The Selfie

It amazes me what we chose to document.

Since the beginning of time  it has largely been the same.
We make pictures,
of animals,
of gods and creation,
of significant events,
of the lands around us,
 but most of all we make images of our selves.

In what will be called "The age of the Selfie" the act of capturing the self is nothing new.

For centuries the upper classes documented themselves in oil paintings that covered the walls of castles and chateaus. These paintings are how we know so much of the lives of the wealthy before the skills of reading and writing were common. They might not have had enough money to write their memoirs. But they could try to capture their entire lives in a single portrait.

Painted portraits were the only way to capture a physical image other than sculpture until the the late 19th century. Thousands of years of human faces only captured in paint. Now we live in a world where your face will exist for an eternity in thousands of forms on the internet. We all have the power to capture our face and put it out for all to see thanks to platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Imagine trying to capture the sum of your life in a selfie. Would your friends and family be involved, would you be using a bathroom mirror, on a beach or in a city, would you be able to see the background at all or just your face...

Things to think about on a sunday night.

My Life as a Cat Slave

How I know its time to go to bed.

1. One of my cats scratches at the door, usually the little one who likes to sleep with me whom I call Kitty Princess.
2. She makes the rounds then sits at the foot of my chair and meows until I put her on my lap.
3. I hit up the ususals of my internet browsing, email, Facebook, National Geographic, then the never ending Tumblr. 
4. After 20-30 minutes of that its off of my lap then a flurry of fur sprints to the bathroom where I follow and confirm that there is food and water as I had confirmed for her a few hours earlier.
5. While she munches I brush my teeth wash my face and glasses then get into bed.
6. Just as I am falling asleep she leaps up onto my chest. 
7. Purring loudly for the next few hours she stays there and keeps me quite toasty.

How I wake up.

1. Little Kitty Princess as I call her, sleeps peacefully on my chest.
2. One of my other cats, usually the one my mom calls Blackie scratches on the screen outside my door, at 2 am.
3. She proceeds to do this until I let her in, Blackie takes about 5 tv minutes to make the three foot trip. She wants to look out for the other cat Big Whiney as she will hit her in the face if she can.
4. Once she is in I can go back to sleep, for a while.
5. 20 minutes later Kitty Princess decides once again I am the optimum sleeping perch and I am awoken by a pounce on the chest.
6. Then my mom wakes me up at 9 with "Why are you still in bed," with Kitty Princess still sleeping on my chest...

ehh its vacation im not going to complain that much...

Religion and Food Part III

      I also found my self spending my evenings cooking more and more elaborate dishes. I went from watching Meet Joe Black and eating Mac n' Cheese, to watching the Dalai Lama speak on TED and cooking roast chicken with glazed sweet potatoes and fresh lemonade. I remember watching one of his talks and wishing one of my friends from home would call, and hearing him say "if we all just treated each other the way we want to be treated the world would be a much better place" or something to that effect.
     After hearing that I wondered why don't we apply that idea to more of our lives? Why do we only think of that when we some one who is homeless, or when we see benefit programs to support people in a disaster situation. Why don't we apply that when we are waiting for someone to call, why don't we apply that when we see a friend who you can tell wants to say something but can't. Why don't we empower our selves to call, why don't we tell our friends I can see you want to say something, whatever it is I care about you and always will. Why do we let cultural manners dictate how we conduct our feelings and how we function among others. We don't determine what station we are born into, why discriminate those who were born a different race, nationality, or ability. We don't like being discriminated against why discriminate others.

     I let that moment, the one where I was sitting in my tiny apartment window ledge huddled over a plate of roast chicken and sweet potatoes, to be my epiphany.

     I took it upon my self to let that simple phase be my guiding light:
   
Treat others how you want to be treated

     This simple phase can be applied to everything from helping those in need, to taking a shift for a coworker, to simple things that can make someones day; like buying the meal for the person behind you in the drive through, spending the day watching movies with a sick friend, calling some one you haven't heard from in months, accepting the fact that people make mistakes and letting things go, buying an unexpected gift for a friend or even a stranger.

     While the phrase is simple the idea can be difficult. Sometimes I can't believe the things that people do and I want to get so very very angry, but I remember how hard it is to take responsibility for your mistakes and I let go, if my anger and work towards a solution I can put my energy to better use.

     While this is an idea expressed in Buddhism its only one of the many views. However I am not a true Buddhist. Im not exactly ok with the whole reincarnation idea, I think there is something after death, but Im not sure if its heaven. But the levels to enlightenment thing Buddhists believe in is a little hard to believe in. I believe more in the teachings of the Dalai Lama than Buddhism. He has a really good talk about all paths to god which I am a believer in. I don't care what you believe in, whether it is science, or islam or paganism, or whatever, as long as you strive to do good without hurting others and allow others to believe in whatever they want its good with me.

      So once a week when some people take time out to to to church, or temple or pray with their families, I sit in my apartment cook something delicious and I feed my soul as well as my body. I sit, enjoy the food I am lucky to have, and dedicate an hour or so to fill my soul with positivity. It might be a TED talk or a sermon streaming from the Dalai Lama, an empowering documentary, a youtube clip, whatever. Its not always religious, but it always presents a new perspective or idea.

     So once I fed my soul as a result of feeding my body, but I have come to a place where I feeding my body has just become part of the ritual of feeding my soul.

Religion and Food Part I

     When I was a little kid I used to drive for 45 minutes on Sunday with my mom to go to church.
My sister my mom and I would be dressed and out the door so we could drive downtown and sit in the pews with my grandparents for hours and hear these old people tell stories in sing songey voices then eat these weird little pieces of bread.
     We weren't Catholic as people often assumed if ever mentioned these never ending services, we were Episcopalian, which Johathan Rhys Meyers has explained to me through The Tudors is very similar but very different. Same beliefs and all, but women can be priests, it doesn't matter who you love aka being gay is ok, no nuns or monks, divorce is more acceptable, and various other changes.
     As a child I didn't really listen to all the speeches, I preferred to color. Sunday School wasn't really my thing either. I mostly went for the company, because I liked buying fancy clothes to wear to church, and the food.
     Almost always after church we would go to lunch with my grandpa and my grandma. I really liked going out to eat and I liked being with my grandpa and grandma, so as a kid I mostly went to church for the food.
     As I got older I didn't have time to spend 7 hours every week at church and lunch, or chunch if you want to call it that. And I began to be bored with coloring and sometimes I found my self actually listening to the old people in the front talking. I agreed with some of it, I really liked when we all shook hands and said, "Peace be with you" and in reply heard, "And also with you" but there were parts I didn't get. Like why we needed elaborate stories about cutting babies in half to learn compromise. And stories of miracles and fabulous feats to teach ethics, and whether or not we are supposed to take these stories as fact. Why did ideas of compassion, compromise, friendship, and empathy need to be veiled with strange tales for them to matter to people.

     As I got older I became disillusioned with the christian faith, I did not believe in the spirit in the sky, and there was no where to go when you died. I did not see any thing other than just ending.

     But it became hard to believe in nothing.

The Ends and Beginnings

When I was about three years old I saw a t.v. show that would change my life forever. I was watching a marathon of Mr. Rodgers with my Grandpa. When suddenly the smiley old man with a fondness for puppets and zip up sweaters was replaced by a man with sandy blonde hair and tiny santa-like glasses. It was Rick Steve’s Europe and he was visiting Paris. I remember sitting on my grandpa’s lap with my eyes glued to the screen.

He went to Notre Dame, scaled the steps of Montmarte, walked the Champs-Élysées, went on Le Grande Roue, all of the things you are supposed to do in Paris and few more. But of all the things in Paris it was the Louvre that enchanted me. Its history as a royal palace, its strange pyramid in the courtyard, but most of all Winged Victory. How could something with out a face or arms be so beautiful and so elegantly capture movement. I think my child self resolved that it must have been an unfortunate angel who fell in the path of Medusa and was turned to stone, in my mind there was no way something like that could have been made by a human. In any case this city captured me in such a way that at a very young age I knew that I would go to Paris someday. It was not a mater of if but to me I saw it as something that was going to happen, someday I knew I would be walking the banks of the Seine with Notre Dame on the horizon. Even at the young age of three I would tell people that I was going to Paris, it was just a matter of  time.

It was afternoons like that one spent at my grandparents house watching PBS shows, building blanket forts, making dolls out of socks with my grandma, or racing my sister to the lone swing that hung from the largest Pecan tree this side off the Pecos river. That I miss the most from my childhood. I spent so much time with my grandparents by the time I was in kindergarden I had picked up a little bit of their Texas accent.

I remember one day during the dreaded reading group time, which I hated because I already knew how to read, this ornery little kid called me out for saying y’all in front of the whole class. It was incidents like this that made me dislike the people at my school, I enjoyed learning, I just was not so hot on all the kids there, I continued to visit my Papa and Grandma every day and I further retreated into their love. The children in my class thought it was silly that I was going on trip “someday” they were very set on making me feel that I was very odd. At that age I didn’t know anything else that I might want as a grown up, I just knew that someday I would go to Paris.

After school and during vacations and summer I stayed with my grandparents while both my parents worked.  My sister and I would do puzzles with my grandparents, help them in their acre with raking and cleaning up after their fruit trees an garden. In the mornings when my mom would drop us off I would help my grandpa. I would go into his room and help him button his shirt, put shaving cream on his face, help him shave and get his dentures for him from their glass.  Then we would sit down for breakfast. By that time my grandma and my sister would have ate already and would be in the yard working, but Papa and I would always spend our mornings together.

My Papa kept needing more and more help from me in the mornings, eventually I wasn’t enough help for him. I knew that he had cancer, but at the age of seven I just thought It was something that all old people got. First my dad and I had to make all theses ramps for him and his walker which was decorated with every sticker I could get my hands on. Then It was a shower chair and a wheel chair. Next was a hospital bed, then meals in bed, oxygen and a nurse. One day my dad came to pick me up from school early, I thought it was for my sisters Open House but he took me to my Grandparents house where my sister and my Aunt Sherry and my Grandma were and they told me he was gone. I remember going into his room but all I remember seeing are his skinny long feet touching the foot of his bed, his closet open reveling the classic Members Only jacket he always wore, and the owl wind chime that hung from a corner of his room. I remember feeling really sad and crying for hour

When my grandma passed away my junior year of high school, the woman who took care of me as a little kid, the woman who taught me to sew the woman who kept my papa’s memories alive by telling his stories through her tears, and so many other things.  Ironically my grandmas passing allowed me to complete the one thing I had always known, that I needed to go to Paris. She left me enough money to fund me to go on a class exchange program to France for a month.

   Its funny how things end up how our beginning tie our end, how falling in love with an idea in an orange chair can land you swimming in the Mediterranean sea with the taste of salt tingling your skin and the sun illuminating your oldest dream. I was so so sad when she passed,  I still am, but at least now there is a hope that  somehow they will find each other in the heaven they so deeply believed in.

Time, Food and Stuff

Its November, NOVEMBER!
     Time just seems to have flown away so quickly. I feel like a few weeks ago I was back in Cali on a road trip with my bffl. But in reality its been almost a year.
     Im finally going home next month for the first time in a year. I am so excited. I get to see my parents my family my friends and my dog! Its only for two weeks, but I still get to go home. I love Chicago and traveling and art and all but a year is a long time especially when you are only 19. I finally booked my flight and scheduled it all so everything is set now I just wait for the semester to end.
     There's so much I've missed in the past year and so much I miss. I missed graduations, birthdays, holidays, parties, parades, shows. Im more concerned about what miss though.
     Like In-and-Out I have been craving some since last November, when I went home for Christmas last year I didn't go and I really just want a burger and fries for less than $20.
     And Costco, samples, samples, samples all fo free! Bulk, buying things in bulk, like almonds and toilet paper, and chicken I miss shopping in bulk if I could here I would only have to go shopping once a semester! I can also get film put on CD for like $2, this why I refuse to go and get it done at Walgreens for $15
     Hagens, its a Sacramento staple and its darn good!
     Leatherby's, I sadly found out is actually a chain, but i still miss devouring banana splits in less than 10 min with my dad.
     All the thrift stores. Theres probably more in chicago than in Sacramento, back home there all just a few blocks away on one street!
     Raku firings! My high school ceramics teacher lets alum come and fire, but the open flame is a "fire hazard" so theres no raku at SAIC Id have to go to Hyde park or Lil street and take a class if I wanted to do that.
     Of course almost everything I miss is food related.....
I also miss adventures with my friends, walking to the river with my family and going off trail and almost getting lost, giving tummy rubs to Mr. Noodles brother, Mr Noodles! Being snuggled by my kitties, laughing at my parents playing Just Dance, Singing on Guitar Hero with my sister... and lots of other stuff.
     Im ready for thanksgiving break with my sister in Chicago, and im really ready for Christmas with my family in Sacramento.

Fear II

If you didn't read my last post I recommend you start with Fear.

     So I am terrified of roller coasters, they are my biggest fear, but I don't believe in letting any one or any thing have a hold on me so I have slowly tried to conquer my fear. Last May before I graduated, my college prep class took a trip to Six Flags Magic Kingdom back in California. I was there to do one thing, lose my roller coaster virginity.
     I was terrified, as we were walking up the line with my class my heart was beating so strongly and so fast I could see my shirt flutter in time with it. I really, really, really, did not want to sit in that seat, but I didn't want to let fear make decisions for me. I refuse to let fear keep me from (almost) any experience, especially ones that so many people find enjoyable. So I did it any way.
     I sat in the seat, pulled the seat belt and safety measures taught, and let Medusa take me for a ride. It was terrifying, never being on any roller coaster before and then going on Medusa, but I thought if I am not going big I might have well stayed home. My eyes were shut for most of it and my language would have made a sailor blush, but I survived, I did it!
     It was terrifying and heart pounding, I wouldn't say that I love coasters now, but it was something  had to do for my self. I could not have done it without my friends.
     Most of my class went with me, they waited in line so that we could get on one train and supported me through something the child me was terrified of. I am happiest for that, to have friends support me through my greatest fear, because that's when you need friends the most. Weather you are battling spiders, facing illness, or just riding a roller coaster we all need our friends when were scared. Good friends the, kind that will wait for two hours with you to do something that makes you say things to them that urban dictionary has censored out, are not just good friends, they are the family that we get to pick.

Raging Bull In Six Flags Chicago

     I am so glad that I have found so many people who are willing to do things like that with me, especially when I left home for college. I am proud to say I have friends who take me to things that make me make faces like this. 

"No"

    The best piece of advice my father ever told me wasn't  really advice at all. It wasn't "never wear white after labor day", "or always look people in the eye", it was more of a philosophy.
      "The worst thing someone can say to you is no,"
    It became one of those pieces of fatherly advice that became cliched. When he begin to speak those words and my sister and I would butt in and finish the line before he could. We had heard it so many times that by the time we were in high school we just wished he would stop giving advice at all. But when it came time for college applications my junior year of high school all I wanted from him was advice.
    I had decided when I was very young that I was determined to have a job that I loved. Not just a job that I could survive and paid well, I wanted a job that made me excited to get up in the morning and sad to leave at night, no matter what the salary was. The only thing  I had found at the age of 16 that made me feel this was was creating art. Art being art, I knew money was something I was going to have to sacrifice for the joys of being an artist. So when searching for colleges I always cross referenced ceramics and fashion, my two real loves at the age of 16. This led me to the discovery of Art colleges, institutions where everyone was after the same thing I was, the dream of being paid to do what you loved. As much as I loved this idea of going away to study with those who also loved creating, expressing, and showcasing their thoughts and experiences through art, I was terrified of telling my parents I wanted to go to art school.
    My parents had saved money for my sister and I to go to college since before we were born. In every christmas bonus and birthday check they selflessly put away money not so their dreams of taking a Parisian vacation or an Alaskan cruise could come true, but so our dreams of becoming A helicopter pilot and the President, (my sister and my future careers according to out uncle) could be a reality. However this "dream career" my parents presented to us came with the idea that we would surpass our parents, make lots of money, and make them proud. At the age of 16 I slowly began to dread talking with my parents. Every dinner conversation, car ride and neighbor hood walk, I feared they would ask, "So, have you decided what you want to do about college?" I feared this question more than failing a math test, more than taking the drivers test, more than I feared the SAT's. Because in my mind telling my beloved parents who had sacrificed so much for me to be better than them that I wanted to go to art school was like me telling them, "I know you want me to go to school get a good job make lots of money and be happy and not struggle in life, well instead of that I am going to make stuff and try to sell it, be famous and maybe homeless in the process." I saw art school as a pipe dream, something that everyone has in their back pocket that they know will never be, like sleeping with a playboy bunny, or solo sailing across the globe.
    Then one day after my father picked me up from swim practice and we began talking about how I wanted to ask one of my teachers for a letter of recommendation for a scholarship I was applying for. However I knew my teacher was a very busy man and had a general "No" answer for these types of things. My father being my father, he started off with his usual rant, and like an epiphany had struck me I actually listed to him and his obnoxious advice for the first time in years.
     "Well, the worst thing he can tell you is no."
And it hit me, truer words were never spoken, it was true my teacher could only tell me no, he couldn't deny me the scholarship, or fail me for asking such a ridiculous question and so I realized that the worst thing my parents could say was no, they couldn't crush my love of art or take away my creativity, they could only tell me that no, they wouldn't pay for art school. This was the first time in years I had actually listened, I mean really listened and saw the sense in his words, to a five or ten year old this phrase was just the sputterings of a weird old guy, at that age the worst thing some one can say is , "We're not getting ice cream" or "You are not going to that party." But at 16 I finally made sense of his madness.
     I finally had the courage to tell my parents that I didn't want to enter college "undecided" or reply to their queries with the standard "I'll get a degree in business" I could finally tell them "I don't want to get a degree in business, or go to a UC or even go to a regular college I want to go to art school, " and know that the worst thing they cold say to me was no.
     So that night after Jeopardy, and reruns of Star Trek I told my parents that I had decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I nervously told them and my mom being my mom said,
"You know we will love and support you in what ever you decide to do in life."