I’ll be in Seattle for 2 weeks starting tonight.  Some updates from the last week and a half:  I got a present in the mail from Roo (a glass pipe elephant); I got approved for thesis and can move to enroll in my section of thesis workshop for Fall semester; someone bought one of my photographs that are on display at Beach Pit BBQ; I renewed my Disneyland annual pass (which expired in September of sophomore year); I met some cool people; I reunited with some cool people; I wrote the 7th and 8th drafts of the script; I ate a LOT of popsicles; I tried my best to sleep more.

PHOTOS HERE:

anna duffy's cupcakes

I’ll post again in Seattle (probably in a couple weeks, towards the end of my visit home!).  Hope your summer is treating you well, whoever you are!  Appreciate the love and people in your life.  And if your life sucks right now, ride it out, and afterwards appreciate the love.

Since being back from Honduras, I have…lived at Catie’s (in West Hollywood) for a week, and been living at the Purple House (in Orange) for the two weeks following.  I’m here for two more nights, then it’s of to Sarahhhh’s (in South Pasadena) for…I have no idea for how long.

Living at the Purple House has been RELAXING.  I took the first week and basically just read a lot, lounged around, and saw some friends.  This past week, I wrote the 7th draft of my thesis, had a meeting with my producer and production designer about our pitch package for investors, walked around the neighborhood with my camera a lot, had a reunion dinner last night with some of GMB/GWB, played around with the trial version of Lightroom.

Last Friday, I got food poisoning.  The last time I puked was in Honduras (it was minor).  And the last time I puked before Honduras was when I was 8 years-old.  Last Friday when I got food poisoning, I puked 6 times in three hours.  Each puke session involved 2-4 heaves while standing over a toilet.  You see, the reason I haven’t puked since I was 8 (except for Honduras) was because I have really good control over my gag reflex.  I am and expert as controlling the gag reflex.  But let me tell you something that I have learned: FOOD POISONING IS AN UNTAMABLE BEAST.  Vomit session 1/6 occured at about 8:30pm, and it was shocking because I felt sick and I was focusing on controlling it and just when I thought I had it, I suddenly involuntarily lurched forward and ran to the bathroom and chunky waterfalled into the toilet.  And then again. And then again.  And that was just the first vomit session.  With each session, my dinner vacated my digestive system until the 5th session when it was primarily bile.  And then Mallory came home from work and brought Pepto with her to save my butt.  I had a shot of pepto and went to sleep.  An hour into my sleep, I woke up to another involuntary forward-lurch of my body, during which I quickly grabbed the bowl that Mallory had set by my bed and vomited Pepto and water into it.  So…that’s that.  I hope that was sufficiently descriptive for you.

I don’t really know what else to say.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CAROLINE!

Here are some photos from the past three weeeeeeks…

And the next thing you know, I’m wondering if we learn names the same as dogs.

Dogs can’t hear the shapes and densities of the sound that make up the words that make up the language spoken between people (this is not a fact, this is an assumption I just made).  So when people hear “sit”, dogs probably hear maybe a muffled version of that..?  I don’t know.  I’m just guessing based on that universal guideline that discourages people from naming their dogs with names that rhyme with “sit” and/or one-syllable names because a lot of commands are one-syllable.

If I’m out and about, someone can say “Justin” across the room and I will perk up and look for who may have just addressed me.  ”Jostled” and “Josh” and if someone is emphasizing the “jah” sound when they say: “jogging”, “Jonathan”, “job search” (this one gets me easily because of the “jah” and the “ss” sounds), and …I don’t know what else.  Those are the main ones.  So again, I can only assume that we recognize our names by its particular sounds.  Or moreso…only certain sounds of our names are necessary for us to recognize it as our names (whether or not someone just called out “Jocelyn” or “Job Search”), you with me still?

So that was about RECOGNIZING or names, I realize.  Okay about LEARNING our names.  How long did it take for my dog back home at my dad’s house in Seattle to learn that his name was Bosley?  Especially because when we brought him home as a puppy, I was always calling him “Bobo”.  He learned by conditioning..?  Maybe at first, every time we said anything, any sound of a human voice, he would respond to and come over…and realize that we weren’t actually directing our attention to him because we were talking to ourselves about what to get at the grocery store.  Maybe it took a while for him to associate the sounds “Bosley” or “Bobo” with people giving him their undivided attention.  And maybe that’s how they learn that that is their word, that is their name.  And maybe that’s how we learn it too.  I don’t remember far back enough into my childhood.

Also I forget why this idea was interesting to me fifteen minutes ago, I’ve been done with my bowl of cereal for ten minutes now, and I want to go run some errands and then maybe get back to an alternating cycle of reading and napping throughout most of the rest of the day.

Honduras is like any other land…it’s beautiful and ugly.  It’s amazing for good and bad reasons.  The people are polite, some are also rude.  It’s like any other place, it just happens to be a third-world and everyone speaks Spanish, almost exclusively.

Cows and horses and children roam the roads, most of which (at least the ones we commuted on) are unpaved, bumpy dirt roads.  Dogs are not pets, most of them are strays and malnourished and sick (sadly).  There’s no garbage disposal system, so people burn their trash.  The smell of burning trash is distinct and unpleasant and I’m doubtful of any benefits it has to the environment and the people.  Grasshoppers are huge, maybe 2 fingers wide and 6 inches (or more) long, and they fly.  Sometimes kids will talk to you, and even after you tell them you don’t understand (no entiendo) and sorry, you don’t speak Spanish (lo siento, no hablo espanol), they will continue to talk to you and ask you questions and giggle.

The first week was Medical Brigades, there were about 40 of us from Chapman.  Each night, at the compound that housed Global Brigades (groups of people in rooms filled with bunkbeds – camp style), we would sort meds.  Sort meds into “antibiotics”, “vitamins”, “topicals”, “heart/high-blood pressure”, etc.  And each morning, we would drive about 2 hours into a different village, set up a clinic at an elementary school and see over 400 patients a day.  The clinic was triage (take in the patients, take their blood pressure, ask them if they’re already taking medications, ask them what their symptoms are, etc.), doctors (talk to the patient, prescribe meds), pharmacy (patients would hand brigaders their prescription and students would be running around in the pharmacy gathering all the meds they needed and then going outside, calling the patient and explaining to them how to take the meds).  Aside from the doctors station (we had 4 doctors with us, 3 of whom we brought from the U.S.) it was all Chapman GMB students working in and running the other stations.

The 2nd week was Water Brigades. Every day we drove 2 hours to the same rural mountain village to work on their water piping system. We spent our days digging trench (50cm deep), laying down PVC pipe, and covering trench. I don’t know how to describe the physical demands of this kind of labor. Imagine the summer heat in a tropical place, imagine breaking a sweat within 5 minutes and having flies and other insects attracted to the sweat. And you know where you sweat? your armpits, your neck, your face, your hairline, the bends of your elbows and knees, and also yes, your crotchal area. So the insects are mostly flying around those areas. But you have to keep pick-axing and shoveling. And then sometimes you’ll strike your shovel into an ant civilization, and you will watch as millions of tiny little ants become furious and starts running around and suddenly the trenching stops, and you must figure out how you’re going to deal with this ant civilization. Usually the only solution is to dig it up/shovel it was quickly as possible and toss it as far away from the trench as possible.  But no matter what, angry ants will usually find their way into your sneakers and on your legs and you will feel their sting.  You will feel their sting and you will wonder, are all Honduran ants fire ants?  And you will not know the answer.  During this week, we were stationed mainly at this one house in the village, where all the trenching tools were housed, and where we’d go to eat our lunches that were brought from the compound.  On the last day of trenching, the women at this house brewed coffee from their home-grown coffee beans. I have only in the recent years, surprising since I was born and raised in Seattle, come to enjoy the taste of coffee.  Black coffee.  This fresh, home-grown, home-brewed Honduran mountain countryside cup of coffee was…like sipping nirvana.  Delicious.

This coffee sipping moment…this was one of the moments I spoke of earlier.  There were a lot of “moments” on this trip.  Some moments I wanted to last forever.  Some moments I knew I probably would never experience again.  Moments that just made me smile and think how amazing it was that not two weeks prior, I was bumbling about in the southern California smog talking to fellow film students and suddenly here I am playing soccer with Chapman pre-med students and Honduran kids on a soccer field in the mountains of rural Honduras.  Are you serious, life?  How did this happen?  How did I get here?  What did I do right?  And thank you.  There were moments where I caught myself thinking about how unique the moment was that I would forget to savor it.  There were moments where I just wanted to come home because I was so over being eaten alive by bugs, having to spray layers and layers of bug spray on my skin and often accidentally inhaling it (the taste of bug spray is grotesque), I missed being able to open my mouth in the shower, I missed being able to speak English to stranger.  There were also moments where I wanted to stay longer (possibly forever?) than these 2 weeks, because something about not having a cell phone or internet access, it makes the interaction with the people in your immediate presence to…solid.  And going back to the U.S. would mean getting back on the grid of electronic social interconnectedness, which you know is kind of disconnecting in a way.  Also there were moments I wanted to stay longer because sometimes you really come to love people who may not know you, who may not know who you are.  You come to love Carlos (our GMB leater) and you come to love Jorge (our GWB land cruiser captain).  They don’t know who you are, and you come to love them.  Because you’re all there knowing why you’re there, and maybe that’s enough to want to stay.  In Honduras, I had a distinct purpose.  Help set up clinic, help distribute meds, help dig trench, help teach the kids about in-home sanitation.  Help doesn’t mean…going to Honduras and helping them.  The way I’m using “help” I mean, co-setup clinic, co-distribute meds, co-dig trench… “help” is the word that links my efforts to the efforts of all the other brigaders on this trip.  I had a distinct purpose in Honduras.  Back in the U.S., I have what sometimes feels like too many purposes and other times, no legitimate purpose.

So in a nutshell of nutshells, that’s how my trip was.  And now…some photos (I only shot on film with the Canon AE-1, because I knew given my clumsiness, bringing my dSLR would’ve been a trainwreck)

To see the little Honduras video on YouTube, go HERE

What I AM worried about is how I will fare this time next year, when I’m the one trying to find a job, find an apartment, get ready for my future.  I feel like a lot of my recently graduated friends are looking for jobs not in their field of study, not in what they’re passionate about, just something for money to pay the rent and the bills.  I can’t do that.  If it came down to it, I probably would since there are no jobs right now in the film industry apparently, but I would feel awful having paid out of my butt and my parents’ butts for 4 years for school to prep me for the big world out there only to end up in a job that I really could’ve just started at fresh out of high school and then technically could have foregone film school altogether.  I’m a little scared.  Also, I feel like almost everyone is moving to L.A. fresh out of film school.  My desire to spend a year traveling and volunteering is still strong, and I hope that next year as my co-graduates start the migration into LA, that I stick to it.  We’ll see.  Things change.

Things change, and we adjust and we adapt and we grow accustomed to the changes until they’re not changes anymore, and then what happens?  They change again.  Life is like a series of changes that you have to keep adapting to.  Life is a test of resilience and endurance.  I miss Roo.  She left on Wednesday, then starts law school in Boulder in the fall.  I miss Nea, she leaves Monday (but I’ll be gone already).  This was like summer 2007.  It sucked because I knew that I would probably never in my life be just a 15 minute drive away from my best friends, and we would probably never be able to see each other every day and bask in a lack of serious responsibilities.  It’s like that now because when I drive from my house in Orange to the 22, I pass Roo’s old apartment and it’s awkward knowing that she’s not there.  The worst will be when Apartment 73 over on the other side or Orange is totally emptied out.  Momma Nea, big sister Roo, versatile family member Catie are probably never gonna be just a 10 minute drive away again, it’s never gonna be as easy to convene with them altogether for a night of lounging, l’art de vivring, talk-like-childrening, act-like-childrening.

AND this made me realize that this summer is, in fact, my last official kid summer.  Because come next May, I gotta at least pretend to be a grown up, for real.

Don’t expect another post again until the end of this month, but expect pictures from Honduras!  I’m shooting on film only, while I’m down there!

good luck to anyone who has finals this week!

All right enough babbling.  Photos (there weren’t a lot of Jamaica, mostly hotel :/ sorry! this trip was not a successful photo adventure):

Today, I was there again from morning until midafternoon and surprise!–everyone and their mother was there too!  I was doing Jessey’s senior portraits in the afternoon, so I had my camera with me when I went to Lucca…meaning: I got to photograph my lovely friends who came to the cafe for various reasons.  David showed up about the same time I did and spent the morning working on his thesis proposal and script, and had a major breakthrough in tying up some loose ends regarding his story!–a feeling that I was lucky enough to experience last week when I finally figured out the purpose for some of the elements within my story, which solidified the framework of the whole thing…but the work has only just begunnnn.  Amy and Lexi came for food, and then Anna and Simon joined them and it turned into a PR/Ad meeting (they basically run PRSSA and Ad Club at Chapman).  Catie arrived to meet Nick to work on their scene/script together.  Kaycie and Laurin came earlier in the morning and did some homework.  Dani came in the afternoon, after I’d come back from the portrait session with Jessey, and I took a break from homework to hang out with her for a bit over some ice cream.  So the main question is…WHERE WERE YOUUUU!?

So here are some photos from today…as well as some ones from this past week!

And now, photographs:

and also…some photos last week…

that’s it for now! have a lovely week, everyone!