"the merry blues..."
it's been a struggle lately. beacause of what, i'm not quite sure yet. i have isolated some suspects: el salvador, school, family. and i'm pretty much convinced that they're in on it together to make me feel so bleh. i sent adam, shani, & anthony the naughty and funny souvenirs i got them in el salvador... and as predicted, they liked them a lot... hehe, that was nice to know. anyway, last night i hung out with my sweetest of sweethearts, sandra. she introduces herself as sandy now, but i can't change my ways and shall continue to call her sandra until she pays me good money to quit. i ran some errands... blockbuster wouldn't accept the dvds i rented because i had kept them for too long... a bit more than a month... and i still had to pay some fees for them! once again, my account is overdrawn. damnit, i need a job. but the ambition, the motivation, it's left me... but that's another rant you'll read about in a bit. anyway, sandra and i... we hung out in leimert park! for those of you who don't know, leimert part is this chill enclave buzzing with a few coffeehouses, restaurants, galleries, and jazz and blues musicians, right here in the hood, off crenshaw boulevard, right by the loveably ghetto baldwin hills mall. rastafarian tony wanted my number, but i'm taking a vacation from men at the moment. and clarinet player james went off on a spiel about the ways that men should love us. we dined at augustine's... the food should have been better, but the jazz singer was wonderful. and it was the just the chill ambience sandra and i needed. as always, it was so good to spend time with her. i told her about everything that's been bugging me lately... the tiny new mole that appeared on my finger overnight and that i thought was cancerous... and the panic attacks that ensued when i found it. yeah yeah, furrow your brow in confusion, then have a good chuckle. lol i'm driving myself insane! i need to get out of the house more, damnit!!! but i need money for that damnit!!! lol anyway, it was good to have someone tell me to shut up and come back to reality. but i still need to shake off the feeling of pointlessness... i think i know the answer to that one... but i'm just not feeling it quite yet. when i was a hedonist, i thought the point of life was to have fun, pleasure of all sorts; when i was super religious, i thought the point of life was to be good and serve God, pray a lot; when i was a little girl, i thought the point of life was to help my mom have a better life (funny, it must have been vice versa for her); earlier this year, i thought the point of life was to live for your love and make each other happy; for a bit, i thought the point of life was to fight for the improvement of other people's lives, you know, the path of the activist; and up until recently, i thought the point of life was to just have wholesome fun ;) and be happy (in whatever cool, peaceful way that may be) and love everyone, you know the Golden Rule, but especially show your love to your closest friends. well, i don't know where i stand on the issue now. i'm leaning toward my most recent stance... but the fire within me is weak, and so goes my stance, and i'm thrown into a whirl of confusion... no, it's more like an abyss. like i'm feeling the answer in my head but not in my heart, if that makes any sense. anyway... in a nutshell, sandra and i are going through an insane mid-life crises in our very early twenties. lol ridiculous, i know, but at least i'm not alone.
earlier this week, we found out that my cousin roger was in another motorcycle accident. this one wasn't super serious like the one a couple of years ago... still, his eye needed some stitches, his leg was bruised up, his bike is totaled, and there's always a concern about him suffering head trauma again. but he's fine now. a couple of days later, my grandmother received a phonecall that an aunt of hers had pased away in el salvador. she cried. it's always sad to my viejita crying. and she continued to cook dinner for us. the aunt that died was a bit older than my great-grandmother, 92+. she's the first of four siblings to pass away, which means i've got some good genes... take that, silly new mole! lol my grandmother was especially sad because we weren't able to visit the lady when we were in el salvador, thanks to the storm. it was weird that night, my aunt mentioned that my grandmother should have a living will... and then she remarked that the older irma would probably leave everything to the younger irma (me)... it was such a weird topic... and through all the weirdness, i couldn't help but feel a bit honored... not that my grandmother is able to leave some gigantic inheritance, but just the thought that the little bit that she does have she may leave to me to dole out... but none of this will happen any time soon. it reminded me of the time, a few years ago, when she took another trip to el salvador... she was really, really worried... she was probably going to buy the property she has now, it must have had something to do with taking a large sum of money (large for us, that is) out of the bank (people watch, follow, rob, and kidnap or kill other people who come out of banks in el salvador)... before she left, she told me of all her secret stashes of money and who was supposed to get what... it was a verbal will of sorts. of course, i couldn't remember all of it and it scared me... but again, i felt some weird sense of honor that she chose to tell me, not my aunt or uncle. anyway, this has become a tangent.
well, sandra dropped me off pretty early last night. as tired as i was (i didn't sleep much the night before... and the night before that one), i couldn't fall asleep when i got home. i kept the tv on to distract me from heavy thoughts on the meaning of life, and the meaning of mine in particular. i think i slept for like two hours until my grandmother came in and turned off the tv... i've been catnapping since four thirty this morning. oh man, and it was another struggle to get my ass out of bed too. i can't quite figure it out. i have tons to do, settle into my room for one, unpack from both recent trips and the boxes i had shipped in may... but i can't fucking get myself to do it! sleep deprivation isn't helping. so this morning i watched one of the movies i was forced to keep... i'm glad they were good ones: Finding Neverland & Les Choristes. i watched Les Choristes, which was wonderful! and remembered how much i loved French, it's so beautiful... made me want to study it again. i read a couple of magazine articles with several references to French cuisine... and my pronunciation was not bad at all for a sloth who hasn't practiced in years. maybe i'll take that up again. and i've been listening to Manu Chao lately, which is making me want to take up Portuguese as well... it totally sounds like drunken Spanish, i love it!!! but i feel like my year is flying by fast and i'm just now starting to decide what to do with it. i updated my resume just this week and haven't sent it out to anyone... even though i've received a ton of notices about job offerings... i just can't get myself to respond to any of them. it's weird. i mean, for me, it's never been, and i'm sure it won't be, a difficult task to get hired. but i'm not motivated. probably because i'm forever tired. i still have the ambition, but nothing driving me. i think i'm worried that a good portion of my year has gone by already, so fast, and that really, it'll be just too short a time (i hope to move back to new haven by the end of april) to allow myself to enjoy any real success here. but i need the money damnit.
i think this can all be solved if my sleep were on track for once. but i don't want to tell my family that i've got insomnia, they'll worry. i haven't even told them about the tiny new mole that has me freaking out! lol damn, i can be silly sometimes. but i also don't want to take a sleep aid without letting them know... agh!!!!! that's it, i'm tired of being lazy. let me sum this thing up by letting you know that at the present moment, i am enjoying a cup of hot chocolate my grandmother made from chocolate patties we brought from el salvador, chocolate patties made from toasted and ground up cacoa beans... real cacoa!!! awww, real ingredients, that's so cool!!!! and claribel alegria is a beautiful writer. damn it, i missed I Love Lucy! peace.
earlier this week, we found out that my cousin roger was in another motorcycle accident. this one wasn't super serious like the one a couple of years ago... still, his eye needed some stitches, his leg was bruised up, his bike is totaled, and there's always a concern about him suffering head trauma again. but he's fine now. a couple of days later, my grandmother received a phonecall that an aunt of hers had pased away in el salvador. she cried. it's always sad to my viejita crying. and she continued to cook dinner for us. the aunt that died was a bit older than my great-grandmother, 92+. she's the first of four siblings to pass away, which means i've got some good genes... take that, silly new mole! lol my grandmother was especially sad because we weren't able to visit the lady when we were in el salvador, thanks to the storm. it was weird that night, my aunt mentioned that my grandmother should have a living will... and then she remarked that the older irma would probably leave everything to the younger irma (me)... it was such a weird topic... and through all the weirdness, i couldn't help but feel a bit honored... not that my grandmother is able to leave some gigantic inheritance, but just the thought that the little bit that she does have she may leave to me to dole out... but none of this will happen any time soon. it reminded me of the time, a few years ago, when she took another trip to el salvador... she was really, really worried... she was probably going to buy the property she has now, it must have had something to do with taking a large sum of money (large for us, that is) out of the bank (people watch, follow, rob, and kidnap or kill other people who come out of banks in el salvador)... before she left, she told me of all her secret stashes of money and who was supposed to get what... it was a verbal will of sorts. of course, i couldn't remember all of it and it scared me... but again, i felt some weird sense of honor that she chose to tell me, not my aunt or uncle. anyway, this has become a tangent.
well, sandra dropped me off pretty early last night. as tired as i was (i didn't sleep much the night before... and the night before that one), i couldn't fall asleep when i got home. i kept the tv on to distract me from heavy thoughts on the meaning of life, and the meaning of mine in particular. i think i slept for like two hours until my grandmother came in and turned off the tv... i've been catnapping since four thirty this morning. oh man, and it was another struggle to get my ass out of bed too. i can't quite figure it out. i have tons to do, settle into my room for one, unpack from both recent trips and the boxes i had shipped in may... but i can't fucking get myself to do it! sleep deprivation isn't helping. so this morning i watched one of the movies i was forced to keep... i'm glad they were good ones: Finding Neverland & Les Choristes. i watched Les Choristes, which was wonderful! and remembered how much i loved French, it's so beautiful... made me want to study it again. i read a couple of magazine articles with several references to French cuisine... and my pronunciation was not bad at all for a sloth who hasn't practiced in years. maybe i'll take that up again. and i've been listening to Manu Chao lately, which is making me want to take up Portuguese as well... it totally sounds like drunken Spanish, i love it!!! but i feel like my year is flying by fast and i'm just now starting to decide what to do with it. i updated my resume just this week and haven't sent it out to anyone... even though i've received a ton of notices about job offerings... i just can't get myself to respond to any of them. it's weird. i mean, for me, it's never been, and i'm sure it won't be, a difficult task to get hired. but i'm not motivated. probably because i'm forever tired. i still have the ambition, but nothing driving me. i think i'm worried that a good portion of my year has gone by already, so fast, and that really, it'll be just too short a time (i hope to move back to new haven by the end of april) to allow myself to enjoy any real success here. but i need the money damnit.
i think this can all be solved if my sleep were on track for once. but i don't want to tell my family that i've got insomnia, they'll worry. i haven't even told them about the tiny new mole that has me freaking out! lol damn, i can be silly sometimes. but i also don't want to take a sleep aid without letting them know... agh!!!!! that's it, i'm tired of being lazy. let me sum this thing up by letting you know that at the present moment, i am enjoying a cup of hot chocolate my grandmother made from chocolate patties we brought from el salvador, chocolate patties made from toasted and ground up cacoa beans... real cacoa!!! awww, real ingredients, that's so cool!!!! and claribel alegria is a beautiful writer. damn it, i missed I Love Lucy! peace.