether or not to put them on everyday

These shoes sometimes hurt my feet

I am reminded with every step the pain of trying to fit something too big

Like a heart into a chest

Or a shoe

And wear it around all day

To Do List

- Send Letter to India

- Do laundry

- Mach mein Hausaufgabe

- Buy new Netti Pot and Long shower brush

- make soup

- put away clothes

- Finish reading book/s (yeah right)

- Find new job

- Find out who I am now (as an artist, as an American, as a girlfriend, as a sister/daughter, as a consumer, as a voter, as a commuter.

- Call PCC about Financial Aid (a month later i got it! geez i thought my other school was unorganized throw 10,000 more students on top of that...)

Movie List

- Sherlock holmes

- Slamnation

- Monte carlo

- Milk

Things that I have been disgusted with

- Ben Brandis licking a slug at recess in the 3^rd grade

- How much US dollars goes to Military and Nuclear funding

- Bush being elected for President of the USA

- Bush being re-elected to President of the USA

- Baby poop

- cigarette butts in nature

- The fact that I have managed to lose every water bottles I have ever owned. I went through 4 water bottles in India in the past 7 months; the last two were in Portland while bussing and babysitting.

Things I miss

- Indian Chai, fresh coconut, Pipa (Central American and South Asian), Set Dosa, Idly, Gallo Pinto, Papusa’s, fresh mango, gelato, clos, mojitos, sangria, nepali tangerines, papaya, yuka

- Sarah Kaplan Gould

- Having my own apartment

- Shabat

- Pretending to be an adult

For my boo:

Things I have learned about living in Portland

Even though I am “home”, I am still never home

Education is expensive

Bach flower remedies are awesome

I lose my belongings no matter where I am

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass

The universe eats up silence with silver utensils

2011-07-18T02:26:00.000-06:00

I fell asleep the other night with my headphones jammed in my warm ears listening to KBOO. I had stayed up until midnight just to listen to someone who before I met I knew I was in love with and always would be. It’s hard to be certain of things sometimes love is so frightening…I think lately I have feared the future, I feel somewhat like I am part of an orchestra but put on mute. Or just someone’s tapping foot keeping time, I’m nothing really, just a tool. India is different then where I am now, and I feel like it’s slipping away from me, only tangible through my memories. I saw a National Geographic that showed a train trip through Udaipur, India in 1984 and it looked so familiar. The monkeys, the different colored street food being passed through windows, the two-leveled bunks filled with people, the people.

In my reminiscing I wrote this:

There are so many other places I’d rather be right now

Sitting at the edge of the farm in the forest, nakedly 16 years old, looking out from my sit spot. Not knowing the world and finally declaring I belonged on it. It was a fresh and heartfelt age.

Standing on that bridge, a river never reached beneath, and the tropical haze - a foggy paradise. Hearing my brain say that jumping would be suicide and deciding to follow my feet anyway. Most of my better decisions have been made this way.

Under the blankets in Vipassana, my body prickling with sensations, where I was conscious of even a drop of water sliding down my leg. I was miserable, I felt hopeless, lonely, lost, lusting for home. But little did I know I was being trained to be and have the kind of love that fills you and bloats you till it seeps out of you there’s too much of it to be able to hold it all in.

Under the blankets of the fort Sadie and I built on Flanders Street.

Wrapped up in love. That moment staring into his eyes so intently that reality shatters around us.

In the arms of every man I’ve let hold me because no matter how much of a feminist I am, I still feel the safest in this place.

In my dream last night where I jumped off of a roof and landed up, I was flying, out of necessity.

In the first tree I ever climbed, I got high enough that I got too scared to go down.

At that waterfall in Rishikesh where we made up fairy names, grown teens, wet with nature’s natural pleasure and quenched with its freedom.

On the stage, with a microphone in hand, the black dress on that showed my shoulders, after I sang the song Black Coffee.

On the stage sitting next to the other cello players, with the lights off and only our bows that had glow in the dark stickers visible.

On those stages in front of all those strangers.

Not here, right where I am, walking underneath this umbrella that keeps out those dribblings and droplets of positive encouragements in life. Its pouring outside this umbrella, it rains college loan debt, buckets of wet soaked fear of unsuccess, lethargic lightning bolts that induce depression, and a wind whistling that’s risking the normal healthy balance of things.

Mad about Mad Men

2011-06-07T23:04:00.002-06:00

Now that two miles has become an easy feat for my small lungs and heavy thighs to carry out, that and being in a familiar place where I am no longer a guest and am allowed to do the dishes, I find myself settling. Settling in with old friends (my bike), finding odd jobs, and trying out all of my sister’s new clothes (like her black acid wash skinny jeans and I know, I know, acid wash really but I dig on them). I have been busying my time by watching episode after episode of MAD MEN. You know when you get obsessed with something and you know your obsessed because you keep relating to it in real life conversations...its a little embarrassing.

Yesterday after sleeping almost 12 hours I went to pick up my film that I was having developed. Looking through the photos I rested my eyes on one particular shot, it’s the one with all my girls from India center at the Idly place one morning. That place is so romanticized in my memories, the standing tables, messy haired-dirty toothed owner who would guess our order every time we came in and ask, “tea madam?” at the end of our meal. We would all nod our heads yes in the middle of discussing the nights before adventure, or a homework assignment. I never minded the flies and liked washing my hands after eating, being able to self-serve water, and the view of livestock as I ate. I miss India, more then I missed Costa Rica, and I am impatient with the readjustment period.

But in spite of missing it today is Tuesday June 7^th, I just finished watching the Bansky film Exit Through the Gift Shop. I tried to see it in theaters last summer before leaving for India but had too much to do and so I never did. I thought this movie would be more about capturing Bansky and how he did his street art while remaining so anonymous. But it ended on a sour note with a bunch of famous street artists who felt like the initial documentary maker Thierry Guetta sold out as he became pretty famous only after his first art show. I could see how much he liked the attention and money he was getting for doing fairly easily produced art. Maybe his success in LA was because he was a sort of knock-off Bansky, more collectible and accessible then Bansky is but lacking in sincerity. I saw all the other street artist’s disappointment in him including Bansky for turning the way he did, but I also got a new perspective on street art.

The venture is a somewhat egocentric one, you spread your signature name or message repeatedly all over the city, a semi uncontrolled space where everyone has to see it. It’s a way of being recognized on your own. The reason why I value what Bansky does so much is that what he does is art, something that really takes skill and is beautiful. His message is political, it makes you think, and it is not mainstream. As an artist he chooses to remain completely anonymous, even after he became famous, giving more value to his message. At the end of the film Bansky is interviewed about Thierry’s success and leaves us with a sad sentiment saying, “maybe Thierry was a genius all along, maybe he got a bit lucky, maybe it means art is a bit of a joke”, or maybe it shows the true meaning of what some of the street artists message to the people are, to wake up and think for yourself.

Before watching this movie I saw something that I think is really cool and interesting. I get excited whenever I see or read or talk about anything quantum. The concept is so fascinating to me. Here it is, get excited instead of down about art, and humanities inability to form valuable opinions about things.

Sometimes i say things i don't mean and other contraditctions [title of my chapbook for this year]

2011-05-17T03:55:00.000-06:00

I am running out of people to hang out with, running out of things to do (besides pack and clean) and all I can do is make hot cocoa to calm my nerves. When I get hungry I make cocoa oatmeal (why didn’t I think of trying that before, its amazing!!). It’s better than portfolio week where all I ate was idly in the morning and kept a jar of peanut to spoon-feed myself encouragement. My portfolio is done and unlike last semester I feel more accomplished. All that I did for my independent study was built on my own initiative. I tried to collect water samples from the slum at 5am in the rain, climbed into a sewage filled storm drain to pick out trash and talk to the neighbors, I wrote a letter to the government about what I learned on my study. Not only that but finishing all my other assignments that had piled up throughout the semester (including a paper about procrastination, the irony!) and being peer mentor I learned a lot about myself. heres the link to my online portfolio: http://indiacenter2011.weebly.com/

I have been spending the last moments with all the other students who are leaving Bangalore to other places in India or those going home. Everyone is sad about leaving in their own way and don’t know how to properly say good bye. How easily they leave and are gone. All of them dealt with it in their own way, some stressed, twitchy, lucky for me, my roommate cleans. My roommate, Aileen, left first, after we all went to the idly place for breakfast she left with a stuffed backpack and waved three times before finally disappearing. I can feel India disappearing from me. Like in inception it feels like the dream is slowing falling away around me, I am watching it disappear, the spirituality, the noises India makes, and then lastly me.

It’s hard for me to remember what its like back home, the cleanliness and how straight and square all the houses are with square lawns in front. India is messy but there’s magic hidden in the piles of rubble, the stories from yogi’s that live in Himalaya who can teleport, the mystery of a Baba who couldn’t be assassinated, and how the Ganga runs pure in Rishikesh but is totally polluted in Varanasi. I will miss all the Tibetans, Maoists, Marxist’s, Rajas, Muslims, Babas, Uniks, Strays, Beggars, Brahmins, Monkeys, Villagers, Tribals, Indigenous, Shopkeepers, Auto drivers, fruit stands, chai garam, fresh coconut, temples, mosques, cows…

I turned 20 in this country...

I look at this website that posts pictures everyday that Nasa has taken of space. This was April 15^th ‘s post, the big, beautiful spiral galaxy “Messier 101”. I thought this was relevant because “Messier” is a good title for how I gracefully entered into my 20’s. Although spent with friends, took care of by friends, but I managed to mess things up with some friends. I received an e-mail from my mom the day of my birthday with the lyrics from the Joni Mitchell song she used to sing my sister and I to sleep when we were younger. I had totally forgot about this song, always singing the chorus part couldn’t remember the others lyrics never finding out who the song was by. Us on the top bunk, voice breathing these words that I did not know later would so easily describe the point I felt when I was turning 20.

So the years spin by and now the child is twenty

Dreams have lost a lot of grandeur, coming true

But, there'll be new dreams There'll better dreams a plenty

Before the last revolving year is through

Messier 101
Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing and additional imaging - Robert Gendler Explanation: Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse's large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. This mosaic of M101 was assembled from Hubble Legacy Archive data. Additional ground-based data was included to further define the telltale reddish emission from atomic hydrogen gas in this gorgeous galaxy's star forming regions. The sharp image shows stunning features in the galaxy's face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.

Maybe life is like my birthday galaxy, a mess, spiraling, sparkling, until I end up in the nothingness black void, the center where I will die and decinegrate, disappear into unrecognizable matter. How easily we’re here in this world and then gone.

The oldest walking culture alive will remain in my memories until I return, good-bye India.

Fotos from Farch feelings about Marpril

2011-04-10T06:23:00.000-06:00

I missed last month’s blog post. I apologize...

My hopes were that I would be able to post 15 short video’s I took with my new, (and now newly cracked) ipod. But technology is not on my side in what everyone calls this third world country.

So here are some things I have been doing:

I went on a trip to Kerala, we visited Silent Valley National Park, saw the Kathakali Dance and chained up elephants and took a trek to the top of a mountain where new houses were being built for the Indigenous People there...

I was the featured poet at Urban Solace on international Women’s day and read this poem:

I’m Saree, Addressed to a dress

This is my apology letter to the Saree

I’m sorry that I can’t wear you

Like you deserve

I’m sorry that my body is not equipped

I don’t have the hips

I have no resilience for your shape

I am used to the Barbies body

All butt and boobs

While your covering up your chest and legs but exposing that intimate curve of the hip

I’ve got mid drift

I am that clumsy American girl who sometimes can’t button her flannels right and has ripped shorts that show scarred knees

I have got burgers for eyes and fries for thighs

Where dressing ourselves up in the West is as complex as a zipper and button

Or shortcutting becomes something with elastic

It’s not as fantastic

As the woman I saw today

Tailored to fit

Each piece dancing with its partner, perfect knit

Strong duty and pride hang in the badge that drapes the shoulder

Visual carriers of culture

Your royalty, your queen

But this is not how women are seen

When I do wear the dress of the Indian woman

I put it on my face too

I feel like I am in the costume of a prisoner to a tradition, culture, and for me lack of freedom

Why should I conform to a concept of what a woman should dress like

Its not that I dislike

I just don’t want to be enslaved by an image that’s been pillaged

I will wear sorry on my face because I disgrace India

There’s grace that can be found in each fold of the saree

But my ankles get tangled

You couldn’t even run away because the saree doesn’t stretch in that way

My cleavage might look sleazy but that dress just makes me feel so uneasy

I feel more comfortable in tight blue jeans

Then a lose saree

You’ve got biological genes

And I ‘ve got starry

Eyes

I can make leaps to transcend and cross borders

Trying everyday to make that cultural gap disappear

But I’m sorry

Lo siento in Spanish

En Deutsch es tut mir lied

māf kījiye̐ in Hindi,

Shamisi,

Kodi,

Because I can’t even compromise that much of myself

For your beautiful silks

The textile not influenced by corporate logos

Where’s the artistry in mass production

Handmade block prints is your seduction

I deduct there’s no solution only resolution of the self

You stand behind your husband while the community whispers behind their doors

And I choose

To stand-alone

Nakedly not negotiating any part of me

I don’t want to be that oppressed in my dress

Maybe its because I’m afraid it will make me more like you

We all have complexes about our complexion

I’m not trying to bleach my face

Or burn it in the sun

But embracing its place

Sitting on my shoulders looking out as I humbly apologize to the saree

I visited the oldest newspaper in India and appeared in other newspapers for my poetry reading. http://www.hindu.com/mp/2011/03/11/stories/2011031152041500.htm

I made a gluten free banana cake and took a picture on photobooth of it while in the process burning through the chord of our stove followed by a small electrical explosion and a nice reminder of it on my finger...

I took some other photos on photobooth

I am sitting in the mountains, head cleared, waiting while life passes me by. My sister is here, she is the feeling of arms of love and family around me. How come I still feel a little lonely and lost in this country, on this planet? It may be the impending end of this India journey and the switch to another realty, back to that bubble that is America. Or, is it the thoughts on my impending 20^th birthday?

From 2010 to 2067 to 2011 in a month

2011-01-31T02:05:00.000-06:00

Itinerary

Bus from Bangalore to Chennai

Train from Chennai to Delhi

Meet with Aileen take local train then local bus outside of Delhi to Vipassana Center

Vipassana Meditation Retreat http://www.sota.dhamma.org/ December 16^th- 26^th

Bus, Rickshaw, local train back to Delhi

Kathmandu, Nepal

-Stayed with a host family for a week

-Volunteered at a local school

-Then went to the touristy area called Thamel

-Traveled to a farm that practiced permaculture, called Hasera farm

I went to Vipassana not knowing I was in the year 2067…in Nepal. I only lived 2 weeks in that year (most of which was spent sick) but it’s ok because I will get another chance as a 75-year-old woman after years of living and decaying in the same body, 2067 will come around with my second chance…

This is an excerpt from a diary entry that I wrote in the beginning of my trip:

I walked fast out of the bus saying goodbye to Dia from Finland who I met at the bus stop and ended up sharing seats with. She was surprised by how small my backpack was. I was worried that I would miss my train so I sped walked through the crowd of people. A driver came up to me and asked where I was going, he quickened his pace making sure I was behind him as we talked price. I was basically running after this man as he took me to his rickshaw. When we got to the rick I began to have doubts about my hasty choice of drivers, he had trouble getting the car started. Then when I asked how much it was to the train station he said 250rps! I knew this was too much. So when the car started and we were still arguing the price I almost got out. But stayed in because I could tell he realized how serious I was. We ended up spending the first half of the ride-arguing price: me, threatening to get out and get another rickshaw and him, driving while not looking at the road. The thing I could agree with in the situation was that wherever he was taking me, he was going there fast. He used a different tactic and switched to speaking to me half in English and half the local language so that I couldn’t understand his argument. He even resorted to singing his price to me. We got settled after a while and he introduced himself, Ganesh was his name, and he asked what my good name was and where I am from. He acted so hyper I was almost positive he was high on something but, as we talked more, and I didn’t see any glaze in his eyes I concluded that it was just him, his character. I was able to relax a bit after this and I asked him jokingly if the big hotel that we passed on the way was where he lived or if he owned it because it was called, “Hotel Ganesh”. He liked the idea and then started calling the city, “Phoebe city” (or however he pronounced my name). We talked more about things like how he smokes cigarettes but doesn’t drink and I made up a story that I had a husband but no kids yet. He drove like we were in a video game and when he asked me if he should slow down I said that I just didn’t want to die. When we reached the station I realized how early I was and how far we had gone. So I gave Ganesh 200 rupees because I liked him mostly but also I didn’t have exact change for the 150 I had worked so hard to bargain before. I didn’t feel like arguing more over the $1. I got out of the rickshaw waving to Ganesh and his 3 front toothed smile as a boy walking by tried to cop a feel and only smiled back at my frowning at him.

December 14^th, 2010 Train to Delhi

There’s nothing like the train experience in India. You get visited by everyone; Uniks, (men dressed as women who everyone fears will put a curse on if they don’t give them money), missing limbed people who crawl along the aisles and ask for money and of course the creepers, men who think you will have sex with them in the train bathroom. Sitting in the open doorway, pee from the toilet next door (which is basically just a hole in the floor of the train) splashes my feet a little. Trashed tracks below and pure speed and wind make me feel freer then I have in a long time. No school, now one else I am traveling with and unknown land. I could get off this train whenever I wanted to. The only limits are the speed of the train and this body of mine.

After Vipassana…

It’s hard to talk and even write about. Probably because the whole time I wasn’t allowed to do those things during it. Now that I think about it, I cannot believe I went all that time without music (besides that one day I sang those two songs aloud while taking my bucket shower) reading, art, tv, processed sugar, CHOCOLATE, a cell phone, electrical machines (besides lights that only worked a couple hours a day). I spent those 10 days meditating, sleeping, and eating and that’s pretty much it. I had probably 4 hours out of the day that was not meditation. In the quiet times I went from fretting horribly about my future to digging, then trudging around in my past. Memories of things that had happened that I hadn’t thought about since the moment they happened. Like all those hours my dad would sit and do homework with me (especially the math). How impatient I was and how his seemed endless. I remembered a show my sister and I used to watch on ABC family about this group of boys who did dumb stuff with their skateboards in their backyard or how we used to share a bed when we were younger. I even thought about my old dog, Tilly, the way it felt when I pet her in my favorite spot on top of her head in the curve of her skull and on her snout right before her wet nose. I remember how she started farting more when she got really old.

CHRISTMAS

I woke up the morning after my friend and I had discovered the little presents Vipassana had given us in our heads but especially in our hair and wrote a note. The note said:

Merry Christmas!

This year I got lice and a little bit of enlightenment.

<3 Phoebe

I placed the note in my friends shoe outside her door before I left for 4am meditation. The whole day I assumed I would have trouble meditating because I would be thinking about missing Christmas at home, but I was happily surprised when I did not. I didn’t really think about it at all. The next day was the 10^th day, the day we could break our silence and talk! In our morning meditation all I could do was think about what my friends and family were doing because it would have been their Christmas night. I have for the past, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 7 years gone to my friends house for a party. I started to cry sitting there in that room full of silent, closed-eyed people. I figured it had just taken a while to hit me. When we all walked out and met in a group that’s when the silence broke. Women started crying and hugging, all with smiles on their faces because it had ended. A girl who had seemed like a grumpy person said to my friend and I, “Merry Christmas”. I stopped and had to rethink. I realized later when I got my cell phone back that I had mixed up the date of Christmas and that’s why I wasn’t upset the day I thought that it had been.

Letter to a friend January 21^st, 2011

I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. 10 days of no talking, writing, reading, music, TV, Internet, computer…just meditating… I think I described it to myself in the first couple of days as a prison camp inside my mind. Spending day after inside my mind I worked through a lot. I felt like I went from childhood to present in memories. I learned how much in life I am taught to look outside for things, when really I should be looking in. I already knew but couldn’t really put why I knew religion was not for me. Now I know, it is because I don’t feel comfortable looking to anything else for guidance. Coming out of meditation I felt like, “I am god”, that I had infinite compassion for everyone and such peace I have never known. Jealously and forgiveness were two big things I worked on and I’m still not done. But what did come up was you and I realized that I was still holding onto whatever irrelevant things happened in the past with us. So in hopes of moving on I am writing in “The Book” (lol) which I found while switching rooms with my roommate for the rest of my time here in India. So much has happened since I left last summer, I am sure we both have plenty to catch up on! When I get back to Portland I plan on chilling there for a little but longer then last time so I am looking forward to Powell’s, parks, and party excursions with you!

Wishing you infinite LOVE

Phoebe

Kathmandu

When I made the decision to take the “deluxe” bus from Delhi to Kathmandu I will admit it, I had expectations. And right there, that was my mistake. Getting to the bus that morning I was happy because everything went pretty smoothly- unlike anything about the actually ride I had on that bus. The morning of, I talked to my family on skype, ate a chocolate banana dosa (!), bought socks and pomegranates and got a ride from the travel agents uncles’ bike to the bus. All the seats from the front of the bus were packed so I happily went to the vacated back so I could spread out. I was hoping I could spend the next 32 hours to Kathmandu reading and writing. In the beginning I thought to myself, this will be great, I can see the countryside, read, and have some quiet time. I was so proud at how adaptable I had become while also pondering a question I came out of my Vipassana with: Why do I out myself in uncomfortable situations (like 10 days of silence or 32 hours bus rides) and somehow find such pleasure and comfort in it? Goenkaji, the guy who we would listen to over the tv screen give nightly discourses called talked about misery a lot. So for those 32 hours on that bus I was probably not uncomfortable for about 2 of them. After only getting a couple hours sleep the first night on the bus, I started to get car sick, altitude sick, some kind of sick. With every bump my migraine pulsated and the nausea threatened the seat that I had been hitting my head on while trying to sleep the night before in front of me. It didn’t help that the group of men who talked to each other in some language I didn’t know but could tell when they discussed where they thought I was from were also smokers. The real complications started when my phone battery was left to one bar. Then I realized that my Indian cell phone, which I was told would work in Nepal, was actually not working. So I wouldn’t be able to locate Aileen and worse I had only one contact number of someone who I had never met or talked to, in a country I had never been in or taken time to read about. When I reached Nepal after driving over mountains, passing turned over buses, it was later then they said it would arrive in Kathmandu.

Nepali Mountains [photo taken on a hike to a Buddhist temple from Hasera Farm]

I asked to barrow someone’s phone to call the contact I had and talked to him briefly saying he would pick me up at the bus stop and that I should call him when I get there. My fever was at its peak and I was sure I would throw up. I ended up falling asleep for a little bit and got woken up by the security guy’s flashlight at the checkpoint. We reached the first bus stop and I realized I didn’t know which stop to even get off at. So I tried to call the contact number again but the phone said something in Nepali and when I asked the stinky smokers they said that the phone was turned off. So bus stops went by and I decided to go ask the driver. My trusted driver and crew smelt horribly of liquor but he let me use his phone and didn’t seem like he was going to put me in any more trouble then the intoxicated driving he was already doing. We called the number probably 50 times and before the last stop one Indian guy who I had friendly talked to about Germany tried to convince me to go to a hotel with him that night. So I stayed on the bus ending up in their parking lot discussing what I should do with the bus driver. He said no hotels were opened in the area but that I could take an overpriced taxi to an overpriced hotel or sleep on his bus. The driver gave me blankets and left for his house, I had decided feverishly to sleep on the bus for the night.

NEW YEARS

Sick.

In bed.

Asleep before midnight.

Next day called my dad telling him that I wanted to quit Global College and come home.

Went to the emergency room, doctor told me I had one of the three things: a urine infection, food poisoning or an STD!!

Host Family

Poem I wrote on the farm about Vipassana after debating with a lovely German with dreads who had just converted to Buddhism.

In the year 2067

Buddha’s church can afford hypocrites

And people carry around little pieces of politics in their pockets

Ready to dictate their doubts about the demons around them

It’s so easy to be a victim

Misery is He and She they say

But these words harvest droughts in their mouths

Until global glacier warming makes fountains of their daily discourse

Escaping reluctantly upon those un-expecting

No spouting can be ever high enough to touch enlightenment

So stop wasting water and examine your breath

The real light in enlightenment is

Pricking, percolating, perched on your intestines

It’s singing to our hearts

The song sings I am God, God is me, la di-da di-da di-di

Buddha Park

2nd hotel we stayed in.

Thamel, Nepal the first creepy hotel we stayed in for 2 nights for $2 each.

My friend was saying how she didn’t want to just stay in Kathmandu because she doesn’t want to only see one part or tell people she only saw one place in Nepal. But as a traveler I go to places and not look at things like tourists (or try hard not to at least). I think tourists go to places and don’t really know what to do with themselves or the experience they souvenir. For me it’s different. I talk to the locals and try to observe but not annoyingly imitate or purchase culture. Aileen and I ended up hanging out with a German guy who introduced us to the bassist of a local Nepali band called Cobweb http://www.facebook.com/pages/cobweb/323603233217?v=wall#!/pages/cobweb/323603233217. There were other people from different countries we talked to who I noticed were rude to the locals, didn’t trust them for no reason, and hadn’t much depth about the culture even though they had been there longer then we had and some even knew the language better then us. In the short time we were there, we became friends with the bassist and saw the band play a couple times. At one point I was talking to him and he was so surprised with what I was saying he said, “are you sure your from America”.

I have been trying so hard to find the right gifts for my family and always feel this made up obligation whenever I go somewhere new to get something from that place for them. Just because I think I won’t be able to get it at home. To a certain extent this is true, India’s fabric and textiles are truly unique. But so many things they make available to tourists I have seen in the US, like at world shops. We ran into this woman in Delhi who shops for a living and sells the things she buys abroad to stores in other countries so they can then sell them themselves for more money! That’s why I have trouble with gifts and souvenirs…and I know my family doesn’t care what I bring back for them.

I am losing attachment to material possessions, which makes it even harder for me to shop. What I will souvenir from Nepal is the way they drink plain tato panni (hot water) all the time, their beautiful houses that stand tall with decks and rooftops to “take sun” on and a garden in the backyard where the grandma’s stay at home all day and tend to. I will souvenir the Nepali style of clothes and the most attractive people I have ever seen. I know I want to go back to Nepal, but maybe before I turn into a 75-year-old woman.

I have been really anxious since I got home to Bangalore and still a little sick but the past couple of mornings I have woken up and written a short poem…here’s one while I was eating breakfast (gluten free cereal my friend brought back from the States for me with banana):

Munching on my thoughts

Cereal crunches sound

My nerves buy tickets to the concert of this noisy performance

Happy for the break of swimming around under my own skin

Only looking for purpose

All they do is pace

The concert is something

We can all concentrate on

Pink City (Jaipur), Golden City (Jaisalmer), Taj Mahal (Agra), Oldest city in the world (Varanasi), Posh City (New Dehli only drove through on the way to the airport), Modern City (Bangalore)

2010-11-16T03:05:00.001-06:00

My train to Varanasi leaves in a couple of hours at 9:30 in the evening…The last overnight train ended my long field trip with the group but opened new doors for next semester. A woman in a bright sari commented on my henna as I was passing her compartment. I was heading back to my seat after a friend and I had spied on a cute boy in a nice Kurta with chest hair. In our pursuit we ended up being followed by a drunken creep who ruined the whole endeavor for us. This woman though was not like any Indian woman I had ever encountered on my own, she was even more. She was the sister of a shopkeeper in Jaisalmer that me and the girls had gone to, her sister was so pushy though talking about how she was part of an organization to help local women by giving them equal share of the profit of their crafts. I was skeptical of her so we didn’t buy anything or stay very long.

The sister now told me all of what they were doing, that she had started the shop (the only shop in Jaisalmer run by women) and was helping the women that made their products to become more empowered financially and personally in their own lives. She said the community didn’t support her and her sister and would lie to tourists leading them away from her shop. When she first opened the shop she said they smeared cow dung on her sign. She spoke so openly about how she wished she had more freedom and independence saying, “I think American women should switch with Indian women and then maybe the men [Indian] would understand”, followed by a laugh that felt contagious. She talked about how she wanted to continue in school to get her PhD and become a teacher but that her husband wouldn’t let her because he thought that she wouldn’t have enough time for him. I glanced over at her husband a couple times during this whole conversation, I wondered how he would react if he spoke English. He was such a kind of small ordinary man compared to this woman’s huge personality and sparkling sari. I went back to her that night 2 more times getting up the courage to ask her if she knew anything about the practice of Sati (my personal academic interest I have been pursuing). Contrary to what anyone else has told me she said that Sati still does exist, mostly in the villages and told me a little about how the ritual is performed on a certain moon cycle. She said i could come with her to talk to the women and do research and this seemed like the perfect idea for my independent study next semester.

I have mixed feelings about going into a field research study with Sati or issues concerning women’s rights because I know my values are different. The cultural practice Sati to me, seems like a gross moral injustice to the world but who am I to say that to whoever is practicing it. I read in the book that there are accounts of some women who voluntarily commit Sati and jump in the funeral pyre with her husband because they believe they don’t have a life without him. It’s so complicated because a widow in India in some places is treated almost as an untouchable so the reality of a life after the husband dies can be worse for the woman. Then there are women like the one i met on the train who is so blatant about how her culture treats women and is not only fighting in her personal relationships to break this tradition but in her professional life and as what she calls it “charity work”. So where is this change coming from, are western values being pushed on Indian women? Is this want for change coming from westerners themselves? From globalization? Or is it natural, like how all cultures are hybrid and the change has just been fueled by the women who have the power to help fight for it?

Where does that leave me again…in my opinion all women and people in general deserve to be treated equal with equal opportunity and freedom in life…so if gender equality is coming genuinely from the women of India then I think I would support that but how I go about doing that I think I have to be very thoughtful of.

Update on loss of material possessions

-One of my water bottles (the robot one with the suck top)

-Waterproof travel notebook from Powell’s (contained diary from independent study in Costa Rica and other thoughts)

-Exposed a whole role of film that I had taken since I had been here (rolled it the wrong direction and the film came out of the canister)

Other things lost…

-Didn’t lose but ruined the duffle my sister lent me (bag was too heavy and made holes where is strap connects to the bag on either side)

-Faith in ever feeling not tired

-Brain cells

-Moisture in hair

Gained in material possessions

-Blue silk (western) dress

-Duffle bag given as a free gift from the salesman (to possibly replace my sisters)

-Hotel ashtray

-White kurta

-White, not all silk; dress (western but with a Tibetan style)

-Blue vest

-Bell anklets

-Scarves

Other things gained

-Bug bites!

-Books finished reading: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

*Excerpt from my diary on my opinion of the book besides it being raw poetry “reading Dharma Bums feeling like even this experience [mine] is more exotic and sincere then this fake Buddhist”. But I also wrote down a quote from the book that I really like, “Nobody can tell you that you aren’t free”.

And Death by Fire: Sati, dowry, and female infanticide in modern India by Mala Sen

-New amazing yoga routine

-Experience of riding a camel in the desert!

-Had an experience when we went out to the desert where I tripped on something called bhang (marijuana), which is legal in north India. At one point we went out on the dunes at night and I looked at the horizon and the whole sky was made up of this grid in a white twinkling outline of tiny infinite seeming squares.

-Offers for sex/uncomfortable implications (men ranging from street boys age estimated 14 although he said he was 17 to yoga teacher whose 55 married and hinted at me wanting it with him) offers for opium, hash, and marijuana

-Business cards for different hotels and restaurants (at least 10 just in Jaisalmer)

-Crazier craving for real Mexican food and Gluten-free pizza

-More “good luck”, as I walked by the Ganga and under a telephone pole I felt something drop on my head, a little boy started laughing at me. I looked up and felt my head…MORE BIRD POOP. I washed my hair in the river that’s probably infested with more feces then what I was rinsing out and thought about how I should try my luck at the lottery.

Jaipur

Camel Safari in the desert of Jaipur

Taj Mahal, Agra

Ghandi graffiti in Varanasi along the Ganges

My train ride home from Varanasi began stressfully partly due to me. My friend from High School happened to be in India at the same time as me and in the same place! At first I thought my train was leaving 10 hours later then it was but it ended up being in the morning so I had limited time to actually see her and talk. Trying to get all the things I wanted to get done before I left and see my friend I ended up being late to meet my friends who i was traveling with for the train. They had a rick waiting so we just hopped in and told the driver we were in a hurry but for some reason he thought it was appropriate to stop to get some tea on the way. Then we get to the train station and tried to figure out which platform our train is supposed to come on so we go to the tourist help room. There’s a line and our train comes in 30 minutes so our friend goes to ask someone else. She comes back saying our train got derailed and re-routed to another station. So we wait in that long line of Australian accents, posh Europeans and loud American tourists to refund our ticket and exchange it for another one. When it’s our turn the man at the desk says he cannot refund our ticket because it was purchased online, he cannot help us. So in a rush we call our teacher to have her refund the ticket and look to see if there are any seats open on the trains leaving to Dehli today, which of course there are not. So after being traded off by various train station officials we get 3 “open seat” tickets which means either stand by the toilets (we did for a while) or in the doorways to the compartments or the doors out of the train. Or there is always ther option to sit on someone’s bunk who isn’t there (we also did this for the first part of the trip but got kicked out by the ticket checker man). So there I was standing next to the sink full of wet cigarettes outside the squatting toilets that is just a hole in the ground leading to the tracks underneath that rush by. Your pee flies away as soon as it goes down the hole so that it almost seems like your flushing (i said almost!). A man immerges from somewhere down the packed compartment and asks me if I would like to sit down, at this point I had already gotten a little sleep from the seats we had stolen earlier and was just happy to be on a train going to the place I wanted so I thought about it. I finally said yes and he brought me to a semi full compartment with an open bench and I went back to tell the two other girls I was traveling with about the spot after I saw that the man was harmless. The man was hard of hearing and had a book of music out the whole ride, he played air trumpet humming the tunei assumed was in the book until his stop. I liked him because he said I looked Russian.

We spent the rest of train ride in this compartment, at one point there were 25 people packed in, at one point they were all discussing the reason why we didn’t get on the train we had a ticket for even though we told them multiple times that it never came to the station, at no point did I go to bathroom because I didn’t even see that there was a path for me to get there, and at no point was I unhappy with our predicament.

We could have gotten kicked out a couple more times as the ticket man showed up again and the people whose seat we were sitting in showed up but at this point we had been adopted by a group of Dehli students who only after it got dark decided to ask us questions the whole night about how we define happiness and our ideal husband. We got off the train and got a rick to the airport admiring Dehli’s impressive infrastructure. After that everything seemed easy, clean airport bathrooms, retractable airplane seats and a reliable bus ride to my sweet apartment where my roommates waited in the living room prepared with hugs and a celebratory dinner out.

Something I find comfort in when I think about how far away from home I am and how long it would take me to get back… I am on the other side of the world so far from everything that makes sense to me, that’s easy and that I am comfortable in and I look up at the sky. It’s always there and it usually looks the same. When the stars are out I feel much more at ease in comparing the measurement of the distance of the universe and space then finding home again.

Chat, Chai and good “Culture shock absorbers”

2010-09-27T03:18:00.013-06:00

I felt initiated into India the day I went to the police commissioner’s office. I spent all day there from something like 10:30 to 2pm waiting for my number to be called, only to be crapped on…literally. The waiting area was outside with a sort of covering that looked like a nice place for pigeons to hang out in. So I was standing under this covering chatting with my friends, when I feel a warm drop of whitish-green liquid appear on my leg… bird crap. HA HA totally laughable right? Except this isn’t the first time this has happened to me.

Last year in Costa Rica it happened. One of the always-sunny Costa Rican mornings I go for a run around the futbol field in my neighborhood and all of a sudden from the sky falls the crap and it lands, this is the best part, on my face. My host family didn’t hesitate to laugh at me (they never would) when I returned home. In India I was told its good luck to be pooped on (no, you perv not like that!) but I feel like wherever I am in the world, whatever situation it might be it will always suck to be shit on for poopsake!

When I first got here I saw India but I didn’t actually believe what I saw. (kind of like looking at this picture from my favorite websites http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100920.html) I would be looking out a bus window or feel something as real as the wind inside the rickshaw but still didn’t really believe where I was until tonight I think. I was walking home from dinner with the girls, looking up at the palm trees trying to imagine what it would have looked like before cement streets and corner stores, it must have been a jungle I thought, totally wild. But the houses that are apartment type buildings on top of each other made up of old painted looking stone or cement almost swallow up the sky. Or maybe I just don’t care to go that far because the balconies of colored laundry, steaming dinners and curious kids are so distracting. There is too much I want to learn.

What would my blog post be without a list!

- Successful 25 days of being a vegetarian
- At 2 chai’s a day and sometimes more I have had around 57 cups of chai so far in India
- Quote from my roommate Roo about Indian men “its only a toilet if there’s foreign ladies around”
- Purchasing wine at a corner store ironically named “not just wine and cheese” that only carries alcohol
- Its not ‘karma’ but ‘karm’, its not ‘Yoga’ but ‘Yog’
- Sign for body whitening cream
- Dog licking a dirty baby diaper
- “Your breasts are like water balloons”
- got to drive a rickshaw

I miss my bike (the smooth clean pavement with fresh air, my thunder thighs propelling the wheels under and up liberal MLK street with all the freedom the distance of my existence allows me to make)

nannying neverending nausea, nerves and narcissim

2010-08-29T15:11:00.003-06:00

I don’t understand why summer days move at a different pace then normal days. They always have and while I still have more days of my summer left I am having trouble remembering how I got here.

I cannot put my whole summer into one blog post but I can put it in this perspective, if my summer were on a graph every two weeks would peak and then start heading downhill. It would look like the mountains in Montana, at Glacier National park that I visited with my sister. Huge ruff, ragged, up scales and declines some times kind of dramatic but also very natural. But what would my post be without a list!

Here is a list of things the summer took away from me…

Items Lost

Book lent to me by friend: Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan *found

Book lent to me by the Clackamas County Library: Why is sex fun, the Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond *bought new copy at Powells for $10 hopefully the library will except this copy when I have finished reading it sometime in the next 5 days

Bike biked it to the bus stop and got on the bus without it…something else was probably lost with it...like my sanity *found and rescued by my sister

Sunglasses the ones that appeared in Juno the movie must have left them on the bus

Running Shoes must have also left them on the bus, possibly the same day

Hat my sister had knit, this amazing hat was to replace my old one that shrunk to miniature happy me size in the wash. Must have lost it downtown walking to Backspace or in Backspace I don’t know…don’t have the heart to tell my sister, more like the balls she is going to be pissed, I’m pissed it was an awesome hat.

Leather Jacket (most recent loss…still mourning)

I think some of this had to do with my goal for the year, which was to become less attached to my material things…which is good, but my leather jacket…really world?

I thought I would also do a list of things I gained, as in pounds after what I have made and then quickly consumed this summer. I was so excited for Gluten Free baking and cooking with my own kitchen and oven that I decided to document everything that I made. As you look through these pictures just imagine them purified, drippingly plastered against my innards…mmm now your excited.

First was rice pudding, it looks better then it tasted...i cooked things mostly that i missed eating from Latin America and things that i missed eating from the States.


I don't remember the contents of this masterpiece but it included beets, mexican cheese and possibly an egg. SO GOOD


This is something I ate at Ceibo (sustainable community, see other posts) and wanted to try to make it myself. The only real big difference in making it was the fire taste i got from cooking on a fire stove in the mountains. It was still really good and i made it multiple times this summer actually. Garbonzo's, Carrots, Onions and best of all Rosemary!

Gluten Free cookies!


Made and shared with friends at the first house i house sat this summer. It was for my moms landlady's mother, an elderly woman who had broken her elbow. She was an animal lady with 5 different cats, a little dog (hardly able to call it that) squirrels, birds, raccoons and some stray cats as well. i felt like i had aged a century after i stayed at that house.

Oh yess

I did...but wait

It gets sooo much better


Joy the Baker's Chocolate layer Avacado Cake! (i made gluten freeeeee)

I miss good mango's! Adapted from a recipe i got from the yoga retreat in Nicaragua

with lentils!

My dad makes the best Fritataaaaaa


ok, this was a little weird...i never had a real thanksgiving pumpkin pie

and yes i know its the middle of July or August or something..and it was like 90 degrees outside but...

It tastes soooooo good (again GLUTEN FREE)

Gallo Pinto (kind of a pathetic attempt at replicating my host moms but it looks the same!)

*I also made a huge delicious Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Bread but never took a picture of it because i was in too much of a hurry to get to the beaaach!

I did a lot of things I wanted to do this summer. I sort of had a mental checklist of things I wanted to do. I did the Oregon coast, voodoo, music music music and I even made some new friends! I worked doing some house sitting and assisted at a camp at Waldorf for little kindergartners. My favorite quote from the camp was: ‎"Maya, please get those ants out of your pants". No explanation needed, these are kindergartners!

I also worked on my writing, participating in a workshop put on by ibex studios (http://www.ibexstudios.com/) with Becca. There was a group of 7 or 8 of us who met for 4 Wednesdays in a row. I wrote one short short essay and two poems that I like. One is a poem about this moment I had late one night trying to find a bus home. I was in some sort of bliss about Portland and how grand it is. I crossed the Hawthorne Bridge listening to drum circle that happens sometimes under the bridge and played my harmonica while walking. Completely alone on this bridge I finally stopped and looked at downtown, it seemed huge and impressive, with the different colored lights. Mostly unexplainable what that moment was, some kind of awesome.

Here’s a video of that poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wikT5GffFB4

The other poem I wrote unintentionally, the intent was to write a body of a piece of non-fiction instead of a poem…fail. But oh well here’s another poem that I wrote while having a series of nights of intense dreaming to the point where I would be exhausted waking up. It was after I had seen the movie Inception in theaters; the last movie I had seen in theaters was last Christmas so the experience kind of overwhelmed me.

Like a dream you don’t really remember where a poem begins

You only remember when it ends

You remember the last thing you hear or read or understand

And at the end you’re supposed to come out with some big realization

Like this: the truth of a poem does not come in the beginning

What would you have to look forward to?

And if it’s proclaimed in the middle

You would miss the unnecessary, probably inevitable dull ending that would have to follow that rash statement

You can’t trust time

Or your brain

I don’t remember where the memory starts

I just remember thinking ‘that’s weird, I wonder why dad is talking to mom on the phone’

Usually the preferred communication between my always-divorced parents has been through my older sister or I

It was Christmas time because the toy carousal was out with the horses dancing

It played a song I never got tired of

I liked to sit and watch it turn

I should have been watching my mom on the phone but she had left the room while she was talking with my dad

She came over to the carousal

I don’t remember where my sister was my memory cut her out

My mom came close, phone still in hand and said “Grandpa passed away”

And then like a dream I wake up

Except its real but I can’t remember how I got there or how it ends

I write poetry as a therapeutic decompression

To recycle and understand everything that has happened to me

Or maybe it’s to wake myself from the life I have been dreaming

It’s hard to know what’s more of a reality

Is it the words that sit immovably permanent on the page?

Or the carefully, and in perfect punctuality of life,

It plays and progresses in a time-line

But some moments seem to go at different paces then others

Like the first time you know your in love

And even if a second goes by on a clock, the one you watch change while waiting for the bus to come, or something like the length of a breath or the calculable minute

You wouldn’t be able to tell

Because in this particular moment nothing as understandably measurable as time, Exists

But maybe you’ve just wasted your time listening to this poem

But only 2 minute and 17 seconds of it.

In transition from summer to awareness/sanity (lets hope), or something like the next school year, I had a dream. This is what I told my friend about it on facebook.

“i had a dream i gave birth to a baby that turned into a kitten. I was happy or confused at first and then really scared because i would have to give up everything if I kept it. People kept naming him for me, like Stephen and Lucas i think. There were a lot of tears. Also much confusion over who the father was..Patricia Lynch was there. It felt more real then a lot of other things lately...”

My significant dreams are usually explainable when I talk them through with my dad or look them up to try and understand certain symbols so this is what I found to be true about this dream.

“Pregnancy dreams, like real life pregnancies are harbingers of change, creativity, and new life being brought into the world…

To dream that you are giving birth to a non-human creature, signifies your overwhelming (and unfounded) fear in the health of your baby *<(nooooooooooooooooo!). You are overly concerned that your baby may have birth defects. This type of dream is common in expectant mothers in their second trimester. If you are not expecting *(phew!), then it refers to your fear in the outcome of some decision or project. You are trying to overcome difficulties in your life and achieve inner development.

For a single woman, loss of virtue and abandonment by her lover.

Dreaming of a difficult birth signifies that you need to let go of something you love very much; it also may refer to an illness. In relation to animals, the birth means a new opportunity, or a new phase in your life.

It also can mean a new attitude towards life.”

I think the last two sentiments are the most accurate. So I am saying goodbye to the big full moon here in Portland and taking off to a new space of discovery!

Next post will be from INDIA!

My last day, what is the right thing to say?

2010-06-06T19:46:00.001-06:00

How do I say good-bye to a family I will probably never see again…A place I probably will never visit again but also never forget?

    It’s hard to say good-bye. I feel like I’ve spent weeks saying it and the most important one, to my family, I was too tired for. Stumbling out the door, barely being able to carry my four bags and stand upright I kissed my messy haired host-mother on the cheek one last time at 3:45am.

   Before this moment i had spent a lovely 7 days at Nosara beach. I had one day to put my things together and leave the next morning on my early flight back to the US of A. I was kind of a mess; mosquito bitten, ghost lice and i knew the place I was going back to in Portland but not sure if it would remember me. But before i left, I was surprised at what I came home to (other home) from the beach.

   Coming back to the house after going to the beach was like going backwards yet I saw the future at the same time. My room was empty and had started to be put back into what I assume was its original condition. There were hair products in the bathroom - not mine - and the absence of my post it by the toilet no longer reminded me what the word in Spanish was to urinate (orinar).

A new student had come while I was gone. I became jealous and protective of ‘my house’ and ‘my host family’ like I never had with other visiting students.
I sat in my room, in my home, with my family and thought about where I was going next…I questioned if that place was still “home” or if I could have some sort of joint custody arrangement with both places. This wouldn’t work out because dollars always get in the way of things, like divorces and dreams.

I look back on my year in this country listing all the firsts I’ve had:
1st's
– alcoholic drink at a bar
- Bungee jump
- Surfing
- Swimming in the ocean
- Gambling
- Smoking a cigar
- Driving stick shift
- Playing with monkeys (or any other sort of physical interaction with monkeys)
- Getting a professional message

2nd's
– getting lice
- Writing and performing an original poem
- Gaining weight/losing weight
- Visiting a volcano
- Feeling out of place (this is more of a reoccurring thing rather then my second time)

I’ve packed away all my things; my body and scent no longer occupy the space it had before. So what’s left, memories that will be forgotten after some amount of time? What am I taking with me (besides the lice)? My scars?
                 My silhouette is replaced by new dust particles filling in the empty air.
I was affected by you Costa Rica, by your uneven streets, your ability to smile in every situation (except perhaps a missed goal), your salsa clubs and high heels, your thunder storms and sunsets, your pineapple fruit and the way you make plantains taste soo good, I was affected by your mountains and the communities that lived in/on them and everyone I ever said a probably non-sufficient good bye to.

Good bye. Cao. Hasta luego. Auf Wiedersehen.

To show what I have accomplished academically this semester I made this: http://www.serioussillyness.weebly.com
It’s an online portfolio that shows some of the papers I wrote and movies I made and some pictures I drew.

I also developed the film pictures i took throughout the semester.
               here are my favorites:

My addiction with Nic

2010-04-22T12:09:00.004-06:00

I went on a trip to Nicaragua for two weeks.

It’s been hard to write about because, as is my constant struggle, I feel like my words are inadequate, unequal and never enough. The day after I got back, I couldn’t do anything. My pajamas and I watched Harry Potter all day while thinking about how we should actually be doing something that needed to get done, like homework. Talking to me that day was not fun, I apologize dad, sister, host family, Harry Potter…

I took pictures in Nicaragua with my film cameras. I probably won’t get them developed until I go back to the States for lack of funds and Spanish vocabulary in the photo development process. But, what I do have are two postcards I bought at a craft sale of photographs from the revolution and a poem written by my own humble hands.

If Nicaragua were a place, it would be a boxing ring.
This place, it’s in your face, it’s exciting and interesting
you want to watch what happens next but at the same time there’s something wrong with that
and you get disgusted with yourself.

This poem is written next to my grocery list

I will buy these things at Pali this afternoon

An Avocado, Tomato

Carrots, Corn Flakes

Tortillas, Cheese

Yogurt, and ice cream

The boxers that play in the ring are worn out but so driven to win

This poem is brushed up against my keys

This poem was written with a broken pencil

This poem isn’t afraid of getting wet from my water bottle of clean water

This poem does not have order, organization and sense

No simile mocks my subject

In a poem you usually have descriptions with adjectives that are silky, soft, and sensitive

In this poem, you won’t find eloquent, elusive, imagination

It’s not fair to its readers

Strong and sweating to the finish they fight not giving up even when they are repeatedly beaten down

The spectators make bets and sometimes the game is predetermined, corrupted by hunger for money

The boxer knows this, and takes the hits anyway.

This poem means something to me

It was written in my own backyard

You see, I am from the United States

I am from me me me and take take take

Media consumption, a socialist phobia, and a fat wad of opportunity

I also came from

A house that kept the rain out,

I had a loving father who respected the women in the family

And enough food to live and be healthy

You reader, like the blind man who would hold out his hand on the street, can’t see

And I don’t know if I can properly explain

When you only have a paper and pencil in a place

Where a ten-year-old boy is shot

For his shoes

At the game it’s sweaty, hot and loud
cheap food is being sold in the allies and aisles,
trash is scattered on the ground because people have the mentality that someone will clean it up
or maybe they just don’t care.

A 14-year-old girl’s body was found discarded in the sewage after being raped

Someone else will clean it up

I don’t want you to TAKE this story,

Like how I sat and took notes on the different women I talked to

I wrote as a pathetic distraction

Forming words that printed on my page

English as a code of translation but still not understanding

Take these words as braille

The government in Nicaragua is like that “referee” in the match
Unemotionally making the countdown when the boxer has been knocked down

He’s there watching but not doing anything to stop the violence

When I look at the pages that I have scribbled, it reads things like:

Single Mother

4 children

Question: What’s the first thing you think about when you wake up?

Answer: Making breakfast for my kids so I can get them to school on time.
Sometimes when she can afford to take the time to go to the doctor,
but she only has enough money to help herself or her children,
who is she going to pick?

Different House

Single Mother

5 children

Question: What do you wish for your eldest daughter?

She says for her to have an education because i never got that chance
But sometimes, for the family, she sends her daughter to work, to contribute, to sell her body,
to be a prostitute

Even the lighting is similar in the boxing ring to the sun that beats down in Nicaragua,
In the background there’s a constant unanimous cry from the crowd for a win,
for the fight to finally be over

Another House

Another Mother

3 children

She said to me that if her husband had any second alone with her, he would rape her.

Sometimes she doesn't have food to feed her crying child so she gives them glue to sniff to curb the hunger

Sometimes I think I am the one in the ring…

I left in tears but my body felt more then the downpour

A squirming of my organs, the pumping of my blood and the prospect of my earlier meal going in the reverse direction it went down

All I have for you is my words

My process for writing is never-ending revision but what makes this poem unfinished is its lack of title…

This only portrays one element of Nicaragua that I learned about, the poverty and the realities that people live in. I also visited two indigenous communities. At one we were shown ancient pre-Columbian art that had been preserved on the rocks of this protected area. I also looked at women’s health learning that Nicaragua recently outlawed therapeutic abortion (1 of 4 other countries in the entire world). I learned a little about the tourism industry seeing the complexities of it play out in front of me one night when I was out with my friends. There are young boys who have baskets full of things to sell (candy, cigarettes etc.) and as we sat in the restaurant we watched a boy talk to two men (gringos) and then introduce them to some nearby not seemingly looking prostitutes. The young boy made hand gestures for blowjobs and other things having this whole conversation. The men declined but this interaction that we witnessed was referred to as human trafficking. What?! Punch in the face! I saw this happen? This happened in an establishment that gave information-warning tourists not to buy from these street kids on their menu? Not to mention the young boy, who was probably about 10 years old, was HIGH! You see sniffing glue is popular because its cheap and accessible, and most importantly it curbs the hunger. slap slap SLAP! And I was told that tourism isn’t the biggest demand for prostitution its local… Fuuuuuuuck

These are only some small local problems. I am overwhelmed with the structural problems that Nicaragua has. Political corruption, environmental deterioration they have it all and yet the people stay strong and i can't help but be a little addicted to this place even though i want to leave at the same time.

I literally retreated to a yoga retreat for two days in Nicaragua. We had Yoga twice a day and some chanting sometimes. It was a beautiful place with a saline pool, a huge bed with an amazing shower and bathroom! The only problem, a SCORPION. yeah not ok, in my room, on the floor, next to the bed. Me and my roommate after calmly acknowledging the problem (screaming and jumping up and down) killed it with a shoe, quite the team effort as i chickened out after i hit it once with my shoe and she finished the job putting the thing out of its misery. The scropion was accompanied by giant flying ants and hand size spiders. They made up for the bugs with the food they fed us! oh my gosh, vegetarian usually vegan deliciousness..curries, salads mmmmmmm

The second to last day at the yoga retreat was my birthday, i got my first professional message ever. The day didn't really feel like my birthday but i am ok with that. After 18 years of spending my birthday with my family their absence made me feel that much older. Its a new year of traditions and i am getting older whether i still laugh at jokes about poop or not.

One year older, one more country, and a whole year of experiences carved into the curves, cavities and callus' marking my body leaving a permanent effect on who i am and who i will be next year.

Un Montón of Mountains

2010-04-04T23:07:00.002-06:00

April 2nd 2010
It’s the last day of my week in Ceibo-Bokis, a sustainable community in the mountains of Buenas Aires, Costa Rica. I couldn’t sleep last night, when I woke up in the middle of the night (as usual) I looked at the moon that was big and present, the rooster cu-cooed as if it was morning because of the light from the moon that cascaded over the endless valleys…I couldn’t sleep.
        Although the day started out normal, a mountain of fruit salad for breakfast and the hot sun. Right after breakfast an indigenous family that lives near by came to visit for coffee and crackers. They stayed for a very long time, all the time that I was searching for berries and getting scratched by their thorns, all the time that I was getting oranges from the trees and falling on my butt, they talked. Then it started to rain. And it rained! It didn’t stop raining and lunch preparations began.
I made more coffee for the family while helping with lunch. A whole pot of rice and lentils, carrots and potatoes and the rain let up, the family said good-bye.
       I ate this delicious lunch slowly after 3 ½ days of only eating fruits (in smoothies and raw) and some vegetables. Today, after that meal, I notice how different I feel. The weight of my body has changed, I am no longer light and airy but thick and heavy. I have a headache and feel a little like throwing up but at least I don’t want to put things in my mouth anymore.
                                                    Why I was only eating fruits?
Because I had learned about cleansing your body of built up toxins this way and thought I should try. I don’t know why I feel worse then I did before this week but I have been eating cloves of garlic and drinking tea to combat this cough that started. I love this place though…something about the air, the mountains and the people who think like I do yet speak a different language…

It was an adventure getting to this community and i would like to tell you a little bit about it.

First I couldn’t get a hold of the lady Diana who was supposed to pick me up at the bus stop. The night before I was to leave to just show up and see what happened, I got a call from this guy, Sergio. Sergio spoke a little bit of English and told me he could give me a ride if I met him in San Jose.

The next day I wait for this guy at the bus stop and he comes with a goatee after a few hours and he takes me to this house in this neighborhood he likes to call “Los Angeles”. We end up at this really nice house of a hippie community headquarters called Pachamama (http://pachamama.com/) and what I was told the guy i met who lived there was a musician that was part of a pretty famous group in Costa Rica (I forget the band name). We picked up a bed there then headed to buy a lock box.

On the lock box adventure I found something that I had been looking for a long time, my key. I have passed up so many keys that presented themselves, in London, at my bus stop on my birthday and others, so I decided this was the one and i took it (hehe). Keys are mainstream jewelry now but for me, what my sister has taught me, is that your key is something that helps you make decisions. Here is a picture the key; I still need a good chain for it.

Next we start for the mountains with stops on the way to pick up fruit and vegetables from stands on the road. Sergio says that we are going to his moms house and I wasn’t sure why. What happened was we went through these small communities of houses on a dirt rock road (naturally) and ended up at the end of the road at a small but really new and nicely furnished house. I was not prepared to meet the mother of my goateed coiffure and luckily she was not at the house when we dropped off the bed. Sergio said that he wasn’t that comfortable driving the rest of the way to the community that evening because his lights sometimes didn’t work so he suggested we spend the night at his moms. I thought this was a ploy to get me to bed and maybe it was but it didn’t work, he fell asleep in the hammock while i was on the coach. We fell asleep watching this anime movie called Paprika.

Woke up to a guy looking in the window at me. He is apparently the watering guy of the yard. That morning we went to the community. Sergio and his goatee were tired and so i said that i would offer to drive (even though i don't know how to drive) but that i didn't know how to drive stick shift. He asked me if i wanted to learn...why did i lie. But i went with the spontaniatity of the trip and said yes. Next thing i know i am driving up to the mountains on another gnarly dirt road in this truck and he tells me to stop. I stop in the middle of the hill. He says ok now change gears. I say, aren't i going to go backgrounds, he takes a quick look back and says yes. Then the engine is roaring and the car rocks back but bursts forward and i start up the rest of the hill. Sergio tells me i did good for my first time, i'm not sure if i believe him or if he was just trying to get me to bed.

Diana and Cycril (the people I originally stayed with when I went to the community last semester) weren’t even there when we arrived but their daughter was who greeted me with a big hug. The next few days I spent working in the garden and the house getting weird looks about my juices and listening to conversations in Spanish that I could not make contributions too. I have never felt so aware of where I came the US then with these people, they weren’t mean about me being a gringa but they definitely talked some shit about the US in front of (rightfully so). Because I couldn’t really say anything to defend or even just give my view on it, I was uncomfortable. In the end I became friends with the people and this one woman in particular I got close to. I really just enjoyed what these people are trying to do, not contributing to the system. I feel lucky to have found people like this in Costa Rica where everyone is content and non-controversial. This is a huge generalization of course and there are many good things about this but I felt like I understood these people. Once again I’m not really sure if the people understood me…

I rode back with a soar butt from the second time I had fallen in that day before when I was taking pictures. I had slipped and fell on my camera. I don’t know how but now one ever saw me fall all those times but I could show them the evidence as I have some nice scrapes on my arms and a petite round bruise on my left butt cheek. This Italian guy, Ali drove me to San Jose telling me about his world travels as a transcendental music DJ. He’s also apparently famous in Costa Rica http://www.transelastica.com/djs.html.

My favorite thing about this place was the environment of course, I couldn’t stop looking around at the mass of tropical tress and birds and for some reason it always looked different. I took a series of pictures the day of the storm that shows the clouds encroaching.
Here's the morning (you can tell the storms rolling in)

[pause for copious amounts of rain and down pour]

and it passes revealing the bamboo house currently in progress

and then this happens.

Its not so much the place where I am its about me being in that place

2010-03-14T15:45:00.004-06:00

    I miss the howlers, no not the ones from the street, the real ones, the howler monkeys in the jungle trees of Puerto Viejo. I have spent the last two weeks in the Caribbean Coast of Limon, at the beach in Puerto Viejo. I went to volunteer at a Waldorf inspired school and study about happiness in Costa Rica. I have looked at many definitions of happiness and they all seemed to cover many different elements of happiness that I think are all interconnected. When they are all balanced and combined then, I think, that is ultimate happiness. But I am also unsure if that can ever be achieved.
I wrote an e-mail to my mom the other day that brought me to a better understanding of what I have learned. To catch you up, in the last e-mail she wrote me she talked about a pair of ducks fornicating behind her house, Easter and Chocolate, always chocolate. Here’s a little bit of the e-mail mixed in with a better explanation then what I had wrote to her:
Hey mum,
   I am home. It was nice to see the family. A LOT has happened for them in two weeks, which is a little strange to think about, as it has seemed like no time at all for me. It’s Sunday, in the middle of the day and I feel the stress of these next two weeks creeping up on me as well as the itch from all the bug bites I have inherited from living in the Caribbean.
    I think your thoughts on happiness definitely fit into my theory that I have created. I made it into a circle a sort of circle graph with different components of happiness that equal a large overall happiness for a person. So I start out with a person and lead into the lifestyle that they have (if they are living healthily and all the things that naturally go with that) then lifestyle leads into the person’s environment (many of the interviews that I have done in Puerto and based on the study that was done naming Costa Rica the happiest place on earth - they include the very low carbon footprint – shows that having a healthy environment and living in nature is a very important component especially now in a time where the health of the environment is deteriorating). These two categories lead to health. Physically and mentally when things are balanced in a healthy manner then that allows a person to be happy. Health is a broad term that allows, for me, temporary sickness, depression, and life crisis, all those natural events that occur. Your spirituality is another component to happiness. I read a book on Tibetan Buddhism because I was toying with an idea that happiness could merely be a trick of the mind. It turns out I disagreed with a lot of what Buddhism is about because it focused solely on the mind. I do think this is an important part of overall happiness but I did not like the idea of stripping all my emotions and living desires to reach an enlightened state. Although spirituality is complicated for me, I think that a positive attitude and your own belief system are good for peace of mind and a healthy inner life. Then what it all comes back to is the person, the human being, what would we be without each other. My theory becomes full circle from where it starts, us, me, you. I think human connection brings me the most happiness, i journaled every day my happiest moments in Puerto and most of them were about people. There's a reason why isolation is the worst form of torture. All these elements are interconnected and lead back to each other.

   I think I understand you a lot more with the idea "where ever you go there you are". Just looking at your life that principal makes a lot of sense to me now. I think it’s a good thing to look at for my project also because although I struggled with where I was in Puerto and in general being in Costa Rica, it’s like here I am, now do something with it. Its not so much the place where I am its about me being in that place… if that makes sense?
And I love that Maharaji quote ["If you want to look gorgeous, it's not in the makeup. Be with people who love you and you will be gorgeous! Love will not see the flaws”].

One thing that I did read in the Buddhism book that I really liked was that they do emphasize the brain and the inner world. Making everything outer not important, yes we are physical beings but we are also intellectuals and that is really important because not a lot of other animals, well none (that we know of) have evolved like we have to have this whole other conscious, to be able to conceive of things that we do. LIKE SPACE AND QUANTUM PHYSICS something that I infinitely find interesting but will probably never fully understand. And that’s ok; I think I like the mysteries. That’s why I don't pick a religion, I don't want something to tell me everything, I don’t want to know everything and I know that I can't.
I am attaching a picture from this website that takes pictures of space and post them everyday!

Explanation: The Tarantula Nebula is more than 1,000 light-years in diameter -- a giant star forming region within our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). That cosmic arachnid lies left of center in this sharp, colorful telescopic image taken through narrow-band filters. It covers a part of the LMC over 2,000 light-years across. Within the Tarantula (NGC 2070), intense radiation, stellar winds and supernova shocks from the central young cluster of massive stars, cataloged as R136, energize the nebular glow and shape the spidery filaments. Around the Tarantula are other violent star-forming regions with young star clusters, filaments and bubble-shaped clouds. The rich field is about as wide as the full Moon on the sky, located in the southern constellation Dorado.

I want to be able to paint this. I have seen these colors before but I don’t think I could ever replicate them like they show up in this picture. It’s hard to imagine that this is real.

how is the Peace Corp application going?
love you!

Valentinez Bluez

2010-02-16T23:05:00.004-06:00

Today I was really sick this morning (yes, I like that sentence structure). I have had this constant stomach pain that was really debilitating for a couple weeks. I went to the doctor here in Costa Rica (a real one, like not any parent from Waldorf that has known me since I was little). They basically gave me something to mask the pain and made a guess that it was a reaction to the walnut size of gluten I ate (I have celiac disease). So I woke up this morning feeling pretty bad and I told my host family. They talked about what I had eaten the day before and suggested i had eaten gluten again, they were sure it was my fault. I was annoyed, i had been trying my best to get better and they were blaming it all on me! Then my host sister who i am generally pretty close to and have had some personal conversations with actually said something that was more of a truthful diagnoses then i have gotten in awhile; she said, “maybe your just sad” (in English).

I know that that it is super typical and annoying to be sad on Valentines day, but I was and I am. I think about my x (I hate that word for someone you’ve broken up with).

This video is my excuse for thinking about my x today. It explains the addictive qualities of love.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html

I like scientific explanations of my emotions and ted.com is a real cool source that has talks on many different subjects. I learned on the next video i watched about orgasms and how a dead body could potentially be probed in a certain area in the spine to have one!

Sometimes I really like words and sometimes I’m not good at making them represent what I want to say. So here is a compilation of things I have collected on this topic. Sorry to overwhelm you…?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms7_iT3o1ZU

Its not that I am sad about not being with my X anymore but, I was talking to my friend about this over drinks and its really just that love is such a strong feeling. And when you’re IN love with someone and in a relationship with them you merge into this being of one. The combination is like what my friend was drinking, he (my x) is the strong, hard alcohol of the drink and I was the zangy lime and sugar and the combination made something delicious.

I remember feeling withdraws, I remember needing more even when I was looking into his eyes, its overwhelming. Ugh I hate writing about him, I’ve written about it so much its like word throw up now, its worse, its like chunky diarrhea that’s old and grey and overworked that spews out the mouth onto this page. EW

*So i guess i sent you on more of a treasure hunt with all these links, but they are little bits of gold to me and so the travel is worth the while...Which is sort of an analogy of why my relationship with my x ended...

My Walk, my what a lovely kalology

2010-01-31T17:22:00.002-06:00

I walk about a mile and 1/2 to school Lunes to Fritag and then another to come back. After experimenting with different routes i found the one with the least amount of:

- Traffic
- Howlers [men of all different ages who say things that point out that i am a woman (they are actually pretty unavoidable as a lot of comments are made from the safety of their cars)]
- Frighteningly loud dogs behind the gates of houses (they can smell my fear)
My route is also made in cooperation with my regulars that i say hello to: Old Guy who sits on his porch, Guard at the school, Esteban and others (guys who work at the Furniture store that now one of my friends is dating)
- Various stray dogs and their poop
- THE SUN (always says hello back)

i like to list things.
My walks are always eventful whether its on my way to school or on the way back, i watch by as the music from my ipod is the soundtrack to the Latino actors playing a 'typical day in Costa Rica'.

I like to collect things, i am pretty sentimental.
Last semester i collected feathers.

The other day i found this on the side of the road and picked out two for myself:

Too bad i don't have the tools to cut tile or else these would make really great necklaces.

My neighborhood in Costa Rica is really nice. So nice that I walk by the presidents mothers house on my way to school. One of the first times I saw the house there was a goat grazing in the front lawn. Its a beautiful white house with huge trees, a basketball court and it looks out at a view of the mountains. In the yard the biggest and best tree around there is a lonely swing.

There are two barriers between that swing and me.

The first is a rock wall that goes up to my shoulder at its highest point. There is a small knit fence on top of this wall along with some harmless looking foliage. I have gotten to this point, on top of the rock wall to get a picture of the tree but not any further. The next obstacle to swing bliss is this taller then me, pointy on the top tips, bitch of another fence!
Every time I walk past this house I dream of jumping this fence and taking a swing under that beautiful tree. But then I think of the possible consequences of this action. It goes in a sequence. First it’s getting caught, and then it’s legal action (trespassing), then its possibly jail or a large fine, deportation, having criminal action on my records, not getting a good education because I was kicked out of my school, and then death.

(Ok so the ending is a bit dramatic sounding, but it is the inevitable truth)

What is it that holds us back from doing what we want?

Is it the barriers or the consequences?

PS i love words.
*Kalology is the study of beauty

Schwester's 21

2010-01-16T12:20:00.002-06:00

For my sisters 21st geburstag i asked 21 people (including myself) what they loved about their sister.

Can you guess which one is mine?

~ I love my sister because putting all history, blood and sisterly loyalty aside she is a really cool person and her being my sister just means I get to spend more time with her.

There’s nothing like a sister. Its universal, 20 other people agree with me they just say it better then I could…

I don’t know if Love is the right word, more of loathsome disdain. But if I had to choose something I would say I love it when she drinks. A sober [sister] is a NO-FUN [sister].

I love that we look similar. There is now one else that shares the closest DNA with you, then your sister.

I love that I can barrow her cardigan when we are in the same country.

I love my sister’s ability to impersonate famous people

I like how she helps me fight my battles

When I’m sick she takes care of me, I love that.

I love that she is hypocritical

I love that my sister was my birthday present the day I turned 10 years old. I think about holding her in my arms as a baby that day.

I Love that my sisters sacrifice their time, possessions, events, and personal wants for me in times of need. I love how protective we are of one another and how well we know each other. We are best friends for life. What a true blessing. Redeeming love always.

I love i love how I can be the biggest dork around my sister and she is an even bigger dork back to me, so I
have be even dorkier to counter act her.

I love how even though people think we’re so alike my sister and I are actually really, really different.

I love how my sister is always there for me when I need her to be. No matter how far away she might seem she is willing to journey to my side.

I love that

my sister

never judges me.

I can tell her anything

and she’s cool with it.

I also love her sisterly wisdom.

.I love that my sister inspires me to do things without even realizing it.

My sister and I are both artists. She is the only person I can trust for a 100% honest opinion about my work, even if it isn’t a good critique, I appreciate it because I respect her and her own artwork so much.

I love how my sister is always there for me.

I love my sister because I can always be there for her.

I love that my sister’s smile is my smile, when I am happy she is happy. She is a part of me no matter the distance.

I love that my sister and I are committed to our relationship with each other; it’s not something that we’re going to quit.

She knows me better than anybody else and she loves me better than anybody else.

21 love notes for a lovely 21 year old.

Happy Birthday Sister.