So it goes.

I dont write on here much anymore. I mainly come on to see postings from long distance friends. I think Tumblr is for a certain setting that I’m not in much for the time being. I have no desire to give it up, I’m just waiting for the right setting in future months. It is indeed a loner thing. There’s something about doing something else all day, coming home, being alone, and letting your thoughts unravel on here. I now work 8 hours a day, mostly on a computer where I’m engaged and busy enough to not be on Tumblr. When I’m not on the computer I’m in long meetings with a large team, battling ideas back and forth. I live with 4 people of varying ages and different daily pursuits. I eat family dinners. Somewhere between all of the working, socializing, family time and trying to fit my errands into some time slot that is not 9am and 5pm, I don’t write on here much anymore.

Yet, I’m still the same person with this internal monologue, these complicated inter-laced facets that don’t all fit into my immediate outside world. I’m still the same person that needs to write—I just don’t know where it goes now. Sometimes I do panic that thoughts are getting wasted, lost somewhere too far for recall. Are any of these ideas worth putting on some solid medium? I don’t know, but something always tells me I should. 

I like writing to see where and how I’ve grown, even if it’s not my growth that I’m talking about. I think I’m growing,  I have changed in the past months, and that is something that I want documented somewhere. I’ve made decisions, had realizations, made up my mind, set some goals, endured some pain and had some fantastic times. I’d like somewhere to put it other than the thoughts in my head. 

What I’m trying to say is, this blog is still very important to me—it’s just in some sort of brief hiatus. I’m on here at least every other day, for a brief time, seeing what friends are up to, trying to keep up with and share in their thoughts, happiness and sadness. I’ve seen things that merit a congratulations or a “you’re in my prayers, I’m sorry for your loss” but again, these thoughts keep staying in my head. 

When my setting is right, I’ll get back to it all. Till then, keep blogging—I’m very much interested in reading. 

If there were anybody that could tell all of my secrets, it would be this bed. It carries not only the weight of my body, but the weight of all of my thoughts. And as it lies there, horizontally, it’s the sole witness of my early morning and late night. It’s difficult to cry in front of people, it’s difficult to open up, but there on that bed, I let all of my tears soak into its mattress. When no one else will stay up to listen, to be argued with, to be condemned, there I lay, speaking softly into the night, sure that only this bed can know my thoughts. Only this bed, is privy to my letting go, of my capability to lose myself, to feel desire, to love, relentlessly and without boundaries. This bed, can feel me push off in the middle of the night, with thoughts of either excitement or worry, unable to sleep into the night, it supports me as I sit up, reflecting. This bed, feels the blow, when my body collapses onto its plane, exhausted, expended, cursing the insomnia and begging for sleep. It knows the days I shirk responsibilities, fake sick, cancel the day and envelop myself in its sheets. This bed, the third party to all late night talks and early morning phone calls. It holds me, incapable of judgement when life beyond its edges, for today, or this moment, life, is just too much. 

I dreamt some bitch at Claire’s was running after me with this ha-uge needle that had a butterfly at the end of it trying to pierce my nose. Except that when she did, the needle turned into a pointy pencil and I screamed bloody murder. Then my nose ring was this ridiculously big fake rhinestone stud and I demanded she change it to a small diamond.   

I don’t even want my nose pierced. I have problems. 

I know I mentioned earlier working on not being materialistic and devoting less time to thinking about “things”. On the grand scale I think I wouldn’t be considered terribly materialistic. Still, I want to free myself from that feeling of needing “things” as opposed to experience and feeling. But so far, the truth is, I want nice things. Nothing ridiculously lavish but not exactly what I can call humble. I still want a nice wardrobe where the average clothing item would probably be between $60-70 bucks. (see? not lavish but not humble). Okay, I’d like shoes and bags and watches that are probably way higher than that price range. I still want gorgeous non-Ikea furniture and shiny new appliances in my kitchen. I don’t want to think twice about the price of make up or beauty products if I truly think their worth it because I think I’m worth it. I was never that into jewelry but now I want to build a nice collection I’d be proud to hand down to my kids. I also want to give nice things. Lastly, I want the money to travel to places. 

I still want to donate and help and change the world, but I have to admit that I want to have nice things. 

• I want to get back to writing I just can’t figure out what my style is or how I want to approach it. I left poems behind a while ago because I decided I don’t really like all the line breaks and I like my words to stick together. I like the look of a paragraph or two. But I don’t exactly enjoy writing short stories. I enjoy thoughts and little tid bits. I guess I like keeping a journal, maybe one day turn it into a memoir. 
• I woke up with thoughts of traveling to eastern Europe and riding trains. Ever since I read Aleph (Paulo Coelho) I have this feeling that a long train ride would develop something in me that would change my life forever. 
• I had a good time at the party we threw last night. The aftermath is just bottles. It was pretty chill. There were some random groups of people and they mixed well. I like when that happens. 
• Besides, I thoroughly enjoyed the after party
• We’re planning a trip to Maine because we’ve never been. It will also be a camping trip because besides Bonnaroo I’ve never slept in a tent. Early on, our relationship grew out of random adventures and I think it’s time for another. 

We’ll get through this because we must,  we’re meant to. These rough patches jolt the soul in to remembering how precious this is. How in one way it can be so strong and in another it can be so fragile. It reminds us how love needs constant love to survive. We can be sure it is meant to exist but we can also be sure it is not meant to linger unattended. As all beautiful things, it is often attacked. We step back. Look at the things that don’t belong in this pure feeling. Sometimes I think, “how did we get here?” If only we could cover it with something strong enough to shield it. But from what? We can’t and we don’t know how. So we let it wander through this life, our life, our own lives and despite this current sadness, we know we have the hope that it will thrive. Like all things, only more beautiful after it’s made it through the fire. 

No one will really care about this but I like to write things down.

I’m very very excited about my future projects. I’m excited about my future job (as in, in 2 weeks) because I love everything about it. I feel so blessed to have found a job I love that also happens to pay handsomely and come with benefits and perks. In addition to what I’m doing as Project Coordinator, I honestly can’t imagine a better job than one at a University. I know I’ll never be bored with what I do in my career because research is so alive, all of the time. It means you learn, you ask question, you conjure up scenarios and data to answer your questions, you write about it and you go back and ask more questions. It’s dynamic. It’s nothing like a traditional 9 to 5. You collaborate, you meet people…you just move up and around and everywhere. 

Anyway, enough about my crush on research. I’m excited because my duties and responsibilities are not static. I met today about 3 papers I want to write in 2012 in collaboration with other faculty at Columbia that I’m (well, all of us) are determined to get published:

1) Is the early home environment related to early on-set childhood obesity and overweight outcomes in pre-k and kindergarten? 

2) Is the early parent-child relationship related to early on-set childhood obesity and overweight outcomes in pre-k and kindergarten? 

3) Are years of immigration and language spoken in the home (acculturation) associated with nutrition practice and BMI? 

I get to write these on the clock. I also get to go to conferences and workshops to sharpen my skills for these papers, paid. I also get to collaborate with brilliant minds. I’m determined, by the time you google-scholar me in 2013, i’ll be there. 

Today I had my first work meeting (sort of pre-officially-hired). I met this really cool man who is practically the guru of teaching young children mathematics. We’re going to be stealing some of his videos for the mathematics component of our Head Start intervention program. After our meeting he was on his way to a Sesame Street meeting because they want him too. Awesome. (this is the nerd in me) 

Anyway, he also is a professor at Teachers College (Columbia University) and he starts mentioning these courses him and a colleague teach in the Fall about teaching children and videotaping lessons in order to understand the psychological process of learning by watching the videos later and understanding the reaction of the child. It’s his whole philosophy on how often teachers gage children’s actual grasp of concepts during a lesson wrong based on other “quick-judgement” characteristics in the session that are better to look at later through video. It’s relevant to what our team wants to do with our intervention program in terms of teaching parents to teach. 

So my future boss turns to me and goes “hey, you should take the class! As a Columbia employee, we’ll pay for it!”. I slowly grinned and conjured up a mental image of my Year 2012 resolutions. “Learn to live without school”  Ha! Fuck outta here! Now I’ll have a job with tuition remission?! Oh I’m taking classes all day. (Well, not 9 to 5). Fo free. I love school. I’ll never give it up. 

-Temporary living arrangements for the next few weeks (I have 7 days to figure this out) 

-Strategy for packing and painting this apartment white again (7 days)

-Money until my first pay check (time to reach into the Mami Bank) 

-The things that were said yesterday

-The things still left to say 

-My thesis (table clean-up/methodology/citations/deadline budgeting)

-That other for-publishing paper I decided to take on (database/variables/lit review/meeting/deadline budgeting)

-That other data project I decided to take on (meeting/materials/deadline budget)

-Some reflexion on myself (what I want/where I’m heading/my character/health) 

-Time management in general 

-Daydreaming and serious thinking about my job (transportation/office/approach/goals/networking) 

-More permanents living arrangements 

-Some other thoughts about my goals (PhD/learning outside of school/small steps to keep in mind now for goals in few years) 

Yesterday. I wake up, dreading the hours ahead of me because I know that no matter how hard I try I will only have one thought in my head, “my dad died three months ago”. Somehow I was wrong. 

I wake up to a text that says someone else died. Someone else died. I had a stepmom years ago. She cultivated the root of all of my problems. Abusive. Verbally and physically, abusive. She taught me to hate my skin, hate my hair, doubt my mind and pretty much stick all of my dreams, goals, childhood, innocence and aspirations into a black hole. She taught me to sit in a corner and feel my worthlessness.  She made me believe my mother was a whore who abandoned me years ago to live her life in America and she wasn’t too sure because of my skin color that I was actually my fathers child. She told me on many occasions that the entire family would be better with me gone. She taught me to hate my dad because he never did anything about it. She caused me to hate my dad years later because he would never believe me when I finally had the courage to open up; “if that was really true, why didn’t you say something years ago?” , “you have such a vivid imagination, those things would never happen” . The only times I truly believed in praying, where when I would pray that all of the evil in the world, whatever wasn’t already inside of her, would please, dear God, fall upon her. I spent days imagining her death or running into her in the street years later, being a beautiful as I could possible be and throwing her in front of a bus or on my less vicious days, cutting off her long black silky hair. 

But she didn’t die. In fact, she got breast cancer and got through it. She married again after my dad. Her children somehow, grew up thinking she was the best mother on this earth. Then one day, years ago, I forgave her. I asked the Universe to forgive me for all of the thoughts that I had put into this world and all of the bad energy I had focused on sending her way, wherever she was. I truly forgave her. And as I grew up and became fascinated with the human mind, I felt sorry for her. I spent days wondering what could have happened to her, what could have went wrong in her life, that she would be that sick to do that to a child. 

Yesterday I woke up feeling my dad’s death in my heart when I learned her 27 year old son died of cancer. Her son, who often made me feel just as small and worthless when we were children. Her son, who without fully recognizing the consequences would shun me, gather with his 3 other brothers and sisters and make up rules about how much I couldn’t play with them. He died with bone cancer, after his final chemotherapy treatments and surgery. 

I spent so much of my life, all of the angry parts before I came to peace with the past, wishing the worst for her. In my mind, it was always her death. In reality, she lived to see a son die. Sometimes I wonder why things happen and I realize I never have the answer. 

I forgave her years ago but I never had a conversation with her about it. I have no feelings for her. The best I could do was send an honest message to her daughter, feeling sorry for the loss of her brother. 

We often hate people and think we’d happy if something terrible happened to them. I don’t really know what kind of person could honestly experience that. I know I’m in no fault that her son died, but I think about all the times I thought I’d rejoice when she “got what she deserved” and I do feel sorry. Because I am not rejoicing. This was after all, a person who I shared 3 years of my life childhood with and for better or for worse, at one point he was my brother. 

I know my father loved him as a son. Maybe they’re somewhere up there together.