21: The Second Time Around

I got up yesterday morning hoping for nothing out of the ordinary. I offered up simple prayer of thanks for another year and asked that I'd be mindful of blessings around me so I wouldn't be too sad or lonely. God still throws this old kid of His birthday surprises.

Ann, Apple and Gee threw me a birthday party 30 minutes before the end of September 24. They succeeded in taking me by surprise and making my mouth hang open for a few seconds. Then I grabbed my cam... (Haha! Apple you're the only one who knows how long to hold a pose for no-flash shots!)


It took me a minute to realize that the candles I had just blown out spelled out "21" instead of 22. Haha!


The roommates were mortified (most demonstrated by Apple)at their mistake but it was just too cool a mistake to feel bad over. Hey, I don't mind being younger!


Forks up!


Me eating the 1... Gee you're so cute!


Thanks roommates! I'll miss you gals!


Thank you God. You have taught me to hope.

Okay, maybe not as hopeful as to feel 12 again. Haha! That would be cool though.

Thanks to everyone who remembered!

ida and everyone in america: aunties, uncles,

cousins, friends; mom, dad, bros, nellie, gee, ann,

apple, janna, junette, salve, kuya caloy, the dcbc

sunset service congregation, anna b., gilda, sheena,

kathy, roxy, arbie, lg, jordan, auntie minda and all the

folks in ilocos sur

Nice, Naive, and Beautiful --- Plumb

The month didn't have a promising opening. I went out to ice skate and ended up tearing a couple of ligaments. A cast immobilized my left leg for two weeks. It's off now but muscle atrophy settled in during the [over]cast days. I can't even run if my life depended on it, much less dance. I feel so sad that I can't dance, can't turn up the volume on my iPod and move around the room at 3AM.

Of course, my iPod died on me too. Great timing.

There's my laptop. Hay, laptop. You and your mood swings.

Then there's the dorm matter. I wasn't renewed so I have to look for some place to live in next semester. I'm graduating so new living conditions were on the horizon. This, however, feels premature and depressing.

But. In the words of LG, "Life is good. Life will get better. Trust that something good is around the corner."

Thus,

Things That Make this Month A Great Month Despite Setbacks and Circumstances:

1. Mom, Dad, Omar, Mikhael
2. Tickets for December US trip.
3. Stillwaters people for taking me in
4. Nellie, Yam, Roxanne for being there when I was lonely, needy and depressed
5. Ate Jojee for understanding her crazy kid
6. New friends at Stat
7. Thirst for Him
8. The kindness of strangers when I needed rides and help during the days I had a cast on.
9. There is breath, blood and life in me.

And look at that, I'm a two decades and two today.

Tales

I must have had about five people ask me about God during the months when I thought I was going agnostic. It was weird to me at the time. There I was, wanting to leave Christianity alone, wanting nothing to do with God, and yet defending the faith, talking about the Man. It was frustrating because it was like God was dogging me at my heels at every turn. It's not that I stopped believing God existed. I think I just didn't want to follow Him in the way that I was. I felt like such a phony. I felt pretty bad. I also could not help getting angry whenever I was with people who worshipped him and looked so happy and sure about the wheres and the whys of their lives.

My first Bible is with a former roommate of mine who received it as a gift from me a day after she decided to take Jesus seriously on the salvation matter. I don't really miss the book per se. I miss the times I had back when I owned it. That Bible is covered in all sorts of highlights... Some pages bleeding raw, not a single word alone in white space. The words were alive, they were spoken to me and they hit home. Those were the times I'd just sit on my bed and talk endlessly to God and know He was listening. I'd sit there for a long time just enjoying all the stuff he said and all the light just seeping into me. I'm surprised my roommates did not call a psychiatrist. I was the Chesire cat, grinning ear to ear, just basking in a love so outrageous.

A classmate stood up after our class today and shared the story of his life. I was awestruck...and a little envious. You could tell he was having tangible interaction with God. He didn't sound like he was after you praying for salvation or like he was after anything at all but telling you about his best bud. It was something beautiful and true. And it got our classmates talking about God. Cool.

I try not to think about my Christian growth, about being mature or about who I'm supposed to be. It's too complex for me and maybe it's not what I should be thinking about. My bestfriend says I'm a fast learner. God knows otherwise. I'm a mule. I'm a wrestler. I'm a runner. Pretending to be anything else robs me of really experiencing the vastness of grace, love, justice and joy that is Jesus Christ.

I feel like I'm unconventional and some have called me liberal, whatever that means. It makes me afraid to pray in groups. It makes me afraid.

Life's messy right now. But this road continues to look more right as I walk it.

The Right Drip

I attended Stillwaters last Tuesday. In one part of the message the speaker talked about Jacob and his tendency to run away. You all know the part where God corners him one night and they wrestle. Dawn comes and Jacob dude is left with a limp because God touched him on his hip. After that the speaker said something about how God still does that today, that cornering thing when we run away. How he might not touch us and give us a limp but God is still definitely down with pursuing you and cornering you. Well, when I heard that I looked down at my leg and cast and I just cracked up. God has the craziest sense of humor.

Seriously now, going to Stillwaters felt like coming home for me. I've been running away from church, fellowship and basically God for a long time. I don't know why I've been running. I know where it started but now it's all so confusing to me. At the same time that I've been running, I've been searching for... I don't know. Searching for only God knows what.

For a while I thought I was becoming agnostic. I mean, I know some stuff about God. Okay, precious little about God. I know that he loves me and that he cares deeply about my past, any and all injustices that have occurred, all the wounds and pains, everything. I know that being in this relationship with my Creator isn't like being buddies where we continually pay each other back for favors done. I know that God isn't asking me to earn his love. But my mind can't seem to communicate that to my heart.

I'm one of those people who have problems with grace. I have struggled with grace and stuggle with it immensely. I have lived with this entire vocabulary of faith for almost half a decade now. I've read it, heard it, spoken about it, sung about it and even danced about it. But sometimes it doesn't make sense to me. It's like a foreign language I'm not down with. "Grace" is on top of that list. Accepting grace is an entirely different thing than just talking about it. I wrestle with God constantly over this. It gets so crazy at times, like a steady stampede on my pride and emotional barriers. But a voice tells me that maybe that's good for me.

Rox told me the other night about how much she sees Jacob in me. Not the lying and conniving part of Jacob, thankfully. But the wrestler in Jacob. She sees me everyday and she sees how I wrestle with God. When she saw my reaction, she quickly said that this wasn't a bad thing. Think about it this way, she said. Wrestling means an awful lot of contact with the other person. Contact isn't something you can have too much of with God.

You're familiar with white noise. To stat majors, I'm not talking about the white noise of time series analysis. I'm talking about white noise from the TV. And I'm talking about white noise because for the longest time that all powerful Gospel Paul talks about in Romans was white noise in my life. It was white noise then it was nothing.

I said earlier that going to church was like coming home. It was like the Truth stepped into that room and wrapped it's powerful arms around me. It felt like Jesus was holding me still and prying off the goo of lies and sins, cleaning me up. I felt like God was crawling through my mind and throwing out the junk. You know when you have this really bad cold and you go around talking funny and never breathing with your nose? Last Tuesday felt like my first breath of air after a terribly congested cold. Almost like the relief of my first clean breath after a terrible asthma attack.

I'm still going at turtle pace here. I feel like this "little thirst" (as my mentor put it) for God is such a fragile thing. I can't manufacture it myself so I'm going to take it slow. Maybe the limp and the cast on my leg is showing me how to rely not on myself but on God, like I would rely on a crutch if my fall was worse.

I don't feel such a strong urge to look for anything or anyone to latch on just so I can feel something. It's like my poor sick soul finally got hooked up on the right IV and that IV is the Truth and its bringing Life and Light into me.

Women Are Walking Accidents

from AFHV

Days of Blue

Brace yourselves for some medical terminology...*Evil Laughter*

I went to the doctor this afternoon, hoping i'd get a opinion that validated the feeling of stupidity for showing up in an orthopedic surgeon's clinic with no apparent swelling of bruising in my knee. "This is nothing. It just needs rest." I reassured myself as I knocked on Dr. Jesse Conjares office. I have to say something about Dr. Conjares clinic manners at this point (I feel like I owe the guy, you know) --- he was incredibly warm and friendly. I wish all doctors had his "aura".

Anyway, after asking me questions to form a detailed account of last Saturday's fall at the ice rink, he made me stand up and try to do certain things with my bad leg. I failed at all three tests of this sort. Then he sat me down and gently performed another three tests by rotating my leg and putting pressure on my knee. It hurt in all but one test.

My diagnosis? Dr. Jesse is sure I've hurt my medial collateral ligament (see picture), found on the inside of the knee joint and spanning the length of the end of the femur to the top of the tibia. I have a Grade II MCl tear which means 3-4 weeks of joint rest i.e. wearing a leg cast to immobilize the leg. He can't diagnose whether the anterior cruciate ligament or the meniscus cartilage have been torn along with my MCL right now. He said we'd have to wait until my MCL has healed to find out. The good news is that my X-rays are cleasn and I have no bone fractures.

So I'm sporting a blue leg cast that covers my left leg from my midthigh to my ankle. They seldom use plaster these days pala. They use fiberglass meshes that need just a bit of wetting to harden. The meshes come in a variety of bright colors. I guess my friends won't be able to doodle on this thing now. Wearing jeans is a problem (anyone have spare jogging pants?). Taking a bath and doing toilet stuff is a bit challenging. But I can still walk without crutches---cause for celebration! Now, if I could get AMP to help me getting to farther places... He does have a car... *Giggles*

In other news, my grandmother's first batch of blood tests are in and they're negative for diabetes. Happy happy happy. We're still waiting for the tests for other blood diseases. Keep her in your prayers. Thanks.

That's all for now. Be careful with your knees kids.

Slow and Steady Progress

I'm so tired but I've got some AMP juice to get me going...

I've been limping around since Saturday afternoon, trying to avoid putting weight on my left leg. The knee has been painful ever since the fall I took while ice-skating. That coach! He promised he'd catch me before I slip but he didn't. When I slipped, I landed on my left knee with my left leg twisted behind me and my right in front of me. Not a natural position for the body of course.

I don't think anything is broken because there is no major swelling in the area but everytime I try to straighten or bend the leg, my knee feels like it's going to snap sideways. I can't hear a popping sound so I don't have a dislocated knee which is already extremely good news to me as a ballet student. But I can't do retires (essential for pirouettes) and degages. The doctor told me to rest the leg as much as possible and if it still hurts by Wednesday then I should have an orthopedic surgeon look into the matter. Well, it's Tuesday night and I'm still having problems with the knee. I guess it's off to find a doctor tomorrow. Hopefully it's nothing serious...or expensive.

My grandmother has a lot of lesions and bruises on her legs and they've been getting worse. My mother, who can pass off as a doctor sometimes, says that this is a symptom of diabetes or leukemia. So my Lola is going to have a check up and blood test tomorrow. Hopefully nothing serious is going on in her body too.

Things are hectic so posts might be getting rarer or a lot shorter in the weeks to come. I leave you with a recommendation to check out pandora.com, a site by the Music Genome Project. You give them an artist or song and they will give you similar music based on an unbiased analysis of some 200 musical parameters. It's been a great way for me to discover more artists who play the music I like and I now have five radio channels that play exactly what I want. It's pretty cool. To cite from a New York Times article on the project:

Bit by bit, Pandora’s music analysts have built a massive
archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of
more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova
to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome
Project.

At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their
favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music
with similar “DNA,” in effect a private Internet radio station
microtailored to each user’s tastes.

Pandora’s innovation is to focus on the formal elements of songs,
rather than their popular appeal. Say your favorite song is Aretha
Franklin’s recording of “Respect.” Pandora will make you a
personalized soundtrack that could include Gladys Knight and the
Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and Solomon Burke’s
“Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” (Why? Click twice and learn
that Pandora thinks the Gladys Knight tune resembles “Respect”
because it includes “classic soul qualities, blues influences, acoustic
rhythm piano, call and answer vocal harmony and extensive vamping.”)

It may not take 21st-century technology to deduce a link between
Ms. Franklin and Ms. Knight. But the more you tell Pandora about
your tastes, the more creative it can get.

UP Student Regent's Reply to Gonzales

Persisting as Social Critique: The University of thePeople

"Well-behaved" Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalesmaligns the University of the Philippines yet again,f or producing "destabilizers and naked runners".

As this gentleman's gentleman is entitled to his own opinion, U.P. is not required to respond, but precisely because it must, it will. The Universityhas the right and the responsibility to dissent.For how else may prove its worth? U.P. as an educational institution can only affirm itself when it puts theories into practice. Woe the day U.P. stops talking, commenting, and thinking--which is in contrast, the time Sec. Gonzales happily waits for, when U.P. performs its "true role" in government service.

U.P. is bound to defend Philippine statehood. Sec.Gonzales must understand that U.P. does indeed, in a manner that is idiosyncratic, sometimes abrasive, but always with best interest at heart. U.P. is a social critic, not a yes-man, so it will not ask permission or forgiveness when it says it like it is: government sucks. But U.P. is also an agent of change, which is why, in the same breath, it contributes thousands of its best graduates to help make government and society better.

I will now claim the privilege to opine: Sec.Gonzales is just rattled in his prude morality by streaking, in his occupational delusion by U.P.'s firm request for clear leads in Karen Empeño andSherlyn Cadapan's case. But I am disturbed that this is just half of the truth, and that the whole lies somewhere between the lines of the military's "Know the Enemy" and Oplan Bantay-Laya.

In the midst of all this name-calling and witch-hunting, I am sure the thinking populace is becoming more emboldened to stand up. I can find more than a thousand other U.P. students who would gladly wear a sign saying "destabilizer" just for the pleasure of driving a point through: what's wrong with it? If dissenting has destabilized anything, I am comforted one example is Marcos'regime.

He with the gall (and gallstones) to disapprove of academic freedom, Sec. Gonzales stands now a stalwart enemy--barring Gloria Arroyo herself--of human liberty. But God has been kind enough to also make him bigoted, for if he had more sense to comprehend the essence of the Oblation Run, he might have also joined these celebrated naked runners.

And surely, that would have been obnoxious.

Raffy Jones G. Sanchez

Student Regent

University of the Philippines System

September Comes at Last

You know when you're busy when it takes a reminder from your mom for you to recall that you'll be celebrating your birthday some time later in the month. Dear friends, you know what this is for. =) Of course, no expectations and this is an "open-ended" list.







sleep mask











Donald Miller's Through Painted Deserts

















iPod Nano Skin











Tickets to the movie or the book



















mascara (my current craze...i'm a make-up junkie)

Derailed

1. Roommates planning weekend:
lonelysoul: I don't know how to get to the Mall of Asia... Do you?
sadsoul: Hindi rin...Uhm...ang alam ko, LRT or MRT lang un...
tas baba ka somewhere. Then sakay tayo ng multicab jeep.
*smiles*
lonelysoul: Hmmm... Baba ako somewhere. Helpful.
San kaya un somewhere?

2. Looks like I'm supposed to head the publicity division for CAP-STAT. Not happy. At least not THAT happy.

3. Probably failed my 146 exam. What I don't get is why I'm having difficulty with this particular subject. All my batchmates think that this is the easiest subject we have this semester. I'm the outlier because I find 147 and 145 the easiest subjects. When I tell them this, they look at me like I'm an escapee from a mental institution. It's so frustrating that four shots of Jager seem like a good idea right now. Then tomorrow, after nursing the hangover, I'm going to study even harder. And hope for a miracle.

4. 145 paper defense... Ah, I'd rather just forget about it. It's up there with horrible experiences. Groupmates were equally horrible. Freeloaders all of them. *sobs*

5. Ice skating, bowling and food trip scheduled tomorrow. Yey. Some fun after five incredibly depressing days. I'm celebrating my birthday 22 days early.