Her name's Indi. Yes, like Indiana Jones.

Sitting here on my bed, Indi curled up on my pillow, cold mojito by side, I'm ready to write. 

It's been a few days and quite frankly, there isn't much really to convey. I will admit that in the time that has passed since my last post, however, I've had what could quite possibly be some of the best days I've had in the state of Florida. Who knew that owning a dog could bring such meaning to your life? Now listen, I did the whole vegetarian thing for nearly a year (mainly for health reasons) and have never considered myself that annoying friend in your usual group who constantly talks of animals rights - although I'm not against them, I just feel they should be approached similarly to religion: what you believe is quite a personal thing and should therefore be kept that way unless in a setting that allows for you to elaborate on such beliefs appropriately (meaning church and/or PETA rally, not your best friend's niece's 1st birthday). 

With that said, Saturday was wonderful. Andrew and I woke up early, spent most of the morning falling in out of sleep letting what was to be hurricane Danielle pass by before heading to Dania beach around 4 that evening. The beach had been found quite serendipitously and only the night before when I needed to get out of the house. And so it was decided while washing the sand from our feet we would bring Indi there the next day. Now, again, I realize she's a dog. But having driven here back and forth from Cape Coral nearly every weekend and having little to no contact with other dogs aside from our neighbors, we thought it would be a good treat for her. Not to mention it might be the only time in her short doggy life she'd see the ocean and actually get to swim in it. There's absolutely in no way a chihuahua mix weighing less than 10 pounds would survive the cold water of Santa Cruz...

Walking up the wooden ramp leading to the beach, Indi instantly perked up and started pulling at her leash - an image I could only equate with a young child on Christmas morning. There was no way to know what was under the tree, but the idea of it being there was enough to have the entire family awake at 6 am. 

Indi on her way to Grandma's yet again.

And it was. We're not quite sure what she's mixed with (we jokingly say she's half Chihuahua, half fruit bat/fox/meerkat/velociraptor and whatever else may come to mind the moment a passerby asks us what she is exactly). But at the moment, all I could see was the happiest dog alive, running the course of the beach, being chased by bigger dogs and chasing smaller ones. She wasn't that excited about the water, especially when Andrew walked out into its oncoming waves, dunking her in and pulling her back out again. She rolled in the sand, got in a few fights, made some friends, and within an hour was hiding beneath our chairs to escape what was left of the day's sun. It was overall what you would call a good day.  


Do I think it's kind of sad it's taken me nearly 5 years of living in Florida or traveling to the state often to have a day like that? Maybe, but it was worth the wait. I used to making fun of people who idolized their pets, carrying them around like children and throwing them birthday parties. And although I will never subject Indi to a purse unless sneaking her past security at Target because I feel guilty for leaving her in the car when its a bazillion degrees outside, I do love her. Unconditionally. So much so that I will openly admit I've seriously considered getting a tattoo of her portrait. 


Relax, it **probably** won't happen. But hey, why not? Let's just say I'll sit on the idea for awhile first.

Regina Spektor - "Samson" [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

Sufjan Stevens - For the widows in paradise

August 24, 2010. 2:11 AM

This feeling is familiar. This emptiness, if it should be called that, which seems to all together consume everything down to the marrow of my bones. And laying here in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar place, I'm at a loss. I simply have no where to run.

When I was 15-years-old and my father was stationed in Oakland, he opted to live in Novato rather than in Alameda, where the housing and schools were run down. A blessing in disguise as that house and what lay beneath it would be where I found refuge, even long after we had been forced from its walls. 

At this exact moment, I wish I could close my eyes and transport there. Sneak out of the maids quarters tucked behind the kitchen on the first floor and where I called home for three years to walk out into the cold night and start another transformation. Rise from the ashes of my teenage self to describe the despair I carried before falling asleep to dreams filled with wild sage. I was lost, but only for the night. With morning always came some unspoken promise of change, mapped out within the pages of my journal. All that was left to do was translate it to myself. 

I always went to the same place - an old abandoned runway the Coast Guard had taken over when the Airforce left, building a brick wall along its tower to keep the passerby and occasional drug addict out. But I was determined, I refused to stay away. And so its cement floor, infested with owl pelts and overgrown weeds, became my sanctuary. The estuary my alter, Third Eye Blind's self-titled album my bible. 

Even in college, I went back there. Sometimes to sit, to scream, to smoke a joint and just melt away into the far off howl of a coyote. I was alone to be whatever or whomever I wanted, and in that there was peace. 

But who am I now? I feel myself slipping away at moments. I've seemed to have lost my purpose among the gray tiles of this house, misplaced it in one of the thousands of job applications I've sent out into the world.

I've called out of her, my purpose, you see. But she no longer responds to me anymore and I've grown quite tired of waiting. 

I'm counting down the days until I'm back in California. I don't plan on telling anyone that I'm coming home. I doubt I'll stay anyway, just be there long enough to collect what little belongings I have left and say my goodbyes before coming back here. I applied to a TEFL certificate program in Prague. It's 4 weeks, enough time to disappear. And then from there, I don't know. Maybe I'll go to South America, maybe I'll try the bay again. I just need to find answers, I need to start learning how to ask the right questions - I'm afraid I haven't been for the last 23 years. 

All I'm sure of is that I can't continue this way. I choose life. I choose all the matching suitcase, owning your own home, raising kids in the suburbs bullshit. But for now, I have to scare myself. I have to do the things I've only dared speak of when alone, when wishing of what will become of my life. 

I should say I'm counting down the days I can return to that runway for the last time and leave knowing I have the strength to never come back again. I told myself I would lay down among the fog of that city. I told myself this would never consume me again. 

More importantly, I told myself the world would remember Mariel. Here begins that story.

Above & Beyond pres. OceanLab - Breaking Ties

Wait, what happened?

“As accidental as my life may be, or as that random humor is, which governs it, I know nothing, after all, so real or substantial as myself" - Anthony Ashley Cooper

God, how brief and powerful we are. Leaving breadcrumb trails of chaos and brilliance as we go, hoping to revisit those moments in which we choose to define ourselves - revisit the accidents we would later deem as our finest moments. Because in reality, it's all an accident. An ongoing change in plans that will never truly be what you had anticipated. 

You know those moments when all these aspects of your life seem to intervene in one, obscure place? One that on any other day you would let slide from you, allow to be washed clean with sleep. But on the day you decide to really look, allow yourself to collaborate with the world even if only a minute scale, something opens up to you. You feel as though your bones are in tune with the rotation of the earth - that you can only exist on the most organic level there is. Nothing is foreign, nothing is at war, nothing can disrupt what you know as "myself." 

It had been raining all morning, putting Andrew and I into a haze. But there was a guitar he wanted to show me, so we went. Sitting in a far corner, I let my eyes close and listened as his hands played a number of familiar melodies he had picked up over the years. Things only he, the musician, would hear differently on this guitar as opposed to his own. Once with his capo, once without. Once on body with a cut-out, once without. Once on a nylon-string, once on a metal. I caught myself drifting when Ivo approached us, his head turned into what Andrew was playing. 

He was reserved, embarrassed almost of his accent, but eager to talk. He was from Brazil, he explained, and wished he could play Flamenco guitar the way Andrew had taught himself. There was nothing special in the meeting, not really. I coaxed Andrew into admitting he had been trying to learn Portuguese for awhile, and listened as Ivo taught him some phrases. His mouth contorted as he tried to slow down the guttural noises of his native language for Andrew to perceive indefinitely. 

I asked if he knew any Bossa Nova. He did, smiling childishly as he tuned his guitar. It was then, when the room was empty except for the three of us, the impending rain casting our bodies in deep shades of gray, that I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of peace. We really take for granted the things in one another that connects us to this earth. For this man, these songs were his home, a stepping stone in his career as a musician, the soundtrack to his childhood. It was one of many things that created Ivo, and that we were lucky enough to witness.

I had a similar experience the following night while waiting alone for the nurse to start an IV. 

It was close to 9 PM and Andrew had ventured off to find food. The nurse had told me she needed to start therapy because of my severe dehydration.. It wasn't so much the pain I suppose that scared me, but the idea of this foreign thing siting in my vein, pumping me full of salt and drugs. 

So I sat, waiting, my brain turning over itself. Should I ask them to wait until Andrew was back? Or would I pretend to be the brave woman I wished I was? I dimmed the lights of the room, standing half-naked over my bed, scanning my body for some unseen illness. This was the place where people came to die, after all. There had to be something wrong with me to deserve all this pain. "Unwarranted" would not suffice. I heard a soft knock and slid back under the tattered blanket Andrew had found among a number of cabinets. 

My nurse was young, blonde, and tired. Her face course from a 15-hour shift. I whimpered a hello, watching as her small hands worked swiftly to unpack what was to be my IV. I swallowed hard, exhaling loudly to catch her attention. 

"I'm pretty scared of these things." I admitted, attempting to smile. Removing her rubber gloves, she patted my hand, her skin uneven to the touch. "It's okay." 

It wasn't that comforting, but she tried. I had never met this woman in my life and most likely would never see her again, but for these few minutes, we were inextricably interconnected. I tried not to hold my breath, and she promised to do her best. That was all we could ask of one another. I yelled anyway, sounding to most in the hall outside my door like Steve Carell in the waxing scene of "40-Year-Old Virgin." But it was over with, and I was proud of myself when Andrew walked in looking surprised that I had gone it alone.  

We all need to feel like we belong to something bigger than us. We need to know that we can approach a stranger, whether to talk guitars or to admit we're afraid, because it means we're still human on a human level. Not simply people who go through life without seeing the forest for the trees. And when we can recognize one another for our strengths, not our weaknesses, we set one another free. And most importantly, we give ourselves permission to be "us", inherently, regardless if accidental or not.  

God bless you, Steve Zissou

I couldn't begin to explain my love for this movie (especially this scene). It simply is the best movie ever. 

Recent writings

Roadmaps.


In the moments 
following a heavy rain,
I hear you.


Softly at first,
Like a mother might
hear her child,
thirsty from chasing
half-forgotten dreams,
call out to her
for a glass of water.


Then, as the storm passes,
the trees quiet,
lost in their earthly contemplation, 
your voice comes swiftly,
enveloped in the pink gossamer 
of a morning dove's chorus. 
Forever filling images 
of a rapidly fading Florida
with your presence.
Always soft and deliberate.


It is in this exact moment,
when it is I feel
so utterly inconsequential 
and diminished
that I fall in love with you
again.


I want nothing more 
than to acquiesce to you.
Flesh and bone becoming
salted and uneven pages,
the words speaking of
fragmented desires and
plagues unknown.
Black ink ebbing and flowing
as equals,
together making the woman
seeking the roadmaps of your hands
to guide her home.


But like the storm,
so he, too, is fleeting.
Inhibited and grey.
Yet, she always waits.
Sitting and reveling in his brevity
before patiently returning
to the house of her chest,
putting out the candle
she lights every night
and that once drew him
to the windows of her heart.


-Written 7.19.10


South Beach Speculations


There's something about swimming in the ocean that allows for a rebirth that only salt water can bring. The soul seems to be swept clean, picked apart with each passing grain of sand. Made transparent as though returning to a state of sea glass. Each vein turning to foam, bloated with the ashes of dead fish and oil. But she, the ocean, remains intact although slightly altered. Her presence a reminder that we came from her belly and will some day return through her mouth. 


-Written 7.23.10

The Album Leaf - Within Dreams - A Chorus of Storytellers

Move number 1,387,623 and counting

Hallandale House, courtesy of Google Earth.

Okay, so in all honesty the number is closer to 13, not including all the moving in/out and to/from dorm rooms. 

But all of them combined have nothing on what's been going on the last few months. 

Sitting on the couch in the Hallandale house (I'm not really sure where "home" refers to these days, so I'll title each house accordingly for the time being), it's the first quiet I've had in nearly a week. On Tuesday morning, my mother called me frantically, asking that my sister, boyfriend and I return to Cape Coral after realizing there was no way only her and my brother could manage packing alone. 

All of this began about two years ago when my father went to Iraq as a civilian civil engineer employed for Michael Baker. We, like many families around the world, were financially crippled by the end of 2005. The economy had started to turn seriously sour and to make things better, my dad had been "passed over" by the Coast Guard (i.e. was forced to retire when he didn't qualify for Admiral). It was decided my parents didn't want to continue living in the bay area of California and would move to Miami, Florida. Here my mother could visit her home country of Puerto Rico more frequently, but my dad would have the job security of living on the continental U.S.

Right, job security. Like that was going to happen. 

Not to mention like most baby boomers, living in an apartment (even if it was 20 minutes from South Beach) wasn't enough. They had three kids, a dog, two cars, and wanted a place that we could finally paint the walls in. So they found a house in Cape Coral and moved without really consulting us, the three kids, who were busy working a summer camp in Oakland back out west. In all honesty, we weren't that surprised nor did we really care. The move had yet again been taken care of without us - out of sight out of mind. 

The Cape Coral house became our meeting point: while I still attended school in Tampa for the first year my parents and sister lived there, I would eventually rejoin my brother in California, looking to the guest bedroom that I helped decorate as a comfortable, temporary place only inhabited during holidays and summer vacations. It's always an odd feeling when you move out and your parents home, no matter if its the one you grew up in or not, no longer feels like home to you. I knew all the decorations, always felt a sense of calm when entering the house after being away for months but remembering its familiar smell. And yet, if I was to ever get a glass of water in the middle of the night, I'd find myself searching all the kitchen's cabinets, never quite sure of where everything was. I couldn't tell you where we kept the spare keys to my dad's Chevy, or where my mother kept the queen bed's spare sheets. My pictures were in all the frames, but I felt like nothing more than a familiar stranger to this place. 

It was during my graduation, when my mother, sister and father were visiting, that they told us they were going to foreclose. The whole event, including my ceremony, was a blur. My father hadn't been himself - Iraq had physically and mentally altered him into an entity that I found hard to believe had been the man I'd known all my life. And while my mother and sister had been eager to see us all together again, the year without my father had taken an equal toll on the both of them. For my mother, it was struggling without the help of the man she'd relied on for more than 26 years. For my sister, it was trying to pick up the slack of a house that had been neglected while trying to cope with the failed attempt to study Interior Design in San Francisco. It was the first time in my life I felt the five of us didn't really know one another anymore, that we were becoming one of those American families who simply drifted apart. 

"But how could we?" I cried to my boyfriend one night. "We're not white! Didn't you see my father? He won't even hug me. He won't even touch my mother." 

My father returned to the states and left Michael Baker, taking a job offer in Virginia to work with the Army. We were moving yet again, and this time it was going to be sloppy. The Cape Coral house hadn't sold yet nor had my mother been given a transfer for her job. In February, I flew out from San Jose, helped put together a small shipment of furniture, clothes, books and utensils and drove with my dad to Orlando where we caught a train that would put us just outside of DC. 

I knew I was helping, but all I could think was how much I hated this. Why couldn't my brother be the one to help? He was the eldest, this was his job. My father and I sat in our small sleeper cabin for nearly 13 hours, hardly saying a word to one another as we awoke to fields blanketed in crisp, white snow. How could this be it? How were we supposed to survive this? I had imagined my life, our life, to be so different. I was supposed to graduate and get my dream job while my parents retired and enjoyed one another for the rest of their life. I never believed another move like this would happen, one rushed and outlined in the faded fabric of an amtrak train. I was begin to doubt life as an adult was meant to be happy one. Maybe college was it, your last hurrah - the memories that would help you get through the rest of what was to become a mundane schedule filled with stress and heartache. 

He cried when he dropped me off the airport a few days later and made me promise I'd help my mother when the time came. Which leads us to this point, why I'm writing this. 

We left Tuesday only planning to stay a few days, but that ended up being five. What was going to Puerto Rico? What was going to Virginia? What could be thrown away? What did my sister and I want to take to the Hallandale house? What could Andrew and Marcos take back to California? 

What. What. What. What. What. All wrapped in stolen newspapers and bubble wrap, placed in cardboard boxes labeled neatly in thick, Sharpie. My entire life was yet again going into storage, just like all that I had left behind in San Jose and Oakland. Stuffed into basement corners and closet shelves. I felt like a drifter, a nomad, completely disconnected from the idea of a home. 

We worked slowly, at times allowing ourselves to revisit old pictures and trinkets not yet unpacked from when we first moved in. Knowing that my sister, boyfriend and I would come yet again when my mother was feeling lonely or needed to finish. 

The Hallandale house is quiet, and I invite it in. I think of my room, just around the corner from where I sit, filled with what little clothes and belongings I chose to bring when I came. 

How it's all temporary. How I'm trying to figure out if I should stay or continue to fight to go back to California...a place that I'm already starting to forget. It may be move number 1,387,623, but I still feel like that little girl who didn't know what to expect when the big truck came to take all of her things away to some unknown place she isn't sure she'll like, but she has no choice discovering. 

So what is home? And how do I find it?

A new beginning

Sitting down to this, I feel the same disquiet and elation as I would starting a handwritten journal. Partly because I know that I've never been one to feel particularly inspired while sitting at a laptop - I still hold very romantic sentiments toward penning in fine black ink amongst the pages of my Moleskin. And because having written since the 5th grade about everything and anything, I've become an earnest writer who refuses to hold back. Journaling has become a permanent means of self-discovery and therapy, therefore it serves no purpose to me to edit for the sake of self-image. And because this is publicly accessible on a far larger scale than my Moleskin, I'll take a moment to make a quick warning to those who choose to proceed with this blog, especially those who know me personally:

Seeing as how I'm making a general effort to stay committed to this whole writing thing (and posting it to the online world), please note that I will probably write about you at some point if you cross my path on a regular basis, more so if we're close friends and/or family. And for those of you I may never have the pleasure to meet, well, you are also equally warned that I'm an avid people-watcher. If you make a fool of yourself in public, or say something quite wonderful that I happen to overhear, there's an 89% percent chance you'll come spilling out onto this in some way, shape or form, sooner or later. 

This will, therefore, be a "quilt" (if you will) of me. Whether written speculation or photography, I'm striving for this to be the interactive forum I feel I've been needing lately - one in which I can really connect with myself and those who decide to follow me rather than comment on statuses and stalk through thousands of photos. More importantly, however, I want this to be a springboard into my (potential) writing career. Having taken a well needed although far too long hiatus from writing after finishing my undergraduate thesis in May 2009, I'm at a point in my life where I need writing and I need to feel excited about it again. My life has been one lacking order and cohesiveness - ironically more in the 15 months I decided to take my "break" more than ever - with the exception of writing. So here it is, a promise to myself and those of you who are crazy enough to read this shit: this is my officially coming-out-of-retirement statement. From now on, I will post an annoying amount of pictures, poems, short stories, rants/complaints, revelations, and  everything in between that may or may not have anything to do with me. 

I'm excited. Aren't you?