All Ready

Ok...winding down for the evening.

Laundry is done, but still needs to be put away. I guess I'll save that for tomorrow.

Brushed my teeth, washed my face.

Waterpack and GU all prepped for tomorrow's run.

Running clothes laid out.

Yikes! Let's hope I can be up by 5:45AM. Need to leave the house by 6:20AM to make it to the marina by 7AM. Bah! This training is killing me!! :-( I am SO not a morning person, and SO NOT a morning person who exercises!! :-P

Good night, everyone! Hope you have pleasant dreams!

Yoda as Pope?

Only in Rome...!! :-)

Brrr....

Just finished dinner. Me so happy. Me so full. :-)

It's freezing!! This house is so darn cold!!

Apollo 13 is on tv. I've seen this movie a gazillion times and never really get tired of it. Two other movies on my 'never get tired list' are: Shawshank Redemption and The Sound of Music.

Why Shawshank, you ask? Well, if you see it, you'll know why it's on the list.

Why The Sound of Music? This one is partly due to my childhood. Before VCR's and cable, we'd watch it together as a family when it would air on regular tv. I'd always look forward to it each year. Additionally, if you know me, I'm a sucker for a cheesy storyline. I know the entire movie, line by line, song by song! It never ceases to give me warm fuzzies whenever I watch it. It's almost as good as chicken soup! :-)

Tom Hanks rocks as an actor. Anyone remember him from Bosom Buddies? I sure do. He was hilarious in that show!

Eyes are getting heavy...might head to bed soon as I finish up laundry...

Ok. Now I'm Better - For Reals This Time :-P

I took a shower and drank a bit of juice.

Uploaded Italy pics from my camera to my computer. Gonna figure out how to post stuff to my blog. Hope that will be easy to do.

I still feel a bit blah, but I am much, much better now. :-) Tears be gone!

Friday evening was good. Had dinner with some friends - 7 of us total. Good times. Afterwards met up with SF. More good times. :-)

This morning I had to work. It's our qtr end and we take turns being the point of contact on Sat/Sun for the last weekends of the qtr. I chose to take the first Sat so I can get it over with. It was a piece of cake. No issues at all. :-)

Finishing up some laundry and cleaning up around the house today. The place is a disaster area. It was in the early stages of neglect prior to my trip, then after unpacking and such, it's gotten worse. Hope to get everything squared away before the end of the weekend.

Tonight will be lowkey. Church service for sure, then maybe dinner with a friend, or maybe some quiet time at home. Not sure what I need at the moment, but will figure it out as the time comes around.

Need to run to the store to pick up bananas and snacks for tomorrow's run. 10 miles! Yikes!

Still looking for donations. Ack...that reminds me. I need to figure out a fundraising event. Ideas, anyone??

More later!

Ok. Better Now.

Ok.

I had a good cry after my "I Can't Go Home" post. Our reactions to life are a funny thing when I think about it.

It's weird. I was excited to go home earlier this year. Since I wasn't going to be home for Thanksgiving, I took the week of Halloween off so that I could take my niece and nephew trick-or-treating. I also spent a lot of time with my grandparents. The rest of the relatives I avoided. I just didn't want to deal with their judgmental eyes on me.

Then Christmas and New Year's comes around and I get like this. This pattern has been going on for too many years now. I don't know how to break the pattern. Any suggestions? Anyone? Anyone??

The only thing that keeps me going home is to spend time with my niece (2.5 years) and nephew (5 years), and my grandparents. It's amazing how much love I have for my nephew and niece. I'll have to blog about that another time. The familial and maternal love I have for them - it's overwhelming and awesome. I look forward to having my own children some day. :-)

It's also amazing the love I feel from my grandparents, despite the communication gap we have. My conversational chinese is limited, but one of the lessons I've learned from them is how awesome the power of true, unconditional love can be. I feel it whenever I'm around them and I know that they understand me no matter what my circumstances are. I even feel that love now, just as I think about them. It was a sad day when I went home one particular time a few years back and saw how much they have aged. How I realized their mortality, and how I sobbed knowing that all things in life come to an end, and yet, those ending truly are new beginnings. The beginnings of a new type of relationship, a transition from the physical to the eternal when it is their time to move on. Again, it comes back to the imprint we leave on people's hearts.

I have yet to accept how mortal they really are. How do we accept that our time and resources are limited? I want to spend time with my grandparents. I want to spend time with my niece and nephew. But I have my own life ahead of me to build, too. And it's rooted here in SF for the time being. How do we translate our desires to love into that imprint on someone else's heart?

Oh man...sobbing like crazy now. I hope this mood passes soon.

Thanks for listening. Now go hug someone just for the heck of it. :-)

*Hugs*

I Can't Go Home

I can't go home. I just can't.

'F' Christmas. I just can't do it this year.

My cousin sent links to pics of our family gathering at Thanksgiving. Family should be about good times and good memories, but all I felt when looking at those pictures was saddness and hurt and anger. It's complicated.

We all get along, don't get me wrong. And we are all very close, having grown up together. But I've always felt different from the rest of my family, both with immediate family and with the extended members. It's possible that these feelings are self-imposed, but there is some reality to this feeling, too. Part of it is a rebellion of the cultural norms and expectations imposed on me, and the other part is a personality conflict of sorts.

My family doesn't know ME. What they know is their perception of me, and that perception is based on their expectations. I've never felt it was ok just to follow my heart or to do the things were outside of the norm. Their love for me wasn't liberating. It was constricting. And now I struggle with it because those messages are ingrained in me and are now part of my internal dialogue. How do I, as an adult, reprogram those messages and believe in myself enough to rework those messages and release myself from the constraints of self-imposed expectations?

To go home this year means to face the reality that I don't fit in. That my concept of belonging and being loved is contingent on being someone other than who I really am. The immediate family is fine, and I can emotionally deal with those dynamics. It's the extended family that hurts me, despite their best intentions to love me.

Sorry for the digression...the holidays aren't exactly the happiest time of the year for me.

'Nuff said.