Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Baghdad

BAGHDAD bomb blasts Baghdad neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweep.

province personnel been.

bomb exploded minibus east Baghdad. people police

street blast happened.

pressure Shrapnel place bed treated three people
pickup before ambulances
bomb exploded east Baghdad neighborhood people police

bullet-riddled bodies neighborhood
bodies neighborhoods west Baghdad, apparent

capital, bomb targeting police exploded people police hospital
explosives-rigged base. exploded base

South of Baghdad, police responding reports bomb in bomb, policemen suspects .

police collaborators
helicopter planting bomb Baghdad.

Baghdad

dozens bomb blasts Baghdad, by

deaths
day's bomb downtown bus Baghdad.

delivering blast.
bed destroyed
back before.
bomb Baghdad
bullet-riddled bodies

bodies Baghdad, death.
bomb
base.
Baghdad, bomb bomb detained.
bomb Baghdad

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

An attempt at poesia

Ay senor de la lavandría, quién me hablaste.

No puedo dejar pensando en ti.

Este es una mentíra.


Me gustaron sus preguntas directas completamente en español

Sobre la iglesia y mi vida

Estás Casada? Porque no?

Tus ojos son tán bonitas.



No, no soy abogada, no soy profesora

Vives en la calle Browning, una cuadra de mi.


Eres de El Salvador. Has estado aquí dos años. Vives con sus primos.

Trabajas. Construccion. Estás cansado. Tienes 21 años.


No tengo coche, y cuándo tu viste que me pusé mi ropa en una bolsa grande, me dijiste:



--Tengo coche, puedo darle una vuelta a su casa--



--No, no. Estoy Fuerte-- yo respondí. Vivo en Los Angeles donde los vecinos son extranjeros y no puedo confiarlos



con mi cuerpo ni mi ropa limpia.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Ecclesiastes: A book of Hope

Not so despairing today. Why? I don’t know. I slept well. I am taking PTO tomorrow and head back to Santa Cruz. I ate a delicious pummelo. I walked in the fresh air to work and I saw a banana plant in blossom and very cute 5-year-old on the bus with his dad. I read Ecclesiastes and I saw the sentence “So i hated life” and I felt not so alone in my feelings of despair. The bible knows that life is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Molecules and sunrises seem less like complicated abominations and more like necessary facts today. As the author of Ecclesiastes would note: stressing about the fact is life is life is also meaningless. I feel like I am holding less tightly to life and understanding it. Every paragraph of thought is started with “everything is meaningless.” And this gives me hope because if it doesn’t (or does) come to a conclusion, it still is meaningless.


geez... i feel like these two last posts have been so White American and High School. Oh well...

A psalm to the tune of Averill’s “Why you got to go make things so complicated” Or 20 reasons I am not in a cult Or Every single cell in my body IS Or

I am tired of everything being so complicated.

Set aside for a moment all the countries in the world, with their multiple languages, alphabets and cultures.

Set aside AIDS, politics, and the rules for Olympic Ice Skating

Set aside even your neighbors and all their woes, set aside the abacus and the computer, the elasticity of rubber bands and the grief over the person who recently died.

I am freaking out because I have these strange appendages of legs and arms. (not that I should like to do without them, that would just ensue further complications). So these appendages extended from my body with short hair that on my legs I should shave and my arms I don’t need to shave (except under my arms mind you, since I am an American woman after all) and each arm has a hand and each has 5 fingers and each finger has a fingernail which I had to trim this morning. We take these appendages for granted as normal. I was created in the image of God so I guess God has arms and legs?

To further complicate this scenario is each of these appendages has feelings. For example if I were to walk into a blazing fire, it would hurt. To make things more complicated, each arm and leg not only has physical feelings but is attached to emotional feelings. For example if you were to gently punch me in the arm and say, hahaha that was a good joke Alessandra, I might feel a little special. However if you were to punch me in the arm and run out of the room yelling, “I hate you alessandra and I never want to see your ugly face again.” I would probably feel very sad and hurt.

To even further complicate the scenario the things that can be done with these alien appendages changes depending what I have in my hand or where I am standing. If there was gun, I could shoot you, physically that would be a possibility, but perhaps my emotions and/or morals would stop me from doing such a thing. If I had a wad of cash or even a credit card, I could go on a thoughtless shopping spree. Alas I have neither but a board full of buttons touching my fingers, (we call it a keyboard as keys and buttons are the same thing, I guess).

We take these arms and legs for granted. You can tell because the models on the run way, their clothes have special exits for each arm and each leg. Diapers were designed to be useful in conjunction with legs. Wedding rings only helpful if hands are attached to arms are attached to the bodies of the one you want to marry.

Why did I wake up so bothered by the fact that I have arms and legs full of cells and each of these with its own nucleus and mitochondria and a 100 other things I can not remember from bio class.

In high school while reading Waiting for Godot, we studied existentialism. (which is a complicated word just to spell). These strange creatures: bnumienhags have evolved/created with the strange need for God. Christians have found this God while Estragon and Vladimir are still waiting and wondering what the hell they are doing with these strange appendages.

Once while in the jerky motions of G’s driving, I asked him about the cult and why he stayed so long. He said he had had his doubts for some 20 years or maybe it was just 10 years but then what, he was so dependent on the group, he didn’t know how to live life apart from the group, and perhaps prayers were even answered and children were born. You do what you know. Some freaking half a life time later he decided to leave and stand on his own two shaky and wobbly feet

1. If I left right now, no one would stop me.
2. unlike Matt Salmon, and Geoffrey Setjo and G (minus 10 years) I don’t have a bible verse to spout every time someone asks me a questions about what I believe that I could beat you into the ground with so you don’t question me any more.
3. From Oscar in Congo to JRS in Santa Cruz to the friends I have met in LA to Pstr J. and his wife in Payatas, the people I have not met in Peru and Mexico city, to the scholars in Sri Lanka to homeless who believe, the nuances of what we believe and how we live our lives in knowledge of the belief may be different but the essence of what we believe is the same and we are not all sending our money to a Swiss bank account nor are we all following some Charismatic leader who changed his name in the 70’s to make it sound more biblical.
4. When I pray and ask for guidance I check it against the bible, check in with some friends, my own conscience and desires, not just some feeling or abstract “yes” and then I go and hop aboard band wagon of what all my friends are doing.
5. the only time I have been locked in a bathroom was that time at grandma’s old house when I was a child and the bathroom doorknob broke and you had to call a lock smith.

I am just so tired of abstractions. Faith. Glory. Blessings.
But maybe I just missed the page where it explained what glory is.

I am tired of being a slave. A slave to the American mentality that I cant escape because its all I have know. A slave to my emotions. A slave to gravity. A slave to trying to figure things out. A slave to human relationships. A slave to WellPoint and money. A slave to food and water. A slave even to the enneagram!!! A slave. I have seen enough to know of the slavery talked about in Ephesians, but not enough to find my way out from that incessant boulder that keeps squashing me.

Definitions of glory on the Web:

-a state of high honor; "he valued glory above life itself"
-brilliant radiant beauty; "the glory of the sunrise"
-aura: an indication of radiant light drawn around the head of a saint
-rejoice proudly
-Glory is a 1989 film which depicts the Union's attack on Fort Wagner during the American Civil War, which was spearheaded by Robert Gould Shaw's 54th Massachusetts Regiment.
-Glory is a KMFDM single from their album Angst. It contains two remixes of the title track "Glory" (as well as the version from Angst), plus remixes of the tracks "Lust" and "Move On", both originally from Angst. There is also a remix of "Trust" which would be a song on their album Nihil.
-Glory (from the Latin gloria, "fame, Judeo-Christian religious tradition. In Hebrew it would probably be the הוד Hod.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(religion)
-A glory is an optical phenomenon produced by light reflected toward its source by a cloud of uniformly-sized water droplets. A glory can have multiple colored rings. The angular size is much smaller than a rainbow, about 5° to 20°, depending on the size of the droplets. Since it is seen in the direction opposite the sun it is most commonly observed while airborne, with the glory surrounding the airplane's shadow on clouds.
-Glory, also known as Glorificus or The Beast, is a fictional character in the American television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by Clare Kramer. She appeared during most of the fifth season of the program.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)



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Monday, January 22, 2007

Another morning’s walk

There is something in their blood, or perhaps more plainly put, a lack of something in their blood that draws them out of bed and to the porch before the sun has broken over the city. The street is still dark with morning shadows, the streetlights have not yetswitched off. These women are alert, sweeping the porch or smoking cigarettes, turning any chair into a rocking chair with a nervous twitch. They nearly never hear my ‘good mornings’. I am not sure if it is my hello doesn’t reach their ears or if life on the porch is entirely consuming and all the rest of the world is in fuzz, a cloud, a fog.

With two sweaters, a scarf and gloves, I feel like I do not belong in los angeles, but here I am trying to stay warm with all this clothing and a quick pace walk to the bus stop. The scaffolding around the new low-income housing being built on Vermont is covered in graffiti. NCTF and WOT have warred over this corner’s temporary wall that it looks like a page of doodles scratched out so many times that you don’t know what the artist was first intending. Its funny, there is an entire length of the block that has more scaffolding, but it covered in advertisements for recent movies and albums, tennis shoes, and the newest AIDS cocktail, which the taggers respect I guess as their tagging stops where the advertisement starts. I believe these children with spray cans will make fine Americans.

Friday, January 19, 2007

What is Chaos Theory?

  1. The same ingredients put into the same brand name blender in the same order over a period of 8 hours produced different textures of smoothies, some blended easily, while others were quite difficult, but the customer were waiting, making the 16 year old girl in the Jamba Juice apron, question God and her morals. Is there any point?

  1. Tito’s Tacos - trying to figure out exactly why so many people stand in line outside on a cold night to eat bad fake Mexican food that costs too much (thanks Molly)

  1. the weather in Utah can be affected by the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil

  1. Some people watch the death and mayhem that has ensued at the university in Baghdad from the comfort of their treadmills running at a challenging 6.5 pace with their ipods plugged into their ears, while others watch the same scene but the dust and debris filling their lungs that they can no longer run to safety. Where is that?

  1. i. cell phone lost

ii. cell phone lost and found by a man

iii. cell phone lost and found by an elderly man who doesn’t know how to use cell phone, who is dining at the pantry, but when you go to find him he is not there, and he never picks up the cell phone again. The cell phone dies since it can no longer be charged and your cell phone which is your clock, your address book, and a connection to sanity and being overwhelmed has entered an abyss where you can not hope to join it.\


f. Some days I am hungry and feel unloved. Some days I am full and feel nothing. Some days I am hungry and know that I am loved. Some days I am full and I hate the world around me. Some days I am hungry and I cry because I know I am not starving but I am still hungry. Some days I am full from eating out of habit. Some days I am hungry because I have a tight ship to run. Some days I am hungry for a little while and than I eat too much and I am full.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Laughing and Crying its all the same release.

Here are some occupations that could render workers ineligible for health insurance under the policies of some insurance companies (according ot an LA Times article) the comments in italics are of my opinion, niether the newspaper or the insurance company i work for ascribe to these opinions.

Air traffic control Much too close to alien life

Building, moving

Chemical/rubber manufacturing

Circus or carnival work No wonder half the clowns have permanant frowns, and the other have have to paint on thier smiles

Concrete or asphalt work

Crop dusting

Firefighting

Furniture and fixtures manufacturing

Lumber work, including wood chopping, timber cutting and working in a sawmill

Migrant labor We probably dont pay them enough to elect Health insurance anyways, wait, do we even pay them?

Oil well or refinery work

Police work so i dont know how this works, that we wouldnt cover them because cities have to provide insurance to thier employees and from my experience their benefits are the most complicated and convuluded of them all. I despise when thier renewals come around.

Roofing

Sandblasting

Sports, semi-pro or professional

Stockyard work, with or without butchering

Stables, all employees

Stunt work well yes, youre being paid to be stupid, and that shouldnt be our responisbility as people paying for insurance cost to cover that. your pay check should be very large.

Telecom installation

Transportation and aviation

Tree climbing i have a few relatives who have died due to the profession. It is dangerous.

Tunnel work

War reporting
So i wonder what the benefits of CNN are like?

Window work at heights exceeding three stories
Who do you think is in those building on the floors above three stories, why health insurance sales offices, brokerages firms, I know of a few on the 65th floors

Friday, January 12, 2007

One Hundred and One and 00/100

101 Dalmatians

101 minutes after bed time

101 reasons to hate you

101 clouds in the sky

101 toe nail clippings

101 Shakespearean verses

101 dreams about holding hands

101 T cells left in his body

101 paper plates

101 invitations wrapped with ribbons

101 bones in your body

101 eyelashes and 101 wishes

101 tree branches to climb

101 freeways arching through America

101 days a year

101 glasses of wine

101 rain drops on the windshield

101 teabags used and thrown away

101 dollars on a business lunch

101 colors in my paint box

101 sadnesses

101 crystal light packets

101 trombones in the big parade

101 clarinets fill the air

101 posts on this blog

101 days after the war began

101 break lights ahead of you

101 words in the word search

101 snow flakes in Russia

101 places I want to go

101 fears gluing my boots to the carpet

101 drops of lotion used

101 vouchers to be processed

101 floors in the CPS building

101 leaves falling in Vermont

101 stars in the sky

101 people and I am all alone

101 poems and 101 clichés

101 fish in the sea

101 grains of rice on her plate

101 vocal chords in her throat

101 dogs in the park

101 pills after the surgery

101 lbs until he is a man

101 cacti in the desert

101 stairs to climb

101 dust particles fall to earth

101 pictures of the dead

101 names and address to forget

101 cherry blossoms by the McHenry library

101 fingers pointing

101 staples, 101 thumbtacks, 101 rubber bands

101 nothings to hold together

101 videos unwatched

101 checkmarks on the calendar

101 hopes dashed when he left the room

101 grains of salt

101 stories I do not want to hear

101 bricks in my ribcage

101 rocks to build a mountain

101 words and still no picture

101 missed hellos

101 Valencia oranges

101 miles till the promised land

101 seconds of silent

101 American dreams

101 American boot straps

101 trash cans to be emptied

101 diamonds to die for

101 reasons to live

101 women's breasts drawn during the renaissance

101 totem polls knocked down

101 drafts of an email

101 blades of grass

101 moves you shouldn't make

101 palms trees in South Los Angeles

101 sunsets I regret to have missed

101 evenings spent alone

101 questions I have for myself

101 answers hiding on the top floor of the building across the street

101 inches until heaven

101 valentines until she feels loved

101 candles on someone’s cake

101 light bulbs spent by erratic electricity

101 frozen berries from Costco

101 countries signed the Geneva convention

101 children soldiers shot in a war they did not understand

101 gangs members shot in a war they did not understand

101 jokes I do not get

101 dreams I can not remember

101 lessons I didn’t want to learn

101 angers I have to wade through

101 lies I have to unlearn

101 doors that I have to knock on

101 journal entries I’d rather not write

101 fingers in my ears

101 brownies baked for my birthday

101 windows I want to look through

101 freedoms only written about

101 postcards to send home

101 statements, lacking conclusion

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

From the drain in the bathtub

A List

3.

He was wearing a black and white flannel jacket with a rip in the elbow.

Sunglasses that looked like they were from the 80s

5.

I will not jump into the deep end before I get my feet wet

2.

I don’t remember the rest of the dream. But at one point this warlock offered to give me a piggy back ride because I was tired of walking and so i let him, but then I accidentally choked him so I had to walk the rest of the way.

4.

He began to give me tips for how to stay safe while riding the bus. Tears came to my eyes. Was it anger: I have been a girl living in Los Angeles for many years. I grew up here. I am tough. Was it the novelty of fatherly advice, and I just didn’t know how to respond. “Yeah, yeah” were my final answers to the tips.

But altogether, the conversation left me shook up. I wasn’t even hungry for dinner.

That morning a man of questionable stability, had singled me out on the bus and followed me when I got off. Nothing happened, but it was still frightening.

6.

Dating might have been a synonym for slavery, and slobber. A multiple choice question with 3,000 possibilities. A pool of water that you step into and your feet disappear, go deeper and deeper to find you feet and you slowly realize you no longer exist.

1.

Killer whales were once given that name because they did not perform tricks.

I am worried about global warming and the world heading toward heii in hand basket so when I went to starbucks today I brought my own traveling mug to reduce the waste

I saw a hit and run accident that left shattered parts of car on the ground, but no one stopped not even the driver who had been hit so I threw away the piece of paper with the offenders license plate number