April 2011
63 posts
dana's life: making orange juice.
dammit, i wrote this whole long awesome post about how i made freshly squeezed orange juice for the first time tonight. and than tumblr ate it.
anyway, i can give a jist of it: i got a whole box of rescued oranges from nancy, a lady who founded an organization called fair foods. fair foods goes around and rescues produce that is about to be thrown away by food distributors and redistributes it at a humble cost of $2 a bag to low-income neighborhoods out of the back of their truck. it’s recycling food the best way you possibly can. fair foods can be found here: www.fairfoods.org
i peeled 5-6 oranges, threw them in the juicer (which was terrifying), and got magically fresh juice in the matter of seconds. thine cuppeth runneth over with thine juices of the heavenly realms. it’s SO GOOD. and so potent. o.j. does the body good. mmm.
SO.
after officially pysching myself out 50 times over, i fiiinalllyy got the courage to ride my bike. it’s such a simple task, but if you see where i live and how many (m)assholes there are driving these roads, especially in the hood (which, yes, i live in THE hood. the kind of hood they make movies about), you’d have pity on me.
and so i rode to work. and i was full of glee! the wind whipping through the 16 breathable holes in my helmet, the single-car road in front of me: the world seemed to be at my finger tips. it was bliss.
and than, i stayed late at work. i forgot about a meeting i had that went until about 9 at night. and than things got crazy. people were like “omg dana! why are you wearing a black jacket! wheres your bike light! let me pray for you!” and “yo gurl, them crazies out there gunna snatch you right off yo bike. better be careful, gurl.” I WAS FREAKING OUT. never in my life had i been so scared to go home. and it was all foggy out too, which made it way creepy. i felt like zombies were waiting to eat me or something.
i convinced my friend ben (who was at the meeting) to ride his bike with me to my house for extra safety. luckily, ben knows what he’s doing and is a bike-friendly kinda guy and showed me a little of the ropes. like when some guy honked his horn super loud at us and i yelled “AWWHH SUCK IT.” and the guy slowed down to harass me back. yeah, ben warned me not to do that again. good guy, that ben.
needless to say, i made it home safe. i nearly peed my pants going through a pretty serious intersection and realized how much of a fatass i am because i was panting the whole way home. but i guess the moral of my story for tonight is this: riding your bike is freaking hard and those hipster kids HAVE to be lying about how cool it is. for real.
WHY
do i live in the scariest part of the city where riding your bike feels like a death threat? i just want to ride my bike to work, but i keep chickening out. blaaah
i’m so not cool
my housemate just got into the shower again? the 2nd one in an hour whaaaaat?!
HEY!
it’s my 23rd b(earth) day.
today a man passed by my car as i sat in traffic, walking with a cane and a cup in his hand. sadly, my first reaction was to roll my window up. but instead, i took the time to watched the man. there was something so beautiful about him. i didn’t have anything to give him but a smile and a dollar bill, but the moment i shared with that man was more than words can describe.
i asked him how his day was and he called me “m’am” and told me that he was having a slow day but it was good. and he was all smiles. i felt humbled by his presence and wanted to jump out of my car and give him a hug. instead, i put my lonesome little offering into his cup and when i did he said “thanks for stopping and talking to me. you made me feel alive!” as he stared up at the sky and laughed with such joy that i nearly cried.
i saw jesus in that man. he shook my world a little bit, too.
“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.” —
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.” —
Rosemarie Urquico (via kblitz)
(via conversationslips)
Rosemarie no longer has an active blog, but she can be found on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=585211028
To see the post about how she was found, please go here. Thanks to Booksnbrew for searching!
(via themonicabird)
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as a youth worker for a christian non-profit organization that promotes peace and justice in an underserved neighborhood through service and building relationships within the community, i have a hard time differentiating if i’m doing my job because i’m passionate about social justice, or because God is passionate about social justice. am i too quick to be a humanitarian and not quick enough to proclaim why my heart is pulled for those in need? why am i so scared to tell others that yes- i believe that all should be treated, loved, and respected equally because GOD loves us all equally, deeply, and compassionately? am i afraid that i will lose the respect of others because my motivation comes from something outside of myself (or, perhaps something rooted incredibly deep within me)? why, as young christians, are we so afraid of offending others because of our “christian” title? and why, as a young generation, do we hate that word so much and deem all things christian to be immoral and corrupt?
just pondering. also, this article kicked my butt:
“How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest—a sign of strength and rule. This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.”
— St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.276
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