soleilshine's Xanga

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 03:35:25 GMT

thoughts from a dreamer
kate is the proverbial ''one woman rock band''

I want to live my life knowing that I developed my mind as best as possible, and that I used that knowledge to the best of my ability. I am trying to cultivate myself. I want to read everything from Plato to Angelou, and I want to take all that and give it away. I want to learn, and create change. It's very idealistic, but I am also very determined. I will NOT let my life go to waste. Even if I am not remembered, I will go having affected someone's life for the better.

I want to do what I love and act. I want to fulfill my own soul by doing this.
I also want to have children, because I believe that the ultimate gift is life.
I want to teach kids, and impress upon them the importance of living and not just being robots. I want to teach kids to stay kids, and to keep that love and honesty they have.
I want to work with mentally disabled people and make their lives full of love and pure joy.
I want to work with psychologically damaged people and try to massage some happiness back into their world's, shine some light in their dark shadows.
I want to work with physically disabled people and rehabilitate their minds and spirits, letting them once again be free and happy. Give them movement of some kind.
I want to feed starving children, and find a way for them to provide food for themselves and their children, forever.
I want to make friends with the person with no friends.
I want to do this without doing it prove something to myself or others, but simply because I am genuinely open to everyone.
I want to live confidently and be honest.
I want to know what to say, and say it.
I want to leave the world a little bit brighter.

Stupid, huh? Yeah, I know, but I would rather be stupid and ignorant than blocked up and pessimistic.

"It's all we really got tonight
Stop your crying hold on
Tonight is what it means to be young
Tonight is what it means to be young

Let the rebels begin, let the fire be started
We're dancing for the restless and the broken-hearted

I've got a dream when the darkness is over
We'll be lying in the rays of the sun
But its only a dream and tonight is for real
You'll never know what it means, but you'll know how it feels
It's gonna be over before you know its begun

The things they say and then the things they do
Nothing's gonna stop us if our dream is true..."

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 03:34:39 GMT

"Silky smooth
Lips as sweet as candy, baby
Tight blue jeans
Skin that shows in patches

Strong inside but you don't know it
Good little girls, they never show it.
When you open up your mouth to speak,
Could you be a little weak?
Do you know what it feels like
For a girl?
Do you know what it feels like in this world
For a girl?

Hair that twirls on finger tips so gently, baby
Hands that rest on jutting hips repenting

Hurt that's not supposed to show and
Tears that fall when no one knows
When you're trying hard to be your best
Could you be a little less?"

Monday, July 28, 2003

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 23:34:33 GMT

Things I Want To Do
Before I'm 30

1. Eat non-vegitarian sushi (i.e. raw fish, so far I've only eaten the veggies)

2. See myself with blonde hair (wig, hair dye, anything!).

3. Perform on Broadway.

4. Wear a dress whose skirt is less than 8 inches long.

5. Attend the Oscars.

6. Be in a film.

7. Wear pointe shoes.

8. Work in a hospital with psychology patients.

9. Teach a special education class and be involved with special needs kids.

10. Be on Oprah!

11. Write a book.

12. Have a foster child.

13. See a building in person that I have designed.

14. Own a trampoline.

15. Be a member of a gym!

{to be continued}

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 18:34:21 GMT

People said I was cute
but I was a strange looking child

Monday, July 07, 2003

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 18:42:50 GMT

"update"

^I just got in that show!^

baby name extravaganza

Okay, I have no child to name, nor do I plan on having one anytime soon, but picking out children's names is so much fun! (note: please help red_dirt_girl with her quest for the perfect baby name) So, I have compiled a list of names I like....warning, I have wierd taste. My poor children. Favorites in bold.

girls
Keyanna
Kioko
Lilly
Lorelei
Macy
Madeline (Maddy)
Marilyn
Milan
Naja
Nailah
Norah
Rosalie
Scarlett
Sela
Solange
Tawny
Twyla
Vanna
Aida
Alannis
Anabel (Ani)
Amelie
Astrid
Audrey
Audra
Avery (Ava)
Bella
Carly
Cassidy
Chanel
Charlize
Damali
Demi
Dior
Evita (Eve or Eva)
Faye

boys
Sterling
Manning
Miller
Oakley
Pascal
Razi
Rane
Shaw
Silas
Tai
Warren
Ari
Carver
Carter
Clark
Ethan
Everett
Everley
Ford

:)
(its a long list, help me narrow it down?)

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 23:09:58 GMT

sorry for my absence

there are times when words lose their meaning, and sentences are no longer substantial. letters run out and fools rush in.

"Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood...."

i have been here reading every blog on my sub. list, though...no comments, i have just been reading from a distance.

"Careful the wish you make,
wishes are children."

i am forcing this explanation out, but im still reaching for the words so i'm sorry if i'm not very active for a while.

"I wanted to make you
something that
Sparkled and shined.
But the glue dries up
And glitter flakes off and
You would be left with a piece of paper.

So I decided to pour a
Little bit of myself out
Into my hands
And scratch wildly on this
paper so
I could show you something
that lasts
forever."

Friday, June 27, 2003

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 00:46:16 GMT

'I cringe from the heat of the night on my face. I feel as bare as open flesh. Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years I have lived. Thenight is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend on it.
Shadows shrink and spread over the lace curtain as my son slips into bed. I watch as he stretches from a little boy into the broom-size of a man, his height mounting the innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds.
For a brief second, I almost distake him for the ghost of his father, an old lover who disappeared with the night's shadows a long time ago. My son's bed stays nestled against the corner, far from the peeking jealousies. I watch as he digs furrows in the pillow with his head. He shifts his small body carefully so as not to crease his Sunday clothes. He wraps my long blood-red scarf around his neck, the one I wear myself during the day to tempt my suitors. I let him have it at night, so that he always has something of mine when my face is out of sight. I watch his shadow resting still on the curtain. My eyes are drawn to him, like the stars peeking through the small holes in the roof that none of my suitors will fix for me, because they like the watch a scrap of the sky while lying on their naked backs on my mat.
A firefly buzzes around the room, finding him and not me. Perhaps it is a mosquito that has learned the gift of lighting itself. He always slaps the mosquitos head on his face without even waking. In the morning, he will have tiny blood spots on his forehead, as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face.
In his sleep he squirms and groans as though he's already discovered that there is pleasure in touching himself. We have never talked about love. What would he need to know? Love is one of those lessons that you grow to learn, the way one learns that one shoe is made to fit a certain foot, lest it cause discomfort.
There are two kinds of women: day women and night women. I am stuck between the day and night in a golden amber bronze. My eyes are the color of dirt, almost copper if I am standing in the sun. I want to wear my matted tresses in braids as soon as I can learn to do my whole head without numbing my arms.
Most nights, I hear a slight whisper. My body freezes as I wonder how long it would take for him to cross the curtain and find me.
He says, "Mommy."
I say, "Darling.."
Somehow in the night, he always calls me in whispers. I hear the buzz of his transistor radio. It is shaped like a can of cola. One of my suitors gave it to him to plug into his ears to he can stay asleep while Mommy works.
There is a place in Ville Rose where ghost women ride the crests of waves while brushing the stars out of their hair. There they woo strollers and leave the stars on the path for them. There are nights that I believe that those ghost women are with me. As much as I know that there are women who sit up through the night and undo patches of cloth that they have spent the whole day weaving. These women, they destroy their toil so that they will always have more to do. And as long as there's work, they will not have to lie next to the lifeless soul of a man whose scent still lingers in another woman's bed.
The way my son reacts to my lips stroking his cheeks decides for me if he's asleep. He is like a butterfly fluttering on a rock that stands out naked in the middle of a stream. Sometimes I see in the folds of his eyes a longing for something that's bigger than myself. We are like faraway lovers, lying to one another, under different moons.
When my smallest finger caresses the narrow cleft beneath his nose, sometimes his tongue slips out of his mouth and lick my fingernail. He moans and turn away, perhaps thinking that this too is a part of the dream.
I whisper my mountain stories in his ear, stories of the ghost women and the stars in their hair. I tell him of the deadly snakes lying at one end of the rainbow and the hat full of gold lying at the other end. I tell him that if I cross a stream of glass-clear hibiscus, I can make myself a goddess. I blow on his eyelashes to see if he's truly asleep. My fingers coill themselves into visions of birds on his nose. I want him to forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts.
I know that sometimes he wonders why I take such painstaking care. Why do I draw half-moons on my sweaty forehead and spread crimson powders on the rise of my cheeks. We put on his ruffled Sunday suit and I tell him that we are expecting a sweet angel and where angels tread the hosts must be as beautiful as floating hibiscus.
In his sleep, his fingers tug his shirt ruffles loose. He licks his lips from the last piece of sugar candy stolen from my purse.
No more, no more, or your teeth will turn black. I have forgotten to make him brush the mint leaves against his teeth. He does not know that one day a woman like his mother may judge him by the whiteness of his teeth.
It doesn't take long before he is snoring softly. I listen for the shy laughter of his most pleasant dreams. Dreams of angels skipping over his head and occasionally resting their pink heels on his nose.
I hear him humming a song. One of the madrigals they still teach children on very hot afternoons in public schools. Kompé Jako, domé vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep?
The hibiscus rustle in the night outside. I sing along to help him sink deeper into his sleep. I apply another layer of the Egyptian rouge to my cheeks. There are some sparkles in the powder, which make it easier for my visitor to find me in the dark.
Emmanuel will come tonight. He is a doctor who likes big buttocks on women, but my small ones will do. He comes on Tuesdays and Saturdays. He arrives bearing flowers as though he's come to court me. Tonight he brings me bougainvillea. It is always a surprise.
"How is your wife?" I ask.
"Now as beautiful as you."
On Mondays and Thursdays, it is an accordion player named Alexandre. He likes to make the sound of the acccordion with his mouth in my ear. The rest of the night, he spends with his breadfruit head rocking on my belly button.
Should my son wake up, I have prepared my fabrication. One day, he will grow too old to be told that a wandering man is a mirage and that naked flesh is a dream. I will tell him that his father has come, that an angel brought him back from Heaven for a while.
The stars slowly slip away from the hole in the roof as the doctor sinks deeper and deeper beneath my body. He throbs and pants. I cover his mouth to keep him from screaming. I see his wife's face in the beads of sweat marching down his chin. He leaves with his body soaking from the dew of our flesh. He calls me an avalanche, a waterfall, when he is satisfied.
After he leaves at dawn, I sit outside and smoke a dry tobacco leaf. I watch the piece-worker women march one another to the open market half a day's walk from where they live. I thank the stars that at least I have the days to myself.
When I walk back into the house, I hear the rise and fall of my son's breath. Quickly, I lean my face against his lips to feel the calming heat from his mouth.
"Mommy, have I missed the angels again?" he whispers softly while reaching for my neck.
I slip into the bed next to him and rock him back to sleep.
"Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us." '

Friday, June 27, 2003

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 00:19:23 GMT

"You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother had two rules for living. Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook and housekeeper who ever lived.
Your mother's second rule went along with the first. Never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn't say you enjoy it, or your husband won't respect you.
And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook.
Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more.
"What will she do? What will be her passion?" your aunts would ask when they came over to cook on great holidays, which called for cannon salutes back home but meant nothing at all here.
"Her passion is being quiet," your mother would say. "But then she's not being quiet. You hear this scraping from her. Krik? Krak! Pencil, paper. It sounds like someone crying."
Someone was crying. You and the writing demons in your head. You have nobody, nothing but this piece of paper, they told you. Only a notebook made out of discarded fish wrappers, a panty-hose cardboard. They were the best confidantes for a lonely girl.
When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.
You have always had your ten fingers. They curse you each time you force them around the contours of a pen. No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. You remember her silence when you laid your first notebook in front of her. Her disappointment when you told her that words would be your life's work, like the kitchen had always been hers. She was angry at you for not understanding. And with what do you repay me? With scribbles on paper that are not worth the scratch of a pig's snout. The sacrifices had been too great.
Writers don't leave any mark in the world. Not the world where we are from. In our world, writers are tortured and killed if they are men. Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women. In our world, if you write, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. They end up in a prison dungeon where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they're forced to eat their own waste.
The family needs a nurse, not a prisoner. We need to forge ahead with our heads raised, not buried in scraps of throw-away paper. We do not want to bend over a dusty grave, wearing black hats, grieving for you. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine women who went before you and worked their fingers to coconut rind so you can stand here before me holding that torn old notebook that you cradle against your breast like your prettiest Sunday braids. I would rather you had spit in my face.
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call them. Ghosts like burnished branches on a flame tree. These women, they asked for your voice so that they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak in a tongue that is hard to understand. Even if that's patois, dialect, Creole.

The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil for we are always with you.

When you were a little girl, you used to dream that you were lying among the dead and all the spirits were begging you to scream. And even now, you are still afraid to dream because you know that you will never be able to do what they say, as they say it, the old spirits that live in your blood.
Most of the women in your life had their heads down. They would wake up one morning to find their panties gone. It is not shame, however, that kept their heads down. They were singing, searching for meaning in the dust. And sometimes, they were talking to faces across the ages, faces like yours and mine.
You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head. You often thought that without the trees, the sky would fall on your head. You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice. There have been days when the sky was as close as your hair to falling on your head.
This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life. Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a million pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh. Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried "Krik?" and we have answered "Krak!" and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us.

You remember thinking while braiding your ahir that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother, who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother, she introduced you to the first echoes of the tongue that you now speak when at the end of the day she would braid your hair while you sat between her legs, scrubbing the kitchen pots. While your fingers worked away at the last shadows of her day's work, she would make your braids Sunday-pretty, even during the week.
When she was done she would ask you to name each braid after those nine hundred and ninety-nine women who were boiling in your blood, and since you had written them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this was your testiment to the way that these women lived and died and lived again."
-Edwidge Danticat
"Krik? Krak!"

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Thu, 22 May 2003 17:05:09 GMT

(idea cruelly and unfairly stolen from red_dirt_girl )
things you may not know
(or want to know)
about me

1. I eat soy beans every day, rather methodically. I eat about a cup of them, shelled. I go through each bean and eat the skin of all of them first, and then eat all the beans in 4 bites each! They are delicious.

2. I have a fascination with cutting up clothes, and have been known to "flashdance" old t-shirts. My favorite is this baby blue men's muscle tank that I found at a flea market, that has this huge wheel with wings in red across the chest (it was the t-shirt for a skateboard club) that I cut up into a little tank top. I wear it to the beach.

3. I love kids and spend a lot of my time entertaining them. All of my weekends, pretty much, are spent with them. Because of this, I am very, very good at all those weird little hand-clap-games that are never really taught but everyone knows. When I get online, about 10 elementary-aged kids IM me, all spilling their problems that all have to do with each other on me, and I sort them out, and I love it.

4. I have a flip-flop tan on my feet, from living here in Hawaii for three years. Also, the veins in my feet especially stick out along where my sandals go. Very weird.

5. I go to a school that is considered one of the best (probably only because they charge extreme amounts of tuition and can pump all of that money into technology, teachers, etc.). It also has one of the highest rates of eating disorders in the U.S. I would venture to say that every student either has an eating disorder or a substance abuse problem. Sad.

6. Of the two mentioned above, I have the former. I was bulimic last year and now am somewhere in the ED-NOS range (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. I don't meet a lot of the criteria to be diagnosed as anorexic or bulimic, but still have my habits. it is a hellish place that you do not want to be.) I have problems with eating more than 1000 calories in a day, usually hovering around 700. Really not good for the body. My parents don't know.

7. I have a problem with wearing skirts to school.

8. I have an unnatural and terribly unfair amount of scars on my arms, from my kitten. She can be a bitch.

9. I am addicted to Jamba Juice.

10. I was a gymnast for a while, but at the gym I went to they only spoke German so I could only go so far.

Saturday, May 17, 2003

Sat, 17 May 2003 04:40:19 GMT

how did i forget the rush that i got when i went over the waldo road dip with my seat back, or when we chased the deer over the hills in Germany in our van, me in the middle of the front seat, keys falling out of the ignition, us laughing harder than i ever had before? what happened to french toast with the guys? i hated french toast, i just ate it for them, and that alone made it taste so good. when did i stop hanging upside down on the monkey bars? i treasured every blister on my hands. 10:00 was a magical time for muppet babies and murphy brown. i thought i had x-ray vision. i wished i could show you. i thought i was 'mad about you'. i want to know someone or something like i knew the river in the park. making scrambled eggs was an occasion. a problem was a missing sock. i want to swim every day and see bats. i want someone to know every island and tadpole in me, too, just like that river. why did i have to realize that my aunt's parrot was a stuffed animal? i miss it when my daddy used to say 'yumping'. i miss the laugh that came out of me when he said it.

somehow when you held me like that i got a little bit of that back. i don't know how to ask you to hold me now