fun with a blood orange

oranges are good. blood oranges (moro oranges) area SUPER TASTEY! and they are pretty too.
not only are they a georgous maroon red color on the inside, the skin is a beautiful bright orange blushed by the same georgeous maroon red color.
seeing how i'm stuck at work late at night on my day off because of an emergency situation, i spent some time exploring the digital macro setting on my digital camera taking pictures of the fabulous color and texture of the blood orange i ate for a snack...while watching Little Miss Sunshine.
they say that "necessity is the mother of invention." i say, "boredom is the mother of abstract creativity!"

"Put me in the Zoo!"

today i've come to a point where i'm tired of being responsible. i'm tired of always doing for others, always doing the right thing, the responsible thing. i'm feeling a great urge to be irresponsible, live wildly, throw caution to the wind...to do things for ME.

it's like i'm being ripped in two...one part of me screams, "get in your car and just start driving...run away, see where the road takes you!" and the other is saying, "but i have a job...responsibilities. ...there are certain expectations that others have of me." how can i possibly find the motivation to get out of bed tomorrow, go to a stuffy "supervisors" workshop for FOUR hours, have meetings with my staff, and then come to work in the evening when all i really want to do is to just disappear?

i feel like i did when i was a kid... sometimes i'd get so upset at the fact that my parents obviously didn't understand how much something upset me or how important something was to me, i'd hide and think of running away form home. i'm sure most people did this as a kid...you start thinking, "when i'm gone they'll finally realize what they missed out on, how important i was." and you'd wait, in your hiding place, hoping that a worried parent who had been searching high and low for you would find you and, in the time you'd been "gone," would have come to an understanding of what was going through your head.

maybe if i disappeared they'd realize how much i did to help them...how much work i absorbed that they never had to worry about--work that they never even knew went on.

how can my sense of duty be SO strong that it keeps me in a place that drives me to, what feels to me like, madness...head spinning, hair pulling, mind boggling, possibly certifiable, madness.

if i could only take a picture of the mess that lives inside my head right now...

i could try to explain the chain of events that took me from having a fairly productive and relaxing day off to wanting to disappear into the night...but i don't feel like recounting them at the moment. i'm frustrated enough already.

creative emotion purge

so i think i'm in need of some serious creative emotional purging, but i'm having a hard time finding the right project or the motivation in the midst of my hectic life.

you see, recently i've found myself in the middle of a very "High Fidelity" style relationship "what if?" psyche-crisis-cycle (eat your heart out DSM IV-TR!). i'm tired of certain things from my past creeping into my everyday thoughts, but i can't seem to shake them from my brain. i try distracting myself, but reminders and memory triggers of all sorts seem to be waiting around every corner...
i understand that these types of things are part of an emotional growth period, and i want to continue growing... but that doesn't stop me from being tired of it. i'm sick of the tumult in my heart and my head, i need peace for a while.

activities i am going to try in efforts to purge my current emotional demons:
wild unrestricted journaling
unabashedly-wild painting (on a BIG canvas)
intense apartment cleaning (my shower grout always gives me a good workout...)
organizing (anything and everything in my apartment; order in my physical surroundings always makes me feel better)
uploading pictures of and blogging about my pre-motivation drought crafty endeavors

In Honduras

so, i haven't posted in a while because the holidays were busy with traveling back and forth between work and visiting my family in Indiana... then once i was back at work, i had to make final preparations for taking 11 high school students on a trip to Honduras, where i am currently posting from. Yes, the orphanage where we are volunteering for the week has satellite wireless and i can get a signal on my laptop if i sit outside on the steps of San Christobal, the visitors house.

So my basic mission in posting was to post some pictures and outline, in brief, what i am doing here. a co-worker and I brought a group of 11 students from our school to visit and volunteer at Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos Orphanage in Honduras. we have a former co-worker who is doing a year of volunteer service here and we decided that it would be a great opportunity and experience to come visit her and see what NPH is like.

our first two days have been great! we've met a lot of the kids, eaten meals with them, taken lots of pictures (they LOVE to have their pictures taken and will BEG to pose and to have you let them take pictures too!) and are getting acclimated to the lay of the land (it is a HUGE Rancho and we walk A LOT!) and the day to day activities. tomorrow we will help with work around the ranch, either on the farm, in the garden, in the tortilla house, or in the kitchen.


more later in the week, hasta luego!