Take your last puff, muthafockers. Tomorrow, the Buckeye smoking ban is in EFX!

I’m having a shitty 29 hours. I’m hoping it ends soon, but the possibility of the shit spilling into 2-day zone is high.

It all started yesterday, when I received an email about another Filipina writer, quite successful in NYC. Instead of warm-hearted support for another Filipina or simply another woman writer, I seethe with anger and jealousy. Why must I live under the blanket of anonymity? Because I am a toothless fearful person, fretting my life away in a blogging corner – where EVERYONE AND THEIR MOM blogs?

The literary grinch inside me leaps around like an frog on crack and asks THE question, “Why do people in New York get all the breaks?” Meaning, why is a written life in New York perceivably a trillion times more exciting than a life, say, in, oh I don’t know – OHIO? I’ll tell you why. New York is home to millions of people who are there for a million reasons. Ohio is home to millions of people who are there for about 49 reasons. The top ten have something to do with accessibility to really great hospitals on really open highways when you are giving birth to triplets. The latter have something to do with Ohio’s transportation protocol to drive an SUV through its ultra-sleek farmed and flat geography.

I’m planning a trip to NYC, not in my desperation to be discovered as a daytime soap actress (second runner up to being a writer), but to visit my best friends. Under a freakish constellation that HATES me, four of my closest friends picked up their lives and plopped down in the Big Apple. Between the four of them, they’ve ranged in living in NYC for four months to a decade. I leave Thursday night.

In my inferiority complex as a Filipina writer, I asked my childhood friend and Brooklyn resident, Tricia, if she keeps up with my blog, to which she replied, “I don’t read ANYONE’S blog.”

I im- and ex- ploded, “BUT I’M NOT JUST ANYONE!”

If I cannot convince one of my closest friends to read my writing, do I stand a chance against the world full of strangers?

In the miserable mood that I am in, I continue to contemplate my life’s purpose, with regard to writing, photography, marriage, feminism…and life. What IN THE HELL am I doing? Seriously. What am I doing? I guess one could say I am trying to carve out my professional and personal career and it takes time (-Adonis). I could say that I’m taking good jobs that pay well for doing nothing (-Siblings). I’m working my feminism (-Supervisor). Or,

I’m doing my best. (-Me)

Let this declaration be heard: I am not Teddy Ginn, Jr.

While I myself consider myself to have an electric personality, I do not have electrofying running skills as the star running back of the Ohio State Buckeyes football team.

Why am I writing this? The connection is related to why I have not posted all week.

Last Turkey weekend, Adonis and I were enjoying the unusual warm temperatures by indulging in my favorite pastime: throwing a nerf football around and pretending I am an undiscovered athlete with tremendous speed. Adonis, the football guru, is teaching me different plays: a fly, inner, outer, stop’n go…

Adonis is trying to advise me how to run full speed and then suddenly stop, change direction and turn to catch the damn ball. I tried. I went to work Monday and that was the last recorded activity this week. I’ve been lying down for 3 days. A trip to the doctor yesterday confirmed my left butt pain that began descending down my left leg.

Adonis and I glimpsed what we’ll be like in about 60 years. Him holding onto me while I peed because I could not sit on the hard toilet. Him pulling my pants up as I wailed about my helplessness.

I’m limping around, but am back on my feet. The good news is that I got about 32523 hours worth of GRE studying, which I’m taking on Sunday.

I’m going to kick it in the nuts.

So, both Adonis and I are in the hunt for doctoral programs. He, theology. Me, Women and Gender studies.

Last night, I am mating with the GRE book, forehead pressed against the pages, bemoaning the entire system of standardized testing; wishing it all to hell. Relearning the Pythagorean theory dates me back to days where I lusted after a football boy who sat in front of me in Geometry class and did his homework for him. I was mindless in numerous ways back then.

Adonis is proofing, endlessly, his personal statement. We try to encourage one another. Lots of kisses on the nape of my neck because my face is buried in the prep book, shouting at the Satanic numbers, ordering they stop torturing me. Gentle forehead kisses and murmurs for Adonis as he struggles to write flowing descripts about the truth and passion fueling his doctoral drive.

Our professional futures are as opaque as they can be, but we’re getting through it. My cousin just wrote me, sending a reminder to be thankful for our lot in life. The lot where you can go after anything you want in the world, anything at all. The gift of education and freedom is beyond privilege, it’s a rarity of most people only dream. I’m trying to remember that as I perform exorcisms around the quadratic equations page.

Should I make a list of things I am thankful for? Would that be committing blogger’s sin of holy cliches? I suppose, but what the hell else do you really write about the week of the holiday where it’s all about GRATITUDE. It’s the one day a year where we stop the vain self-indulgence to be grateful and then we indulge in gluttony.

I am great, err, grateful for many things:
My rocking Adonis of a husband
My wewillloveyoutillyoudie family that sends me to therapy and smiley in-laws
Merce, my therapist, for throwing my shit back into my own face forcing me to deal
Health
…and all the things that I was born into benefitting: superior education, smooth skin, brittle hair, neglected cingulum tooth that is pushed back for some reason in my upper jaw, and expandable stomach to accomodate any amount of jasmine white rice…

And I’m thankful for my future, my dreams, the ones that I know, with reasonable pushing, will come come:
My future biological, adopted, and foster children
Health and ableness
Home with no knick knacks
A TV with a remote control
The arrival of my 18-200mm VR Nikkor lens
Continuation of my exploring G*d and the inevitable growth that comes with such an impossible and necessary journey

So, there. So, Thanks.

Lighting up is awesome.

Go Do This.

Now.

Sometimes you just have to be honest. Seriously honest. And to be honest, I have to admit that I have jealousy bugs crawling over me all the freaking time. It’s not in earnest to be someone else. It’s jealousy when others have found HOW to be themselves and make a living out of it. Me? I want to be known for a passion, something great, something so profound. I guess we all do. My problem is I’m passionate about 42 different things.

When friends, like Keith, get to hop on plane and go to China simply to shoot pictures, I turn chartreuse with envy. I feel like I could die. A travelling photography trip to China for fun? You might as well tell me that bell hooks stopped by my office when I was out to lunch. It’s the same kind of suicidal disappointment.

It’s not just about photography. It’s the same kind of envy I feel when someone under thirty publishes a book. I feel the hourglass start shaking; precious sands hurtling downward, marking my inevitable end of life and I have so much still that I want to do. I want to write my life, write my story, write my way into a place I cannot see from here. I want to photograph emotion from strangers, peace from petals, and horror from war. I want to go places and see things, and FEEL, Goddammit! FEEL!

It is not enough for me to “have” a job that is aligned in social justice. I must DO justice; DO meaning; DO great things. I must give something to this world after all it has given me, after all I have taken from it; after all I have ingested.

Yesterday, I went to a lecture from the first women editor of the New York Times editorial section. What did she emphasize beyond politics, journalism, and writing? PASSION. Passion is what drives; PASSION is what does and will make you distinct.

Afterward, I skipped a lecture from Sandra Day O’Connor. I decided to be passionate on my own. Knowing this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and wondering if I would regret it like I did when I skipped a lecture from Coretta Scott King, I still knew what I truly thirsted. It wasn’t more advice from another pioneer. I didn’t need to hear what I already knew: it’s truth, passion, and goodness that propel. What I needed was quiet. I craved one night to myself, time to sculpt myself. I must be distinct.

Hallejuah!

Change IS possible!

A good morning to all!

You should not be reading my blog today.

You should be reading up on what’s what with politics and get your voting ass moving. There are crazy things happening in our world that make me want to vomit, like this.

This country’s in dire need of change, but I’m still obsessed with whether if I will be inhaling smoke in a restaurant and/or bar. VIVA LA, BOSTON, ATLANTA, NYC.

NO ON 4. YES ON FIVE.

More to come later today.

So this year has been my “golden year.”
I turned 27 on the 27th of February, this constitutes my golden year.

I’m not clear, still, on what defines a “golden year.” But if golden means to try to find gold, meaning digging, with my bare bleeding hands, through the broken edifice of my beliefs, changing core values, and evolving self, then I am having a golden year. I catch occasional glimpses of the shiny stuff and I still have a little over 3 months to see what I can find.

Perhaps my 28th year of life will be about cashing my gold in.