Life on Holidae

Will post photos soon.  I really wished I would’ve planted the tomatoes later, they are turning yellow due to the unseasonable cold weather we’ve been having in nyc.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to post more often.  Fabulous things have happened in the course of my internet absence.  Let the posting begin! BTW internet world I need your help.  I am progressing my in photography skills and I want to graduate from my point-and-shoot to an SLR.  I bought a great photography book that has been helping me a lot as well as following many photography blogs.  SO….I need a digital SLR that is:

- Under 400 dollars (I know its bad) I don’t want to invest in lenses just yet, so I’m willing to pay that much for the body. 

- Along with the above mentioned, since I want just the SLR body in the future I will be investing quite a lot in lenses.  So which camera brands do you recommend?

- Recommend a carrying case that doesn’t look like a camera carrying case (I live in NYC).

- Finally an SLR I can grow into.  I don’t need the latest models or newest gadgets I need something that allows me at its most basic to adjust exposure, f-stops, ISO etc. 

What do your recommend my buying process be?  Do I shop for the bargain online and not try it out or go to a store and play around?

You’re responses will be most greatly appreciated!

I rarely update butttt its about time I do. I love my job. Life outside of work is far more hectic. And I start volunteering at a hospice program in November. I’m excited about that. Officially graduating is a whole other matter.

I want to visit Jenn and my old roommates sometime in October. And I don’t know why, but I really want to go to Rochester.

I’ve read quite a number of books this summer. Another Country by James Baldwin, Passage to India by E.M. Forster, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, Chango’s Fire by Ernesto Quiñonez, City of Glass by Paul Auster, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. Alot of New Yorker articles and just reading everything I can get my hands on.

I strongly recommend Baldwin’s Another Country if you’re up for something spicy, intense and beautiful.

For something more intellectual go to Auster’s existential mind trip City of Glass.

For a thoughtful introspectice take on the ways of nature check out Annie Dillard’s book.

For something really sad and depressing read Disgrace by Coetzee.

For something with a clever feminist read anything by Margaret Atwood. The woman is a disgracefully clever and delicious writer. She’s the kind of writer that makes other writer’s jealous. She is that good.

As for my favorite of the ones I’ve read this summer I didn’t put mention it on that list because I have been attempting to read it for 5 years. James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head. Talk about heartbreaking, mad intense. For anyone that saw Requiem for a Dream do you remember that sensation of relentless drama emphasized by the soundtrack? Do you remember how the movie left you slightly disturbed and shaken? Well thats how this book is. Except its over 500 of the deepest sadness I’ve ever read.

I can’t read the book in one stint I have to pick it up, read, digest and absorb, rest and then continue.

Its a terribly beautiful book on the life of a dead homosexual, black gospel musician as told through his older brother. That shit is DEEP.

I think there are more books I read, but not necessarily worth mentioning. So that’s the roundup.

ALSO. Lolita was insane. Talk about shameless.

I know some folks feel this way: “You aren’t really hispanic.  But you are definitely not white.”

Sigh.

I been reading so much this summer.  The words on pages have become phantoms glimmering across surfaces while I commute from work.  The backsplashes of the subway walls appear to have words neatly printed on them. So many beautiful words.

But I am reading the saddest and most real books I’ve read in a while Chango’s Fire by Ernesto Quinonez.  Same with with Junot Diaz’s most recent book its just so fucking sad and real.  I have a particularly bad habit of reading fantasy and sci-fi.  This is all good, but after a while this hungry reader isn’t satisfied.  I’ve dedicated this summer to reading the bastards of my bookshelves: historical fiction, contemporary writers of all backgrounds, politics, philosophy, psychology, and science—a more sobering selection of reading material.

To get back to my initial thought—I feel distinctly other. The more aware you become of the realities of the world and how suffering is so exasperatingly pervasive the more you feel hyperaware to your self.  Its the sort of awareness that leads you to longer and more existential moments of melancholia on subways, buses and walks. I am aware of this burdensome identity crisis that aches to be the center of my anxieties.

I mean there are others like me, 2nd generation immigrants who aren’t culturally tied to their countries loves for food, music, clothing.  Despite my obsessive desire to know more about my country, to know the dates, the names and the places my knowledge is suspiciously manufactured.  Dominicans of a “truer” shade smell me out.  I don’t dance bachata that’s one! I don’t speak the cibaeña spanish and thus I do not speak spanish. It takes most people quite some time to even figure out what my ethnicity is.  I can’t go into a Dominican hair salon without being insulted in Spanish for not straightening my hair.  I get stares from my own people for rocking the afro they have long since chemically straightened, dyed and contorted into something else.  I am not of my people, or so my people communicate to me.

There are lots of smart people out there, but not all of them are employable.  Just like there are many employable people out there, but not all of them are intelligent.

Having a namesake degree can you get your foot in the door, but not neccessarily your ass in the job seat.

If you must deal with any bureacracy of any kind document everything, have names, record conversations if you must BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU NOT HAVE DOCUMENTATION!

The city puts millions of little seedlings in a square foot plot of land with all the available resources and says “grow.”  Can you imagine blooming when you can barely breathe?

Pride can kill, de-bone, fillet and grill a man.

My mother is always, painfully, unbearably, annoyingly right.

Stop fearing happiness.