blogging procrastination

I am still blogging all the time on MySpace. I can't seem to get my act together to switch over here to Blogger. One of these days...

In the meantime, here is the other link: www.myspace.com/10136871

And he screams back, "You're a cow, give me some milk or else go home!"

Today is the big day. Semester number two. The beginning of what should be my hardest semester. The beginning of some more mental health threats. Please pray for me to be disciplined when you think of it. I am nervous.

I forgot to mention that I got a 92 on that last Biostatistics final. I ended up with a B in the class, which was great, considering the previous exam grade of 62. This semester my classes will be Epidemiology Introduction and Methods, Maternal and Child Health Systems, Community Health Policy and Advocacy, and Research Methods. It doesn't sound very interesting or anthropological at all. Hopefully, I'll have at least a few interesting pieces of information to share with and discuss with you.

I used our "Attitude is Everything" mug for my coffee this morning, and thought about the little saying slightly longer than usual. This will all be over before I know it. The nights of only a couple hours of sleep and days of torturing myself for being a bad mother and worrying about making horrible presentations and failing tests is temporary. It's like running. You hurt really badly (if you push yourself or sprint) and you can't breathe, but you know that if you can just push through, you will forget you ever even felt any pain at all. It will be gone, and you'll just be high on endorphins, proud of yourself, feeling energized and refreshed. I just pumped myself up so much that I feel like going doing some sprints, which I actually hate.

I've had a craving to blog for a few days now. I had all these good ideas and thoughts, and of course, I can't remember them as usual. All I can think about is this nervous energy I feel. All these worries and thoughts of things I need to remember and do. I am suffering from the typical "fight or flight symptoms" -- upset stomach, lack of appetite, peeing every ten minutes, jumping around. I'll try to get down my previous blog ideas just so I won't have them stuck in my head.

On Sunday we sat in the same aisle with a woman who has a tiny baby who likes like she has Downs Syndrome. The baby is absolutely adorable--soft, tiny, pink, wide-eyed, and gentle-looking. I couldn't help but stare at her the whole service. And the mom looks like she is absolutely in love with her tiny daughter. We were singing some praise music, which reminds me that I want to write about that stuff, and I realized the song had the lyrics "in your arms of love." All the sudden I could understand what God's arms of love are like much better, just watching that mother hold her soft-looking, pink-outfitted baby with so much pride and tenderness. The baby fell asleep on her mom's chest during the service.

I think the part that was most interesting was that I have always worried about having children, in part because I imagined that I would have a child with mental handicaps, specifically Downs Syndrome. Seeing that mom who was so in love with her child made some of those worries melt away a little more.

Now on to modern Christian worship music. I don't like most of it. It's so hard for me to "get into it." I keep thinking this will change, but part of me doesn't want it to. I love so many things about our church, but some of the lyrics from these repetitive songs just seem dumb and weird and annoying. On Sunday our church does a pretty good job of choosing good music, but I recently went to a service where they sang a song with the lyrics, "I could sing of your love forever." That is such a dumb lyric to me. If you COULD sing of God's love forever, why don't you? Prove it! Or, intstead, why don't you stop bragging about what you COULD do, and really sing something from your heart? Annoying. And yes, I know I am cynical, pessimistic, and overly critical. But some of these songs with meaningless lyrics have got to go. I just can't "get into it" when I am thinking about how dumb the lyrics are the whole time. Why don't they at least use something from the Bible? Okay, I'll end this rant right now. It seems a little unnecessary. I do love singing songs to Jesus. I am just pretty picky about what I want to sing.

I wanted to let you know that the couple made it to China. They are there now. After over 30 years of waiting. I actually found out that they had been renting their home for the last 17 years, probably because they were never sure when they would be leaving.

Sophia loves listening to this singer called Raffi. She smiles and starts to dance when she hears it. She bends her legs into a sort of sitting position, and bobs up and down. She twirls around in circles, slowly, in case she loses her balance. She holds her arms over her head and makes a long, low, monotone singing sound. My favorite Raffi song has the lyric, "All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family." The melody is awesome too. Just singing it in my head makes me happy. No wonder children seem so much happier than grown-ups. That is the kind of music they listen to. I love Elliot Smith as much as the next person, but imagine how great it would have been if he covered that song of Raffi's. The idea of Elliot Smith singing, "All I really need is a song in my heart," puts a song in my heart. I also like that the lyric ISN'T overly optimistic--it covers poverty too. You do need some fundamentals in order to be able to be happy--it's hard to have joy when you are starving. Goodness, I could critique Raffi music all day.

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotton

I don't know what to write about today. I can't believe how restless and even, occasionally, bored, I have become over this Christmas break. And it still doesn't keep me from dreading the coming semester, which will begin all too soon this coming Tuesday. Or from being stressed out about the 1.254 million things I should be doing, even while I am experiencing the feeling of boredom.

I'm ready for a big change. Something dramatic. I want something unexpected to happen. It doesn't necessarily need to be wonderful or marvelous, but I definitely don't want it to be bad. Just a change of pace.

Today Emilio, Sophia, and I went to the Oak Park Conservatory, which is a free plant conservatory that we can literally see out of our bedroom windows--it is directly across the Eisenhower Expressway from our condo. I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but it's awesome, because you feel like you are in the jungle, even while you are listening to traffic and trains go by on the nearby highway. It's definately a place I would never have appreciated or even visited before having a child--it's hardly much bigger than our little apartment. It would have seemed to boring and slow-paced. But going there with children makes you understand how magical plants can be. I love that Sophia gets to run her hands along rows of wet ferns in January in Chicago. That's really great. And it's free. There also happen to be fish, turtles, and bright-colored, squawking birds, which are also rare treasures to be found here. And animals are much-appreciated by little humans. I don't know if I ever mentioned here that Sophia's very first word after "Mama" was "Squirrel."

My brother was telling me some crazy story that I don't believe recently, but for some reason, I feel like sharing it. Even though I don't believe it. Apparently, some couple with a three-year-old kid, gave birth (the wife did, that is) to a new baby. Once the baby was home from the hospital, the older child started asking if she could spend a few minutes alone with her new sibling. The parents were a little surprised and wondered why she would want to do that, but after quelling their concerns by setting up a baby monitor they could listen to while the children were alone together, they granted their daughter's request. Once the door was closed and she was alone with the baby, she asked her if she remembered what God was like because she had almost forgotten. Isn't that a weird story? But my brother acted like it was totally true--I guess he really trusted his source.

Well, Sophia woke from her nap prematurely, as usual. Ciao, bellas.

I've had the Mexico City blues since the last hairpin curve

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The above was Sophia's first venture into the world of typing.

Today I spent the morning blind. I had to get an eye exam that required me not to use contacts for the previous 24 hours (I hope 12 hours was sufficient), and Sophia has literally ripped apart my last three pairs of glasses, so they were not in working order. Luckily, all three pairs were purchased sometime in the mid-80's (when I was about five), so there was no long period of mourning or feeling of great waste to speak of. The weird part was being blind today. When I had to cross busy streets (with Sophia) and then later on downtown without her, on my way to the appointment, I would quickly grab one of my ugly broken old pairs of glasses out of my coat pocket and hold them up to my face to make sure I wasn't going to die. Needless to say, I was much more worried about people seeing me holding the ugly glasses to my face than I was about getting hit by a car.

Upon arrival at good old America's Best, the most ghetto joint to purchase glasses that I know of, and the only place I've proudly purchased eyewear for the last ten years, my crazy antics did not stop. Being blind made me feel like my behavior was even more abnormal than usual. I made strange, uncomfortable jokes to the people working at America's Best, and I smiled hugely at everyone I passed, since I didn't want them to think I was being a jerk and ignoring any friendly gestures they could have been giving me without my knowledge. But everyone seemed to like me more than usual, which was fun.

Yesterday I was talking to my mom about getting more used to being away from Sophia and she said that it was a natural thing to happen. Now, with full knowledge that there is a good chance my mom will read this, I want to question that statement. Is it true that it is natural to grow away from your babies? I was doing research on cultural issues surrounding obstacles to breastfeeding in our society last semester, and I read this one artilce about how in the US we have this pseudo-Christian idea that babies are born sinners. We think that they are innately evil. We use words like clingy, naughty, whiny, picky and fussy to describe perfectly normal baby behavior. For example, I remember getting back into bed after nursing Sophia at 3:30 this morning and muttering something about how she was "just being manipulative" because she creid a couple times when I tried to put her back in her crib. Because we are so individualistic we think that babies need their own rooms and cribs--that we need to teach them independence. In most developing countries babies sleep with their parents for years--giving babies a sense of community and fulfilling all their needs for closeness is valued more than teaching them to be able to "soothe themselves." In Thailand they sell huger than huge King-sized beds, because the whole family truly sleeps together. This particular article talked about a number of other interesting obstacles, including our need to be in control of time. We hate the idea that something (e.g. our offspring/ a helpless newborn) could demand our attention and care at any moment or for an indefinite period of time. The article pointed out how we even use the terminology "feeding on demand" to describe breastfeeding babies whenever they cry. The focus is on the word DEMAND. We negatively view the baby as demanding rather than hungry or in need of our loving touch. Sorry if this rant bored the heck out of you, it's just been interesting for me to realize how deeply these deeply embedded Western ideas have affected my own parenting.

The funny thing is that I remember a friend telling me about all this loony La Leche League stuff just two years ago (right before learning I was pregnant) and being absolutely traumatized by the ideas of sleeping with your baby, nursing past one-year-old, and feeding them whenever they cried, among other things.

Sometimes I realize with subtle amount of both horror and delight that my mind is always thinking about leaving. Moving. Whenever I buy something I think about how easy it will be to transport across a couple oceans and seas and whether or not I'll really need said item in the jungle. Like today, as I tried on some bright, funky glasses, I decided to nix them because they might stand out to much and not really fit in if I was living among poor people. Is that weird behavior? I also hate accumulating stuff, because it means we'll either have to get rid of it or lug it along with us at some point, neither of which sound very appealing. Stuff sucks. I wonder if I'll ever arrive somewhere and think, man, this is a nice home. I want to spend the rest of my life here. I wonder if I will ever not daydream about living somewhere else.

But time goes by so fast. I was planning an event for next fall a couple days ago. I've never planned events 10+ months in advance before--not even our wedding. It's just crazy how people think in terms of five or ten year increments now. We never used to think so long-term.

The nice thing about marriage and time is sharing with your partner. I like to imagine all the homes and vacations and good friends and master bedrooms and meals and suitcases and disappointments and fulfilled dreams and boat rides and trips to the park we will share. And I hope that Jordan and I get to share the experience of learning a few more languages together before we die. Maybe Swahili and a click language and Portuguese and Africanse (sp). Or Thai and Arabic and Urdu and Burmese. I don't know. But I love imagining being old and full of memories together--lounging with him on a front porch in the Tropics somewhere, bouncing around between several different languages to best communicate what we're trying to say and recall some crazy adventure we had. I mean, it's true that you can only say certain things in certain languages. And maybe some of our children will know some of the languages, but not others (because they weren't born yet when we learned them or maybe they had already moved out of the house when we lived in that particular place), so we will change our "secret" languages depending on which kids are around. Oh man. That will be great.

I've become increasingly more aware of how anything can happen at any time. Curb Your Enthusiasm has helped with this realization. Just taking the CTA today, a million unanticipated moments unfolded--from the annoying but scary guys who kept forcing the door open while the train was moving to the little girl who asked me to read her a book about giant worms (actually that didn't happen). You just never think about the stuff you don't expect--you have an idea of how your day or week will go, and then it goes all topsy-turvy and ends up someway entirely different. And you end up not even remembering your original mental layout. It's also cool when you're having a conversation to think about the fact that contrary to whatever you imagine, you actually don't know what the other person is going to say next. It could be anything.

You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn't enough to change my heart.

New Shakira Album/s = Awesome. She is pretty much the only female singer that I like, and I love her. More than words. (You are supposed to get that cheesalicious More Than Words song stuck in your head now.)

The only problem with Shakira's music is that after listening to it I get a pit in my stomach and a lump in my throat and for a couple of days visions of memories from Central America keep popping up in my head. I remember eating a late dinner with Jordan in this empty open-air, thatched-roof restaurant on the beach of Big Corn Island, Nicaragua, when we realized that the radio station was playing a Shakira music marathon. We stayed and talked and listened to Shakira and the ocean for a couple hours. Nobody else was there. It is almost not even worth the immediate pleasure of listening to the good tunes.

I know I have touched on this idea before, but I love the fact that music captures the aura of different places. It doesn't seem like it is done intentionally either. My brother and I took this awesome road trip a couple years ago--shortly before Jordan and I got married--to take him out west to UC San Diego. On the way across the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, we came to the conclusion that all American music captures the feel of the geography of America. From the worst to the best music, I believe this holds true. There are some foreign singers who can capture American geography pretty well (U2's Beautiful Day is about the best example I can think of), but try as they might, they still can't beat the American classics. Stuff like Free Fallin' and Me and Bobby McGee. But,again, even annoying American music still gives you the feeling of America. Kid Rock makes me feel like I'm driving through a bad part of Memphis and what's-her-name, that girl who sings Sunrise, Sunrise, makes me feel like I'm on a winding tree-lined road in one of the Carolinas. Good stuff, American music.

But if you love Latin America or any other place, you love its music too. I think when you fall in love with the land, the music captures you. I love Central American folk music, and I love Central American rap, though I have listened to a very small portion of both.

Sophia calls bellybuttons "Dada." It is pretty funny, especially since she seems to be more certain of that word than she is of calling Jordan "Dada." She will lift up her shirt and take your finger and poke it in her bellybutton, saying Dada all the while. If she hears you say something sounding like Dada it will remind her to look at her bellybutton, or yours, if it's more accessible. It's pretty adorable.

Melissa, my sister, reported that the best part about her birthday was that it was the fourth day in a row that she and Karl saw dolphins. They apparently play with the boat, swimming along with it. They are off the coast of South Carolina now and beginning to think about when to head towards the Bahamas. I can't help but wonder if her whole journey originated because of the part in A Severe Mercy where the author talks about floating around the Caribbean on a sailboat with his wife like two brown nuts. Yum, what an image. I also wonder what it's like for my sister and her boyfriend to not really have a normal schedule of the future. I need to ask her what her mental timeline is like... ten years sailing around the globe a few times and then maybe settling in a bungalow in Southern Thailand... I don't know. I don't believe they'll ever go back to normal jobs, and I will eat my shoe if I'm wrong.

I wonder if Sophia would be scared of the dolphins if we were on the boat. Maybe not, since they wouldn't be doing somewhat unnatural tricks.

Jordan and I watched An Inconvenient Truth (which my brother jokingly refers to as A Convenient Truth since it is pretty nice having such a warm winter) last night. It was both better and worse than I expected (a little too political, but pretty interesting--the dying polar bears and baby birds made me want to cry), but it successfully convinced me that Global Warming is occurring and that it is pretty darn significant. I had previously thought that maybe our current global warming could be attributed to a natural cycle or something, which I now know is not true. Furthermore, good old Mr. Gore explained that of the over 900 peer-reviewed journal articles on studies analyzing global warming over the last ten years _none_ of them indicated that global warming was not a problem. The disconnect occurs because over 50% of reports published by the media suggest that the evidence is not conclusive... which is a lie, since it is conclusive.

One other problem with blogging is that you always feel like you are repeating a story you've already told when you tell someone or say something similar to something you wrote on your blog.

Note to My Morning Jacket fans: The lead singer and the guy who waves his very long curly hair around over the drums (the drummer) both appear a couple times in Elizabethtown, despite the fact that the movie pretty much sucks. Since Jordan and I unfortunately happen to own a copy of the movie, notify us and we will mail/lend it to you so that you don't have to rent it yourself if you want to see it.

Sophia and Jordan

These are the loves of my life thus far.

I filled up my shoe and brought it to you.

With what? What did you fill the shoe with, Bob?

Well, I am doing a couple things right now. 1) The blog I wrote yesterday was the boring-est thing anyone has ever composed, so I thought I needed to do myself a favor and write another blog, so that whoever reads this thing will continue to do so and not be so turned off by my depth of dullness. 2) I finally created a blog on blogspot called jungledream. I am not sure if I will really start blogging there, because I love this myspace template and I am really terrified of losing my momentum if I switch over to the generic brand. Furthermore, I am a person who gets attached to old stuff. If it works, why change it? I like this Myspace blogging, as disfunctional as it may be. I don't really care if it is hard for people to get to. In fact, I like it that way. And blogging on Myspace seems like its so unintentional, like I don't really blog or feel like I am trying to get people to read the stupid junk I write. Finally, I am afraid that noone will be able to locate my crappy blogspot blog, and I vow to never send out a mass email to my friends saying "Hey! Check out my new blog on....." That would suck. It would be absolutely destined for failure then.

I'm having another problem which has led me to create a new blog. That problem is the fact that I am running out of beloved Bob Dylan songs. I thought the day would never come, but it's becoming harder and harder to find a good lyric that comes quickly to mind from a song I've never used before. That means I need to 1) buy some new Dylan albums; 2) start using other lyrics from songs I've already used, or 3) start using less interesting lyrics from songs I like less. Any thoughts? I doubt it.

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday. I want to write an ode to her. She is on her boat. Sailing to the Caribbean. I love that girl. Or woman, maybe I should call her. Perhaps I can fill a shoe with something and mail it to her. But how do you mail something to a sailboat? Darned if I know. But there must be a way... But by tomorrow!?

The other problem with blogging is that while I'm doing it, I think of all the million other things in the world I could be doing. When you are doing any one thing, there are infinite other activities you are not doing. For example, just within our apartment, I could be cleaning, filing papers, drawing, folding laundry, writing a letter, doing yoga, making cookies, doing a project I can make money for, or hanging pictures. It's stressful. And that was just the list of stuff that quickly popped into my head. I have this same mental agony about living here in Oak Park. I will never get to spend this day or year of my life living anywhere else, and there are a lot of places I could be living, many of them being beaches and/or islands.

One quick thing I am always wanting to blog about, despite the fact that it really doesn't seem to go in this particular blog, is the fact that everyone has secrets. I was at a party some time ago, hanging out with all these cute, interesting, healthy, normal people, when it occurred to me that so many of them had really dark secrets from their past that not many of the other people (if any at all) knew about them. Stuff like rape, bulimia, serious drug abuse, abortion, sexual abuse, you name it. For some reason, people have told me many secrets. I am pretty good at keeping them, and I never forget them. They make life seem much more gritty and they make humanity much more human. I believe it is so important to share secrets. It makes you realize you aren't alone. I bet many of those people at that party assumed everyone else was healthy and perfect and devoid of dark secrets--that they were the only one pretending they were normal and hiding a checkered past. And it's just not true. We all have stuff we're hiding and wishing never happened. That's one of the other crazy things about life.

This couple at our church has been waiting to go to China for over 30 years. The husband is an ethnomusicologist, which is just a cool fact. The wife went for one year when she was in college, and she has been thinking she would be returning soon for, yes, the last 30 years. During that time, they've had about five kids, at least one grandchild, and some difficult times. The wife was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, just as they were making final preparations to depart and begin their life in China. So, they had to postpone the journey yet again. Over the last year I've watched all her hair fall out and start growing again. She doesn't cover it up or hide it. I hardly know them, but every time I see her, she makes me cry. I love her so much. Well, she has completed her chemotherapy and they are moving to China... next week!!! Can you believe it? A dream fulfilled. I won't be surprised if something else happens to delay the trip again, but I believe it is really going to happen this time. What a crazy world we live in. Nothing happens the way we think it will.