Exciting Friday Nights...

I am babysitting a couple of Cal babies tonight so their mama can finally have a night out. It was lovely... they are sleeping now and I'm watching this weird film on IFC & it has a super adorable, very young Jake Gyllenhaal. Lovely & Amazing, it's called. It has very little, next to nothing, to do with Jake's character. It's about being a woman and how fucked up it is. It's complicated and I'm digging it.

Earlier we all ate pizza and soy beans and played video games and watched a movie and ate popcorn.

It made me miss Dasan even more... but he'll be home in 10 days. I can survive for 10 more days by borrowing other people's children.

I have a midterm and a presentation next week. Something like 4 more weeks of summer classes? Then a week off. I think that I only need 4 more classes to graduate. That means that I will be graduating on time. No matter what I do. That means that next May I'll be done here.

Watch Lovely & Amazing. It just keeps getting better.

So much!

If all goes well... I will be starting my last year at Berkeley in just a couple months. Is this a joke? Is this for real? What the hell is happening???

I'm currently in summer school. I'm without my son. I'm alone in my apartment, which finally feels like home, and for the first time in over a decade home means just me and my things. My homework. My reading assignments. My friends, that qualify as my new family. My open space. My space that is empty in ways that I could not have defined prior to my coming here.

I owe so many of you so much. I don't even know how to express what I feel when I think of what it took to get me here, to this point, so close to the finish line, so close to being able to never look back.

And still... there are these remnants of me. The me that dropped out of high school. The me that got caught up in a life that I will never forget. The me that will always know what it's like to come down, to be high, to feel as though all hope is lost. That me. The one that clawed her way out. The me that thinks "theory" of things like loss and love and hate and classism and racism and sexism and all of the other "isms" is just a pile of shit. How can I sit in these classes that try to theorize shit I've lived through?

I try to just find the balance. I'm sure I'm not alone. Clearly I'm not alone. I just feel like we all need to take a deep breath and a long nap.

I mean really, do you have a better suggestion...?

Finals already...?

I know. I'm a bad blog friend. I never say anything. I'm emotionally distant. Sorry! The first year is almost over and it turns out I'm not in very much of a hurry for my time here to be over. I'm also not so sure I want to be a lawyer... I think what I really want to do is to stick around and try to figure out what I really, really, really want. Which of course is to write, but I need a project. I want it to have something to do with madness and media and violence and pain and death. Because I am not the eternal optimist, and because man is that stuff interesting!

I am about to start writing an awful lot of stuff for finals... but I promise when I'm done I'll come back and talk about all the fun stuff!

Spring Break... hooray!

I know... it must feel like I have stopped writing here, but what has actually happened is I have been overwhelmed with the insane amount of reading that I have been assigned for this semester. It's nutty! It's good though... I feel like I'm learning a lot and it feels good. I feel like my understanding of not just the material, but life in general and even what I'm doing here is expanding in ways that I didn't realize. It's hard! But I'm getting there... I can't believe I am more than halfway through my first year at Berkeley. This summer I will start to study for the LSAT and less than a year from now I will be almost done. CRAZY!

I've been studying violence and trauma and it's hard. It makes every single thing that happens in real life seem more significant than it was before. It highlights the bad things in ways that I never acknowledged, but it also challenges me to really appreciate the good ones. And there are a lot of good things.

This experience continues to amaze me.

Oh, I already need a nap!

Today was brilliant! I will come back to that... but for right now, this very moment, while I am exhausted and longing for sleep... I would just like to pose this one question to you:

How is it possible that I have only just completed my first day of the new semester, and have only attended two of my four classes, and yet I am already behind in my reading assignments???

I mean, the things I'm reading are WONDERFUL, but for serious? If this keeps up I will surely go blind, deaf, dumb, and unable to parent in a matter of weeks. Usually it takes months for that to happen! What gives man?

I am all of a sudden terrified that I am not good enough, smart enough, or driven enough to do it... and those are all of the things that I usually console myself with. This is going to be a long 4-5 months.

Just sayin'.

January 20th, 2009

So that's tomorrow's date. It's a special one, and one that I have been waiting for for the last 8 years. Of course, what's amazing is that really we've been waiting for a day like tomorrow for our countries entire history. I'm grateful for the fact that I will be able to spend it on Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus watching with thousands of others as our new president takes the office. I'm not the most patriotic, and I'm not the biggest Obama fan around, but I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to say good riddance to Bush.

Plus... classes start! So that's exciting.

Every day that I am here, I love it more. I feel at home and it's pretty awesome :)

Oh... hey there!

So... it's been awhile. Finals came and went, and I survived a semester at Cal. It could have been better, but it could have been far worse and to be honest, people get a little irritated at my complaining when they find out what my grades were. Still though, it wasn't perfect and that's a problem for me.

Then I survived the holidays. And when I say that I survived, I mean really it was pretty horrible. So now I'm back in Berkeley and have said so long to OC (hopefully for a very long time) and my boy turned 10 and I am going to sit around for two weeks feeling old and lonely and getting a head start on spring semester reading.

It's going to be a good one, classes on theory and crime and violence and power and subjectivity. Sounds good to me!