Oh your mamas rich, and your daddy's good lookin!

Last night the family went downtown to watch a friends band, The Sugar Mountain Mamas, play outdoors. The night was warm, the moon was purdy, and kids splashin away in the fountains all around. So many kids and babies, yikes! Two of the band members have babies, a 6 mo. old and a 1 mo. old. Elias is such a late night partier, and ladykiller, it is ridiculous. Besides making the mamas squeal with his devious dimples, he shared a kiss with a doe eyed three year old named Chloe. Oh they were so cute, he just kept looking at her and smiling big and trying to touch her, which she liked, but bashfully pointed to the waterfall. Then she looked up at him and touched his cheek, ever so softly with the back of her hand. That was it. Elias leaned in for the kiss, and it was wet and sloppy and tongue and everything!
Mama would've taken her camera out if she hadn't been orchestrating the whole thing, smooth guy lean in and all. hehe.

Well life is beautiful, and short.

Eight years with an asshole for a president have gone by quickly, 14 years since I went off to college have gone, where have they gone?

Anyway, I'm not much in a philosophy mood, and no new pictures to post. I'm in no position to whine, and really, there is nothing brand new to celebrate. But there are too many things that happen and they happen quickly and I just want to get some of them down for myself.
In fact, it would do me well to re-read some of my old messages.

I was having a very hard time about a week ago. Tonight I heard Kate Winslet describe the feeling of a broken heart to Jack Black, (you figure out the movie.) Its not the first time a broken heart has been described. If I were to describe the sensation I was feeling all week, I wonder if I would be describing the feeling of longing, or regret, or geographical separation, lost time, or what, but I tell you its something akin to ants crawling around under the skin. This is going on in conjunction with being nauseous and unable to eat.
How could I have spent to much time trying to prepare for a job that I can't get?
A whole year of preparing, trying to set up a good future, when it may have been the last time to give birth and raise an infant under the banana trees, with my buddies still around in country??

Spent the year in preparation I did. Miss a good opportunity to be in Tanzania I did.
But I am sure that I would have gone through my usual swings of insecurity and not sure if I was doing all that I possibly could to set up a good future.
Anyway, I knew that the best way for me to end up in that situation was to come back to the States and really accomplish something first. That to go back and have number two in Tanzania, in 5 years, hopefully, was the plan.
Set up the house, and be chill.
I don't see how we will be able to be in a position to take time off in 5 years, but if I tell myself now that this is the goal, it doesn't hurt so bad.

I fell in love with Tino, and made the decision not to look back.
After we made it, after we spent a few years together and proved this thing could work, thats when I want the wedding.
Yeah, thats usually why people live together and wait to have kids. That and its ridiculous financially.
But I was afraid that if I didn't commit myself fully, then there would always be a way to escape, and I saw my dreams line up on this man. There was no reason in the world, other than being illogical! that I shouldn't be with Tino.
I know me, and I doubt too much.
Tino proves himself time and time again to be a steller lover, a fuckin good daddy, a loyal, cheerful and hardworking husband, and a spiritual rock. My commitment to him has redoubled.
My mom has continued to be essential perfection, and I am totally in awe of her, and frankly embarrassed that I haven't worshiped her more thoroughly and done everything I can to be just like her.
She is fun, funny, wise, forgiving, giving, loving and beautiful.
Elias is perfect.
I am the crack head in the house, o yes I am.
When it became obvious that a teaching job was not going to happen, I began to spiral downward fast. I lashed out at everyone with bitterness and hostility. I regretted everything. I missed Bjarke, I regretted the phone call I took from the Peace Corps, when the asked me when I wanted to go. I still didn't know where, but if I had said a different when.
IF IF IF.
It is so AMAZINGLY useless.
I had waffled, wanting to study ag, or education, or health care (and then the question was, public health or nursing)
o my god have I waffled for years.
That was why I WENT to the Peace Corps (if only I had gone earlier...! bah!) and came home with, of course! the same problem.
A Global Public Health course is not far from here, but I kept thinking of any excuse why I should do something harder.
The thing is, my decisions did what I suppose I had somehow hoped- they pushed me to a wall and when I realized that this was a good option that was still available to me, you wouldn't believe that physical feeling of ants, gone.
The feeling of shukurani, of appreciation, of gratitude swept through me like the golden sun of dawn, and it felt so good.
I hadn't felt that in long enough.
That day at work I made loads.


Oh my oh my, I have a lot of practice that I need to do on living better!

Feed me Seymour!

I guess it started with ice cream at my dear friend's 80th birthday, when Elias was three mos. old. Followed up by a taste of yogurt, some watermelon, when mama wasn't looking.
But finally, mama had to give up on her ideas that keeping this eating machine from food until 6 months was the best way. He was undeniably ready to eat. Chomping down on those Yoda gums whenever we chomped down food, pizza, whatever!
I thought that sweet potatoe would be the best start, but Grammy bought oatmeal cereal, and, the same night that we had both decided would be his first spoon-fed dinner, he wanted out pizza so badly, that there was no time for boiling and mashing a sweet potatoe. Elias ate with chubby cheeked gusto and his daddy was so proud. Each bite has been preserved on video, so we will have a public screening of the big event soon.

Expressway

I am a slow reader and a slow writer. I type quickly but write slothenly.

I am also a disappointingly slow reader. As many books as I devoured as a kid, they were piled up by my bed, usually several going on at one time, reading in the dim light. Whereas one might have guessed that I would have ended up with glasses and book savvy, just the opposite is the case.
I am a painfully slow reader. But I enjoy it. Depending on the book. When I was young, I couldn’t stop reading a book until I reached the end. I now put down whatever book does not catch my interest. Especially now, it needs to be really sharp, else I am satisfied with halfastory.

Not much else about me has changed since I have grown up. Still dorky and awkward in all the other ways I had hoped I would grow out of at 14.
Not too long ago I was listening to a radio program where a radical rabbi was being interviewed on his god out of the box theories. His point was to get folks in touch with their spirituality, beyond atheism and religion. He told us listeners to take our age and half it. 16. Now I am supposed to reflect back and spiritually advise my 16 year-old self.
So the first reaction of course is to look back and visualize that young woman, who she was and what was on her mind. I was convincing my parents it was a good idea, then saying good bye to friends and boyfriends (yes, in the plural) and going to Mexico for one year as an exchange student.
At 32, I feel like I need to take advise from her. Pre-adventure I think I am always at my strongest, and we always look back with nostalgia, but it is really tragic that, as spiritual as I think I may be, I can’t say that I have gained anything since that time. Philosophically I think I am probably about at the same level. I had left our family church two years before, and done the bulk of my ‘god’ search. In Mexico, smoking weed with a bunch of the European exchange students on a crowded bus out to some beach, I found I had come to pretty much the same conclusion as the rest of those blokes. There is no god.
Yet I still prayed. Dear Lord this and that. This masculine image that didn’t seem quite right, yet wasn’t shakable. Justifiably so. I had felt god strongly, and there was still the feeling that some an omniforce was on my team.
I no longer claim to be atheist, and where I called god a crutch I would now say that it isn’t god, but religion.
So I am a slow reader and a slow philosopher.
Half of my life has passed since I made these conscious decisions, one to abandon the religion of my youth, and the other to abandon my family and country.
Both decisions I embraced with a whole heart, and never ever felt an ounce of regret, no matter how complicated or lonely my situation got.
A few years after my parents divorce (also happened when I was 14…) we had to give up the house I grew up in. Later, the memory of lying in that bed, safe from any feelings of regret was achingly painful. I would never lay in that bed again.
Doubt is the greatest hindrance. Knowing the words doesn’t make the concept any more real to me. I doubt myself to the extreme nth.
I have spent so many years choosing so many paths that my resume either looks like circus confetti or swiss cheese. A colorful smattering of things, or an unaccomplished milky blah.
Sometimes I doubt, and that makes me regret the past, and that makes me needabetterfuturelikerightnow. I get pissy and to combine phrases my parents have offered me, I have a chip on my shoulder like I have something to prove.
Its true. I am afraid of wasting all the opportunities I have been given.
In that same childhood bed, I would often cry myself to sleep. I wasn’t comfortable being comfortable. I felt no guilt at my own doing, but guilt because I was born. Guess I could blame church for that one, but I really think it runs deeper than religious guilt tripping. It’s the human bond that doesn’t allow one to sleep while the other is hungry. When we are young, and we see visions of Ethiopia, it affects us deeply.
This is a good thing.
But somehow I got it in my head, and I am sure it was a direct result of images on the evening news combined with a soft heart, but it was in my head that I, as a young girl in Africa, had stood to the side while I watched my family suffer, and promised the dear lord our god whatever he is, that if I were given the opportunity, I would come back and help.
Bam! A child is born in Southern California with a purpose.
So I sometimes look back and wonder what took me so long to go there.
And then I see the answers. Justifiable they must be, because this is my life.
But I feel regret for being 32, with a ready to go family with nowhere to go.
What could the future possibly bring?
How is it that I am no closer to accomplishing anything at this age than I was at 16?
Lately, I have been looking around me and seeing that things are going too slow as far as building a life that suits my family as well as my own dreams. So I get impatient, ansy, bitter, quiet, weepy, hot-tempered, aloof, hyperactive and clumsy. To name a few symptoms of the syndrome.
But tonight, I took my medicine: the family loaded into the minivan and we jumped on the expressway, all the way to swing dance night, had a wonderful time and came back and made love.
I knew that I needed things to be a challenge for me. I needed to overcome a challenge in order to escape the torture of privilege. But at the same time, my devious self insists that if I were on the right path, everything would be very Tao and fall into place. So obstacles become cosmic omens saying WRONG WAY!
I analyze my pattern for making big life decisions. I find none, sometimes it is confident, sometimes I hem and haw into paralysis (my career!) and sometimes I jump right of the boat, headfirst without looking (my family).
Either way, when I am feeling anxious and embittered that I need to be moving a litter faster down the ol life path, I take a little southern California medicine and jump on the expressway, and totally enjoy the night, and the now.