Counting down

June 30, 2007 at 12:19 pm (Uncategorized)

Number two:

Everyone I know is waiting impatiently for the 5th Harry Potter movie. I am too. Heck, it opens the week of my birthday. Can we say great timing or what?

But The Order of the Phoenix is just one of the two I have been waiting for. The other one? The Transformers Movie. Yes, you read that right. When I saw the preview for it a month ago, I actually squealed with delight when I head the familiar transformation sound when Optimus Prime changed shape. I am geeking out about it. Ever since I heard it was being made I have been counting the days. Next week my wait is over.

YEAAAAAAAAAAYYYY!!!!

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On the ‘pleasures’ of flying

June 30, 2007 at 10:04 am (Uncategorized)

Today I have two post topics. Since they are totally unrelated, they will be separated in two different posts.

Number one:

As you know, the BF and I have a long distance relationship. I’m moving with him soon (more on that later), but for now, since it’s hard to be apart, we fly a lot. With the 4th of July holiday coming, and a friend’s wedding on Sunday, the BF flew me down so we could spend some time together.

Now, I normally fly the wonderful JetBlue airlines. But since I was flying with his miles, I flew Delta. Let me tell you: The circus? It has nothing on terminal 3 in JFK. So, for your entertainment, an account on my flight experience:

Thursday night: I follow the ‘check-in’ procedures online and read all about how on the airport, I have to just drop off the bag and I’ll be done!

Friday: I wake up at 5:30am, run to the subway, the LIRR train and eventually make it to JFK an hour before my flight. (Side note: on other flights, when I fly JetAwesomeBlue, this hour is spent dropping off my bag, browsing through the magazine rack and grabbing a snack after going through security)

7:44: I enter terminal 3. Whoa! Did everyone decide to fly out today with Delta? The lines are ginormous! I go to one of the booths and make sure my check-in is good. Oh, look! Last night nobody asked if I was flying with a bag, so I re-check in and head for drop off. But which line? Well, there’s a sign that says ‘bag drop’ and a line next to it. I queue. Nothing.

8:05: A Delta representative tells us that this is no line, the line was behind us. I move to that line.

8:10: I tell the same guy the line isn’t moving, my flight is in half an hour and he says he’ll move me up.

8:15: The line still not moving, I panic and tell the guy I need to move now. He takes me out of the line, tells me to stay where I am and takes my boarding pass to try to get my bag tags. I see him looking frustrated with the computer. He eventually leaves the station and I can’t see him. As I’m thinking I’ve lost my place in line and my boarding pass, he reappears and takes me and a couple of other 8:45 flight people to the side. He returns my boarding pass, puts us in ANOTHER line and tells us to drop off our bags there.

8:20: I try to tell someone else that I will miss my flight and need to just drop the bag. A chick tells me to stay in the line and they’ll get to me.

8:25: I get fed up and head to the security line. The chick guarding it asks to see my bag open. Since I wasn’t expecting to not check the bag, I don’t have my toiletries in a baggie. I show the chick that my toiletries bag is see through. It’s plastic, it’s see-through and all of the stuff in it is less than 3oz, as specified. No, no can do. Those can’t pass, it’s supposed to be ziploc. In my anger and frustration, and deciding that the security chick does not get to keep my expensive face lotion, etc (I may not buy brand-name clothes or designer shoes, but I pay pretty money for what goes on my face), I dump it all in the trash. I’m not too upset, though. I always fly with small quantities of toiletries, so it’s not like I lost a lot of stuff. Still, I’m going to replace all that, since I can’t be in the middle of the summer with no deodorant.

8:32: I finally go through security and head to gate 1, as my boarding pass says. It’s boarding for Mexico City. Tempted as I might otherwise have been to go to the lovely DF, I panic. Where the hell am I supposed to go? Before I find the monitors I hear “This is the last and final call to board flight 123 boarding on gate 21” Gate 21? That’s on the other side of the world. I run. On platform sandals. My throat gets dry and my chest hurts. I half-run, half walk. Where the hell is gate 21?!?!

8: 40ish: I get to the gate, wave my boarding pass to the girl and try to tell her I don’t have an assigned seat. And I say try because I’m half-wheezing. As she looks for a seat for me, I wonder why I feel like I’m dying. Right then I remember what the lovely doctor I saw last week told me: Your getting out of breath soon when you exert yourself might not be lack of cardio as you think. It seems you have borderline asthma and you just don’t breathe well.
Well, that explains it.

9:20: The plane, after sitting on the runway for 30 minutes, finally departs.

The moral of the story: Never ever fly out of JFK with Delta. Or show up 3 hours ahead of time.

Grrrr.

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On why depression $uck$

June 24, 2007 at 5:30 am (Uncategorized)

Today I was all ready to blog about the details of the grad school demise and my stress about finding a job. I figured it would help me get out of the rut I seem to be stuck on, because no matter how much I try to think I’m feeling better, I’m not.

Instead, I am here now to tell you that I’m broke. Yeah. You read that right. I cashed at the end of May my last scholarship check, friends came into town and I went into depressed mode. So what I did is go to the theater, eat out, buy books for my mom, treats for my dog, etc. All to cheer me up. And all along I kept thinking, “It’s not too bad, it’s only $25 here and there”. And the $240 monthly I spent on therapy? Money well spent. Well, $25 here and there, and no matter how good the therapy is, I have now a little over $200 in the bank. Thank God I get paid in a week, but that is the last paycheck in a long time, since my job (which came with grad school) ends with this upcoming week and I still have no “real job” lined up. Guess I should’ve saved instead of cried. As if I didn’t have enough to worry.

Thing is, I lived from paycheck to paycheck, not eligible for tuition loans because I’m not a citizen (you’d think after all these years… but no). I told myself that I would get a job after grad school, pay the credit card debt and be on track. No I have no PhD in the future, my credit is mediocre at best (due to the high level of debt I accrued trying to survive grad school) and have no savings. Rrrrreaaaallly great.

Fuck. I look at the puffy-eyed person I’ve become and get angry. Where’s the girl who saved? Who was organized with her finances and her papers? Who was funny and loved to cook and read? Now all I do is stare at the TV, cry and stress about the life that’s gone and the future I won’t have. I thought I was feeling better, but am not. And I do not deal well with change. True, I will get a job eventually, but Lord knows when. Sssiiighhhh… Why did I have to go and get sad and spend the money, therefore getting sadder and more stressed out?

I was not like this. I was funny, sassy, lively. Now I’m gone. Fuck.

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So today I ask….

June 12, 2007 at 11:10 am (Life, The Engineer)

Can we modern women have our cake and eat it?

I ask this because it seems that my relationship with the Boyfriend is destined to have a problem. I thought things would work better (not perfect, but better) now that he’s grown up a lot and matured. But it seems we (he?) find ways to complicate matters. This week’s choice item? Career and family.

I don’t know how we got there, but we wound up talking about that and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids… Or rather, I wanted them, but I was afraid I’d be a bad mom. Boy that brought trouble. But it seems that it was successfully fixed, my reassuring it was a fear and most people have it. The real problem came when I said I wanted to keep working after the babies. He said “sure, a couple of years at home and then you go back to work”…. Wha…??? No, no, no. I meant babies, 3 months of maternity leave and back to work.

I tell you, I could’ve smacked the Pope on the face and it wouldn’t have had this strong a reaction from my man: I’m “cold, selfish and unnatural”. What woman wants to leave her babies at home to be taken care by strangers? How can I be so cold as to want to leave them? Isn’t it the woman’s job to raise her children instead of strangers?

Good points. And points that should’ve been discussed properly. But no, it got confrontational, got ugly and in the end he admitted he was pressuring me. So now we are on frozen mode, and I’m feeling cornered.

Years ago, all I wanted was family, babies, husband and I was happy to stay at home. Support me! Heck, I’ll be a lazy ass! Then the Boyfriend and I broke up, and I was forced to see my life without him and find a path of my own. I realized I could be happy alone and could have fulfillment in work and realized life would bring the right man to me and I’d get to have my cake and eat it.

Now school has ended, I’m at a crossroads to decide if I go back to school and in the proper field this time, or if I just work. And if I work, in what? Do I do the cooking thing? Do I do the teaching thing? Do I do the office thing that I’ve always wanted to do? I don’t know. Oh, and since now I’m not tied to school, I can move South to be with Boyfriend. But the office job is in NY and if I take it, I’ve been informed it’s over for us (apparently he is no longer so willing to move up as he was before). And even if I do move South, because I do love him and I DO want to give this a shot, I may be going to be with a man who wants me to quit work as soon as we have kids.

It’s too much for me to handle. And he’s frustrated. The thing is, it’s the pressure. If he wasn’t pressuring me, I bet you I’d be running to get pregnant. If he understood why I want to work (who’s gonna support my mother when she’s old? I ‘m an only child!) and why quitting is not something I can do easily, I’d feel better about considering being supported by him and not earning my own cash. If we could just see things as they came and not try to build a fort right now, I’d feel better.

I’m dealing with enough stress as it is and now this on top of everything, I don’t know what to do. I love him, but when we have these arguments and I feel he just wants things his way, I feel I need to call it quits. What’s the point of maturing and becoming supportive in the things I needed him to be supportive when he now has found a new issue to fight about.

When I look back at my life, I see complete contradictions as to how I was raised. I was to find a man and be a good cook, a good mother, a good wife. But also, my mom told me, I was to have a career of my own and degrees that nobody can take from me, because it’s education, and a way to make my way in the world should the man not be there; as he surely would not be because all men are cowards and not to be trusted. While the BF and I were dating the first time around, my mom asked me constantly, “when are you getting married” along with the “don’t you dare get pregnant while single, and don’t you dare quit school for him”, until I told her to stop all of it and pointed out all the many reasons why.

So now I’m left to deal with the aftermath of a lifetime of thinking that I could and should have my cake and eat it. Now I’m wondering if I’m wanting to have my cake and eat it or if it is just possible that no matter how much we love each other, the BF and I are no longer compatible. We are just too different, we come from different types of mindsets, or we just became different people while we were broken up. We fell in love 3 years ago, and now after all the fighting, patching and working, we have come to a crossroad that is “crucial” as he told me, because he “needs to know now if I will share the life he wants”, or if I want other things for my life.

I know we are not that different. When I close my eyes and imagine myself married to a man who understands me, I know I’ll want to have his babies. But since I’m feeling pressured, I can’t imagine any babies, which only leads him to pressure me more.

I used to think I could only marry someone who understood my culture and language, hence, a Latino. Now I’m rethinking that. Maybe I’ve outgrown our relationship. Maybe I can’t date a Latino anymore. Maybe I still need a man who understands Spanish and my background, but I no longer can deal with machismo and expectations of giving it all up for “him” and “the family”. I don’t know. And I’m paralyzed with pressure from him and fear of making the wrong choice. Of breaking it off with him, of staying and giving up too much of my soul.

Jen has recently posted on fear and it’s done me good to read it all. I used to thing there was one right path in life and was afraid of choosing the wrong one. Now I know that as long as I stay true to myself, whichever path I take will be the right one. If only I could clear my head from all the fuzz and find out what to do about my career, the BF whom I love…

Urgh. But it feels good to let it all out here….

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Thanks

June 10, 2007 at 11:33 am (Life)

I’ve just read you guy’s comment regarding my mood. Thanks for all your support and nice words. I know things will get better and I should not beat myself down. I guess true to nature, I go through the darkness to get to the light.

I’ve got to thank my friends -both in flesh and virtual (you guys!), along with the BF for the advice, support and guidance. I spent a very nice afternoon with my friend the Redhead today and had a great pajama party with Violet on Tuesday. I’m getting better. A sign that things are improving, is that I’m back to blogging.You may have seen my cheery books post of a few minutes ago.

So thanks. And I’ll get around to giving details as to how the grad school thing and the dad thing happened. Once I explain it, I think it’ll make more sense.

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My one true love

June 10, 2007 at 11:05 am (Books)

I may love cooking, I may love dogs, but my one true love is reading.

From the day I discovered reading I was a changed girl. As an only child growing up in a country with two channels of a TV I wasn’t even allowed to watch, I turned to reading as my consolation and companion.

Through a supportive mother who bought me interesting books by foreign authors, I discovered wonderful and magical worlds (for example: I knew about Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story waaay before it ever became a movie and was destroyed by the sequels) which allowed my mind to go places I couldn’t physically go.

Being a bibliophile, I have a ton of books. But there are two very distinct shelves in my room: The ‘oh-yeah, OK I’ve read them’ books, and the ‘I’d die without them and don’t you dare ask to borrow them’ shelf. On that shelf: Yup, you got it, that first Spanish language edition of the Never Ending Story, De amor y de sombra (Of Love and Shadows) by Isabel Allende, written when she actually wrote well; the Harry Potter series and Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides.

It is truly, a brilliant novel. Narrated in the first person, it’s the story of Cal, who used to be Calliope, and was born a hermaphrodite. It’s also a love story, a story of ancestry, of family ties, of migration to the US to try to make it and live the American Dream. It’s amazing.

So you can imagine my surprise when my Borders weekly newsletter let me know that Oprah had chosen it for its book club. No, not because I’m a huge Oprah fan. Truth is, I hardly see the show. I squealed with delight because I know the power the woman has on getting people to read. This means that my beloved, Pulitzer-prize winning Jeffrey Eugenides, will have more people reading him. Many people are put off by the subject, but it’s really not the main part of the novel. Like a good onion, it’s full of layers which peel one by one deliciously.

Now, most people like to quote the very beginning of the book to say why it’s so wonderful “I was born twice, first, as a baby girl … and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan….” (2002 edition, pg. 3)

But the part that got me to buy the book, fresh off the press in 2002 (before it had even won the Pulitzer,) and told me it would be great, is found on pg. 4 (I’m shortening the somewhat lengthy section, having lived in academia all these years I’m paranoid with copyright infringement):

“Sing, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. … And sing how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own Midwestern womb.”

Hmmm…. Delicious. Read it!

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I’m still here

June 9, 2007 at 12:41 am (Uncategorized)

Sorry for the silence, darlings. I’ve been feeling quite blue lately. All the mourning I didn’t do about the grad school fiasco has descended upon me.

Suddenly I realized that my whole life is changing: Grad school is over, I’m back with the Boyfriend, and since we want to make it work, I’m planning a move to his city. I’m not sure I’d wanna stay in NY anyways, despite my wonderful friends.

And add to the mix that my dad “broke up” with me because he feels the Boyfriend is bad for me and the grad school thing is a big mistake that happened due to my mom’s bad guidance and my sadness due to having broken up with the Boyfriend while in grad school.

So in the span of a month I’ve left grad school, I’m planning a move, looking for a job and juggling the plans of a life with the Boyfriend.

I feel utterly useless. Like 13 years of my life, the ones I spent trying to advance in my chosen profession, are down the drain and I’m not even sure they were well spent. I’m second-guessing everything, doubting every decision that has led me here and not sure of what I want. This is freaking out the Boyfriend, who tries to understand, but being who he is, which is a “let’s fix this”-type of guy, he is struggling with seeing me be sad and just wants to fix my problems and make me smile.

I’ll write more later, when I can actually put into words what I feel. I’m just sad and feeling lost.

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