New New

Why hello there, funny seeing you here.  I'm retiring this blog.  I can never delete it, so many wonderful blogs and comments spanning all the way back to 2005, I was 22, now I'm 5 mos from 30.  But I want to start fresh so I'm directing you to my new blog which I'm still tweaking but will be where I chronicle my time in Florida and my life from here on out!  Hope to see you!

Day 5

Hey! Day 5 of Kevin Powell's 30 Day Fitness challenge is finito.  Switched it up today went to a community (FREE) Bikram yoga class and really felt cleansed afterwards.  I've really been debating how to reign in my eating and have decided to do a variation of the Subway diet.  I will eat cereal for breakfast and then have a foot-long sub everyday, half for lunch, half for dinner.  Also supplement with fruit and steam-fresh veggies.  Something I can manage that will also help me budget and pull away from fast foods.  I weighed in on Wednesday at 199lbs, precariously close to 200, I haven't been over 200 since 2006 and will keep it that way.  175 is my goal and I know I can achieve it with discipline and by putting my wellness first.  25 days to go and of course continued fitness and a healthier lifestyle to follow the month of June!

5AM Resolutions

Since I'm up with the birds instead of in bed; I am resolving to do Kevin Powell's 30 Day Workout Challenge.  30 days of physical activity.  I need a push.  It's been a month since I've been to my gym that I'm paying a grip for.  So Wednesday it begins.  Will be updating daily as a means of motivation. 

Touching Base

   April, finally! 3 weeks of Spring semester left, short break, then right into Summer Session till late June.  Hopefully Cabo for 4th of July. Maybe Daytona for little cousin's HS graduation next month. These are my plans for the bulk of Spring/Summer season and I'm excited. Another summer free from working, another summer (hopefully) spending random nights in BK or taking road trips that put unnecessary mileage on my lease! I am hoping no one schedules a final April 25th so that I can go to Canada from the 22nd to the 1st of May. Fingers crossed. I miss Sasha and Seb and crazy Theresa! Mom is still everywhere but home but she's always within reach when I need her so why complain. English class can't end soon enough as the professor is everything I will never be as a teacher.  These next 2 weeks I need to buckle down and finish papers and study for finals.  Then I can decompress from a fairly enjoyable semester, and a highly successful 1st year of college. 2nd time's a charm, say I, newly inducted member of Phi Theta Kappa (Alpha Theta Theta chapter). I need to consider where I will transfer to obtain my BA and if I'm ready to once again venture out of state (I believe so). 

   On the romantic tip, it was a rocky start to the new year, I find myself letting my inner angst shine through more, being more vocal about shit I don't like, and pushing men away faster. Painful, hard to accept, sometimes hard to palette. But necessary! I can't approach relationships with my same aim to please, non-confrontational approach I apply to other aspects of my life. I need someone who can deal with my particular brand of crazy, who actually finds humor in it and a perverse attraction to it! I have really come to appreciate one person in particular, as he has come through for me for two major events and has been steady and consistent since we met this summer. As I told him, I think there's more to our story than our current friendship and I'm excited to see what may come.

   Friendships have grown stronger, I am without some key players and have gained new prospects. But the usual suspects Schnovey, Xica, Nia, Steph...they are all still down. I haven't always been the best friend possible, but I have been myself, and sometimes you have to let go of people who clash with who you are at your core. Discussed this with Karen she mentioned it's good to have friends that are different than you...yea, to a point, and then it's fucking annoying.
   So the future is mine to shape and embrace. I'm happy! I'm successful! My priorities are slowly shifting towards more adult endeavors, I can actually see my goals on the horizon, so life is great. The end.

You Probably Think This Poem Is About You

You probably think this poem is about you

In fact this poem could never be about you

I've written this poem before

I've felt this disappointment before

I have even, in earnest, vowed never to be here again--before

Never have any of my poems been about you, or anyone

I've realized just now that they are always about me

The exhausting Ground Hog Day of my life

Producing the same outcome

Me, alone

Me, moving on

Me, repeating the same choices

Me, writing another rambling poem

Trying to quantify my emotions

You probably think this poem is about regret

In fact this poem could never be resentful

I've written that poem before

I've wallowed in my angst before

Turns out this poem is really about life

As I've never lived this particular life before

Every experience is welcome

Soon Come

Poem for South African Women 

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Written by June Jordan (1936 - 2002)

I have been in a pause.  I just started reading Alice Walker's "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For" and she speaks of "the pause, the universal place of stopping...the universal moment of reflection."  I have stopped writing and I reflect on my life's journey to this moment often.  I sit in silence in my 3rd floor room and drift off into afternoon naps.  I ponder deep and shallow issues at stop lights.  I pause often.  I feel a shift in my spirit and suddenly the thoughts and feelings I kept bottled inside are once again ready to be recorded and shared.  So perhaps soon I will write again.  Maybe not!  But deep inside I feel that tugging and when the desire is strong enough I will submit.  Life is taking interesting turns, I am rolling with it.  School is going awesomely!  I am pulling down As left and right and am planning on finishing my first semester strong!  I am having a consuming textual relationship with someone, it fills my days with laughter and inappropriateness and I love it.  Mom is still floating back and forth between here and Canada, but Gran is coming from Haiti soon so she'll be back more permanently.  I am happier than sad, calmer and less frustrated.  I am much closer to 30 than I once was and can look back and accept the life I've lived thus far, what a gift. 

Textual Relations

10/13/10 - The last two weeks I've established a textual relationship with an old crush...the chemistry is amazing.  Like a volcano the vibe is casual but bubbling underneath is an emotional lava river, both of us wondering when to erupt and let it flow.  Perpetual singleness can leave you in an attention-needing - slightly desperate head-space.  I need to evaluate my motivations, my honest feelings.  Then again aren't emotions always honest in the moment, no matter what the catalyst?  I have been imagining marriage, children, my possible future with the men I've dealt with my entire life, much more seriously the past few years.  Some fantasies seem more attainable than others.  What am I willing to compromise in order to achieve my ideal family?  How honest can we both be?  And for how long?  Questions like this surface when I realize I feel a way about someone.

10/15/10 - Feelings are cool.  I've learned over the years not to let them get away from me.  It was an interesting day.  Saw my very first crush, someone I met when I was 9 years old in 4th grade and asked out on the phone (dying of embarrassment) in 5th grade, and it was like coming full circle from that shy middle-schooler to the outgoing lady I am today.  We basically caught up over lunch and it was nice to know that time puts everyone on an even playing field.  As far as my textual relations, he has definitely helped me stay focused on school by being my main male interest while being out of reach.  He remains just that, out of reach, and the realities of that distance are realer than anything.   

Fair to Middling

My older cousin always replies to my "how are you" question with "fair to middling."  I've been better than that since this summer and am carrying my contentment into the fall and new year.  I know I have a lot of untapped potential; career potential, physical potential, life potential.  I have to address all of these facets in order to claim authority over my happiness.  Being in school has really helped renew my self-esteem and has given me motivation that I want to extend into an ailing arena, my health.  I have always struggled with my horrendous eating habits and lack of discipline and self-control. When I was at my heaviest, it was less over-eating than the effects of medication, but still the lowest point in my exterior journey.  So now that I am my average weight, I really want to push past this fair to middling body and expose my true potential!  I believe I can do it, I just have to find way to reconfigure my lifestyle so that I can eat better and stay active without feeling like I'm missing out on indulgences.  It's never been easy to rationalize feeling deprived or miserable chasing someone else's standard of beauty.  What I'm realizing is that I want to be the leading lady in my own life, a concept I embraced from the movie "The Holiday."  So I've jumped the gun and decided to recommit myself to my fitness and emotional development, (weight loss and blogging) and these are my two pre-year resolutions!  2011 get ready!

Growing Older Not Wiser

My mother.  My mother is both free-thinking and liberal and the most childish, emotionally stunted person.  She asks me for $60, I give her $20 right away.  Later she says let's make it $100.  WTF.  I'm on unemployment.  I get less than $300 a week and have a $400 per month car note.  Are you serious?  Today I give her $30 more because that's all I can afford to part with.  I have a life, it takes money to socialize.  She comes in my room inquiring about the balance, irritated that I can't pony up the rest.  She sees I'm doing homework, reading at that.  She asks me if a book she brought with her is mine and I say no.  She continues to say, you must read this book, if you don't you won't be a good English teacher.  What?  I've had to deal with her manipulative, overwhelming personality my entire life.  This is why I can be so stubborn when I decide on something, because I'm hyper-defensive.  As I've matured, I've tried to be more communicative and less angry with my mother but she makes that virtually impossible.  I tell her to put the book in my closet on my bookshelf.  She does so begrudgingly.  I try to express my frustrations with her manipulative tones.  She avoids my confrontation, takes the book back and closes the door.  How am I supposed to be emotionally well-balanced with her as my model?  I feel like her love is a blessing and at once the most detrimental force in my development.  How am I to contend with her?  Is the answer as easy as separating our lives, our living situation?  I doubt it, she's my mother no matter the geography.  I doubt therapy is something she would participate in.  I can't even focus on my schoolwork right now.  I have to address this. 

All Matter

Bilal Oliver's new album Air Tight's Revenge is incredible.  I've been living off of First Born Second and his unreleased Love for Sale all of these years and finally his new music has arrived and breathed new life into me!  My favorite song "All Matter" asks, with yearning, "what is love?," answers descriptively "cool on the outside hot in the middle...you ain't even gotta try, all you gotta do is realize."  It's all matter.  That's what life boils down to.  Things composed of matter, colliding, interacting, reacting, loving.  On to that oh so elusive subject - love.  I feel like LL Cool J these days, needing love, hearing my conscience call.  Have I ever known love?  Have I ever held it in my heart and loved someone unconditionally?  I doubt it.  I doubt that romantic love is some latent ability that activates when you encounter your soul's mate.  Highly doubt it.  Instead I believe it is an accumulation of lessons you learn from significant others.  This is how you should love me.  This is not.  And so on.  My lack of relationships has me in a lurch.  Not enough lessons learned, which impedes my desire to learn with anyone new!  What a mess.  A lonesome mess.  My heart keeps telling me that I will know when someone is worth the agony, the trials of being taught to love.  So I will date with trepidation, and one day fall with my eyes wide open, into the most informative experience of my life.  Here's hoping. 

P.S.  Katie and I are going to see Bilal perform at BB King's tonight!  It's going to be an amazing day I hope I have the wherewithal to blog about it!