carino de la manana

Woke up to absolute silence and dry heat. Outside my window and all around me still frozen in dreams, I roll over and smile. The tree outside my window is the most beautiful shade of green. What do you call that color? And when the sun attempts to break through the billowy clouds, it draws out highlights of orange. Call it a synesthetic craving, but I miss colors you can taste. This tree is pretty close to that. Not bad for upstate new york. I used to laugh at people who would write poetry about trees. I can't help it now, I'm seeing the world in verse again.

I'm understanding that life works in cycles, that all good has a bit of bad to follow. I've been feeling so many mixed emotions lately that I don't know which way is up, or what is good or bad anymore. I know what I want, and sometimes I get it. And when I don't I just let it flow through my hands. The emptiness of disappointment which tends to break us down can just be filled with love. Whatever pain is in my future, (and it could be a lot of things, things I can't talk about on here, but those of you who know me well enough can guess the big one), I hope that it can be mended and filled with love of some kind, hopefully before it's too late.

Think of ourselves as riverbeds- the water is love. It carves into us, it changes us and our direction. and in times of draught, it leaves us empty. But it leaves us empty so that we can be refilled someday. There is, however, a difference between the human heart and a riverbed- we can make it rain.

Bliss-rant

I'm buried beneath piles of work, and I do not care. I sleep with my window shades wide open, the hazy upstate new york night sky attempting to bleach my room with greys and whites, and failing miserably, colliding with its own reflection on the glass. We sit beneath a tent of blankets, telling stories of far away lands and times already past. I can't remember ever feeling so like myself. I wake up with a different language resting on my tongue, images of sunlit streets and vibrant colors that just don't exist in upstate new york- I wake with all these ghosts that you bring back to haunt me, but the intense feeling of longing is gone. So often I see myself the way others see me, but you- you must not distort me at all because when I'm with you, I'm just myself. There's no act, no censuring of my words- I always edit myself, but with you my actions run free. I don't even try anymore, just let the world guide me. Thanks to you, I've found a newborn faith in people, in love that isn't always passionate, but more caring. I feel this sense of happiness, but am afraid of it all being inside my head, that if I did break free and did disclose the one haunting shadow I've fought for so long, you'd reject me. And there's an element of mistrust on my end too. Are you still in love? There's nothing worse than picking up the pieces someone else left behind. Do you remember how? If you let me I will teach you, just as you unknowingly taught me. The only thing we have in life is each other, not just you and me but everyone else too. If we are all equals, we should all care for one another as such. I am sick and exhausted but I will stay up all night writing empty lines of psychology thesis, just to appear productive, but it doesn't even matter anymore. I'd do it for you too. I don't know how to thank you. I want to tell you that I'm ready for my heart to be broken again. I want you to be the one to break it.

a mi corazon

The first sunny day all year. Really sunny- sun you can drink and it's better than the strongest coffee. Sun like a drug. I've never seen so many smiles. It's an annual event here in the tundra, a part of this repetative, monotonous cycle of 9 months of winter and then BAM sunshine like liquid gold.
It put everyone in a good mood. Or perhaps it's the date that did it. We threw a party today: Greensfest. But I wasn't there to execute the plan. I left the hands on work for other members of SAV- mostly because I had a ridiculous amount of thesis work, but also because I wanted to see if they could do it without me. I have to say, I think they pulled it off quite nicely. Though there was a brief moment of crisis when we realized no one had extension chords, I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely things came together. I know I'm a bit controlling when I throw events, because I know what works and I know what doesn't, and so it was kind of difficult to just sit back and let other people run things. But in a way, it was a little nice. I actually enjoyed this event. It was great to see one of my Hill boys (his band came from syracuse last minute when our original band backed out) and it was the perfect way to unwind after being locked away in my lab for 6 (not exaggerating) hours straight, organizing data and creating fixation files.
Tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful too, and hopefully I'll be able to actually spend some time with a few people. I've been kind of isolated lately, just because of work. I get these moments of panic, especially in the morning, when I just realize that every moment that passes could've been spent doing something productive, and so I stop doing normal things like eating or sleeping. It's an awful habit, I know. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have the opportunity to just relax a bit and enjoy one of my last few weekends on campus.
I still can't believe it's almost over.

What are you doing?!

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Why is it that our society is so obsessed with planning ahead? Everyone knows that it's next to impossible to get a good, decent paying job right out of undergrad. The best jobs (in my opinion) aren't the one that you can just fill out an application for, send in your resume and bam! two weeks later you're hired. No. It's not like that anymore. Furthermore, I don't want a safe secure desk job. I really don't.
My parents are going to kill me- I got a private liberal arts college education, I majored in two very useful fields and somehow I *still* have no idea what I'm doing. If I could do anything? I'd drink coffee and write. I'd just sit around, happily caffienated and write and write and write. Should I be a writer? Probably not- deadlines aren't my thing. A teacher who writes on the side? Maybe- i don't know if I have the patience.
I went to the career center yesterday with a list of questions to ask that my parents gave me. I didn't ask them. I don't care about those things enough. I just want to know how I can best use my creativity without having it sucked out of me by some evil corporate vacuum. Non profits? Maybe that's where I'm headed. I keep going back to this place in my mind where I can chill out, where I can help others, where I can drink all the coffee I want and have poets and musicians perform, where there is a space for college artists and early twenty-something businesspeople to just relax and unwind. God I kind of want to open a cafe somewhere. My parents want to kill me.

Everybody I love you

So I'm starting to slowly say goodbye to this whole college deal. It's funny, while it was happening I never really realized that it was happening. I feel like I've spent the past 4 years waiting for this incredible college experience to descend upon me. And so many times I'm so tempted to say that "i didn't have a colleg experience" but once I start to think about it, I really did. What's more, I think it was in many ways ideal. I diden't recognize that it was happening while it was happening, which is simultaneously the beauty of the situation,as well as it's curse. When I think of college, I think, strangely enough, of the highschool yearbooks of the school I attended before I went to boarding school. It was the mid 90s, and each senior had their own page to decorate and draw all over any way they chose. Twenty or so pages, covered in inky black doodles and Jack Kerouac quotes, lyrics from Ani Difranco (even on the boys' pages, a phenomenon I was too young to appreciate back then) and Pink Floyd. Pictures of people in beat up vans driving across the country, acoustic guitars, long unwashed hair, flannel, barefoot hackey-sack games under thickening dogwood trees, clouds and smoke and sky sky sky. And I'm filled with this feeling of longing and slight dread- did I miss it? Did I miss it all? But then I wonder how we will be remembered. If some kid some day goes into the Hamilton archives and digs up pictures of my friends and I, in our flowing skirts and indie-rock tshirts, our hot pink signs labeled "Babes Against Bombs", our huge signs that spell "rock out for Darfur"- what will he think of us? Will a person like that exist at all, ten years from now? What kind of legacy am I leaving here, if one at all?
But as always, we see ourselves so differently than how others see us. Who knows, and who cares, really? I'm running psychological experiments for my thesis on some freshman today. Both participants so far asked me what I was doing next year. Too bad I didn't have an answer for them. Some want advice, about psychology and about college. My advice? 3 things:
1. Don't let your friends define you. Sure joining a society is cool and everything, but don't become the society. There's nothing worse than a person without an individual identity.
2. Be the change you want to see at college. Don't transfer just yet. What is it you want to fix? And then figure out how to fix it. Hamilton's so easy to change, you just have to learn to contact the right people.
3. If you're going to major in Psychology and you aren't sure about grad school yet DO NOT DO A YEAR LONG THESIS. Learn from my mistakes, you will thank me later. :)

So what now? I want to finish my thesis. I want it to be done, so I can enjoy my last few weeks at college. I want it to be sunny, so I can sit and watch the clouds on minor field again. And I want some killer music. Seriously.

Counting down

I'm soaking in every moment, and at times I feel as if I'm about to explode. A bomb of god knows what, which creates instead of destroys when it's detinated. I'm holding on to every second, every minute and loving it. Running my hands along walls hoping to create some tactile memory to keep with me, some memory of my youth and those "good old days" which were never very good at all. I don't want it to end, and yet I know I need to move on.
Somehow, I feel as if I've been exactly here before...

Semana Santa and Spiraling

Recieved a beautiful email from my dear Ava who is back in Granada. I miss her so much. Every so often I think about what I was doing this exact moment one year ago. It's strange how well I can remember it all, down to the very day. Memories like that help me persist through the bleak winter of upstate new york, which seems to stretch on and on for months past its expiration date. Where was I a year ago today? Well I believe I had just broken my tendon in my foot, so I was in bed, with my foot elevated. I remember hearing all the incredible music of the processions, and how the little boy I lived with would run into my room, grab my hand, pull me out of bed and drag me to the window to watch the spectacle. The air was hot and thick with incense perfumed smoke, and the horns and drums resonated with a noise that grabbed me inside and produced simultaneous fear and respect.How powerful the church once was! How terrible and awe-some was its power that it could reach into every aspect of diverse culture of so many countries and impose itself as fact! How many people died for it, and how many people died because of it! The atonal melodies, the cacophony, the gut-wrenching cries of the saetas,haunted me until late at night, filling me with both comfort and disgust. It was a perfect study on how music can elicit such emotions in one single phrase. Did I mention everyone was drunk? That too, because the death of the son of god is a perfect reason to drink a bottle of wine by yourself. Here I am, locked away in a science laboratory, working on my thesis, dreaming of far away lands and times already past. It's like Israel said to me upon our first meeting too long ago to mention: "Time isn't cyclical. It it isn't linear. It moves like a spiral, and at certain points, it all seems to line up perfectly. And everything will make sense, because you will realize that everything in your life has happened exactly the way it should."
So long I've been wishing this haunting feeling to leave me. So long I've wanted to be content where I am. But perhaps this discontentment is simply what I need to be feeling. This constant plaguing loneliness, the shyness which only seems to take over when I'm on this frozen campus, the way I feel misunderstood or misread, as if I have to make excuses for myself simply for being who I am- these things must pass. I want it to be sunny. I want it to stop snowing. I want to see Ava again, and hear her play the guitar on some street corner or in some plaza, giggling and smiling with all our companions, just being so glad to be alive. I want to tell her to wait for me, I want to tell the whole city to wait for me- that I'll come back some day if they'd only wait. But the beauty of the city, just like the beauty of life, is that once you have something incredible and recognize just how extraordinary it is, it changes completely.
And it's almost time for graduation, and I keep thinking about how they used to tell us "Don't change, you're perfect the way you are" or "Don't let the world change you" or whatever ridiculous advice they gave us at our highschool graduation. Don't let the world change me?! Of course I'm going to let the world change me. Without change there's only death. and even in death the memory of ourselves changes. Sometimes I love this life so much that I want to hold onto each moment, terrified I am going to forget something or someone or some feeling. I get anxious at the thought of moving on, leaving the past behind me. But then there are moments when I realize that the past never dies, that it follows you and haunts you in moments of solitude. It spirals and parallels your every movement. It emerges when you most need it, like 9am on Good Friday in upstate New York.