Thankful

• I am thankful for public universities that made graduate studies possible for me.
• For a library system that acquires books when they are not available on the shelf.
• For a laptop borrowing program in school where I can take em out for 4 hours within the school to do my powerpoint presentation in class.
• For desktop computers in the library and for writely.com so I don't have to bring with me a CD or flash drive every time I work on my paper.
• For the rain that makes the grass glisten when the sun comes out.
• And the cool, crisp November air that gets me excited for Christmas.
• Thankful for professors who inspire me to be the best that I can be
• And thankful for my professors who challenge me with their unrealistic expectations - they are actually bringing out the best in me.
• For flickr friends who amuse, teach and inspire me to take better photos.
• I am thankful for a childhood friend who has been and will always be the sister I never had.
• For a friend who knows me inside out and yet accepts me for who I am and who I am becoming.
• For classmates who became my friends - because they understand the way I feel, and the tough times I am going through because of school and its demands, intellectually, financially and even emotionally.
• And a family that will always be a haven when I need love and acceptance.
• I am thankful for all the lessons learned, wounds healed and memories. They made me into who I am today.
• And I am thankful for Luna, the best cat in the whole world. She warms my feet when I sleep at night and kisses me good morning as I wake up.
• I am grateful for this wonderful life - no matter how bleak it looks sometimes, I am thankful for everyday reminders that it is a wonderful life - birds chirping, fog rolling in, a squirrel scurrying into the bushes, creamy chocolate ice cream and a slice of homemade tiramisu
• I am thankful for everything that makes this life a wonderful one.

What Would It Take

So what would it take for me to write again?

Maybe the rain will. Maybe I'll start writing again because I got home soaking wet from the pouring rain and I had no umbrella. It felt good to walk in the rain, at first but it got old real quick. I started shivering as my not-so-waterproof jacket started to cling to my skin. I cursed in silenced and so here I am, trying to stay warm, typing away again on my blog.

Maybe I'll start writing again, to talk about things that lost their significance in me, things that suddenly are coming to life again. Like racism, classism, sexism, etc. Isms that I've long dismissed because at one point I became hopeless. At one point I thought they are too huge for me and that i am too small to make any difference. So here I am, writing again.

Maybe all it takes is to be treated like crap at a store because of my skin color in the United States of America because I happen to be too brown for their taste. Maybe it takes a friend getting pulled over by a cop because her car registration is expired. And when the cop checked her license, it is also expired. And it just so happened that she didn't have a car insurance. But she got away with it. The cop let her drive the car without a license and without a car insurance. All because she is a light skinned woman. Talk about white privilege. I'm sure if my friend was an African-American man, the car would have been towed and he could have gotten a stiffer fine. But she was white.

Looks like it takes favoritism, inequality and maybe the poverty of a graduate student for me to start writing again.

So yeah, I am writing again.

Golden Gate Bridge

"People suffer largely unnoticed while the rest of the world goes about its business..."

------------------------

"One-thousand, two-hundred eighteen dead. The lives of families devastated. Two dozen deaths filmed by Steel and his crew in 2004. They also taped more than 100 hours of interviews with friends, families and witnesses, who recount in sorrowful detail stories of struggles with depression, substance abuse and mental illness.

The result is a moving and unsettling film, The Bridge that cannot help but touch everyone in the Bay Area in one way or another, not least because it admittedly raises as many questions as it answers: about suicide, mental illness and civic responsibility..."

We simply need that wild country available to us,

even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in,

for it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures,

a part of the geography of hope.

~ Wallace Stegner ~

Waves 2006 © All rights reserved.

There is always some madness in love.

But there is also always some reason in madness.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche ~

Waves 2006 © All rights reserved.