SEPTEMBER 30th!!

well tomorrow is the anniversary of my birth, and i will be 19. my last year of being a teenager, and my last year of childhood!! im on the threshold of my youth.


18 was not the best year, many many struggles and hard times but overall i have grown so much and have become a much stronger person, although i have a long climb ahead of me still. life is full of ups and downs, it reminds me of the joni mitchell song:

"...and the seasons they go round and round

and the painted ponies go up and down

we're captured on a carousel of time

we cant look back we can only look behind from where we came,

and go round and round and round

in the circle game"

tomorrow i am going to breakfast with my sister kim at pannikin (my fave!!) then going on a walk with craig, then eating acai bowl for dinner & going to see one of my favorite films EVER midnight in paris by woody allen in la jolla theater!! YAY!!!!!! i dont really like making a big deal of my birthday, its just the best though getting to be with the people i love most.

happy new year!!!!!!!!!

my darling jews, and any jew who is a jew,

HAPPY MUTHAFUCKING NEW YEAR. teeheee i entertain myself, but seriously.

for myself the next ten days of awe i will be focusing on making amends with people who ive wronged this past year and looking forward another year of health for my friends and relations, and wish all of them the best year ever!!

on a serious note i will be revaluating my life, who i am as a person. how to become the person i want to be, and my connection with hashem. this is something that will take more than just 10 days, it will be something to work on for my entire life!! rosh hashanah and yom kippur are just small reminders (even though they are the high holy days) of what it means to be a true human being, how to be respectful & giving to others, and how to carpe diem the shit out of your life.

so shana tova.

different doors at different times

ive been feeling a bit lonely lately. i really miss my friends all gone at college. i am also a little envious of them. they are off on their big college adventures and im stuck here in san diego, a starving artist with no money, and its no longer the 50's so i cant hitch hike with out getting murdered like neil casaday or jack kuroac and meet awesome sauce people. maybe ill just road trip and bring a shit load of bear mase.

i see all of these photos on facebook and start feeling blue, but all i can do is make the best of whats going on in my life. i am grateful that i have such a cushy life and home, and im happy that i get this extra time to be with my jewish community & also being with my family with all thats been going on with mia familia.

even though i am very independent right now and on my own in a different way then my university-ite peers, its ok. there are times when youre not supposed to be with anyone, there are some doors you have to walk through alone.

robert california

so i am watching the season premier of the office season 8!!! im so excited its back on, ,just wondering how the show will do without steve carrell. the new character of the offices manager/CEO is "rober california" played by james spader.  i feel that this is a very savvy name. he is a very quirky and intimidating character, mixed in with dry humor. so i guess all you office fans out there, lets see how this plays out..........

find x.....

howdy. i just wanted to say that i finished my first math exam today!! it took me 1 hour on the dot. i dont want to jinx it so i wont say how i feel about how i did..........i am just going to have to keep it a suprise :))

also last week i found out my bestie jordan is moving back to norcal (my native land) from salt lake city to be a nanny up by sacramento!!! i smell a road trip, im extremely excited. ooh and if i go to visit here i can also go visti my friend evan at ucdavis. wow now im excited squared (hey a math term!!).

so thats pretty much it. please keep your fingers crossed for the sake of my exam grade gpa.

Psych reflections

MY PSHYCHOLOGY CLASS IS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my professor is hilarious. she is 5'0, fiesty, and is the definition of the South. shes also the human sexuality professor so we talk about sex alot too (one of my favorite subjects...no shit).

last class we had our first exam, so i wanted to reflect on what i have learned and what was poignant to me these last few classes.

one is the paradox of prosses:
so what is this paradox?? it on how we as a society have reacted to adjusting to modern life. for one, we enjoy this rush of technological revolution thus enjoy much more liesure time & choices. however, THIS DOES NOT MAKE US HAPPIER and our precieved qualilty of life has seemed to have gotten worse. mostly because our traditional sources of emotional security have been lost. family, community, and spirituality have weakened greatly. our mental demands of modern life have become much too complex and we have become excessively materialistic. we are on the constant search for fulfillment and the meaning of life.

the human mind is amazing!! we are the only animals on earth who are unique in the ways that excercise free will, personal growth, and we are rational beings driven by our consiousness.

humans are unique & aware of our own mortality, and this causes great anxiety which can be reduced by our world views and culture. constraints like family, school, and religion give us the sense of order, along with self esteem that serves as buffers from fear of death. so do things that boost your self esteem, folks.

we are amazing organisms, are we not??

growing

what a true statement this is. i read this and immediately thought of a very dear friend of mine. i still regard M as one of my best friends of all time, but alas we are on two different tracks in our life.

i think as people we have grown into exactly who we need to be. she has become a great lady in the past few years, she used to be pulled in two different directions of excessive high school drama and materialism and her spiritual calling to the church. for me it has been an internal struggle of self destruction and spiritual callings. although different struggles, we have had the parallel of utter ambivilence.

now M is on her way to thailand & australia for missionary work, she has become more down to earth and caring on her decissions to fallow christs teachings and has achieved spiritual enlightenment from scripture & community of her church, where i am fallowing my passion of art & have found my place as a jew & am absolutely in love with my jewish community!!!

how different our lives seem to be now, we were once inseperatable and now we have had to separate in order to fallow are hopes and dreams. because we have grown into our own selves, we have been forced to grow apart. but that doesnt mean that we have lost the love between eachother. its just different.

the blanket of solace and beauty

my friend georgette from my figure drawing class wrote a beautiful note on facebook the other day. she wrote about our art class and how special it is to be in a community of artist who understand your perspectives on life & creativity. how much i love that class!!

there have been so many artist who have touched my heart and challenged me as an artist in figure drawing. that class constantly pushes you to see and feel the different formalities of the figure and the beauty of the human shell. your image of yourself indeed changes as does the image of the world.

i live and breathe art and creativity, even ugliness is transformed into beauty in my eyes. i feel everything. art is life, its tangeble, spiritual, and REAL. it pulls your emotions out of you, and i find solace with the blanket of my mind.

what a beautiful and sad thing it is to be a human being.

georgetteness:

girl/womanhood

"And we started to learn about their lives, coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn't even experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl. The way it made your mind activeand dreamy and how you ended up knowing colors that went together. We knew that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to craete the noise that seemed to facinate them. We knkew that they knew everything about us and that we couldn't fathom them at all."

-The Virgin Suicides

aint it the truth!! for some reason there is a sense of imprisonment for every girl and women, some secret place that know man can ever understand. its like the secret code & power of all women, unspoken but known amongst our gender. we are always thinking and analyzing details, and stew and discover our thoughts and apply them to life in some mysterious knowing way.

911

thank you firefighters

thank you mothers

thank you children

thank you fathers

thank you soldiers

thank you twin towers

thank you new york

thank you pentegon

thank you usa, even though i disagree with you sometimes

thank you thank you thank you

and i send my condolences & my love

seeing

today after going on a wonderful hike with ellen & mark, i went and played with jonah for a while. let me tell you something, i just love that kid!! he is so sweet. we went swiming and then i watched him on his bike. also our thai students came today!! theyre so cute and have never been to the states before, so we are easing them into it i can tell theyre in a bit of a culture shock. what a divine day!!

 jonah is a very special person and will one day, if not already, grace the world with his raw talent of music and sports. i can see how even though he struggles making his way into the world, but i know that we miss alot of the beauty and detail of this life that he sees and we over look. what a great mystery his mind and ideas are, what things he must observe that we do not.

my lovely cousin hannah who is also an artist put this up on her website today, its a picture of her eye & we both have the very same eyes (which i think is neat!!). here is the link, its pretty amazing!!:

http://hannah-curran.artistwebsites.com/featured/my-eye-hannah-curran.html?newartwork=true

'aint it the truth!!

"Have the courage to face the pure, unsweetened truth of ourselves so that we can move on and grow in more honest and authentic ways."

my friend jordan recently wrote in her blog (by the way, i hate the word blog...blog, smog, log, bog...) about being constantly being on the quest of truth and clarity in our lives.

the truth is always in contaversey, such as the battle between religions of who "has the truth" about god and spirituality, between democtats and republicans. we see this clash all the time!! abortion is bad, choice is good, dont tax, tax, guns, arms are for hugging, dont ask dont tell, same sex ,marraige rights, abstinance, use a condom!! is there no one universal truth?? does everyones personal truth contradict the laws of the universe?? what is one thing we agree on?? i suppose be nice to people and dont talk with your mouth full....but in some cultures its acceptable to talk with your mouth full so i guess its just be nice to people.

but the thing is, its hard to be nice to people. people are stupid, we are constantly screwing up and asking for second chances. and sometimes people are just being assholes which makes it just plain hard to overlook their faults and just be kind.

its hard to be nice to ourselves also. its so hard to find truth within your own personal being. who knows, martin luther king jr might have looked in the mirror and said "i hate how self centered i can be" when he had such a beautiful soul and gave his life for african american equality. marilyn monroe was so beautiful and talented, yet she could not find the truth in her self what a special person she was and except herself. its so weird how we do this, we judge so much.

i am definately contemplative on what these universal truths are. i feel that everyone is beautiful in their own way, even ann coulter. but why cant i see myself as others do?? i dont like myself. well sometimes i love myself, and sometimes i drive myself crazy!! but i suppose no matter how much you internally struggle you must always continue to seek and grow. no matter how tough the road gets!!!!!!

thanks harry

today i watched my recorded star wars movies from the labor day star wars marathon (WTF does star wars have to do with labor day??? well who cares i guess as long as theres a star wars marathon). what a great plot!! same with harry potter. both tell the tales of the heros internal battle between their light and dark sides, fighting for the truth, and being the best friend you can be.

seriously, the timeless quotes from the sages yoda, obi-wan, and dumbledore are wise words to live by. who cant take "there is no try, there is only do  and do not." "luke: i dont believe it!! yoda: and that is why you fail."  "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." "It’s the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." and of course "There are all kinds of courage. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends."
man oh man i tell ya, i cant tell you how many sunday schools and small groups ive gone to, there are obviously ethical lessons from the bible....but honestly i learned more about friendship and loyalty and love from start wars and harry potter. is that sad?? hhhmmmm i dont know if it is. i guess people take away and connect to different lessons. to some people, the baghavad gita, the new testiment, and for me, harry potter. dont judge.

fruits of solitude



"They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.
   Death cannot kill what never dies.
   Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship.
   If absence be not death, neither is theirs.
   Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.
   For they must needs be present, that love and live in that whch is omnipresent.
   In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure.
   This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal."

William Penn, from More Fruits of Solitude

when i read this exerpt, in my head it makes sense. my mind trys to tell my heart "see? you should not have to struggle from grief, because death is just a crossing of the world. you are still connected to that person, even though its not physical. there is no need to waste your time in being sad!!"

but i feel that the heart can never level with this logic. no matter what your brain tries to rationalize greif and death, your emotions need time to process loss.

i wish that the process of grief was as simple as this poem. i agree that you are always connected to your loved one, even in death. but how hard it is to cope with not being physically able to communicate with them, hug them, be comforted by them, laugh with them. you can only remember their smile, funny quirks and mannerisms, & their personality. but your memories of them, no matter how meaningful and beautiful, are only fractions of their character and being.

its true, friends and relations are alive still in our hearts, but being separated by the barrier that separates life and death is the tormentor.

how wonderful for those who have passed on, to be freed of all of lifes struggles and pain. how sad it is for us who have been left behind. 

blind control

one of my all time favorite art exercises/techniques is blind contour drawing. you draw a subject without looking down at your paper or picking up your pen the entire time. i drew one of my best friends, sophie, using blind contour. she came out kind of picas looking, but whatever because this technique is all about paying attention and enjoying the small details. its about giving up control over your art and over your judgement of yourself, how can you judge your creation if you didn't even look at your paper the whole time?? its guaranteed to come out abstract and you never know what its going to look like in the end. 


i never really realized how deep the meaning of this exercise goes, giving up control of your art. to an artist, art=life. thus giving up your control is in a way giving up a part of your life and just rolling with the ounces and just accepting the way your drawing turned out. 


isn't that just how life is?? how hard it is to realize that we basically don't control anything!! we just have to do our best and what ever comes out of our work is what we have to accept how its turned out. and no matter how life turns out, or our drawings, they really do turn out quite beautiful.


sophie:

the miracle worker

Does anyone of you own one of these babies?? well let me tell you something....I DO. and it is life changing. a little something about myself: i have terrible terrible allergies. before i got my tonsiles removed i had strep throat almost 7 times a year and bed struck allergies.

so the past week ive had the worst headache in my life, thursday i went to bed at 6pm and stayed in bed until 4pm the next day and was intrerrupted by an invisible sledgehammer slamming me in the head.

now let me tell you something , i dont believe in western medicine. im pretty holistic so when i am sick i just drink tea and sleep with alot of blankets to sweat out the fever  if i have one. so thats what i pretty much did for the past 48 hours.

i have never used a neti pot before...i thought they were weird and i was always a little intimidated to use one!! my headache got so bad from my stuffed up sinuses i gave in against my better judgement. there is the iscotopic treatment (the regular one) and then the hydronic treatment (the nighty one) naturally i chose the latter.

it seriously changed my life. i did one neti treatment around 9 am yesterday, woke up at 4pm and neti-ied it up again!! GLORIOUS!!! i did it agian this morning and there is virtually no pain left in my sinuses AND i can smell again. there is a god, and he has a plan for us all.....and its called THE NETI POT!!!!!!!!!!!