I have a problem with being alone.
Not alone in my house or alone at the mall or alone at the gym or alone walking somewhere.
Alone in terms of companionship and having the comfort of simply knowing you were always there.
I keep trying to find ways to entertain myself but most of the time it doesn't work.
I don't feel creative, motivated, or driven whatsoever. I've been blankly staring at my notecards and notebook for the past two hours and can safely say that these two hours have been completely wasted.
I never knew how dependent I have been on someone else for the past six years. I thought I was stronger and more independent then most people I know. This situation has proven me wrong.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Projects.
I always say I want to do diy projects at home, but these thoughts never seem to be executed...
I want to make a headboard like so! I need a wall like so first.
Yes, please! I want to make these.
I want a cute place like this to sit in and feel extremely organized.
How fun! I want to make one of these.
My computer is close to overheating and turning off so I have to stop here.
I want to make a headboard like so! I need a wall like so first.
Yes, please! I want to make these.
I want a cute place like this to sit in and feel extremely organized.
How fun! I want to make one of these.My computer is close to overheating and turning off so I have to stop here.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Starvin Arvind
My boyfriend, Arvind is someone all can admire. Beginning this past Monday, him and seven other students from around the country began a fast for the atrocities that have recently taken place against innocent Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka.
Honestly, when he first told me about it I thought he was out of his mind. However, these past five days he has been patiently resisting all temptations of food for his beliefs and to speak out for the people of his parents' country, and I have only grown to love him and admire him more after these five days. All eight of them have work, school, and other daily tasks they must take care of, and are somewhat impeding their lives for a chance to reach out to those unaware and uninformed about the situation.
You should visit http://www.pearlaction.org/fast/ to find out more about the other seven who are taking a part of this fast, and maybe skip a salad or sammich just once or twice for them!
Also, I know everyone loves M.I.A who is from Sri Lanka. She recently spoke up about the genocide:
January 21, 2009
War at what Cost?
Posted: 04:59 PM ET
An elderly Sri Lankan man sits under posters on a street in Colombo on January 4, 2009, featuring an image of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and hailing the military's capture of the Tamil Tiger political headquarters.
An elderly Sri Lankan man sits under posters on a street in Colombo on January 4, 2009, featuring an image of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and hailing the military's capture of the Tamil Tiger political headquarters.
M.I.A.
Musician
While there is no room in the world for terrorist organizations, their defeat cannot come at the expense of thousands of innocent civilian lives.
The greatest failing of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is not its inability to meet its prime objectives (e.g. capturing Osama Bin Laden, eradicating the threat of WMDS in Iraq, and removing Al Qaeda from Afghanistan). Rather, it is that America has given credibility to the act and the notion of pursuing terrorists at all costs.
The Bush administration has decided to ignore the very tenets of democracy (the U.S. constitution, Geneva convention, among others) in pursuit of winning the “war on terror.” In doing so, it sent a very clear message to the rest of the world: all bets are off where terrorism is involved.
Today, we can clearly see the ripple effect. In Sri Lanka, my home country, the Colombo government has massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to eliminate the threat posed by a small yet defiant group widely known as the Tamil Tigers (also known as the LTTE or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). Make no mistake, the LTTE have engaged in reprehensible terrorist activities that have needlessly taken the lives of both civilians and heads of state. The LTTE’s use of child soldiers and suicide bombers is unconscionable, and has rightly been condemned by the international community. But now the eyeglass must turn to the Colombo government as the conflict enters its 25th year. The war has resulted in what many humanitarian groups are now calling genocide. And sadly, for the Tamil people, time is running out.
Just last month, the New York-based Genocide Prevention Project released a report that listed Sri Lanka among the top eight “red alert” countries currently experiencing genocide conflicts. And Human Rights Watch estimates that between 230,000 to 300,000 Tamil people have been trapped in the Vanni conflict zone by the government, denied food and basic living essentials.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that no one knows how severe the crisis is because the Sri Lankan government has barred foreign media from reporting on the subject and severely limited the presence of humanitarian organizations. And worse, as demonstrated by the recent murder of Lasantha Wickramatunga, a Sri Lankan journalist critical of the war against the LTTE, those that question the government are putting their lives in jeopardy.
Yet other than the UN’s slap-on-the-wrist gesture of stripping Sri Lanka of its seat on the Human Rights Council in May of 2008, the World has remained silent about this emerging humanitarian crisis. What is even more disconcerting is that the global mainstream media has largely ignored the Tamil civilian causalities, and has actually praised the Sri Lankan government for “running an effective military campaign.” Additionally, somewhere along the way the media has managed to portray every Tamil as a Tamil Tiger, including myself.
Fortunately, this month brings a close to the Bush administration and its war on terror at all costs. President Barack Obama announced that he will issue an executive order on his first week in office to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility – which has long become a symbol of the administration’s indifference to how it wins this war. But for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, there is little hope that the Colombo government will change its policies.
We must be clear: acts of terrorism are deplorable and cannot be tolerated by any government, but to actively seek out the killing of innocent civilians, under the guise of fighting terror is absolutely indefensible. Governments must hold themselves to a higher standard.
Editor’s Note: Maya Arulpragasam (known as M.I.A.) is a music artist whose song “Paper Planes” received a 2009 Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. She was born in England to Tamil parents and fled the war in Sri Lanka after living there for ten years. She currently lives in the United States.
Credit: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/21/war-at-what-cost/
Honestly, when he first told me about it I thought he was out of his mind. However, these past five days he has been patiently resisting all temptations of food for his beliefs and to speak out for the people of his parents' country, and I have only grown to love him and admire him more after these five days. All eight of them have work, school, and other daily tasks they must take care of, and are somewhat impeding their lives for a chance to reach out to those unaware and uninformed about the situation.
You should visit http://www.pearlaction.org/fast/ to find out more about the other seven who are taking a part of this fast, and maybe skip a salad or sammich just once or twice for them!
Also, I know everyone loves M.I.A who is from Sri Lanka. She recently spoke up about the genocide:
January 21, 2009
War at what Cost?
Posted: 04:59 PM ET
An elderly Sri Lankan man sits under posters on a street in Colombo on January 4, 2009, featuring an image of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and hailing the military's capture of the Tamil Tiger political headquarters.
An elderly Sri Lankan man sits under posters on a street in Colombo on January 4, 2009, featuring an image of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and hailing the military's capture of the Tamil Tiger political headquarters.
M.I.A.
Musician
While there is no room in the world for terrorist organizations, their defeat cannot come at the expense of thousands of innocent civilian lives.
The greatest failing of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is not its inability to meet its prime objectives (e.g. capturing Osama Bin Laden, eradicating the threat of WMDS in Iraq, and removing Al Qaeda from Afghanistan). Rather, it is that America has given credibility to the act and the notion of pursuing terrorists at all costs.
The Bush administration has decided to ignore the very tenets of democracy (the U.S. constitution, Geneva convention, among others) in pursuit of winning the “war on terror.” In doing so, it sent a very clear message to the rest of the world: all bets are off where terrorism is involved.
Today, we can clearly see the ripple effect. In Sri Lanka, my home country, the Colombo government has massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to eliminate the threat posed by a small yet defiant group widely known as the Tamil Tigers (also known as the LTTE or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). Make no mistake, the LTTE have engaged in reprehensible terrorist activities that have needlessly taken the lives of both civilians and heads of state. The LTTE’s use of child soldiers and suicide bombers is unconscionable, and has rightly been condemned by the international community. But now the eyeglass must turn to the Colombo government as the conflict enters its 25th year. The war has resulted in what many humanitarian groups are now calling genocide. And sadly, for the Tamil people, time is running out.
Just last month, the New York-based Genocide Prevention Project released a report that listed Sri Lanka among the top eight “red alert” countries currently experiencing genocide conflicts. And Human Rights Watch estimates that between 230,000 to 300,000 Tamil people have been trapped in the Vanni conflict zone by the government, denied food and basic living essentials.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that no one knows how severe the crisis is because the Sri Lankan government has barred foreign media from reporting on the subject and severely limited the presence of humanitarian organizations. And worse, as demonstrated by the recent murder of Lasantha Wickramatunga, a Sri Lankan journalist critical of the war against the LTTE, those that question the government are putting their lives in jeopardy.
Yet other than the UN’s slap-on-the-wrist gesture of stripping Sri Lanka of its seat on the Human Rights Council in May of 2008, the World has remained silent about this emerging humanitarian crisis. What is even more disconcerting is that the global mainstream media has largely ignored the Tamil civilian causalities, and has actually praised the Sri Lankan government for “running an effective military campaign.” Additionally, somewhere along the way the media has managed to portray every Tamil as a Tamil Tiger, including myself.
Fortunately, this month brings a close to the Bush administration and its war on terror at all costs. President Barack Obama announced that he will issue an executive order on his first week in office to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility – which has long become a symbol of the administration’s indifference to how it wins this war. But for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, there is little hope that the Colombo government will change its policies.
We must be clear: acts of terrorism are deplorable and cannot be tolerated by any government, but to actively seek out the killing of innocent civilians, under the guise of fighting terror is absolutely indefensible. Governments must hold themselves to a higher standard.
Editor’s Note: Maya Arulpragasam (known as M.I.A.) is a music artist whose song “Paper Planes” received a 2009 Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. She was born in England to Tamil parents and fled the war in Sri Lanka after living there for ten years. She currently lives in the United States.
Credit: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/21/war-at-what-cost/
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Home!
Here I am! Driving into Ohio territory and seeing the Ohio sign makes me giddy every time.
I'm totally pumped to be home, but I have a feeling I'm going to be lonely here and there. Considering I lived with 13 other people in D.C. I honestly thought I was going to hate my living arrangement. But that never happened. I never became sick of everyone, or felt like going home wasn't really home. I feel like a lot of people have a lot of adjusting to do when they move away for a quarter or semester. But I didn't. I got along with every single one of my roommates. Naturally, I had annoyances and wishes to be alone for an hour or whatever, but I never got sick of coming back to a full house. Now I sit here on a Sunday night at my mom's house, wishing I could go home and see all of my roommates like I've been doing for the past two months. Living with so many people made me appreciate and embrace all of our differences.. most of the time.. and I can cheesily say that it has helped me grow as a person.
Living on Capitol Hill was insane. The election was one of the best experiences I've had. I drunkenly ran down to a Capitol Hill bar from my house just a few minutes before they announced Ohio as a win for Obama, and from that moment on everything went crazy. Every morning I woke up I saw the Capitol and the Supreme Court. I rode a metro to and from work(I'm going to hate driving now) and walked all of the time. I loved being able to people watch throughout my commute, sprint to the metro before it left me almost everyday, run into everyone on the metro with my abundance of bags,etc. The metro makes me want to live in a city. Is that weird? It makes an atmosphere so much more exciting.
I interned at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs which is a Latin American policy research group made up of ALL interns and our lunatic, eighty year old director, Larry Birns. My first day was one of the worse days of my life. I was assigned a letter to the editor, and I had no I idea what I was supposed to do, and was given no direction. I stared at the computer screen for a good two hours and forced myself not to cry from my frustration. It was probably a poorly written letter, and I'm not even sure that it ever got published. But from that moment on, I learned so much about writing, words, and Latin American policy. I was able to publish three of my pieces at COHA, and was able to build on my foreign policy knowledge. I interned with people from all over the world; Italy, China, Taiwan, California, Hawaii, Honduras, Pennsylvania, Nebraska.... and slowly everyone bonded, learned from each others writings, and became comfortable enough with one another to constantly make fun of ridiculous Larry.
I already miss D.C.
But I am completely happy to be home, and to be able to reconnect with everyone and have an awesome winter break.
However, winter break brings the time to be closer to June/graduation, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take my life totally seriously yet since I'm debating whether to apply for the Peace Corps and/or Teach for America.
This is another long, and drawn out subject to talk about.
More on that later.
I'm totally pumped to be home, but I have a feeling I'm going to be lonely here and there. Considering I lived with 13 other people in D.C. I honestly thought I was going to hate my living arrangement. But that never happened. I never became sick of everyone, or felt like going home wasn't really home. I feel like a lot of people have a lot of adjusting to do when they move away for a quarter or semester. But I didn't. I got along with every single one of my roommates. Naturally, I had annoyances and wishes to be alone for an hour or whatever, but I never got sick of coming back to a full house. Now I sit here on a Sunday night at my mom's house, wishing I could go home and see all of my roommates like I've been doing for the past two months. Living with so many people made me appreciate and embrace all of our differences.. most of the time.. and I can cheesily say that it has helped me grow as a person.
Living on Capitol Hill was insane. The election was one of the best experiences I've had. I drunkenly ran down to a Capitol Hill bar from my house just a few minutes before they announced Ohio as a win for Obama, and from that moment on everything went crazy. Every morning I woke up I saw the Capitol and the Supreme Court. I rode a metro to and from work(I'm going to hate driving now) and walked all of the time. I loved being able to people watch throughout my commute, sprint to the metro before it left me almost everyday, run into everyone on the metro with my abundance of bags,etc. The metro makes me want to live in a city. Is that weird? It makes an atmosphere so much more exciting.
I interned at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs which is a Latin American policy research group made up of ALL interns and our lunatic, eighty year old director, Larry Birns. My first day was one of the worse days of my life. I was assigned a letter to the editor, and I had no I idea what I was supposed to do, and was given no direction. I stared at the computer screen for a good two hours and forced myself not to cry from my frustration. It was probably a poorly written letter, and I'm not even sure that it ever got published. But from that moment on, I learned so much about writing, words, and Latin American policy. I was able to publish three of my pieces at COHA, and was able to build on my foreign policy knowledge. I interned with people from all over the world; Italy, China, Taiwan, California, Hawaii, Honduras, Pennsylvania, Nebraska.... and slowly everyone bonded, learned from each others writings, and became comfortable enough with one another to constantly make fun of ridiculous Larry.
I already miss D.C.
But I am completely happy to be home, and to be able to reconnect with everyone and have an awesome winter break.
However, winter break brings the time to be closer to June/graduation, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take my life totally seriously yet since I'm debating whether to apply for the Peace Corps and/or Teach for America.
This is another long, and drawn out subject to talk about.
More on that later.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Crazy Calabaza
It was so awesome to go home this weekend. Even though I saw my friends for a short amount of time on Friday night, it made my heart content.
Halloween ended up being exactly what I wanted it to be. Highball was ridiculous, and I am so impressed with the city of Columbus' development in the past ten years. More people are coming to Columbus for special events, and I love to see the city growing. It sadly makes it harder for me to want to grow up and get out.
I somehow convinced Arvind and Mike to join me at Get Right for the Halloween madness. Other then Mike losing his keys, it was a successful, Kelis and Nas dance filled night.
I wish I lived at closer distances from my family so I could partake in events such as these:
That is my insanely cute baby cousin, Emma who lives in New York.
On an election note,
HOW IS IT TOMORROW?? I have been covering this since January 2007, and I cannot belive that a new president is going to be elected tomorrow. D.C's atmosphere on this election is not as hyped up as I thought it would be. Obviously, most of the coverage is in the battleground states, and what does two electoral votes mean to Obama or McCain? Not much. However, I suppose everyone is in their offices furiously working on articles and preparing for the big day. D.C better be on fire tomorrow!
MOST IMPORTANTLY, VOTE. Shutup for the next four years if you don't vote.
Halloween ended up being exactly what I wanted it to be. Highball was ridiculous, and I am so impressed with the city of Columbus' development in the past ten years. More people are coming to Columbus for special events, and I love to see the city growing. It sadly makes it harder for me to want to grow up and get out.
I somehow convinced Arvind and Mike to join me at Get Right for the Halloween madness. Other then Mike losing his keys, it was a successful, Kelis and Nas dance filled night.
I wish I lived at closer distances from my family so I could partake in events such as these:
That is my insanely cute baby cousin, Emma who lives in New York.
On an election note,
HOW IS IT TOMORROW?? I have been covering this since January 2007, and I cannot belive that a new president is going to be elected tomorrow. D.C's atmosphere on this election is not as hyped up as I thought it would be. Obviously, most of the coverage is in the battleground states, and what does two electoral votes mean to Obama or McCain? Not much. However, I suppose everyone is in their offices furiously working on articles and preparing for the big day. D.C better be on fire tomorrow!
MOST IMPORTANTLY, VOTE. Shutup for the next four years if you don't vote.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Me!
Friends,
Go to www.coha.org to read my first piece at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs! I will hopefully be getting something up there pretty often. (I imagine biweekly after editing and what not)
Also, it finally feels like fall today, yippeeeeeeeee.
Final thing,
Go to www.coha.org to read my first piece at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs! I will hopefully be getting something up there pretty often. (I imagine biweekly after editing and what not)
Also, it finally feels like fall today, yippeeeeeeeee.
Final thing,
Thursday, October 16, 2008
I'm a pusher? What does that even mean?
So, this video is cheesy... almost too cheesy. But it makes me weirdly happy and makes me want to go back to Colombia asap. The little girls voice is sometimes too much too handle, but watch itttt!
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