“Yeah, she has a puppy…only old…so… a dog”

Kimberly and Becca came up from Wilmington on Sunday night. They stayed at Sam’s house and in the morning, after my eight o’clock spanish lesson, i met them in town and we went to DC with our new cameras. We met Megan from New Jersey on the train and went around DC for the day. We went to Becca’s old school because she needed to pick up some papers, to an apartment of a family Becca used to babysit for and to the zoo with the two twin boys, Nico and Pippo, from that family. We came back to Fredericksburg and met Tim, Lou and Daniel at El Charro, went to Walmart to wait for the Quanns to call, and ended at Dennys with the Quanns and a very grumpy waiter. It was a good time, as it always is with that crowd. Good to get away, especially on a week like this. And now, for some pictures ) I recently got a Canon Rebel XT 350D and Kimberly had just gotten a Canon 40D; these are a few of the results.

mucho gusto de conocerte! i must not speak Mexican, i must not speak slang, i must not give up…

I’ve recently started private Spanish lessons.

Well, you can’t call them ‘lessons’ per-say. My mom used to teach an English as a Second Language class, and one of her students from Peru, Maritza, wanted to get to together with my mom and I and practice Spanish and English. In other words, i can only talk in Spanish/Espanglish and she talks in English. I’m enjoying them a whole lot more than i thought i would. I have absolutely no one to talk to in Spanish, even in my Spanish class, and that has been incredibly discouraging and frustrating. It leaves me on a level below where all my other friends who speak Spanish well, which would be all of them. So when i’m in environments where i might have the opportunity to practice, i let them dominate the conversation, which isn’t very hard. But finally, i’ll have a chance to go over all the random Spanish i’ve missed along the way. Which is a whole lot. I realized i have a fairly good grasp on the subjunctive and know just about every vocabulary word related to cosmetology, but i didn’t know all the months. Sad, i know.

i just need some peace…

Hello world.

i’m actually doing one of these things. i’ve written random blogs here and there on the various time-wasting web sites i’ve joined over the past few years. They were so sporadic because i never thought i had much to say. Always fancied myself a listener, which i do quite often…quite a lot more now. So much in fact, i don’t feel like i can just talk about how I feel or what i think anymore. i’ve lost any kind of articulating skills i might have had.

Now, for a meager attempt to redeem them.

This week has been incredibly painful for me, and it continues to be. For the past two years on this very date, i have been in Mexico City, which is one of my favorite places in the world. In fact, exactly a year ago at this time, i was lying at the end of a row of hot pink, barrack-style bunk beds in a super hot and cramped cement room with the sounds of howling dogs, rogue roosters, and snoring Mexican girls to drift me off to sleep. I never slept well in Mexico, especially at the kid’s camps we would put on in the mountains near the City, but those many of those sleepless nights were spent in the Word or just quiet time with me and my Father. They revived me and renewed me; they helped me in ways a person like me who is not accomplished with words could not even begin to express.

And then it was all over. I went on tour, i went home, and i returned to school. Not a day went by that i did not think of my brothers and sisters in Mexico City. On some days it was happy and fleeting reminiscing, others i was contemplating purchasing cheap one-way tickets to El D.F.

But lately, it’s just been pain. In the forms of sadness that i am not returning this year, old memories that burn into my mind like painfully beautiful movies that flash on and off, panic that i am wasting precious time and not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, which is not limited to my being in Mexico or not. The worst part of it all is that i feel hopeless right now. And i know that God won’t leave me here. I just need some hope. I just need some faith and peace that God knows what He’s doing. I know He does, but sometimes He operates in ways that are incredibly hard and frustrating. For this week, those ways seemed to be by frequent emails and instant messages that brought up enough ‘feeling’ to have me up at two o’clock in the morning reading those passages i discovered in Mexico last year. Oh well. There is much worse to be done, and i enjoyed reading Ecclesiastes again.

“And You know the plans that You have for me
And You can’t plan the end and not plan the means
And so I suppose I just need some peace
Just to get me to sleep.”