Holidays

I hate them.
I have grown disdainful of the fact that people need specific days of the year to implement "family" time. And even those days end up being stressful and irritating.
Why do people need one specific day of the year to be thankful? Shouldn't we learn to be thankful 365 days of the year? Rather than just one day which ends up being ineffective due to the fact that Thanksgiving is a holiday where those who can afford to, (and those who can't go bankrupt trying...) gorge themselves selfishly on meat and fats? The sheer gluttony of the holiday should indicate the irony in its "give thanks" aim, let alone the fact that it is a holiday that arose from a time where our beloved white ancestors were busy decimating a nation people.
And then after Gluttony day we have Giftmas. What a holiday THAT has become! Instead of gorging ourselves with food we covet and buy material items...Yet another opportunity to practice our selfishness. Way-to-go, Christians!
It's true that not everyone indulges in all aforementioned aspects of these holidays. Many don't celebrate them at all and some of the ones that do, may try to keep their intentions true. But my other grudge with the "holidays" is the stress that they bring about. Just in general. People are frantically running around "preparing" for these holidays and they get GRUMPY. And they yell at each other. And they guilt trip their family members into spending the holidays with them. And they spend lots of money to get ready for all this, which makes them even crankier. People are not nice to each other this time of the year. And that fact alone makes the irony unbearable for me.
Even my own friends who I've opted to share Thanksgiving with (rather than my own dramatic family) are not communicating or appreciative of the hard work that goes into preparing a meal.
I work full time.
I go to school full time.
My heart is aching.
And now people I considered close friends, suck.
And so here I am, becoming the cranky people I just spoke of. Yahoo, another successful Thanksgiving.
I give up.

It's been a long week, and it's only Tuesday.

Yes, this week has been a long one. And yes, it's only Tuesday. There have been many sensitive, exciting, difficult topics that have come up in the past few days. Death, school, plans for the future, topics of study that bring up buried memories, trials of the heart. You name it, it has probably touched my life in some way in the past few days.

Lets start with death. I had a mutual friend shoot himself on Sunday. While I have a lot of personal experience with death, it always seems to knock me "three bubbles left of center" (as Hawk, my spiritual teacher and Lakota elder would say) for a bit. I have a foundation in place to deal with death and enable me to help others deal with it as they need it. That does not mean however, that I do not feel any guilt for the fact that I had been avoiding this person's calls for the past year or so. He had always been a very troubled man and a few years ago we took a romantic interest in each other. The only thing that ever developed out of this interest were late night insomniac phone calls and my deciding that his intensity terrified me and that I had better not get involved. So I never did. Whenever he would contact me I would often not reply or not answer the phone. In retrospect, there is a part of me that wishes that I would have answered. Wishes I would have took the initiative to get him help. And in the very least wishes that I had just thrown him into an Inipi. I know full well that guilt does not serve anyone. And so it is because of this that I focus my thoughts and energies on his close friends. They are the ones who will be needing help and love now, not him. And from now on, I will always answer.

Next, lets address my plans for the future. I have been thinking a lot lately about joining Peace Corp after I graduate in a year. It is something that excites me, empowers me, and scares me all at once. I feel a healing power within me that just keeps getting stronger and stronger with time. I know that, though limited, the culmination of my experience has the possibility of helping others. It is this knowledge that draws me toward this plan for my future. For, I realize that the future is not just mine, but that it is shared with the rest of humanity. It is this fact that implores me to behave as such.

There are various reasons for these feelings coming to a head. My personal experiences and growth have always called for action. And my experiences as of late have just brought it to the surface once again. The trials and tribulations of my heart that I have been experiencing and taking part in are one reason for the current culminating effects. I am in love with a man 14 years older than I. And in any ways we are amazingly suited for each other. But, the problem we keep coming back to is his belief that I have not yet had enough life experience to be settling down with someone better than a decade older than myself. In many ways I disagree. I have always been experienced beyond my years and I know that I have a very old soul. But in some ways he is absolutely correct. I have not yet taken the chance to explore the world in ways that I have dreamed of. As a youngster, I dreamed of traveling the world and helping people. As I have grown up I have come to realize that this is something that is well within my abilities, and everything that I have been experiencing in the past year has further convinced me of this fact. I will always love this man, and remain thankful for the self realizations I've obtained in his presence, and perhaps with time we will be able to work out our relationship. The only way I will ever truly be happy in a relationship is if I am able to truly be happy with myself. And denying my life callings is the furthest thing from obtaining that.

Lastly, as if creator knew that I might need an extra kick in the butt, the topics we have been discussing in my Women's Studies classes yesterday and today have been difficult ones. I already know a lot about violence against women and the tragedies it causes. But, due to my already emotional state, tonight something clicked. We were talking a lot about rape and aggression and battering. I have always felt like a survivor of physical and verbal abuse because my step father ruled with a heavy fist and a tongue that cut like glass. Surviving a childhood where you felt forced to tell stories as to why you had a black eye or did not show up to school last week because your emotional exhaustion had finally caught up with your health, was an all to common experience for me. I've always known that I am a stronger person today because of surviving this. I grew up, moved out, separated myself from the monster that ruled our family and thought that I lived a life happily ever after. Which is why I felt blindsided when my psyche decided to remind me that no, everything was not happily ever after. I had never really thought about the fact that when I was in my late teens (18 or 19), I had been raped a party. How could someone as strong as I be one of those women who blamed themselves for being raped? I realize now that being black out drunk and disoriented was no excuse for anyone to harm me. I knew that then too, but I was too ashamed and scared of what my friends at the time would have thought. So, it has remained locked up in my psyche for some time. Watching V Day, the documentary on the Vagina Monologues and the effort to end the violence against women, I was reminded of something I had known all along, that things similar to what I had experienced and much, much worse, happen to women everywhere.

If the fuel for my "make change in the world" fire had not been enough before, after the past few days, you better believe that now it's raging. You see, I can't simply be "mad" at the state of the world and create a permanent crease in my brow. Focusing on the problems will be my one-way ticket to a lifetime of unhappiness and probably the mad house. I need to instead focus on the solutions. I need to focus on the good and positive things that I can give back to this world. I need to unfurrow my brow and keep the smile on my face and show the world just what it means to touch people's lives and make a difference in this world.

I am in love with life. I am in love with the world. I am in love with my loved ones: my man, my family, my friends, myself. It is all of this love that keeps my fire burning. It is this fire that I trust to take me where I need to go.
Aho, mitakuye oyasin.

Fuck.
We've failed.
Failed miserably.
Yet another failiure to add to my reportiore.
Another example of inability to communicate.
Throwing our hearts against a wall again.
Beating them into the dirty floor
So that we can step back and think
"Hmm my work here is done.
I've sufficiently ruined another relationship.
Love be damned and if you aren't, then I'll do it for you!"
Fuck
We've failed.
Failed again.
Not even our friendship escaped the wrath of our baggage.
I don't even want to talk to you
Yet, I yearn to talk to you
To be with you
Free from the juxtaposition of our pasts.
I'm sick, sick again.
By body manifests my sick soul.
But, I thought we'd come so far
But I thought we would pull through.
Now my recurring dream of a marriage of souls
Under the trees in the green magical grove are squandered.
There is no happy ending.
Only lessons and baggage
That we will have to painfully extricate later.

My confusion fog is self induced. Self perpetuated. Self maintained.
Its time to bring out the big fans.
Time to blow it all away.
This cold feeling I have in the pit of my stomach is compounded by the hot burn of my heart.
Ever existant. Ever burning. Ever fluctuating.
I'll figure it out. I will. I will not however, ignore it nor myself.
As my eyelids grow heavy and my body slumps under the weight of my thoughts,
My legs still wearily push forward.
Until I find myself face down in a poppy field covered with the soft snow of sleep.
Dreaming of my life with no fog.
If only I could remember these dreams when I come to.
After a soft white feline has nuzzled me back into the land of the living.
And I can feel the clash of elements in my body once more.
No one said that working for clarity would be easy.
No one said anything about ease at all.
Perhaps that is because such a word is non existant in its literal application in this living of life

This City.

I look out across the San Diego River Valley
To some, these sights register as a beautiful portrait of metropolis.
People zipping across concrete and asphalt set to a backdrop of blue sky striped with the cottony fibers of clouds, framed by palms and cliff edges.
To me, it registers as a prison I've been trapped in for far too long.
Anything I've planted here, has gone through the same growth pattern:
Slow to sprout, quick to mature, cut off by frost or drought before it blooms.
Dead and withering it falls to the ground and is consumed by the beetles and the earthworms.
Smothered by doubt and reality.
This town has claimed far to many of my lives.
And yet I keep rising again, in this putrid place, sure to again taste the grit of defeat, the metallic burn of pain.
It is a cycle. And it cycles and cycles.
Wearing an oblong track that burns into the back of my eyes.
Everything I see must now be stained with this scarlet letter.
Everything I think passes by this mark.
I've been living in this city for far too long.
And now this city is living on me.