Soaring Impulse

The Soaring Impulse

because no matter how many times I feel like I've been punched in the face, i still know my life is beautiful and blessed...


check out his "remember who you are" post. amazing. beautiful.

punches in the face

I seriously feel like I've been punched in the face 72 times in the past six days.

13 people were murdered in my hometown. less than a mile from my house. the place is en route to my job, I pass it everyday. thirteen people massacred. i am still having trouble wrapping my brain around it...

...we are in lock down. take the cots out of the closet in case we need shelter. they thought the gunman was on the loose. i was unsure how i was going to throw myself over 14 children to save them...

i couldn't go home to an empty house, i went to my inlaws. thank god they are retired. they hugged me and let me stay even though they were like an hour late for dinner.

thirteen people no longer exist and their only escape route out was blocked by a car.

so i haven't slept very well. i know my hometown is still safe but thirteen people from my community are dead and, although i didn't know them personally, i am still mourning them...

and we had the children's fair on Saturday which was as much fun as something can be the day following the above events.

Sunday my gma calls to tell me gpa is in the hospital with pneumonia. Pneumonia? I think... He's 79. People who get pneumonia at 79 don't recover...

and monday i had another meeting that had some not so nice moments...

tuesday we had our center inspected by licensing and everyone was stressed to the hilt. Like they were going to take away our license.

and wednesday was the worst day I have had at work since I began. I was actually crying in the bathroom on my lunch break.

but i had an unexpected visitor earlier in the week...and the yankees won their first game today. tomorrow is easter egg coloring day with the grandparents (gpa is out of the hospital) and cocktail day and then I have a week off.

THANK YOU, HP! Cuz truth be told I haven't done much for my thesis since I've been nursing these wounds...

something to chew on...

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful. - Buddha

dreams as reality

I have had this dream, a day dream not one where Andy Pettite tells me I'm brilliant, that one day someone will pay me to do what I love. Sit and write about literary theory. Today that dream is a reality. Okay, its just for a day...and the only reason they're paying me is because I took it as a "personal day" but I'm sitting here writing a response paper and being a "mediator of conversations between texts."

Can I please do this for a living??

PLeASE!??

dream...

I had a dream last night that I wrote my thesis on five huge sheets of butcher paper, stapled it like a book and handed it in. The place where I handed it in was the club house of the new Yankee Stadium. I was freaking out and Andy Pettite came up to me and told me not to worry, that I was a fantastic writer and diligently doing my research and that everything would fall into place. It was a pretty amazing dream...

view from the back porch

Here was my brilliant view of Binghamton on a beautiful Friday afternoon from the back porch of Cyber Cafe West. It may look a little desolate but it truly was urban allure. My cell phone doesn't take the greatest photos...



I drank my blackberry sage tea (a kmc favorite for 13 years, dating back to java joe's days) and read interpretations of Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, an interview with the author (in which she said..."that is why I like writing, because i think in literature, in fiction, you create your own world, and it's that own world when I meet a new person - if that person creates their own world also in a way that is compatible with mine - that is where I find the psychic connetion. The creation of one's own identity, one's own world, one's own definition. Of course, with what we carry with us. Nobody is an unencumbered person. We all come with our own inherited identity. But... I relate more to those who take that and make something else with it. It is that new world that is created from the old and new..." [Newton, 177]. gorgeous).

i also texted a bit with kamin, listened to the dead and tea leaf green and watched people come in and out of the cafe. lovely friday afternoon.

ponderings...part deux.

In this world the wise one holds onto confidence and wisdom. Those are the greatest treasures; all other riches are pushed aside. - Buddha

somethings I have gathered this evening as I have been reading...

transculturation. totally sexy and doesn't need to be defined by which generation of immigrant you are. i'm 4th generation on my maternal grandfather's side and in some ways i can still relate to transculturation in that I am "consciously recognizing and achieving a means to construct an idea or identity that is not just a by-product of two spaces or ideas" (pauline t. newton, transcultural women of the late-twentieth-century U.S. American literature, p. 6).

In my "intro to religion" class I took at Capital University my professor would possibly refer to this as our painted curtain, Newton refers to a "patchwork identity"earlier in her intro which is an interesting idea that she builds upon in this work.

... am i nerding you out yet?

consider these quotes by my ladies:

"Writing seems to me a part of being alive" Maxine Hong Kingston

"I've always written out of necessity" Sandra Cisneros

I relate to both of these statements in ways that are sewn into my heart and soul and entire being. I, too, have always written out of necessity; that necessity being that the act of writing helps me not only articulate and organize my thoughts more clearly but does something more. There have been times when I was sure that no other being could relate to what I was feeling and in order to maintain my sanity the words needed to flow. Not here and no where anyone else will ever see them publicly. Boxes of my sanity are in the attic. ;) thankfully, i may need them once this is over.