you know you're loved when...

you have a day like the one i had yesterday.

i woke up to find our apartment had been all decorated by my roommate - including cupcakes and all.

all day at work i get e-mails, text, google chats, etc from people wishing you a happy birthday - people i haven't seen in YEARS and people that i have no clue why they remembered it.

my sister made sure she went to her friends place late at night to make sure she was able to talk to me in spite of the 7 hour difference.

to top the night off, i had one of the best happy hours/dinner anyone can hope for... the restaurant was a revolving door for friends to swing by, from co-workers, to former co-workers, to people i see every now and then, to my closest friends - all speaking words of afirmation and love... couldn't ask for anything more.

if there's a great way to have a birthday, it was yesterday. here's to hoping that this is a premonition of the year to come!

to all of you, thank you.

and i'm 29.

happy birthday to me.

thank you very much.

good night.

on the eve of 29...

starting the 30th year of my life...

my life is definitely not where i would've thought it would go. all the twist and turns have been exciting and crazy and weird and unexpected... i'm loving every second of it... i'm waiting to be reawakened as well...

dear jesus, reawaken my soul...

let the birthday celebrations officially begin!

this weekend i'm going out of town with peeps that i love in order to celebrate my b-day... 29... as of next tuesday...

woohoo!!!

i might have just missed it

i'm not very practical or tangible for the most part. i live in the abstract realm of ideas and values where those are the driving forces for the tangible and practical things that i do... when you ask me how i do something it's hard for me to explain it. the why is easy to convey...

i forget that most of the world doesn't function in this manner... i forget that overall, i'm really different in this way. it's easy to feel alienated from my surroundings because most of the world around me is discussing the intricate details of the how..

i don't care about the how. i care about the why.

in the middle of loranger, louisiana this has become more prevalent than before...

then add all the mystic influences in my life...

through no ones doing, i feel excommunicated from the general community of god.

it is my responsibility to remind myself that i'm not excommunicated, that there are different forms of spirituality and that right now i'm in a group where i'm the minority.

reiterating - no one has said or done anything to intentionally affect me - this is my new existential crisis, if you will...

ps -in the next week or so look for a post on more transformational experiences after serving a day in new orleans...
pss - tim lahaye and his wife apparently wrote a book a while back about sexual purity... a book, that in my opinion and many of those around me right now, should either become a burnt offering or "left behind"... these peeps are funny...
pss - 7pm in episcopalian time means wine and cheese... gotta <3 them.

a new year

today officially starts the celebration of my birthday. i believe that birthdays should be celbrated for a whole month - my celebrations usually dwindle around valentine's day. i "blame" my mom for treating our birthdays growing up as national holidays... i believe mine still is and everyone around me celebrating a birthday should be treated likewise!

having my birthday so close to the beginning of the year has also meant that my yeras are well defined in that sense - it's easy to go back when i was little and say, "1982, i was four, i remember my first cabbage patch kid"...

growing older, i can go back and say, "1996, i was 18, first year where i allowed myself to be myself." or, "2001, i was 23, the year of the uprooting." "2004, i was 26, the year i officially became an adult, emotionally."

2006...

so many things have happened this year. if you've been near me, you've seen it, no need to recount. those of you far away that got the stories have collectivelly said, " you've had one really rough year..." those of you far away and that we haven't been able to catch up... well, the stories are too many and some of them too painful to send into cyberspace - we can find a way to sit down and catch up...

i can truly say that 2006 was the year when victimization of myself sounded like the best option and i fought my ass off to not fall into it... i believe i succeded with flying colors... it was the year when it was very easy to believe that there was something wrong with me because everytime i turned around somebody else was out of my life without me even realizing it. it was the year - and this is the most painful of it all - when solitude became seriously painful because whenever i went on to take care of myself and meet with god in solitude i would come back to find someone gone - and i allowed this pattern to pull me away from the one thing that gives me the most life. i was afraid to meet with god because it probably meant that someone was tangibly dissapearing.

it was also a year of reconnecting with some ideologies from my past that i had forgotten. i saw myself in a new light, a new light that really has been there all along. it was the year were a handful of my friends and i were able to sit across from each other and with glances and tears we were able to say, "we're in this together," while blowing up that which we had known. stronger bonds, stronger lives overall...

it was a year of redefinition - of home, life, work, identity...

i'll look back and say, "2006, i was 28, it was the year when innocense turned into hope."

ps - thanks to all of you who followed up on me regarding my previous post... the aftermath of suicide is a bitch! just remember that if the thought even crosses your mind!

angry

deciding to end your life might "end" your problems, but it also means that many problems will surface for those of us who love you. can't believe you were so selfish. i'm really angry at you right now!

it happens every time...

whenever i come back from puerto rico, the displacement kicks in. i've been gone for too long to fit in anymore - i don't quite fit in where i'm at either... it's a roundabout way of being reminded that true home is in god and nowhere else - so in a sense i'm lucky for having such a vivid reminder. it is painful as hell, though...

seeing so many people that i hadn't seen in a long time (see picture below for some of them) is very nourishing and gives you a sense of grounding. seeing new people, like little jaikob makes me so happy and extremely sad - i'm missing out on their lives down there...

but i've been gone too long - i'm just a blurb that shows up every year - not a constant in life.

in the united states, whether chicago or denver, finding that grounding stability is so hard... it took three years in chicago. denver feels a lot faster, still shaky ground nonetheless.

need to keep being me - with my "too much puertorican" on this end of the pond, and the "too much gringa" on the island... that's who i am right now - can't help it.

can't expect anyone to fully undersand either - that's the hardest part... people want and can empathize... however this does feel like one of those things that i need to deal on my own...

the prayer for this season is - jesus please be as real as you can be. i don't have the strength or energy to be proactive, so please show up. and open my eyes and awareness so i can see you - even in the littlest things, even in the buttloads of snow out... show me glimmers of hope and the comfort of home.

ps - i will post pictures from puerto rico soon - left the usb cable at my parents'... idiot, gah!

¡feliz año nuevo!

this is what a puertorican new year looks like...




and people have been getting creative...

running away from the snow...

we're supposed to get another foot of snow by friday afternoon...

good thing my flight leaves at 10:30am to go to puerto rico!!!

sweet.

christmas

hope

peace

joy

love

merry christmas to all.

here's a holiday treat...



two of the funniest people i know...

love - fourth sunday of advent

this one in my opinion encompasses it all. going back to my first post on advent, it was because of love that this all-powerful god came to earth through a birth cannal. not because love is a quality of his - but it is his ESSENCE. and luckily for me i've experienced glimpses of his essence in very personal, mystical ways and this week i've seen it in very practical ways...

-random strangers helping people push their cars when stuck
-"here, i live at such and such, take my shovel"
-a friend who gets her flight to go home cancelled because of the blizzard, and in the midst of the frustration, her "big" decision is where to go for christmas as invitations poured her way
-flurries falling on christmas eve, replenishing the snow on trees that had melted already - making it a white christmas (i believe tecnically my first one).
-and many others...

in the midst of it all - god is. jesus born to us. emmanuel. with us.

love.

a love that cries to make its way through humanity. a love born not to solve life's problem, but to allow us to live life to the fullest.

may the essence of the god that is love be with you on this last sunday of advent - also christmas eve.

what my neighborhood looks like

snowed in

i'm experiencing my first snow storm/blizzard... there are 15" on the ground and counting...


staying at some friends tonight... refuse to be alone tonight. horrible weather and emotionally all over the place.

i do find it sort of funny that i-70 is closed from denver to kansas... i-76 from denver to nebraska... yeah, interstates closed from my city til the next state... funny mostly because i'm indoors and safe.

yet again...

today was a very unexpected day...

a friend was having a hell of a time at work...

i found out at my job that through some weird twist of events our building will be completely closed next week - some sort of weird eviction...

and another friend decided that her life was too hard to keep living...

i haven't cried yet - the shock is too strong to let the floodgates open.

what could ever be so difficult to allow you to think that you're done? no, really, you're done.

i know it'll hit me tomorrow and perhaps it would not stop.

for now i'm in shock and grieving for my friend that was really close to her.

it feels too sudden to have something like this happen again... but i guess there's never really that much space in between...

yeah... the shock is too big right now - i pray that i may have a hard time keeping myself together tomorrow - this needs to be released...

i guess i'm a local now... people that i met in denver, that i love from denver, they're gone... i guess this is life to its full extent.

INDOOR LANAIS!!!!

that's the other thing i was supposed to blog about - hanging out in indoor lanais with friends having delicious desserts...

sunbathing at the indoor lanais... make sure you get an even exposure...

chedda

this posting goes out to some special peeps...

you know who you are...

i'm supposed to blog about football games...

i'm supposed to blog about something else, but i forgot...

damn you lucinda!!!!

seriously, this posting is an inside joke - sorry to all of you who won't get it - i usually don't do this but this was too good to pass...

if you would like explanations, call or e-mail - more than happy to do so...

joy - third sunday of advent

so it isn't sunday... i just got home from celebrating advent with some friends... as i mentioned earlier, we do get together on thursday nights... we're "cool like that, yo'..."

whenever i think of the word joy, the first thing that pops into my head is this song from this cantata that we did in puerto rico...

"joy to the lord in heav'n on high (joy to the lord)
joy to the lord in heav'n... on high...
the everlasting father, the prince of peace,
the everlasting father, the prince <> of <> peace
arise, shine, for your light has come,
your light has come...
and the glory of the lord is risen upon you arise shine
for your light has come..."

i realize this doesn't really make much sense when you don't know the melody... however, picture a bunch of late teens and twenty somethings in full choir robes doing cheesy on the spot choreographies and just having fun - these wasn't the actual performance, we would do this after the performance was done... to this day we can all break out into our different voice parts and have a mini cantata...

as weird as this account may be, those are times of joy in my life...

joy - the pink candle in the wreath - a glimmer of hope knowing that emmanuel will soon be with us.

the traditional story told during this time is the proclamation of the angel to the shepherds.

which leads me to another story...

so, back in puerto rico again, for a couple of years we did this HUGE christmas production outdoors. i was playing the angel. traditionally, it is said that this was the archangel gabriel, even though the story really doesn't name the angel. so traditionally you associate this angel as a man. well, i'm not a man. and the only way to get those wings to stay on me where to tie them in such a way around my chest that would sort of weirdly emphasize that, well, i'm not a man... what made this more awkward is that the whole show was pre-recorded - we were "lip-synching" our performances. The voice used for the angel was a man, Carlitos. Don't let the name fool you. Carlitos had a DEEP voice... hillarity for years to come...

but more on the actual shepherds of the time...

they were not old with beards - they were jr. high age. they lived in the country side tending sheep. that's all they did. and a heavenly body shows up and tells them that their savior has been born and that they will find them in a manger. so what do they do? the basically say, "ok..." and go looking for this baby.

let's backtrack a little... this kids have probably been taught that they are waiting for a political liberator of some sort. an angel comes to them, not to a rabbi, not to the powerful members of society, but to kids taking care of sheep. and when they get there, they see a baby. it's going to be at least 30 years until this "political liberator" does something.

yet the say, "ok"... they go, find this baby, and then go around telling the story.

there's a sense of innocent trust that i admire...

that i want...

there is some sort of promise for the future... yet they are able to be in their right here, right now an rejoice in that... not because of the future promise but because of their experience.

inexplicable joy... you experience it... and as it often is with joyous ocassions, you gotta go and tell someone... share in the joy...

in the middle of this season of my life, where many times i feel exhausted, when almost every night before going to bed i ask myself, "really?", when i feel like i've been running for way too long with no real water break in sight, i can honestly say that i'm able to live in this right here right now, that there's nowhere else that i'd rather be - and that the glimpses that i get along the road are enough to spur joy and keep trusting, and running...

and it doesn't hurt that i have some amazing people by my side in the process...

joy.

it doesn't mean to be happy.

it might be a definition for being.

ps - for those of you in puerto rico who remember that beautiful pageant:
barren: cannot have any children
mute: unable to speak
shoe: what you put on your foot
MIRA!!!!

a quick note

the beautiful thing about anonymous comments is that it allows my friends with no blogger account to leave messages, thoughts, expressions, emotions, you name it. it's amazing to me how many people read my random thoughts - it's even more amazing how this keeps me connected in some way with people in chicago and puerto rico, how a conversation grows and blossom from a blurb i threw up into cyberspace.

friends, whenever you leave a comment, please leave your name as well... if you know anything about me, you probably know that doing such things feel almost like innapropriate text messaging - passive aggressive and refusing to be. and that really pisses me off.

that being said, please keep commenting away - i do love it! and stay tuned for the next advent reflection - joy in the middle of expectancy.

peace - second sunday of advent

some of my friends and i are celebrating advent on thursday nights... call us "progressive"...

the concept of peace i believe is misconstrued... peace is usually associated with everything being calm and perfect. i find it that the moments i experience true peace are the moments where i don't know the difference from up and down.

traditionally, peace in advent is associated with the story of the annunciation to mary. talk about messed up worlds! a 14 year old finds out that she will have a baby in a society where doing so out of wedlock was deserving of stoning and shunning. yet somehow she seems to have that peace that surpasses all understanding.

maybe peace isn't the "miss congeniality" concept of "world peace"... maybe peace is keeping life in perspective, keeping the bigger picture in mind. what is a year when compared to a lifetime? this is not to minimize experiences or circumstance, yet in the midst of the upside down experience relying in the holy spirit to be the one that sustains, that empowers, that loves through me. that maybe instead of grasping i need to let go...

i've experienced it. i've lived it. and i wish i could say this is an ongoing experience...

i'm learning and getting better at it, but by no means an expert.

a genius from the 12th century said it best...

lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
when there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is dispair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.