"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

had a crazy dream this morning. i dreamed that i came home and my family was at my house. everybody was rushing around. in the background. i saw my mother. she was crying but strong. i asked my aunt why she told me that she just found out that my mother had been diagnosed with a illness. i took my mother out for a drive and we talked for hours in serenity, knowing that she would be okay, so long as we take care of her. this reminds me of life being way too short to let life pull you away from loved ones.

so i go swoon.com for their dream analysis:

mother:"...a dream of your mother signifies happiness in love or personal affairs"

illness: "Disturbing dilemmas are predicted in a dream of being ill; if your dream involved others being ill, you can expect to be upset by a broken promise."

so, i am going to be upset over a broken promise, in dealing in the area of love or personal affairs.

hmm... interesting. i am not surprised. i will just leave it at that.

=========================

lessons i learned in experiences

i can give you a play by play of my life, since i have not been updating this thing often, but that would be boring. i am not here to give you my schedule. so i am going to try to get lessons out of each experience.

sunday
LA Enkanto had a show at the cerritos family festival. aye. if you saw the audience last year, it was mostly families with lolos and lolas. it was like that again this year except it was possibly 2x bigger the audience.

you see, the program says "LA Enkanto- Filipino poetry". they must be expecting poetry in tagalog. or poetry about the philippines. well, it should say "filipino american poetry" because our poetry is about our experiences and is in english. but they really felt dorian's and mitzi's set because mitzi was singing in tagalog.

lesson: write more. not necessarily write more of "this kind" of poetry or "that kind" of poetry, but generally write more and maybe i will have more to choose from for certain events. (except for the cerritos event. you can funny as fuck like edren, but you will get no response.)

***
saturday
melinda and i emcee'ed the first annual youth spoken word event called "what's the word?". kids from k-12 performed pieces. it was so cuuuuuuuute! on did a step routine. another did a touching piece on martin luther king jr. some did cultural dance. it was more so an overall art festival, because there was spoken word, performance art, visual art, singing, and dance.

they wanted me to be part of next year's organization.

i really felt that a particular administrator was out of touch of the community. kept talking about "us" and "them" type of attitude. talked about how potentially dangerous the area is. how there are fights. yadda yadda yadda. i wasn't afraid to begin with but it was odd for three different people to tell me all this.

but then i met a student there from the south central school it was being held. and she said to me out of the blue "yes, this is a much needed event. i am tired of people talking about the negative things that happen in my school. everybody focuses on the negative and not the positive."

amen. bless her heart. i had to hear that. i wish the administrator heard her and i wish more can be done to bring options to the youth in that part of town.

lesson: fear keeps people from truly knowing other people. discrimination exists, even in our schools, with the very people that are in charge of the school. it goes to show, it DOES take a whole village to raise our children. i definitely, want to take a more active role in contributing what i can to the youth.