today is my dad's 52nd birthday, and we're celebrating it the same way we've done for years... having the extended family over for dinner and the live musical entertainment of my dad, uncle, and aunt. both my father and uncle are classically trained musicians, dad on tabla and uncle on harmonium, and my aunt is a trained singer. so when they play together, sparks fly. they sing the old old indian songs that they've sung all my life, songs that they grew up with, and re-created for me to grow up with. i close my eyes and listen, and sometimes secretly sing along in my mind, and sometimes, i get a lump in my throat because the next thing i know, i feel fireworks in my stomach, and i feel nothing but love. and, every year, my clandestine emotions that stay deeply seeded in my thoughts for the other 364 days , pop to the surface, and spark my dreams all over again.

... a lot of people say that loneliness is the worst feeling in the world, but i find something exciting about it. when i feel truly lonely, i sometimes get this rush of hope, this feeling of expectation, this sense of optimism... as if i'm bursting with so much love and passion and friendship that i'm just so ready and willing to give and receive. i don't know, call it masochism, tragic optimism, whatever. i think that that's why when love does come around, in all forms, i'll able to really appreciate it and hold on to it.

i went to hillary's house a couple of weeks ago. we played with the camera 

my teacher's teacher has come from india for the summer so i've been dancing everyday for the past two weeks. i love it. i've learned two new incredible dances -- and painful. so painful. but i love every second of it. it's indescribable watching sarma sir (my teacher's teacher) choreograph. it's as if he closes his eyes and zooms out of everything and under his breath he hums the melody and on his fingers counts the beats and weaves them together into the most complex combinations... its crazy. it's so inspiring. i love this

My cousin is one of People's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors.
It's so strange. I'm very proud... and all of a sudden my parents are starting to like my ideas. Or at least they aren't objecting to it all as much, which is nice. I hope it's progress.

"My Fatal Flaw

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw: my inability to change.
I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still... It feels safer somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took that leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected... Who knows what other pain might be out there, waiting for you. Chances are it could be even worse.
So you maintain the status quo. Choose the road already traveled and it doesn't seem that bad. Not as far as flaws go. You're not a drug addict. You're not killing anyone... Except maybe yourself a little.
When we finally do change, I don't think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion, where all of a sudden we're a different person. I think it's smaller than that. The kind of thing most people wouldn't even notice unless they looked at us really close. Which, thank God, they never do.
But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference. And you hope this is it. This is the person you get to be forever... that you'll never have to change again. "

i didn't write it, but i wish i had
anyway, i can identify

Who knew cake could be so much fun? (Una and Jennifer did!) 

Love and Genes Can Beat Poverty -Study

Wed May 26, 6:15 AM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!



LONDON (Reuters) - Love and genes can overcome even the most abject poverty, according to a study into the effects of environmental factors on child development.



The study of 1,116 mothers and their five-year-old same-sex twins in poor households in England and Wales found that poverty did not have to be a life sentence and the right combination of parental care and genetics could triumph over adversity.


"Children in our study experienced more than just poverty as measured by family income level, Julia Kim-Cohen of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London wrote in the May issue of the journal Child Development.


"Living in the poorest neighborhoods, their homes were rated as being overcrowded, damp or in disrepair," she added.


The study differentiated between twins sharing all the same genes and those sharing only half.


It showed that genetic makeup does play a role in the ability of children to rise above their poverty and not suffer behavioral or cognitive setbacks, but it was not the whole answer.


"The warmth, mental stimulation and interest that parents pay toward their young children can make a big difference in their children's lives," Kim-Cohen said.


Fellow researcher Terrie Moffitt said they only studied mothers because in many of the poorest households the father was absent, so trying to look at both parents in families where the father was still present would have skewed the study.


"The main point of the research is that neither genes nor poverty can determine a child's fate," Kim-Cohen said.



.... fascinating... just how many mothers with five-year old twins living in poverty are there in England and Wales? (around 1,600, i guess)

The Essay I’ll Never Send

I am not a genius. In fact, I’m far from it. I’m even, dare I say it, a drama kid. I hope you’re sitting down for this one. For most of my life I’ve been labeled as “gifted” by teachers and administrators because of what I think is one of the greatest stunts ever pulled. You see, my brother is an intelligent bastard. I say this in the most admiring, caring, little-sister way. Because my brother’s impeccable ability to not only grasp information, but to use this knowledge to his advantage in argument (which is one of his greatest hobbies) not only accidentally labeled me as one of his kind (simply because we are of the same kin), but supported this suspicion (for my brother would fight to the death if I were considered incapable in any way by anyone other than himself.)
My parents are smart cookies. And I guess, scientifically, hereditarily, logically, they produced smart offspring. But like I said, I’m really not as intelligent as everyone thinks I am. But here I am, selling myself to you like so many others, wrapped up neat and clean in a little package ready to be opened. I am who you are looking for: Driven, Motivated, Determined, and Redundant. It is in this twisted form of prostitution that we all await your Judgment, the way we have been taught to await it; with the knowledge that your decision will significantly alter our futures.
Well-- let –me--tell -- you Mr. Undergraduate Admissions Honcho, as well qualified and perceptive as you may be, this is one future you can’t change. Because I’ve got one thing that you really can’t see on a transcript, or even on paper for that matter. I’ve got the thing that separates the gifted in life from the gifted on paper. I’ve got It. I can feel it in my veins, pumping through my blood; I can see it in my reflection; I can hear it in my head. I’ve got that one indescribable, incomparable, irreplaceable quality that no one can actually put their finger on. And I have every intention of being famous. I’ll win a Nobel Peace Prize, or an Academy Award-- or maybe both. You’re kids will know my name- your kids’ kids will know my name. And I will do great things in the world- you can bet on it. How’s that for Gifted?

I have a tendency to frighten people. Not intentionally, of course. And not in the Oh-my-god-look-at-that-thing-growing-out-of-her-head sort of way, but rather in the Oh-good-god-what’s-wrong-with-her sense. You see, I’m a rather excitable person, and in my mere 5-foot-1 frame, I can easily be mistaken for a rampant dwarf. While most people would consider this flamboyancy a negative trait, I find it to be the single most enhancing aspect of my life. I don’t use the term “enhancing” loosely; I mean it in the very sense of the word. I mean that I derive more pleasure from a plastic spoon than most do from a full-length feature film. I often talk to myself in my own quirky banter, pausing only to nod hello to a friend or say “excusez-moi” to an imposing trashcan. And yes, though it earns me awkward stares and muffled giggles, it never seems to make me think twice about myself-- because that’s who I am.
So, who am I? I must be pretty safe in my own skin to be able to receive such reactions. The answer is nonexistent, largely because I really don’t know who I am quite yet, nor who I’m going to be for that matter; but this makes more sense for a 16-year-old someone than for a 40-year-old someone pushing mid-life crisis. In an age where catharsis is as close by as your nearest plastic surgeon, “finding yourself” has become a staple in everyone’s diet. But what I’ve found after years of Oprah and MTV is that we are not just made up of a conglomeration of places and people and experiences, we are made of clay: malleable and ever-mutating clay. This mutability has created some of the most brilliant minds and the most innovative people- the ones who took advantage of their constantly changing personas. I guess that’s where the acceptance should be; not of who you are, but of the truth that you might not be the same person tomorrow. And maybe that’s what makes life so exciting; that you can get to know yourself a little bit more everyday, and just when you think you know who you are, you can surprise yourself. It keeps life from getting boring- and that’s one thing I refuse to be: boring.
So I continue to walk with myself, not ignoring the varied reactions from passers-by but rather acknowledging them with a smile. I’m just getting to know myself before everything changes; it’s only a matter of time.

June On The West Coast
by Bright Eyes

Album : Letting off the Happiness



I spent a week drinking the sunlight of Winnetka, California
Where they understand the weight of human hearts
You see, sorrow gets too heavy and joy it tends to hold you
With the fear that it eventually departs
And the truth is I’ve been dreaming of some tired tranquil place
Where the weather won’t get trapped inside my bones
And if all the years of searching find one sympathetic face
Then it's there I'll plant these seeds and make my home
I spent a day dreaming of dying in Mesa, Arizona
Where all the green of life had turned to ash
And I felt I was on fire, with the things I could have told you
I just assumed that you eventually would ask
And I wouldn’t have to bring up my so badly broken heart
And all those months I just wanted to sleep
And though spring, it did come slowly, I guess it did its part
My heart has thawed and continues to beat
And I visited my brother on the outskirts of Olympia
Where the forest and the water become one
And we talked about our childhood
like a dream we were convinced of
That perfect, peaceful street that we came from
And I know he heard me strumming all those sad and simple chords
As I sat inside my room so long ago
And it hurts that he’s still shaking from those secrets that were told
By a car closed up too tight and a heart turned cold
And I went to San Diego, and the birthplace of the summer
And watched the ocean dance under the moon
There was a girl I knew there, one more potential lover
I guess that something’s gotta happen soon
Cause I know I can’t keep living in this dead or dying dream
As I walked along the beach and drank with her
I thought about my true love, the one I really need
With eyes that burn so bright, they make me pure
They make me pure, they make me pure
I long to be with you
They make me pure, they make me pure
I long to be with you

When I was fourteen, I slept alone on a North Dakota football field under the cold stars on an early spring night. Fall progresses early in the Red River Valley, and I happened to hit a night when frost formed in the grass. A skunk trailed a plume of steam across the forty-yard line near moonrise. I tucked the top of my sleeping bag over my head and was just dozing off when the skunk walked onto me with simple authority.
Its ripe odor must have dissipated in the frozen earth of its winterlong hibernation, because it didn't smell all that bad, or perhaps it was just that I took shallow breaths in numb surprise. I felt him—her, whatever—pause on the side of my hip and turn around twice before evidently deciding I was a good place to sleep. At the back of my knees, on the quilting of my sleeping bag, it trod out a spot for itself and then, with a serene little groan, curled up and lay perfectly still. That made two of us. I was wildly awake, trying to forget the sharpness and number of skunk teeth, trying not to think of the high percentage of skunks with rabies, or the reason that on camping trips my father always kept a hatchet underneath his pillow.
Inside the bag, I felt as if I might smother. Carefully, making only the slightest of rustles, I drew the bag away from my face and took a deep breath of the night air, enriched with skunk, but clear and watery and cold. It wasn't so bad, and the skunk didn't stir at all, so I watched the moon—caught that night in an envelope of silk, a mist—pass over my sleeping field of teenage guts and glory. The grass in spring that has lain beneath the snow harbors a sere dust both old and fresh. I smelled that newness beneath the rank tone of my bag-mate—the stiff fragrance of damp earth and the thick pungency of newly manured fields a mile or two away—along with my sleeping bag's smell, slightly mildewed, forever smoky. The skunk settled even closer and began to breathe rapidly; its feet jerked a little like a dog's. I sank against the earth, and fell asleep too.
Of what easily tipped cans, what molten sludge, what dogs in yards on chains, what leftover macaroni casseroles, what cellar holes, crawl spaces, burrows taken from meek woodchucks, of what miracles of garbage did my skunk dream? Or did it, since we can't be sure, dream the plot of Moby-Dick, how to properly age parmesan, or how to restore the brick-walled, tumbledown creamery that was its home? We don't know about the dreams of any other biota, and even much about our own. If dreams are an actual dimension, as some assert, then the usual rules of life by which we abide do not apply. In that place, skunks may certainly dream themselves into the vests of stockbrokers. Perhaps that night the skunk and I dreamed each other's thoughts or are still dreaming them. To paraphrase the problem of the Chinese sage, I may be a woman who has dreamed herself a skunk, or a skunk still dreaming that she is a woman.
Skunks don't mind each other's vile perfume. Obviously, they find each other more than tolerable. And even I, who have been in the presence of a direct skunk hit, wouldn't classify their weapon as mere smell. It is more on the order of a reality-enhancing experience. It's not so pleasant as standing in a grove of old-growth red cedars, or on a lyrical moonshed plain, or watching trout rise to the shadow of your hand on the placid surface of an alpine lake. When the skunk lets go, you're surrounded by skunk presence: inhabited, owned, involved with something you can only describe as powerfully there.
I woke at dawn, stunned into that sprayed state of being. The dog that had approached me was rolling in the grass, half-addled, sprayed too. The skunk was gone. I abandoned my sleeping bag and started home. Up Eighth Street, past the tiny blue and pink houses, past my grade school, past all the addresses where I had baby-sat, I walked in my own strange wind. The streets were wide and empty; I met no one—not a dog, not a squirrel, not even an early robin. Perhaps they had all scattered before me, blocks away. I had gone out to sleep on the football field because I was afflicted with a sadness I had to dramatize. Mood swings had begun, hormones, feverish and brutal. They were nothing to me now. My emotions had seemed vast, dark, and sickeningly private. But they were minor, mere wisps, compared to skunk.

~ Louise Erdrich

Jill's mom brought me back an English-Tagalog translation book from the Phillipines and it is the coolest thing. i can say all sorts of things like...

"kailangang aregluhing panibago ang karburador."

"the carburetor needs readjusting"


and

"Walang bagong aklat si Pedro"

"Pedro does not have a new book."

last night i had my dance class and it was wonderful. it was one of those classes that i have once in a while where i leave with butterflies in my stomach. the dance im learning is so beautiful, its not difficult to learn it because it goes so well with the music, its hard to believe that one came before the other, it feels like they were created together, for eachother. its amazing.
i remember watching senior dancers when i was 9 years old in awe. i used to hope to dance like them, i still do. its so weird and surprising to feel close to something like that. its amazing.

Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was highest, a great pine-tree stood, the last of its generation. Whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this old pine towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away. Sylvia knew it well. She had always believed that whoever climbed to the top of it could see the ocean; and the little girl had often laid her hand on the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully at those dark boughs that the wind always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below.

There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and silly Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it, with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird's claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself. First she must mount the white oak tree that grew alongside, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak's upper branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close together. There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the great enterprise would really begin.

She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, and took the daring step across into the old pine-tree. The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons, the pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff as she went round and round the tree's great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn, yet it seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine-tree, and the child knew that she must hurry if her project were to be of any use.

The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing its way from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet-voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and held away the winds that June morning while the dawn grew bright in the east.

Sylvia's face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when before one had only seen them far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages; truly it was a vast and awesome world.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett

i found this on a fellow blogger's blog... its an article about courtney love from rolling stone. im not a fan of either, but its engrossing and damn good work.
http://www.rollingstone.com/features/featuregen.asp?pid=2904

So yesterday my brother officially decided that he's going to go to berkeley. i fully support his decision... such a great school, in such a wonderful area... with an urban outfitters so close by! how can you go wrong!?everythngs going to be really really quiet without him though. its gonna be weird

today i had my first official swim mete as an individual swimmer. i swam the 50 free and 100 free and placed 2nd and 1st, respectively. it was so exciting. im very happy about it. its kind of weird because these past weeks ive been so bothered by swimming and ive been resisting the idea of quitting (which i wont let myself do) and ive been dealing with a couple of mean girls on the team. i wish i could say that ive been trying my hardest but i havent and now i think im ready to swim like hell.

un malheur ne vient jamais tout seul

today my brother and i decided to take two separate routes home (something we never do) because he wanted to go to mcdonalds and i wanted to go to sav-on. i always take forever in sav-on because i get so caught up with the sales and the shampoo and the chapstick and the candy that it takes me far too long to get out of the store. when i got home i expected to arrive after my brother, because he does know how to go through those fast food lines fairly quickly, and i did. i went to my room and as i was putting away my newly acquired chapstick and mentos i heard my brother screaming my name. i responded, kind of startled by the worry in his voice, and i he came to me so relieved and told me that he thought i had been abducted and was getting ready to go look for me. he told me that he said to himself, "the last time i ever see my little sister she's wearing jeans and an orange shirt!" i smiled and said, "i'm wearing purple."