Goodbye, little friend..

During my Junior year of high school, I bought a dwarf african claw frog. Super tiny. Super cute.
His name was Froskur.

He's been there for the past 5 years, happily swimming around his tank and hanging out, and coming up to the front and looking at me when I'd be nearby.

After a period of sickness and deterioration as old age caught up with him, he died this morning. Even though it was "just a frog," I'm still pretty sad. He was my little friend, something consistent through a few years where it seemed like absolutely everything around me kept changing.

ACHTUNG!

Quando ek estoy грустна, io nie hablo англиский яазык nie.

Respite

After frantically rushing around for the past three weeks in an effort to finish making Christmas presents and mailing cards and baking and helping clean (plus work, and other commitments), I have finally finished everything. It is Christmas Eve, and after work ended at noon I was able to spend the entire afternoon and evening with my family.

It has been lovely.

I go to pick up my boyfriend at midnight (only 45 minutes to go!), and he will be visiting me for two weeks. I'm so excited. Hopefully this will all serve as a nice break from harsh day-to-day life. :)

repeat

A recurring theme in my dreams recently has been fairly interesting. The first time it happened it surprised me, but now some variation of this dream has happened countless evenings in a row.

Many details vary by the night; though, each time a few things are the same. It always begins with a sequence of events demonstrating that this place is no good, and that America is not as safe or free as we are led to believe. It becomes increasingly dangerous. I refuse to deal with the current events leading to a further deteriorated state, and begin speaking out. At some point I realize it is no longer safe for me to stay here.

Somehow I manage to get on a plane and leave the country. The details branch out and get fuzzier from there. I'm not sure how I leave ... I just know I decide to defect. As far as I remember, all of the dreams involve a decision to seek asylum in South Africa.

It's just interesting how I've had so many nearly identical dreams recently ..

little sprouts

Just so we're clear, these shores have never been the ones with which my loyalties lie. Granted, those feelings intensified upon finding a place I could love deeply enough to proudly call home, but they did not initially blossom in that instant. They had been there for years, lying dormant, simply waiting for the right moment to grow.

guardian of family treasures

I am my family's designated heirloom recipient. Anything meant to be passed down, with a few exceptions, goes to me.
After giving this more thought than I should give anything at 3am, I've determined it may be a little strange for me to already own so many things belonging to dead people at age 21.

Finally

Photo Credit: LunaDawnImages

I have been holding on to these for almost two years, deciding what to do with them. They are stones I brought back with me from my trip to Namibia. I've finally decided what to do with them. :)

Helpless, or waiting for a sign?

I've recently realized that quite often when I feel like nothing will change and that I'm stuck in an enormous rut, the problem isn't really that I'm surrounded by something as hopeless as I think. Quite often, I'm not helpless at all.

It's never an issue of not actually being able to find a way out; rather, it's an issue of needing a sign that one day this will be over. There's always a turning point, and for me that is quite often a sign that I could easily miss. I've found that especially when feeling the most down, I need to pay close attention to my circumstances, and make sure to not pass up any opportunities that could bring about change... Those circumstances are usually the ones that make everything take a huge uphill climb shortly afterward.

I had one of those moments shortly after Thanksgiving. It has been all uphill since then, and things are sorting themselves out wonderfully at the moment.
I finally feel like I'm back in a way that I haven't since, really, May 2009 or before. It's been a really long journey since then, and especially since May 2010 it's been really awful most of the time.
Things have finally turned.
So grateful. And feeling extremely productive, getting a ton of things done to head in this wonderful new direction in front of me.

Everything was put back in perspective recently, and it's wonderful. Everything isn't easy still, obviously, but it's looking up.

Idiomas

I've determined that the more exhausted I am, the less likely I am to find myself thinking in english.

Sunday, Productive Sunday

All day I've been working on cleaning, reorganizing, and redecorating my room. It's a wonderful feeling. Just moving things a tiny bit and having everything freshly dusted/washed/vacuumed makes my space feel entirely different.

I've been feeling very creatively inspired recently, so I decided I needed to freshen up my studio. Really, with only one room to call my own, it has to be a studio as well as a bedroom. 

It's looking a lot better already. I have more ideas for tomorrow and Wednesday when I'm off work. It should begin to transform soon into a space entirely new. 

Behaviour Guidelines #1

If I were to run a country, things would be different. Starting now, I'm going to post something every once in a while that I'd do differently.

Today's rule, the first of [probably] many to come, is very simple. Accept the Past, Focus on the Future.


In America, so much focus is given to things that already happened and that can not be changed. So here's a new guideline for it. If people who have been wronged are still alive, deal with that and ask forgiveness for wrongs committed against them. If they aren't alive, it already happened, make goals to never let something similar happen again and work toward those.

I'm tired of hearing about "hey 30 generations back my family was wronged and I deserve to be recompensated." That's unfortunate, but almost everyone had a relative somewhere who was a slave or who was treated unfairly by someone in a position of power, if you trace your family history back far enough. None of that really has anything to do with people alive now.

Now if your family still has people alive who lived through something like that, you have a case. Aside from that, just drop it, focus on the future, and move on.