Make More Magnificent Moments

I used to be that girl who sat on her computer and cellphone for hours. The addiction was induced by a variety of things and women. I could name a handful of apps it was aided by; however I think that why is more important than what poison I was abusing.

There’s a line between dreams and reality. A line that only gets more fine when seen by the eyes of an idealist. I’ve crossed enough borders to know that no matter the size of the line, it still functions as a divider. I was that girl with the rose colored glasses lit up by screens because I was more content in dreams than reality. Why would I want to leave that? I mean, those innocent dreams can be so sensational. Those memories looping behind my eyes with a smile on this face. Why would I leave this romantic place I was living in in my mind? This perspective formed by selfish selection and an application algorithm. Then there came a moment where I began asking myself what I was doing? What kind of moments was I missing? Was I living up to my potential? Was I living?

Some say that readers are simply people who live vicariously through the writers of the world. For it is the writers who tell the tales of their reality and it’s in the readers eyes where dreams are made. However, most of us both read and write social media every day. We operate in an environment where what we read and write is influenced more on what we want people to see than who we are.

My point is that being sucked into the perception of life versus the genuine reality is something that I couldn’t do any more. I couldn’t do it any more because I realized that I wanted to fall in love and be in love with life face to face. I decided my life would not be a spectator sport where I had to wait for my dreams to fall out of the WiFi ladened air. That my emotions would be guided more by la mirada del alma than a screen. I chose a beautiful reality full of adventures I could know so well that I can express them in limitless ways. Whether it’s in a blog, a conversation, a thousand glances, my hug around your body, the touch of my hands, or the kiss of my lips I can show my genuine experience in many more ways than a digital stream. Not to say that I don’t spend time in front of my gadgets but I have power over the line so that it is not a noose destroying a beautiful reality. I challenge everyone to live even a little more in the moment than they did the day before.

Falling Into a Touch…

I don’t just walk into a place like that. I slowly fall into place among it. Because you know, a good bookstore is not just a place. It’s a feeling. As I roam through the aisles, I can’t help but feel the authors reaching out for me. They’re there touching me – my arm, my shoulder, pulling my hand towards their spine. I run my fingers against the front and hold it from the back while I spread it open only to be pulled into their world. You have to pull me from the pages, from the aisles, from the building because why on Earth would I leave this heaven?

You see, this wasn’t just any bookstore in The Bay. Not your typical Barnes & Noble. Instead I was touched by authors and kissed by the thoughts of the many people who have explored those pages, his/herstories, ideas, los almas del autores… the store offers both used and new books. It’s one thing having the authors reaching out for new eyes. It’s another story, literally, when those pages have been graced with the perspective of another. You can feel them subliminally asking, “what do you think?” as you finish each section. Sometimes continuing a dialogue in the notes on the margins.

Between the subtle whispers and load roars of the pages I remembered my parking meter and had to get out. However, leaving a bookstore is never a sad thing. Leaving a palace of books is exactly what the best authors want you doing. Stop reading. Stop reading so that you can go out and improve old worlds. Create new heavens. Have adventures, share adventures and give meaningful value in every, single, touch…

The Worlds I Wander Into…

What do you do in a foreign country when your rental car breaks down? It can be a scary thought. Any thing can happen when you’re on a dirt street corner. Is it safe? What will people think? What will people do? Will they understand us? It’s hot. Where’s the nearest water? Food? You don’t have a cellphone to call for help. You don’t know where you are.

There were three generations in the car that had broken down. The grandmother and granddaughter were from Cape Town and the mother was from Zimbabwe. Luckily, they had broken down in Redondo Beach instead of another place. Luckily, they speak English and a host of other languages too. Luckily, they ended up in my office.

Unfortunately we did not have a car for them. Fortunately a nearby location did and I got the privilege of meeting them all.

You see, that’s a part of my job I love. I love meeting people. More than mere introductions. I mean the meeting the minds, eyes, idioma del alma (language of the soul). When I ask what brings someone into my office, I don’t simply subject myself to the script of sourcing where our business is coming from. I’m really asking, “Tell me about your world. Let me learn it. Show me your perspective please.”

I have had so many people cross my path that influence the glisten in my gaze that I can’t just keep those moments to myself any more. This is the point where I begin to tell about the worlds I wander into…

Don’t Date A Girl Who Travels, Fall In Love With A Girl Who Travels

She’s the girl of many faces from many places. That girl with a gleam of everlasting curiosity in her eye. And an unsurmountable amount of imperfections that you will find perfect together.

 

Don’t date her for she will wrap you in stories and dreams. Over Skype or long distance calls she will keep you up late at night with tales of her adventures. You will continue into the next day trying to sneak in a nap while she races to catch a train to her next destination. You may get jealous. You may resent her not being there. You may miss some phone calls. You may have meetings and be too tired to talk when she wants to. When she is home, she’ll be planning her next trip while you’re trying to get her attention. You will be nervous because you never know where she is in this world. She will not be easy to please as long as she’s stationary. You will fight about priorities. She always needs to be growing and making movements. She will care about you but will care about learning more.

 

So don’t date her. Fall in love with her so that you may share each others dreams. And when you can’t be in the same geographic area, wake up checking her latest trip photos and counting the minutes until you get to talk with her and share your own adventures. You may miss a phone call while out on your own adventure, that’s okay. You’ll write intimate hand written letters and emails to each other telling of everything you haven’t even imagined yet. You won’t be nervous when you don’t know where she is because you know where her heart is every time yours beats. When you are in the same location, wake up in your wildest dreams with her in your arms. Kiss the sun and learn what hot really is in every part of the world together. You will always learn at each others side. You won’t need her constant attention as long as she holds your hand and heart contently because you will both be experiencing life and love together. And when you’re in a hostel or tent at the end of the night you will share your thoughts and inspire greatness in each other. You will grow a bond that is larger than than the oceans you’ve crossed and the skies you’ve slept under together.

 

Fall in love with her, because she will kiss you with the same lips she kisses the ground that she calls home. If you’re lucky, she will call you home.

Message From Your Heart

One of my favorite songs from one of my favorite artists ever. Along with These Magnet Hearts, In Your Arms, The Keeper, Stars Falling Down… okay the list goes on.

When I kiss a woman I…

Say something taboo. Say something naughty. Make the whole room quiet. Are they quiet because they’re scared or curious? Maybe both? What if you did something taboo right now? This very second.

When I kiss a woman I love, I’m not doing any thing taboo. People who love each other, kiss each other all the time. This is 3 year old knowledge right here. Over the past 10 years, the media has taken strides to remind us that they are instrumental in making and breaking taboos.

Girls kissing girls! Boys kissing boys! Madonna did something very taboo when she kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 VMAs. That kiss was the talk of the town. Ridiculed. The cameras quickly turned away. Liberal activists and LGBT advocates applauded and held on to the fringes of what would be an epic 10 years in fierce struggle.

Pop culture does a lot to reshape our perspectives in an era past simple cell phones and single-computer homes. Think about the average length and tools of historical minority struggles. People of color, women’s rights, LGBT rights, those against colonization and neocolonialism. Using traditional tools such as struggle in the streets, door-to-door canvassing, political lobbying and much more are tried and true paths to progress for a more respectfully inclusive world.

However, the LGBT struggle has hit a hot button, clicked the right link, when it comes to creating social change in a digital world. This struggle has won over pop culture. The great mechanism that determines what is “normal” and “okay” in society. Last night and this morning it has had people tearing up and getting goosebumps in front of 33 couples getting married by Queen Latifah. Of course the moment had the assistance of pop icons – Mary Lambert, Ryan Lewis, Macklemore, and Madonna as they sung Same Love. The love anthem of my generation. The love anthem that shows that true love defies the boundaries of gender and conformity because there are NO boundaries when it comes to love.

Not even sensors can stop people from loving the people they love. What makes any one think they’ll succeed in destroying love with doubt, insecurity, and any thing else negative? I know it’s a very optimistic perspective. I just don’t believe in love being destroyed. Relationships, yes. Love, no. The correlation between the two is a different blog in and of itself. Same Love is a statement that speaks to the heart of what makes society and ignorance weak. It’s fear. Fear of knowing. Loving. At the same time, the wide spread popularity of the song is showing that we are no longer afraid to learn or teach. This song and the way it is being used by pop culture is breaking down walls of fear and ignorance. It’s all the same love, love is love… it’s about time we take away the taboo, all be proud of that love.

And one day when I marry el amor de mi vida, nuestra existencia… We’ll play Same Love while we celebrate everything we’ve been through to get to where we’ll go. Ohhhh, the places we will go!

Weed.

First you grab some. Pull it apart. Remove the seeds. You want it smooth, so you put it in the grinder. The good, fine grinder. Now pour it in evenly, yes, just like that. Roll. Now lick the wrapping just a little to seal it. Light. Lift.

Marijuana, weed, herb, hash, kush. Whatever the kind or your name for it, marijuana like other drugs, sex, alcohol – vices in general – has a whole culture surrounding it. Smoke it from an apple. A cigarette. A pipe. Upside down. On the beach. Hot box a car. It has it’s own language, music, television segments dedicated to it. A plant that comes from the ground and makes you high as the sky.

 

Taxation of hemp was a big topic in the 1930s as major newspaper moguls with vested interests in timber farms reacted to the growing popularity. If hemp replaced traditional, from wood paper, they would lose money. In an effort to protect both their investment in creating popular culture via the newspaper business and their timber mills, they pushed the passage of taxation and regulatory measures.

Now our pop culture is being delivered digitally more than on paper than ever before. The newspapers no longer have much business interest in hemp. Except for maybe good stories. Lately these stories have involved the state of Colorado legalizing marijuana for recreational use and a War on Drugs in Latin America. 

 

Legalization is going to throw a wrench in the profits of the global drug trade and subsequent war. After the flower power, do drugs not war, and heroin addictions of Vietnam veterans of the 1960s. The War on Drugs rocked United States soil while raising the stigma of drug use by enticing people to get what they are not allowed to have. Without demand there would not be supply. Supply chains which have been made complicated by covert CIA activities like Plan Colombia, Contra support, the Merida Initiative and more. All of these operations including the War on Drugs in the United States itself has only served as a tool to feed the Prison Industrial Complex, keeping people oppressed as the CIA floods neighborhoods with drugs and corrupt police.

 

However, this legalization wrench is not going to turn itself. Liberalization of public opinion alone will not remove the stigma. We will have better luck in the future with a combination of things. The first addition to the equation being healthcare. This is important according to numerous studies stating that drug prevention starts with adequate health services and treatment of addiction. Specifically as the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) develops, we are going to see better access to mental health and overall wellness resources. Not to mention, the extraction of some of the power that large pharmaceutical companies have in the drug marketplace as government resources replace private funding. Obamacare provides a dual pronged approach in curbing demand and manipulating supply. All the while, legalization and pop culture can help to remove stigma and make non-lethal drugs more of a norm than a taboo.

 

Do we even want to get into police corruption, the hiring of many officers with PTSD and power issues? How about the War on Drugs in Latin America being more about power than product? And that power vacuum being more about neocolonial economics in globalization than people thinking it’s about superficial gang colors and family names? For another blog…

A Great Bad Day

I wake up in the morning with a precise to-do list. Last Thursday I had a bad day. That day I had to get gas, get the rents deposited, get breakfast, and get to work before 10AM. Have you ever felt that anxiety when your gas tank is next to empty? I exited the packed 405 to an ARCO station, missed it and continued into a Shell station. Blast! All of the pumps are out of order. I backtracked to the ARCO station on fumes, gassed up, got going to McDonald’s across the street. What do you mean my gas tank is saying there’s no gas? I paid for it. I went back in to argue with the attendant only to find those pumps were broken too. Now what? I chanced it to the next exit. Gassed up. And rolled into work five minutes late. The rent deposit still wasn’t done. I shook it off and plunged into the crowd of people from all parts of the globe. It’s easy to shake it off when you’re surrounded in interesting people and can put them in their dream cars, out of nearly a thousand different options. 11:30 rolls around and I stop for water. Where’s my phone? I was backtracking again. What car could it have fallen into? The convertible Mustang? The Camaro? Sorento? Yukon? I sat in the Tesla for a minute. Where could it be? I was thinking of a million things I would have to do to get my license, credit card, and phone taken care of. Damn, I still needed to do the rents.

And then I heard Nelson Mandela died. Suddenly, my day was not so bad. I didn’t hear that Nelson Mandela had died from social media. After all, that’s how I heard about Paul Walker, Michael Jackson, Jenni Rivera…
I heard it from people. I heard it from people discussing it. Thinking about him. Thinking about how he changed and will continue to change the world. He was imprisoned for decades. He was basically a living martyr working to end apartheid, inequality, and injustice. It was never just about South Africa for him, it was about people.
And my mind went back to my quarter-life crisis, when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after college and found myself as the youngest in a small round table discussion that Ann Burroughs was leading. When I went, I was no expert on who she was or that she would be my real life connection to the struggle to end apartheid. I just knew that it was a lunch for Young Non-Profit Professionals and she was with Amnesty International. I thought it was a good place to get my name out and some advice. It was. That was not the powerful part though. Nor was it her story which includes her South African prison sentence in the 1980s. Then her subsequent rescue/escape by Amnesty International and becoming the Chair of the Board. All of that takes conviction, passion for struggle and what’s right. As a white woman, she was directly struggling with Nelson Mandela to end apartheid in her homeland. I had my own flashbacks of when I was gassed by the sheriffs in Arizona for protesting SB1070. I was connecting with her.
But no, no, no. None of that was the powerful part that still resonantes with me. It was when I went up to the counter at the California Endowment to figure out where the panel would be. She came up behind me, looked very deep into my eyes – not just at the colors – and introduced herself very humbly as Ann. She told us at the table, to find our passion and pursue it without question.
I look up to both Nelson Mandela and Ann for their will to do good for and with people while being very human. After all, that’s what I’m passionate about. A few weeks later, I started my career with the constant intent of making people a little happier every day. Now I’m increasingly in a position to teach people to do the same.

We can all make a difference each day in our own ways. They did it on both sides of prison bars. Which shows that we can do what’s right, even if we have our own personal walls and bad days. You also don’t need to be a leader to make it happen. Simply mention Nelson Mandela or something beautiful and you could change someone’s perspective for the entire day, month, lifetime…

“We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” – Nelson Mandela

*Rest in Peace*

Around the Corner

Have you ever looked at something and watched it change colors in the light? It kind of draws you in. In Mexico, I would walk about a mile to class every morning and have to dash between cars to come around a corner to make the final stretch to my part of campus. There were a couple mornings, lost in my music, where I would be coming around that corner and it would be changing in the sunrise. The colors would jump around on the walls already painted in different colors. In the cold shade of the building, I found myself walking faster and those two times I actually began to jog around the corner to see the sunrise happen over la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

I’ve always loved sunrises and sunsets. Yet I have never thought too much about that corner until today, when I saw red whales on the Long Beach Arena and I put Blancanieves into gear. I flew down Ocean Ave and cornered Shoreline to see the sun rise.
And I thought to myself, and now to you, is this what achieving your dreams is? No matter how big or small? Is it all about simply speeding up to see what you already know is around the corner? You know it’s beautiful, so you work harder to make the thought in your head a reality.

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

What if I wanted to talk about how a woman breathes (or doesn’t) when she is kissed very, very well? How about the ways she exhales when she’s on every edge she had never been to? Stop, please. Think about it.  Do you want to talk about it? Why? Who doesn’t like to talk about sex? It’s not like we don’t hear about it in music, see it on television, on billboards, in our own dirty, dirty minds. That actually aren’t that dirty because sex is natural. We just act like it’s a bad thing because that’s what we’re taught. Yet, the belief that it’s dirty is apart of what makes it so much fun to talk about. Like ooohhh, you need a spanking for being such a bad girl with those filthy things you say. Fun right? So we communicate about it in more covert ways.

Just as it’s a big part of life, sex is a big portion of the internet. Internet and life, almost synonymous que no? There’s plenty of porn, sites designed for helping people hook up, the sex toy industry, countless graphics, advertising memes, and articles out there to feast your eyes on AND keep it quiet to those you choose. There’s a distinct power in the digital mask that allows people the freedom to be more expressive than ever before without being known. This mask became increasingly prevalent at the turn of the century when more people began having personal computers in their homes. A mask that seems to be shrinking like a Phantom of the Opera disguise as the years go on. With the climbing usage of instant social media websites and mobile phones, we communicate about sex on the daily, instantaneously with those in our circles. That did not used to be the case.

Things are moving a lot faster than my days of Rugrats and Animaniacs. Now we’re in the generation of twerking, 16 and Pregnant, and Miley Cyrus. Other wise referred to as the Millennial Generation. So how taboo is sex now? Really? Do you want to talk about prostitutes, sex positions, and finding the best spots on your partner the other night? How are Millennials changing the way we communicate about sex, publicly?