Sometimes I love sitting on the cool kitchen floor, when the entire house is silent and the crickets outside make me feel like I live in the countryside, instead of Los Angeles, even for a few minutes. The ground is white marble and invitingly cool in this summer heat. I’ve been home for five hours, yet taking off my shoes hasn’t crossed my mind yet. If I let them stay on any longer, they might just permanently become molded to my feet. Henry the Maltese is of course, right beside me, chomping away on some iceberg lettuce. 

It’s the first time in a while I feel like my mind is almost crystal clear. It feels nice. The wind blowing in from the half-opened window over the sink is making things better. I hate and love being tired all at the same time. It makes me feel useful and accomplished, yet tonight, I feel its effects all over my body - not a good feeling in the least bit. 

In a few days, August will settle in. More than half a year gone. I have begun vividly remembering the last few years, moreso than I ever did when I was younger. This year, I remember Disneyland on New Year’s Eve, my sister’s Alice in Wonderland themed birthday party, London in March - moments that I wish were frozen in time. I remember the excitement I felt that I was going to have an article published in print. My name. In print. On actual paper. In a magazine. You can’t imagine how that feels for a writer. I remember the Sookie Stackhouse explosion that sort of took over my life, the films I wrote about, albeit self-consciously. I remember arguments and laugh out loud moments and more hours spent in traffic than I would ever like to admit. Perhaps my proudest moment this year, I remember all the time and energy I put in to produce this here ezine and the amazing response I’ve received so far. I remember contemplating about going back to school - a thought which crosses my mind every day, but not applying because of the fear of not being accepted - I’m still working on getting over this. 

Half the year is gone, and though there are hundreds of things I should have done, could have done and wished I would have done, I’ve come out pretty unscathed. Here’s to hoping the rest of the year is better.

My mind is in a few different places at once now. I can’t decide whether to stay up tonight on Twitter following the protest scheduled in Iran or get some sleep so I can be up on time to go to the protest in Westwood.

The last couple of days have been quite difficult for me. Difficult in the sense that it was very hard to concentrate on anything but Iran - everything else, work, life, even food just seemed secondary. Everytime I complained about something, like the fact that my car had a malfunction, followed by a towing, I regretted it. My concerns, my pet peeves or insignificant struggles could not and can not compare in any way, shape or form to those in my hometown.

At times, I can’t believe this is all happening, unfolding in front of the world’s eyes - I keep imagining how those who voted for change feel, how upset and angry and passionate they must have been to say, “you know what - NO, I will not stand up for this, I will stand up for what I believe in.” That takes real courage, courage that many of us have never known in our lives.

Every day, while I read the tweets, listen to the news and watch the videos, I am reminded of the situations my parents and entire extended family must have been in during the 1979 Revolution. I cannot even begin to fathom what life was like, it many ways it wasn’t a life at all, but then in other ways, it was like they were REALLY living. I’m not sure how to fully explain what I mean by that last sentence. I mean, it’s as if everything in life that didn’t matter just melted away and the important things hung around. The ones you love, the fight for social justice, morality and human rights - that’s what took over.

For example, this is a personal blog and although I can post whatever I choose at this very moment, I cannot bring myself to do it. Something is getting in the way. Something is telling me, “No, it’s not appropriate. There are bigger things in play. There are lives at stake.”

Things worth mentioning in regards to the Iran Election 2009:

1. The outpour of support from around the world, especially the U.S is just amazing to me. It is so touching and amazing - everywhere you look in Twitter, you see a green tinted icon and messages offering all in Iran their support.

2. Social media - All hail the power of social media. I hope Maureen Dowd realizes how wrong she has been about Twitter.

3. Journalism - You can stop buying newspapers, pay us close to nothing, but let’s face it- you still need us. We’re important. When the times are really tough, we are the most important profession on the face of the planet. And it’s amazing.

My mind is racing. I just read that someone received a “goodbye” email from Iran. My mom told me earlier she had heard that many people decided to write their wills and send out their goodbyes, because they knew if they went into the rally, they wouldn’t come out alive. This entire thing is weighing heavily for me and I’m hoping for the best, and fearing the worst. My thoughts and prayers are with all with enough courage to stand up for what they believe in, even though it might mean death.

I had a good cry yesterday. You know, those crying sessions you have where you just let it all out - all the stress and pain and what not, in the form of salty tears. Sometimes you immediately feel better after wards. This was not one of those times.

Like most people I suppose, I suppress real raw emotions when I’m around people that aren’t my immediate family and closest friends. Yesterday  I struggled with that, as there’s only so much contact you can avoid when you work in an office setting.

I held it in for most of the day, but when I packed up to leave, got to my car, the tears flowed while the engine purred all the way home. Driving on the 405, with news of the Santa Barbara fires in the background, the cool breeze felt comfortable against the wetness of my cheeks and the muggy atmosphere of my car. The unbearable heat was a reminder that California summers are here again, waiting in the shadows of Los Angeles to ruin my life.

I’m not sure what I was thinking about in the car that day, because I was experiencing a mishmash of emotions that were dancing and crashing against each other in my head. Fears, hopes, dreams, regrets, circumstance, love, hate, rejection and acceptance - they rose and crashed independently of me.

And in that moment of haze, the only thing I could remember was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S Eliot.

I wise a wide-eyed and introspective sophomore in high school when I first was introduced to the likes of this poem. Anxious and excited, I walked into the first day of Honors English class to find a photocopied version sitting on everyone’s desk. The assignment? Interpret this 130 stanza poem and bring your written commentary back to class tomorrow. It was a classic “WTF” moment, if only “WTF” had been in popular use back in 1999.

Trying to interpret the meaning of this poem became the bane of my existence. Every explanation we brought in was rejected and it was at that point that I started to wonder about J. Alfred Prufrock. Who was this buffoon of a character and why was he making my life so difficult by not speaking clearly. By the end of the week, I was so sick of hearing about J. Alfred Prufrock and it was the first time, I think ever, that I was happy to see a piece of literature vanish from my site.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

I kept thinking about the passage above and I came to the conclusion that no, there will not be time and not in the Jesse Spano “Caffeine Pill Freakout” kind of way either. There wont be time for a hundred indecisions and revisions. There isn’t time, because you’ll wake up one day and look around and hate yourself for wasting it all. If you want something, make it happen. If you want to go somewhere, go. If you want someone, do all that you can to show how much love, compassion and generosity you’re capable of. The time isn’t later, the time is now. Love, real love (whatever that means, anyway), is not an every day occurrence. It’s not something that lives in people’s lives all the time, that’s why everyone is always out there continuously chasing it.  Most people are not in relationships because they feel they would lose one half of themselves if they were ever apart, they’re in relationships because of convenience, confidence and inability to be alone.  So when you find that person that is always there for you, no matter what, the person that you wouldn’t mind spending every waking moment with, the person that you can yell and scream at but know in the back of your mind that while you’re doing it, everything will be ok, the person that doesn’t try to change you, doesn’t blame you or resent you, grab them and don’t let go.

So no, Mr. Prufrock, there will be no time.  Life is too short to have enough time to dwell, to be wishy washy and to procrastinate.

I made it to my doorstep just as the sun was coming down and as Prufrock was disappearing from my mind. I took a look in the car mirror and decided makeup couldn’t help me at this point, so I tried as best I could to wipe the wetness from my face and step inside, to the sounds of television announcers and the smells of dinner.

There was alot that was left unsaid in my mind and still in the paragraphs above, but real emotions are raw - too raw to be said out loud and sometimes too raw to be heard, even if they’re coming from someone sitting behind a computer. Bringing rawness to the surface is a difficult task and not without consequences. I might write about it one day, but today, I’ll just be happy if I can make it home without having to wipe any tears.

It’s official: I cannot use public bathrooms. Before I go on, I must clarify that my definition of “public” includes anything that does not sit within the confines of my home or the home of the ones closest to me. This means bathrooms in eating establishments, work and anywhere else you can think of. If a toilet seat cover needs to be applied, I can’t use it.

Of course, just because I don’t want to use public bathrooms, doesn’t mean that I don’t have to and need to, because well, let’s face it, when you gotta go, you really gotta go.

Remember way back when you were studying for that psychology midterm and no matter how hard you tried to get beyond the words “psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior” you couldn’t. You just kept repeating the same incomprehensible phrase in your head over and over again until it didn’t mean anything.

Yea.

That is exactly my thought process when I’m forced to use a public bathroom except instead of repeating phrases from overpriced textbooks, I try to talk and coach and coerce myself into peeing.

The smells, the sights, the sounds, the knowledge that hundreds or even thousands of bums have graced the toilet seat before me is nauseating enough to make me feel a dizzy spell coming on. Fortunately, I have mastered the art of the mid-air pee.

It’s hard enough to actually make myself go when I’m alone in there. God forbid someone walks in, because my entire endocrine system shuts down and refuses to cooperate. My bladder stops in its tracks and my body finds it indecent to object.

Today I desperately had to go. I held it in as long as possible before I decided that I would combust if I tried to deny it any longer and made my way to the dreaded three stall bathroom at work. It wasn’t until I was situated that I realized someone else was in there with me. Oh dear God, I thought, how am I ever going to do this now?

I suddenly found myself mimicking the conversation a dad might have with his son at a softball game.

“You can do this. You can do it. Just believe in yourself. Try harder. You can do it!”

After a couple rounds of repeating the sentence above, I finally got myself to relax enough to start and end my time in the bathroom of the second floor of an office building somewhere in Santa Monica even though someone else was in the stall next to me without a care in the world.

This “I-can’t-pee-in-public-bathrooms-especially-when-I’m-not-alone” business is really bordering on the brink of an illness. A crippling, nerve wrecking, socially awkward illness.

Luckily, whoever it was had left before I came out of the stall. That’s another thing. I have no interest in seeing who I unwillingly shared my fiercely private moment with. I will stay in a stall as long as I can so help me God, as long as I don’t have to exchange pleasantries with my pee buddy.

I am not sure where this dramatic disdain for public bathrooms stems from. There are times when I am proud of myself for refusing to use them, there are other times when I hate that I can’t just go with the flow (no pun intended) and just pee already, for the love of bladders everywhere.

Do not even get me started on doing anything more than the occasional tinkle.

Dear blog of mine,

I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring you. In fact, I feel really bad about it. I’ve been meaning to update, I think about it every day, but the truth is, life just keeps getting in the way - that and writer’s block mostly. I’ve been tweeting more than anything. Listen, blog - this does not mean I don’t love you. Twitter is just a fun distraction, you’re the real thing honey. I mean it. Don’t be mad at me. Don’t look at me like that. I don’t like it when you’re mad at me. When you’re upset, I’m upset. I’ve had a very busy couple of weeks you know, lots of editing, selecting writers and reviewing articles. On top of that, I had to drag myself to Beverly Hills for a screening of Coraline, write a review for it which took forever.  On Tuesday I went to the Magic Castle, which is the second funnest place ever, next to Disneyland and although it was an amazing night (complete with me being called up to assist one of the sleight of hand magicians), I had to drink coffee the next day to stay awake and Lord knows I almost NEVER drink coffee. Yea, that’s how tired I was. Then there was more work and more headaches and traffic and procrastination and yea, you get the jist of it. I see brighter days in our future together, however. I feel some posts coming on, so don’t fret pudding.

Writer’s block. Pomegranate juice and cardamom tea on a Sunday afternoon. Damp weather at first, but not for long, as the sun shines through the window by midday. Liberated by the fact that I’m using a Sunday for what it’s good for: being lazy. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to just sit down, read a good book, listen to good music and reflect. All work and no play squashes creativity. I’ve been having trouble writing here lately. So much to say, but having a hard time writing it all down, coherently. Right now, I’m thinking about this year, the year of the ox. I’m thinking about everything and nothing at the same time. I’m thinking that I miss Hugo the Maltese in London…

I feel very self-conscious when I write in this web space of mine - that might be why I’ve been avoiding it, that or because I’ve been having quite a great time posting shorter blurbs on the amazingness that is Twitter.

The truth is, is that I can’t define what this space is most useful for. Is it a personal blog with random entries about all aspects of my life? Is it about my journey into journalism? Is it something I should use for my professional career? Is it a mix of all these things? See, these are questions I don’t have answers for and perhaps it worries me when it really shouldn’t. Maybe it’s ok to not have the answers. Maybe it’s ok to write about whatever I wish, without following any specific guidelines, I’m not sure. I guess you could say what it has been for me mostly, is a place of reflection, a place where I can write about whatever I wish and look back at later, wondering what I must have been thinking or feeling. It’s a bit like a memory capsule.

A lot of what prevents me from writing in here about topics I’d like and as frequently as I’d like, is the sheer amount of energy loss I have when I actually have the time to write. An eight hour day, coupled with a three hour daily commute really makes you want to collapse by the time you get home. I hate it. It sucks. I wish traffic would die. But alas, no such thing will happen. This is Los Angeles, and traffic is the price we pay for the year round Mediterranean weather.

Still, there are other reasons I’ve been avoiding this place, like the fact that I currently don’t have a camera and hate that I can’t include photos with my posts or take pictures of the things I bake.

I’ve had quite a busy week, full of editing, writing, categorizing, movie screenings, dreams, goals and social media. I hope tomorrow and this weekend are better days for the writepudding.

When a new year arrives, nothing cements its status better than writing the date for the first time. This year, it happened to me quite early on, since I trotted into work on January 2, after a two day binge on Disneyland and doing absolutely nothing. I sat at my desk and between dealing with writers, editing and fumbling around on Twitter, I wrote the date down for some reason or another, and for the first time as far as I can recall, I didn’t mess up. I didn’t write “1/2/08.” I didn’t have to cross it out and fill in the correct year. I simply took my pen to paper and wrote out “1/2/09.”

It might have been trivial, but it was exhilarating, knowing that I had actually implanted the seed of ‘moving forward’ in my mind, rather than staying stuck in the past, or carrying on in the present. Although I had written the date of a new year correctly on the first try, I had long resolved before 2009 actually came to make some resolutions, or solutions, or goals. Whatever you like to call them, I decided to take action and have an impact on the long and winding road that is my life.

While I write here or watch television and especially when I am driving, or rather stuck in Los Angeles traffic, I feel like my mind might some day explode, because its reached its maximum capacity of occupants, like an elevator. I feel my hopes, my goals, my ambitions, my dreams and my fears float up to the surface and then I imagine feeling so full, so up to the brim, that I do explode, and hundreds of thousands of little neuron bubbles containing my thoughts descend to the pavement and desintigrate. Poof.

It’s a very overwhelming feeling and a frightening one too, to know that there’s so much you want to do, but don’t have all the time in the world to do it in.

I’m trying to change all of this in 2009. I’m trying to regroup and reorganize my thoughts and my wants. I’m trying to isolate them so they don’t collide and spill over. I’m trying to make sense of my purpose and of my life and of my future. Sometimes, it’s harder being younger, than it is being older. Finding your ground and establishing your existence and goals, that’s the hard part. That’s the battle. Not living it. Living it is easy, but people make it hard. But trust me on the sunscreen.

In 2009, I propose to drink eight glasses of water a day. I propose to take better care of my body and my mind, to think before I eat and look after myself. I propose to apply to graduate school, to get a degree in pursuit of my two loves, journalism and English, or both if I’m lucky. I propose to further myself through continued education, through the classroom and the professors that I miss, all the while knowing that knowledge truly is power. I propose to finally start writing more, to getting published in a national magazine, to keep faith in print, to write short stories and start on a novel, to do what I love. I propose to read more, because to write, you must read. I propose to travel, to London, to Oregon, to San Francisco and perhaps Seattle. I propose to save money and not let a pair of gorgeous shoes in the window persuade me otherwise. Mostly, after six years of being so far apart from each other, me in Los Angeles and him in London, I propose to make sure that starting in 2009, we’re never apart from each other again. I don’t know where we’ll be, but I’ll know this: that we’re together. Some day, when I’m feeling particularly brave and open, I’ll share our complete story here, piece by piece. But for today, suffice it to say that someone in this world loves me very much and that I love that someone just as much. There is someone I can’t live without, even if I tried, someone who’s seen my good and my bad, who wants to spend his life with me - someone who packs my luggage and prepares my breakfast while I sleep, someone who makes me laugh beyond words, someone who was made for me, someone whom is the longing for the half of myself that I lost, when God decided to split people in two. Yea, I love him, and that love I feel for him, words can’t even do it justice. Happy New Year, here I come.

The year of the Ox has finally arrived. I spent the last remaining hours of 2008 cramped between strollers and over bearing people, trying to fight away the frigid air and navigate through the lands of tomorrow, fantasy, frontier and adventure. By the time I left Disneyland in the wee hours of 2009, I was tired and cold and ready to call it a day, but that will never take away the fact that I had an amazing time, even with the annoyances. It’s the best place to be for New Year’s Eve, believe me. Note to parents of kids aged five or younger: If your kid can’t walk on its own, then you have no business bringing them to Disneyland. Yes yes, I know, it’s fun, it’s meant for kids, they have a good time, yadda, yadda, yadda. But you know what? They don’t have a good time and most importantly, YOU don’t have a good time and that ultimately means that people like me don’t have a good time because of you and your backwards thinking of dragging a whiny, crying, stroller-loving child to a theme park full of people and rides and crowded streets and long lines for food. I mean, what are you thinking? Do you think that 2-year-old you are carrying even cares? Do you think he will remember this place? No, the answer is he will not, annoying and ignorant parent. He will not. But I will and you will. I will remember how long it took for me to walk a couple feet because you and your crowd of stroller pushers blocked entire walkways. You will remember that you did not have a good time because you dragged your rugrat to a crowded, cold, over-priced park, that, let’s face it, was not made for small children, and on New Year’s Eve no less! Ok, I’m done.

As you can tell by the photos above, which were all taken by Nathalie, we went a bit mental after the clock struck 12. There are many more photos from the first minutes of 2009, but the sheer craziness of our faces might frighten you. Suffice it to say, we had a more than splendid time. Here’s to the new year, to new choices, to new goals, to new solutions, resolutions, health, wealth, love and happiness. Here’s to a year of  more writing, blogging, publishing,  creative ideas, reading and reporting. Here’s to a year full of more laughter, less sadness, more walk, less talk, more beauty, less pain and everything in between.

It’s 6:57 a.m. and I’m coming to you live from Los Angeles, where the sun has just come up and the air is as crisp and fresh as it will probably be for the entire day. You might think I’m a bit mad for being up at this hour, but I assure you what I’m about to tell you might be madder: I am planning on driving to Disneyland with my best friend and sister to buy tickets for entrance in the park for New Year’s Eve tonight. Because of a fiasco last year, in which we arrived too late, and found that tickets were completely sold out, then subsequently had to buy California Adventure tickets (ugh) and then decided to be sneaky by getting into the main park through the Monorail that runs through Downtown Disney, which we succeeded in doing by the good grace of a stranger who had extra tickets to get us through, we are trying to make sure we get in this year without the hassle, and believe me, it’s not easy. We’re making the 42 mile trek now so that we can buy tickets, drive back and go later tonight. Oh, what a chore. Because of the craziness that will ensue tonight and tomorrow, I bid you adieu, internet, until the new year!