Synchronicity

I am having a Wolfgang moment, as in music has a way of speaking to me at the precise time I need it.

While I was still under the influence of the I am a loser mood manifestation that inspired the previous post, I started playing the Orishas music I previously mentioned. One of the songs is called "Conexión" and it has a great line that spoke to me in such a great in-your-face way:

El destino esta marcado nadie lo puede cambiar
Pero ten siempre presente tu esfuerzo no esta de más
Lo que no sirve de nada sácalo ya de tu mente
A veces vale nadar en contra de la corriente

I am not an expert translator, so I could not reproduce the sense of rythym, but the lyrics could be translated as follows:

Destiny is fixed no one can change it
But always keep in mind that your efforts are not in vain
Get out of your mind that which is useless
Sometimes it's necessary to swim against the current

Well, it's quite late. If I don't try to go to bed I will never sleep.

Just get the big L tattooed to my forehead

When I was young, my mother praised my intelligence so much. She built me up so high, told me I was so intelligent that it was a duty to use my brain to do something big and of importance with my life.

I was fascinated by science books and loved animals, so I was going to be a scientist when I grew up and discover the cure of cancer or something else equally big and important. This was said in all seriousness. My family had very cultured people, and some trailblazers in its ranks, after all. My grandpa's brother, who was my favorite uncle growing up, was a famous painter. My maternal grandmother had been one of the first group to graduate from the Normal School at the University of Puerto Rico. She was a math teacher and eventually became a school director.

Both my mother and father graduated from college and did some graduate work, my father in Stanford and my mother in Berlin on a Fullbright scholarship. So my mother's expectations of me were pretty high. And I am sorry to say I have been a huge disappointment. First of all, I switched majors on my second semester, changing from Biology to History. Then I graduated college with no clue of what to do with my life. I dropped law school after one semester. I remember the day I told my mom I was not going to be a lawyer and that what I really liked to do was write short stories. She looked at me and said "Then you'd better damn be the best writer there is." I think that comment jinxed me. For years I suffered from writer's block. I lost the spark. Eventually I just gave up on that part of my life altogether and focused on making a living.

I started working from the ground up. I did not have any friends in high places to give me a hand, and I had majored in History but had no inclination at all to be a teacher. So my first jobs were clerical in nature (receptionist at a San Juan newspaper, salesclerk at the UW University Bookstore in Madison, WI, office clerk at a clothing manufacturer back in San Juan).

I have been working 10 years for my current employer, and I have moved up the ranks from Administrative Assistant to Business Planning Manager. Fancy title, eh? It's actually pretty generic, it really doesn't convey well what I do. I like my job very much. I truly have a career by accident. I knew nothing about this business when I started. I have learned all I know on the go. Sometimes I think about it, this accumulation of experience and industry knowledge I have. It's hard to gauge it accurately. I fear I know less than I should. I suspect I may not realize how much I actually know. Does that make sense?

I love my daughters, and I want them to be the best they can possibly be. But I do not want to make the mistake my mom made. Her expectations of me were so high that they crushed me.

Orishas

triste loco el que ha dejado atras
su sol, su gente, su camisa
sin pensar tan lejos cambia todo
y la nostalgia te hace trizas
Orishas, "Emigrantes"

I discovered Orishas today. I bought their latest release, Antidiotico, on iTunes and it is amazing. The song quoted above and the one on the player below are my favorites.



The video for that song is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POfXi_2avtc

I wasn't able to find "Emigrantes" on imeem.com or in You Tube, so I linked to iTunes so you can listen to the 30-second preview, although it really is not enough to grasp it.

Shirts by Providence Handmade

My friend and fellow Mommy Board member, Stephanie, is a great crafter. She does all kinds of things, very tastefully and with meticulous attention to detail, and she is getting ready to open a shop in etsy.com. She made these shirts for my girls. Aren't they cute?

The Mother of Giveaways

Lately I see a lot of giveaways taking place on blogs, especially mothering blogs. I am usually too lazy to enter, but today, through the blogs of my friends Keara and Amanda, I learned about one that I will definitely not miss. The prize for this contest, organized by 5 Minutes for Mom and sponsored by Best Buy, is a 37" Flat Panel LCD HDTV. Awesome!

Click here if you are interested in participating.

Reluctant housework Sunday

As the title indicates, housework is not really my thing. I can just imagine both my ex and my husband reading that comment and saying "Gee, ya think??!!" To say Ingrid hates housework is like saying Puerto Rico is an island, or the sky is blue.

But this weekend I have embarked in one of my frenzied housecleaning episodes. I did several loads of laundry yesterday and finished clearing toys from the floor of Paula's new bedroom. Today I will vacuum the room and it will be finished and waiting for Paula to return. Isabel's new room will still be messy. I will deal with that one with more time.

I am still doing laundry and I have a mountain of clothes to fold and put away. This is sometimes hard, as we have too much stuff and not enough storage. I have to set aside some clothes/towels/bedsheets to give away.

Redundancy

Holy crap, I just realized I used the word feel, or some permutation of it, eight times in my previous post, four of them in the first paragraph. Yikes!

What's my skill?

Lately I have been feeling precarious. This is not to be confused with my "mostly hormonal blues" of the past few days. Once the veil of doom is pulled back, I still feel like my footing is unsure. Part of this is related to work. My post is evolving. But more than work, the blogging world has brought about this feeling. The more blogs I discover, the more I read, the more relationships I build, in short the more I venture into this world, the more I feel like I don't have a freaking clue.

Please understand this is not a poor me statement. I have no reason to feel sorry for myself. Nor am I fishing for sympathy. I am writing to make sense of this feeling, the equivalent of thinking out loud. This is not a a bad thing, especially since it's been brought about by an increase in exposure to people, ideas, opinions and information that I would not normally encounter in the safe bubble of my everyday life. It is not too different from how I first felt when I started college a long time ago. Only this time it feels less like a small-town kid visiting Times Square, more like waking up from a too-long nap on a hot afternoon.

The most unlikely sources trigger reflection. A children's movie, one I have seen countless times, for example. I find myself wondering what exactly is it that I am good at and what should I do with my blog. While I am definitely nowhere near being "popular" on the Web, I have more readers now than when I started blogging. I think about this audience, especially the ones that pay me return visits. Why do they come? I know that my Mommy Board friends come because they want to know what's going on with my life and my kids. We share a bond much deeper than this blog. But what about the others? Why do they come back? Do they like what they read here or come because I also visit them?

The never ending stream of questions inside my head goes on. What is my place under the sun? What is my voice? What is this hodgepodge page I keep? Should I focus this blog on my life as a parent? Should I stick to keeping a journal of my mood swings? Should I only talk about what it means to be a Puerto Rican far from the island, married to an American? Why am I blogging in English, by the way? Should I strive for a bilingual blog? Should I talk about work? Should I just dedicate it to posting the pictures I take? Am I as good of a writer as I think I am? Am I getting too old to grow up, trapped in platitudes?

Such are the questions unanswered. There are two things of which I am quite sure, though:

• What I post is my truth alone. I don't want to impose my views on anybody and have no intention of hurting anyone's feelings.
• I love to read other people's blogs, and I like to have readers. It invigorates me to be able to have contact with people far removed from my everyday life and circumstance.

Breakfast

Breakfast, originally uploaded by icruzbonilla.

Here is Isabel enjoying her oatmeal this morning.

Here comes the rain again

I woke up to the sound of rain. We had a respite the last couple of days, but it's back. And that's fine by me.

It's not raining hard, and I love hearing the rain's singsong this morning.

I am behind on some projects at work. I have had a hard time figuring out how to do what I need to do. It's part of the learning curve, I guess.

Last night we went to a baseball game, Astros vs. Padres. At the office I was offered a pair of free tickets at the last minute. It was totally meant to be, as Gabe had just told me he had cancelled some Chamber of Commerce commitment he had. He also managed to get my mother-in-law on the phone, and she agreed to pick up Isabel. Yay! She also agreed to pick her up from daycare again today. My friend Amanda and I have been talking about maybe doing Happy Hour together, hopefully we will be able to do it.

It's also my mother-in-law's birthday today, so I have to make sure I bring her birthday gift with me today. We got her two framed pictures of the girls, a t-shirt that says "Home is where my grandkids are" and a pretty figurine of a grandmother and child.

Also, I had forgotten I had been invited for a farewell lunch for one of my former colleagues in the Latin America group. He is not leaving the company, but he is leaving Houston and going back to Colombia to take the Marketing Manager position there. He is a great guy and will be missed.

Lastly, I finished the Harry Potter book last night. I still don't know how I feel about it. It's OK, I guess, but I am oddly empty of feeling towards it.