Random Updates...

I've been going to the gym! Well, to be honest last week I failed, but the two weeks before that I was a frequent visitor, and I went today. I do have a confession: today was the first time there was no one else there (it's the small gym from my apartment complex), so when the below song came on my Pandora...I actually did a little dancing on the elliptical. It was very niiiice.

(In asking Jeff for help in finding this video, he just shared with me how him and Pat used to cruise around bumping their Pure Funk CD. I love him.)

Anyhow, not sure if I mentioned that we put in our 30-day notice at our apartment complex. We did. Sigh. We're really gonna miss this place. I stopped by the leasing office today to pick up some move out paperwork, and they kindly informed me that no matter how clean we leave this place, they're still gonna rape us for all that our deposit is worth, and more. Uuuuuggghhhh.

So, in preparation for this monumental move, we started packing today. We decided to start with the stuff that's easy to pack: DVD's and books (I'm terrified of packing up the kitchen. Uuuuuggghhhh x2). In packing up the books I came across the one item I've ever stolen [from a store], in my life. I was about six or seven. I have a super clear picture of the parking lot, and the check out stand, but for the life of me I can't remember what store it was. What I do remember is that by the check out stand there was something I really wanted, and my mom said "No" when I asked her to buy it for me. It was like a buck fifty, and I was a little pissed she wouldn't spend a buck fifty on me (as in $1.50, not $150.00).

My mom and the register lady started chatting it up, which I took as a distraction mechanism. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I grabbed what I wanted and hid it in my sweater. We then walked out of the store and into my mom's Mitsubishi, which was sweltering. "Why don't you take off your sweater? It's hot in here." I tried to make up some excuse, but the heat was undeniable, and mother knows best. It probably didn't help that I must've had the most guilty expression on my face ever.

So, she made me take off my sweater...and that thing I had just stolen slipped out. Needless to say, she wasn't happy. I started crying. She threatened to make me go inside and return it (we were still sitting in the car, in the parking lot), but I think she was a little embarrassed herself, and my tears were probably pretty convincing of my regret. So, we never returned it. It's actually floated around between my mother (yeah, she had the nerve to keep it for HERSELF!), then my grandmother, and when I found it again a few years back, I finally took possession of it.

What is it?

A BOOKMARK!

Hahhahaha, so lame.

Re-visiting our Beginnings

Last night, our friend Suman had a show in Costa Mesa. It was at the same bar where Jeff and I hung out for the first time. We had finished our second shift closing at Starbucks, and Brookie and I had made plans to go hear a friends band play at Detroit Bar. We invited Jeff and he agreed to go with us. I later found out that was the night that Sarah was having her birthday party, and I think it took her a while to forgive me for stealing Jeff from her that night. But months later...we were besties :)

So we got to revisit Detroit Bar last night. Almost five years after Jeff placed his arm around me for the first time. Suman, also known as Rocom, put on a great show. Here's my favorite so far (keep in mind that live is [usually] always better) (also, warning: explicit language to follow):

Both Jeff and Suman have a little art show tonight, which I'm very excited for. Hopefully I'll have some stories and/or pictures to report later this week.

Easter week in Guatemala

I miss a lot of things about Guatemala. I miss the language, the culture, the food, the smell of smog (really, I do), my grandmother and my friend Isabel, traveling through the countryside, walking everywhere, my green and brown school uniform....you get the point. And holidays. Holidays in Guatemala have so much more intensity than holidays in the U.S. Specifically, Christmas and Easter. As of 2006, 50-60% of the population in Guatemala was Catholic. With an increase in Protestant churches, this number might be a little lower now. But still, there is a huge Catholic population in Guatemala, and the ferver in the celebration of these holidays is something to behold, whether you're a believer or not.

This week is Holy Week, which means that most people in Guatemala have a week long vacation. Yeah, kind of like Spring Break...but everyone has it on the same week because it's accommodating a religious holiday, not a school schedule :) And although some people use the time off to hit the beach and relax with the family, there are still many people that use it to attend the processions that are organized throughout Holy Week. Each day, different processions are had throughout the country that commemorate the last days of the life of Jesus Christ. I've admired these processions since the first time my grandmother took me to see one when I was little.

A few things about these processions.

A lot of preparation goes into them. And a lot of preparation goes into making the carpets over which the procession will pass. Each town or city prepares the streets through which the procession will pass by decorating walls and doors, and making detailed and intricate carpets out of vibrantly colored sawdust. I remember having to wake up super early to work on these when I was little. But it was so exciting!

As you can see in the pictures, the carpets are surrounded by fresh pine needles. That, combined with the smell of incense, are the smells of Easter! In Guatemala, at least...

Other things: hooded men. That's never a bad idea, right? I think my grandma told me where this tradition started...but my memory is lacking. I saw a couple videos from processions this year, and I was actually bummed to see a switch from the purple traditional robes to suits. And that is why you....lose traditions (I was tempted to incorporate "and that's why you don't use a one armed person to scare someone"). Music. The procession is followed by a full band. The music is usually somber, appropriate given the circumstances. There's something so sorrowful and moving about this music.

Finally, and maybe most impressive: the people. The people that trek from all over the city and country to watch these processions, and the people who chose to carry the floats in the procession. Women carry the float of the Virgin Mary and other female saints that may follow behind the main float, and men carry Jesus and other male saints. Each of the floats that comprise the procession usually weigh several thousand pounds, and require 50-100 people to carry it. If my years of Catholic schooling in Guatemala serve me correctly, the pain of carrying this weight is supposed to symbolize the pain of Jesus carrying the cross. If you need some suspense in your life: watch people trying to get one of these floats in or out of a church, or trying to turn a corner!

So, my point is, I want to go to there. I'm hoping that next year, around this time, Jeff and I will be in a position where we can go to Guatemala for Easter. Then I can post videos of my own!

Can you just google your brain?

I'm a big gmail fan. Google in general, but I love my gmail account. I can organize my emails in folders. I can archive stuff so it's not filling up my "inbox." I can use search terms to find emails that have been lost in my cyber mailbox. I can search by a contact, and see every single email I've shared with that one person. It groups my email and subsequent responses in one "email." I mean...things weren't always this amazing! Remember hotmail? Yeah...

My favorite feature is definitely the search capability. All I need to remember are a couple key search words, and I can find the EXACT email I need, even if I don't remember who it was to or from. So I guess it shouldn't really be a big surprise that lately I expected my brain to do the same. I was trying to remember something, not sure if it was a memory, some sort of information or whatever, and in my mind I started thinking of the search times I was going to use to "gmail search" my brain. Once I realized what I was trying to do, I couldn't help but laugh at myself. But how awesome would it be if you could gmail search your BRAIN?! You'd never "forget" anything (not sure how the brain actually works when it comes to remembering and forgetting...but assuming it all stays stored in your brain somewhere)...you'd just have to remember the right search terms and you'd be set.

I shared this recently with Jeff, and he shared a similar story he had . He was smelling something at his parent's house, he wanted to share the scent with me, and wanted to email it to me so I could smell it. Ha!

This sounds crazy now...but it's only a matter of time...right?

Lost and Found

When I moved out, either before college or when I left for college, I left a couple storage boxes with my aunt, and it has taken me around 5-7 years to pick those up from her garage. Most of it was junk, a lot of it was Enrique Iglesias paraphernalia--from teddy bears, to books, to my embarrassing scrap book. But there were also some goodies:



Among these: my "yearbook" from Santa Teresita in Guatemala, from 1993, and my tea cup set that I never really played with, but still think it would be cool if I had it around in case I ever have a daughter.

But the biggest find was my first diary. I started it after my 8th birthday, so my handwriting and spelling are terrible. It's actually pretty entertaining to read through it with Jeff--including all my boy crushes, ha. Here's an excerpt so you get an idea about the deep and meaningful things I wrote about:
So in case you can't make out my terrible writing and spelling, this was on Monday, July 1 of 1991. And I write: "Dear diary, yesterday my mom showed me how to drive a reall car. Today I had four little taqios (I'm sure I meant taquitos) in the kids combo. I was suprised (spelled phonetically, I'm sure) I at all that! in 25 more days I will be with my mom. I'm counting the days. The end Alex 9"

I'm still surprised at how much I eat sometimes. At least some things never change.

Grandma's House

For those of you who know me, you know I like to frequent my grandma's house whenever I can afford the plane trip to Guatemala City. I never stay anywhere else while I'm in Guatemala, unless we're traveling around the countryside. But ever since I was born, that was my destination for the Summer and miscellaneous vacations.

I'm sure most of you know that Guatemala isn't like the U.S. in many ways: it's not very clean, it's way more dangerous, and people don't move out of their parents house until they're married--which isn't weird over there. It's normal for people to live with their parents, I think mostly because renting is way too expensive and kids just can't afford it. Another thing is that people don't really move around. Ever. You buy one house and you pretty much stay there. And most people are like my grandmother: you moved in when you were a kid, and never moved out. My grandma started living in her house in Guatemala City when she was about 7 (or 10, not sure). She grew up there, and at one point or another, so have her children and her children's children (me!). Point being: my grandma's house has a lot of history to it.

I remember going to spend Summer's with grandma when I was 5, when the back part of the house was only partially built. My sister/cousin Vanessa and I played house through the non-existent windows, along with the roaming chickens and piles of dirt and piedrin. I also remember having the reception for my First Holy Communion in the new garage, at the age of 8. I remember having to shine the tile floors after grandma waxed them. And boy do I remember the Summer of 2000, when I went with my 3 younger cousins in tow--it was the Summer of Brittany Spears videos (the one with the plastic-looking red body outfit...we must have watched it on MTV about 100 times--no exaggeration). And I remember all the hard work my grandmother has put into that house. She's drawn her own plans and built two fully functioning apartments in the back, not to mention the front and back yards which are her pride and joy.

And most recently, I remember my husband's first Christmas in Guatemala, lighting fireworks on the roof amid all the electrical wires. I still don't understand how that doesn't lead to disaster...

It's always nice going to that familiar home, the same halls where I used to push my great-grandmother in her wheelchair, and the same room my uncle Franky, at the ripe age of 15, played his music a little too loud--according to grandma! The thing is, things are getting crazier by the day over there, and grandma's getting older. The family recently started talking about selling the house and permanently moving grandma over here so she's closer to everyone and not constantly traveling back and forth, between her family and her home. I know selling the house makes perfect sense, and entirely rational. But it scares the crap out of me.

I love going to Guate, love spending time there and I'm honestly afraid that selling the house will break our last link to Guate. Sure, I can go and stay in a hotel while I'm visiting, but it's just not gonna be the same. It becomes a leisure trip instead of a trip to grandma's house to visit grandma. I know I'm being selfish about this whole situation, especially because it's even 100 times harder for my grandma to process.

But there really isn't anything else to do. We can't really rent out the house because you can't leave a house alone in Guatemala, for fear that it'll be taken over by gangs or drug lords (seriously), and no one in the family is in a position to take the responsibility to go over there every now and then and check up on the house. I wish I could do it, but as of now, my life isn't as stable as I'd like, and I can't afford the airfare to go out there all the time. I guess I'll just have to hold on to the memories and accept the realities of life. C'est la vie.