I'm dreaming of

A Trek 520

The ACL

I never knew I had it. Now I know way too much about it. And what it means to "fix" it, if you can call it that. I have to admit that I am fearful. I rarely admit that I am fearful. but today, I am honestly fearful. I have been taking myself out every day on mini adventures for 2 years. Just recently I got into actually doing exercise without the adventure component. Now I am faced with a surgery that does not seem to give the kind of results I want to hear about. Other people in the world are suffering worse. But I have never liked relativism. I am very afraid of this surgery. I am afraid of having screws in my leg, and getting "weather pains" from rain. I like the rain. I want to go out in the rain. I want to have a normal body again. But once its broken, you can't have it back. So sad. I have ignored my fear, until now. My lifestyle, and the lifestyle I was trying to cultivate, is in jeopardy.

California

My close friend Christine recently empowered me to come and visit her, and also to see the West Coast for the first time.  The trip was simultaneously beautiful, fun, social, and stressful.  The main characters of the expedition being this lovely duo, Christine and her New Zealand counterpart Jen.  I am very tired, and the pictures came out in a random order, so I will briefly comment on each one.

We encountered a dead Sea Lion.  It put me into a meditative state.

All of the beaches were lined with cliffside.

It was almost always cloudy, which made for a strange sunset on highway one.

The nature was quite striking

The ruins of a cannery interested me, considering that California is one of those places that are so relatively recent to western society, that it is odd to think that it could have ruins at all.
I wasn't sure what I was going to think of San Francisco.  I have to say, it was very gay, and simultaneously very taoist.  Not a combination I expected.
I thoroughly enjoyed the culture

This post is such a cop out, but its bedtime.

Figuring it all out

Or maybe not.  I have been meditating a lot, not in the traditional sitting style, but in the american free-thinking style.  Not that the American's have a monopoly on free-thinking, but I would say an unfettered wild mind the moves without direction could be described as a common American trait.  And as I think about what it all means, I don't really get very far.  Maybe the purpose of my life is to try to be cool and enjoy life, like this guy who offered to teach me mandolin

Or maybe it all means nothing and humanity is actually just insane.  If this is the case, I think a car like this is perfectly acceptable.

Or maybe its the way I thought all along and I just forgot, because I was so focused on other things, near-term things, that I forgot that I had given myself a purpose.  I want to be a humanitarian economist.  I want to work for Latin America.  I want to make people happy.  I would like to stay healthy and happy myself.  I think that is fair enough, and a large enough ambition to carry me until I no longer exist.  My friend Lorena Duenas cheered me up, she was a humphrey fellow at BU from El Salvador and she is a financial regulator in her home country.

I saw Josh today, so I gave him back his textbook.  I have to say, I was fairly nonplussed, and I think that is a good sign in moving on.  I am proud of myself in that I had not thought about him in over a week.  I've learned a lot about myself, and I have a lot of things to work on in myself before I start my next relationship, if that ever comes.  If not, I think I will be ok just doing the things I set out to do.  Companionship is a beautiful luxury, my favorite luxury, but it is still a luxury.  Whether or not I find someone is mostly out of my hands.  Whether or not I find a bike however, that is fully in my hands :P

It Feels Real as it Slips

I remember, about a week after he left, I was heading to a cafe in Cambridge and I saw this written on the sidewalk, alone with no context or surrounding graffiti.  It encompassed the entirety of my emotional experience at that moment.  And as I look forward in my life, and see nothing and everything, I gain no happiness.  The delusion of control I had over my life vanished, and once again I saw myself trying to swim against the current.  Time, irreversible, drives forward.  Sometimes it gently nurtures you as you grow, other times it rips you to pieces, and worst it sometimes slowly eats you alive.  I can not seem to bring my perception back to the positive view of time.  Instead, each second seems like 80 years, my body losing all attractiveness with each mark, my mind losing its sharpness with each attempt at using it.  

Why I have become so deeply affected even I don't understand.  But it feels so real as it slips.  It feels so so real as it slips.

The Saturday that took me to whole new places

What is this haze.  Where am I.  Purely Lost.  Why.

Poor Neglected Blog

It takes one month of neglecting a blog to lose your quality. This poor blog missed the entire month of January, and that is a pretty big gap in entries. Clearly I am not maintaining this well so I am debating whether to return energy to the blog, or to withdraw from the blogger world. I am slightly attached to my neglected blog, and this makes me lean toward energy, let's see what I can do. I think I should try to get Josh to make a blog and upload his photography. I decided to give the reader a small sample in this post, and hopefully my one or two readers will agree :P

It took a great deal of self-restraint to limit myself to only five photos, as there are endless photos he has taken that I would like to show to others, but I knew that I should leave that to him. I tried, in these five photos, which I jacked off his facebook albums, to cover the range of what he does. The first photo is one of his human photographs, which I personally find to be the most difficult photos to capture correctly. It is from a Mexican socialist rally. I don't know how to describe the second photo's type, but he has a lot of little things that he captures artistically in similar photos. The third is classic Josh, he loves decay and that was one of the things that ensnared me. The fourth is one of his many environment pictures that he just seems to do so well. And the last one is one of his paneramics, in which he takes multiple pictures of a vast landscape and stitches them together with some program.

Click the pictures to see a larger version.

Hopefully he will make that blog, if not just for his photography.