Not much for the Blogging Lately...

School concluded about a month ago, and I think maybe I have gotten so facebook dependent so much that I feel like I keep up with people by tweeting rather than blogging, but I do like this forum as well. As many of you know I am headed off to Spain in about one week. I will be studying there for a month, and then I will be traveling with my mother in Ireland and Scottland for about two weeks. I am very excited and I plan on updating often with lots of pictures to show when I am on the trip.

My sister has been deported for her Peace Corp service for a month and a half now, crazy right? You can check out all of her latest happenings here http://bulgarianna.blogspot.com/. I had thought that I was going to be able to see her when I was in Europe this summer, but it doesn't look like it is going to happen as of now. She is going to be living in a rather remote village that will not be easily accessible via weekend tripping. It's sad, because I miss her, but I feel like I get to talk to her enough to keep in touch and to know what's going on. She seems to be doing really really well for herself, and I am so proud of her.

One of my best friends is getting married this weekend, on the 4th of July. A few people have commented that this is really weird, but I think it's amazing that I get to go to an awesome party thrown by someone else for this holiday. It will be wonderful and I am sure there will be amazing pictures.

I got a new tattoo. It's a Japanese crane- taken from the album The Crane Wife by the Decemberists. It's not complete yet, but when it is the bird will be standing in water and the water will say " Here All The Bombs, They Fade Away". People have asked me why this is so significant, and I guess the best way that I can explain it is that I love the Decemberists and there music makes me feel extremely connected to my sister, because she told me about them, we have listened to them together, and enjoyed a few of their concerts together and it has been magical. Also, this is my third tattoo, and it is a bird like the rest. The bird references have to do with my mother, because she is a birder through and through, so it all links back to her-- like most things in my life.

I don't have a ton more to say. I have really just been relaxing and getting ready for my trip and I am excited about it- even though I will miss D I think it is going to be good to get away and to experience the world a bit more...

Expect to hear from me more when I am In Europe. Have a wonderful summer everyone.

Year One Almost Done- Mission Accomplished

In September, when I started the Masters of Urban and Regional Planning program, I felt like I was in a crisis mode almost immediately. It seemed that through some poor choice of my own I had entered into a field that prepared students to be municipal planners or work for private consulting firms, and while I am not opposed to either of the two, neither one was ever something I thought of as a goal. I came into the field of planning because I wanted to study the intersection of environmental and social justice issues, because I don't think green movements are sustainable unless they are actually available as solutions to even the poorest people in the world. As I started taking my classes and learning about planning as a field I though that perhaps this program would have been better suited for someone who wanted to be a transportation planner or a land use planner, and I certainly didn't fit into the category.
I started talking to past graduates of the program and asked them what they thought I should do in order to make the program work for me. They suggested that I get in contact with OCCORD (Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development) and talk to them about the community organizing efforts that they do around the Platinum Triangle in Anaheim. This turned out to be a perfect connection for me, and I started to broaden my own view of planning as something that could range from municipal planning to community based planning efforts that occur within organizations like OCCORD. Both my experience working with them and my exposure to new teachers with different views helped me to expand my understanding of planning. Also, as I began to look at community based efforts as very much linked to planning I talked about these things often among my colleagues, because I felt that by continutally reminding others that planning was bigger than the city, then perhaps I could influence others who were struggling like I was.
During the Spring Quarter (which is currently ending) some students got together and initiated a class called Critical Urbanism. The students were the teachers in this class, coming up with the readings and course material. We talked about issues of race, class, and gender in planning. We also focused heavily on community based and radical planning efforts that worked to change the system rather than to uphold it. The twenty people in the class had different opinions, but were all of the same mind that something in planning needs to change in order to address critical issues that we often either don't think of as planning, or that city planning departments don't address.
Yesterday the class hosted its final project- a colloquuim called Planning in Crisis: Critical Urbanism in Action. The event consisted of three panels, each of which contained different speakers that could address ciritcal planning issues from a different perspective. We had community based planners/organizers from OCCORD and Latino Health Access. We had students from UCI, UCLA, and UCI that were talking about the efforts being made on their campus to address critical planning issues. We also had a panel where students and practioners talked about the collaboration of planning academia in addressing real world problems, and how some of their projects in the past have gone.
The event was a hit! The Department Chair among other faculty was extremely impressed by the event commenting that the speakers were very much on topic and everything ran very well. I heard rumors that the Department Chair really wants to publicize the event on the department's website because it went so well. Students were excited to make connections with radical planners in the community and on different campuses. Conversations were had among students from all three campuses regarding how we could connect in the future in order to work towards critical planning efforts.
For me, the event was so important because it was truly a benchmark of how far I have come within this program in just one year. I started off as a frustrated student, considering whether or not I belonged here, and ended as a student who felt like I had really accomplished something on campus. I feel like the first and most important think that I accomplished was the alliance of many like-minded students in the program. I also feel like in some ways because of my insistence on looking at planning outside of the box, I have helped my colleagues to do so as well. Thirdly, I feel like this group of students who views critical planning as important just established themselves on campus and earned the respect of the department through the event yesterday. So yeah- I feel really excited about this accomplishment and how this first year started on a rocky note and ended on a great one. I am hoping that this process can be continued into my experience as a second year in the program.

My sister left, I cried.

I didn't cry for that long though or have a major breakdown, and I am rather proud of myself because of this. Also, whenever I get sad about her leaving I am just going to look at the professioal photo that I took of her and my cat. Because it's Hilarious!

Too Much

4 classes, while working and attempting to be an intern is too much shit going on at one time to stay sane.

I think that's maybe part of the reason that I have been such a poor communicator in my relationship lately. It's like this general sense of being overwhelmed spills over into my personal life and I have a hard time separating eveything into neat little piles. This is the pile where you are overwhelmed by school and this is the pile where you love your boyfriend and you want to have a happy weekend with him without making all of these little conflicts out of nothing. If you saw my room right now, you'd see all the piles are pretty jumbled, and such is my life at the moment. (This kicker this weekend was really bad PMS)

Anyway I have things to look forward to.
1. Concert with D this weekend
2. Two concerts with Jare in like two weeks
3. Going home to see my family
4. and Summer Semester in Europe.

So if the next 4 weeks if a blur because of school I guess I am just going to suck it up and roll with the punches and hope that I keep my piles a bit more organized on the weekends so I am not so bitchy and conflict causing.

I am shocked as D smiles.

Thanks for capturing this rare moment John.

Just letting you all in on a little secret- he smiles a lot when he is with me.

But don't tell him I told you that.

He'd like to keep it a secret.

Reflections on a past life

Yesterday I worked at the Southern California Assemblies of God Conference, and it was a weird blast from the past. As I sat around and watched people all of the elements were familiar. People walked up to me and said "Praise the Lord". I watched the huge service on a big screen TV and the preacher spoke for over an hour and at the end had a long "alter call". People raised their hands to the loud worship music and bathed in the spirit.

The thing is that by the time I was at the end of wanting to be involved in Pentecostal Christianity I was kind of in the same place I was yesterday. A place where none of it played on my emotions as much it did in the beginning, but rather where all of these things were common place. I got to the point where the dramatic music and the demands of the preacher couldn't make me cry one more time, because I had already cried so many times. It was like I had to make this emotional separation between myself and what was going on, because otherwise I was constantly hysterically crying for some reason- spirit induced or not.

I don't mean to completely knock the church because I think there are some things in it that are important to people- the teaching to love your neighbor, the fellowship, etc. For me, the constant heightened emotion was the thing I struggled with the most. It's almost as if I felt like the preachers were performers and their goal was to make me cry, and with just the right rift of guitar and piano at the end, when they were asking people to come forward and ask for forgiveness they did it to me again time after time. It's hard for me to explain what I mean, except at some point I just felt so emotionally manipulated I shut down, and that made me doubt a lot of the realness of a lot of things that I had experienced- because everything was so dramatized that I didn't know which emotions I could consider to be legitimate. Another bone in the bag is that I am diagnosed clinical depression and sometimes felt like the church just always kept me on the downside of things because of all the emotional issues it created.

I don't know if this makes a lot of sense. I didn't sit at the conference yesterday and think that the people in attendance were ridiculous. I respect their beliefs a lot. I just can't take the emotional-ness of it because I am so emotional in the first place that I can't take another thing being thrown into the mix. Also I don't like feeling that manipulated all the time. I didn't like feeling guilty because I couldn't cry anymore.

I appreciate so much the freedom of being a Quaker. I feel like I am just at peace with myself and am not constantly having to make sure I am okay enough with all the preachers who are telling me that I am not. I appreciate the ability to be emotional when I need to, but at the same time having the peace of mind to really just sit an enjoy the silence without feeling guilty because I am not responding in the appropriate emotional manner.

Great Shots from Friday at the WAP

I like the lighting and contrast in this one.
Small medium and large. The tiny one is a month old.

I am as sweet as nectar.

So crisp and beautiful

Baby cheetah!

Sleepy teenage lion.