....

oh my god what a night of fucking profundity and serendipity and every emotion i could feel and joy and love and just...jodie foster said it best in the greatest movie ever made "contact"

"no words...should have sent a poet..."

first off it's FUCKING cold outside! i just walked back from a bar and my fingers are cold as a bitch and all the locals were claiming it felt like 30 but according to weather.com it's actually 44. i call bullshit. it can only go downhill from here and this is what worries me most.

anyways i am feeling so deep and emotional that all i can do is listen to some sufjan stevens and cry and weep and laugh etc etc. basically my life right at this moment is a cameron crowe film.

Ok so today one of my favorite authresses was in town talking on campus. I don't know if you have ever read any Sandra cisneros and maybe you have, and i hate to say this but if you are not mexican american her stuff won't touch you the way it touches us. basically she is the first author i have ever read where i felt like she was telling my story and not literally my story but the story of my people, of people who share my experience, of the american experience where we are still tied to our "motherland" that is not really our motherland but is. seriously it's some deep shit, and unless you have felt it you won't know. Anywyas she's a relaly good writer and i just love her for the fact that she puts it all out there and she's kind of a hero for me, an di will be honest, i've never had a mexican-american hero so it means alot to me. so she was here and i went to hear her speak and the auditorium was pretty empty which i thught was sad but not surprising. She gave a talk on why she does not like to be called "hispanic" oddly enough as the keynote speaker for "hispanic heritage month." so she gave this long talk, in a very mexican way, where she didn't directly answer the question, but she gave a story to describe and we coudl figure out from the story why she or we should not want to be called hispanic. I personaly don't want to be called hispanic. But this is all irrelevent because it was time for the Q and A and a few white women stood up and told her how wonderful she was as a "latina" and a black girl stood up and talked about how awesome she was and such and the quesitons were good but not profound. And then this young looking india girl stood up and walked to the mic and said

"Hi, i am a um...sophomore in high school right now...and um....i just love you because i am one of the only Mexican's in my school and it's hard and um....i'm....illegal...and my one dream is to go to college...and um...college here...at university of michigan...and (long pause) how do i do that? I thought i would ask you since...i don't know how to do that."

At this point the room went silent and sandra cisneros was silent and there was such desperation and hope in this girls voice and it was one of those moments in your life when you have no words but only emotions to describe how you feel and i just put my hands over my face and started crying because it was so sad and real and beautiful and desperate and every adjective in teh english language and spanish language too. I felt so...sad. just sad. It wasn't sympathy and it wasn't pity it was pure empathy. i felt such empathy for this poor girl who was probably brought here against her will and all she wants is to go to college and her question was not about SAT scores or GPA or letters of rec. her question was of the most simple basic kind...how do i do this? And i have been there, where all you want is to go to college but you have no strategy for how to do that. i felt for her so much.

Anywyas just like the rest of us sandra didn't know what to say so she was just liek "mija i dont' know what to tell you. I am so sorry and i pray for you and i just hope that you know that everythign will work out and you just keep doing what you know how to do best and things always fall into place and there is a reason for you being here and me being here and knwo that you have angels watching over you always." and NO ONE knew what to say because waht do you say to that! an di don't know why i cried. I cried for my dad and my tia eloisa and the kid that david took care of who had kidney failure because he went 10 days through the arizona desert with no water and i cried for that poor girl who had no tools for how to survive in this country. I went up to her later and i gave her my information and told her that if she ever needed anything she coudl call me and i would help her. I hope she calls me.

so at this point i was feelign really sad and i went to josh's so we coudl go out an di told him the story and he cried too because i was crying and we were both crying and drinking and there were no words because sometimes there are no words. Anyways after all of that drew came over and we went out for a drink and i will be honest, i was kind of depressed and felt liek crying more. Bu ti didn't. So i was going to take my backback and drew said that i would look lame if i did that so i left it there. We got to the bar 10 minutes later and i realized....my id was in my backpack. fuck. So i walked back alone to have some time by myself to process the night when i walked by this random old sad looking man selling books on the side of the street. 5$ a book. I glanced over his selection as i kept walking when i noticed a familiar cover. It was the cover of "the prophet" by kahlil gibran, which is by far one of the most beautiful peices of literature/philosophy i have ever read in my life. I left my copy back in LA and so i happened to by chance have a 5 on me and so i figured, you know, in the spirit of serendipity and this night i would purchase this book. So i did and i called orges because this is ourbook together and i decided, what a great way to purchase this awesome book!! the plan is to read it again, soak it in, and pay that shit forward by passing it on to another reader.

so basicallly what it all comes down to is that i am not a writer, i do not express myself well. I had a sad night that turned into a great night that made me realize that everything happens for a reason. But i guess overall tonight i kidn of saw the beauty of humanity and as angela chase once said:

"Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth -- that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me."