Sammy's Musings and Insights

This is the first time I ever put this out in writing.  I am hoping that once I put on paper (or computer) it will be the last.  This past week I was visited by the memory of a former crush.  This crush was someone I interacted with on a weekly basis (sometimes two to three days a week). Since I don't think he will ever come across my blog, I will put some details here but I won't reveal his name for the sake of anonymity.   Dear Former Crush This week you have come back to my memory after ten years, ten long years.  To be truthful, I did not expect to see your memory again. In fact, and this is the truth, I have not thought about you since that last time I walked into your bank and made my last transaction there.  It was as if the moment I walked out of the bank, my thoughts and feelings for you disappeared.  I thought it was a sign, a sign towards a new life.  A sign that things would be different and for the better.  Well, I was wrong...

I have been seeing a lot of plays in the Bay Area recently.  Last night, I was at the San Francisco Playhouse and saw something that was interesting that blew my mind about science and medication.  It was The Effect and I was amazed. Keep in mind, a few times I wondered if I would fall asleep because I was dead tired and have not been in the best mind-frame. The premise is this:  two people, Tristan and Connie, are participating in a research study in a controlled environment.  Connie is new to this kind of study and Tristan has participated in this kind of research before.  The psychologist supervising this study, Lorna, makes sure nothing, absolutely nothing, deters from getting the results she needs, including keeping the participants separated from each other, especially when they fall in love. Now, experiments are amazing things but also can be dangerous when handled improperly.  For one thing, not all experiments go to plan.  Things can hap...

It has been a while since I have been inspired to write.  To be able to get the inspiration to wake up and come to my computer (which I have been itching to do all day) is a beautiful sign.  What is bringing in me this inspiration?  Did it just happen by happenstance?  Could it be that International Women's Day has happened and seeing all of the stories posted on Google may have done it?  Could it be the latest protest against ICE may have had something to do with it?  Could it be I just want to get something written down on a piece of paper? Who the hell knows? All I know is today is the day I take my pen (or computer) and begin to write...

I know I have been incognito for a while.  It feels like I am waking up from a long, depressing sleep.  I have not had a lot to write about or discover.  Partly because my life isn't what it used to be anymore.  It used to be filled with literature and music and art and fun.  It still is in some ways, but I feel like I want more of it to come back.  I want it to fill me up like it used to.  I have been watching the Divergent series on DVD.  I remember the times I was getting involved in the story, loving the dystopian universe that was being discovered, watching Four and adoring him, wanting to be a part of Dauntless, and I wondered what happened to that woman who was doing so.  Three years certainly changes someone.  It happened to me.  What about the Hunger Games?  I finally watched the last of the series too.  Why did I wait so long in that respect?  Was I that depressed and broke I couldn't make time to go see...

As many of you know, I have an avid interest in genealogy.  In genealogy, there are those questions that you get answers right away and some you don't get the answer until later and those questions that become a mystery and cannot be solved.  In some cases, the questions you feel you have reached a dead end suddenly shed to light after all this time and you feel like you are on top of the world.  There have been a few instances this has happened to me where there were questions that felt like there were no answers to and finally by divine intervention, the answer is here and now.  There was a case two years ago in 2014 when I finally found out how and when my paternal grandmother had passed away and not only that, where she was living in Albuquerque when she finally passed.  This had been a mystery for years to the day I bagan my family tree in 2009 (or at least my version of the family tree).  At the time I thought I was at a dead end on my s...

After much deliberation of processing this for the last few weeks, it is time to say this. The Internet is a tool to use for research purposes, for reaching out to old friends, keeping in touch with family faraway, for entertainment and for practical uses such as shopping and education. It is not, and I reiterate, NOT, to be used as a way to stalk, threaten, intend to threaten or harm or frighten a person in any way, shape or form because someone is angry at someone else. ... Just recently, I have been the victim of this and this perpetrator knows who they are and what could be done to them if they do not stop (thank goodness not one of my friends/family here on Facebook). I have been calm, professional, and ladylike about this, but this was very unnecessary and inappropriate and with everything else I am coping with, this was over the line and unacceptable. People like this are part of the reason I don't date, go out to parties, go on social media or reveal private parts ...

I have been contemplating something for weeks that has been bothering me since it happened.  Along with that, I am still bothered by the attitudes surrounding it.  After many weeks, I am still at the same conclusion; not only that I am still baffled by why others would not agree with my conclusion.  A few weeks ago, I was moving my things from my apartment to a storage area and was scrambling to find people to help.  I was in a bind because I had to be out by a certain date and my landlord had already made arrangements for another tenant to move in.  (Along with that I could not afford the increase in rent which would have gone from $1050 to $1395.  I don't have it).  I originally called a moving company to see if they could do the job, however every weekend until my move out date was booked and a weekday would not work for me because I couldn't get the time off.  I did manage to get two people to help me, a old colleague and his friend/roo...

Tonight I finished watching the latest episode of Once Upon a Time, "Sympathy for the De Vil".  The episode focused on the backstory of Cruella De Vil and her turn toward darkness and villainy.  Now if you are a follower of the show, you will know that the producers make a point that there is no such thing as pure good or pure evil.  As Regina says "Evil is not born, it's made, and so is good".  Yet in Cruella's case, we end up with a villain who was already evil from birth: the classic bad seed.  It seems this classic villain broke the mold the producers created in the first place: good and evil not born but made.  Let's take a look at how the villains were created.  Regina is a perfect example: a young aristocrat happily in love with a stable boy, enjoys riding horses and enjoying a more simple life.  Yet thanks to overbearing mother Cora, Regina is thrown into the path of regality by saving the life of Snow White and marrying her father, King...

I know as a single woman, it is expected to be with a family on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Well, on Thanksgiving I am covered because friends always invite me somewhere, sometimes but not always.  I decided that regardless of that, I still keep these holidays special to me in my own way and so I made a list of traditions I love and some I think I may incorporate: 1) No After Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping--this is thanks to moving to the Bay Area and seeing how crazed shoppers are here. (This is like Ramadan for me as a recovering shopaholic) 2) Celebrating Advent by going to Mass on Sunday 3) Putting up the tree and decorations 4) Lighting my candles on Winter Solstice 5) Watching A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street on DVD 6) Go see the Nutcracker 7) Attend Christmas Eve Mass 8) See a movie on Christmas and eat at Denny's (I started this in 2002 with my sister) New ideas for this year: 1) Attend Las Posadas (Spanish-American trad...

Despite my disappointment and frustration I had at the Anne Rice signing, I have to give her credit for this: for the best writing advice I ever got from her.  This advice was is that there are no rules to writing.  I am glad she has said that because there have been times in class where I felt like I was restricted in my writing and my creativity and felt like my writing was being hinged.  This happened to me again last week in my American Women's Literature class.  Our assignment was to write a memoir piece that shaped our identity cultural, spriritually, etc.  It had to reflect on our gender identity and values.  Unfortunately, my first draft of my essay, it was not acceptable because it did not meet her requirements.  So I had to ask myself what experiences shaped me as a woman and my gender identity.  I ended up writing about an experience about being bisexually curious.  I was off and running on this and the ideas were comin...

Can I even call it a meeting?  More like I just had a quick word while she signed my copy of her latest novel "Prince Lestat", on Wed. over at Books Inc.  The only word I can sum up my experience is disappointing. I have been a eager fan of her books for fourteen years, since I was an accounting student over at Solano Community College.  Her Vampire Chronicles began to heal me from a depression I was feeling about myself: a 20 year old college student who was unsure of herself and what she wanted to do with her life.  Especially when I was being encouraged to take up accounting and was not completely sure if this was the career choice for me.  Of course, I still finished the accounting program at the college, but I was still feeling empty.  Then came the days when she became self-proclaimed Catholic again.  My knowledge of religion and faith were foreign to me.  Trying to understand the mystery of faith was something I never could grasp or eve...

Today I just saw an article of a group called 4chan users, who have started a smear campaign against Emma Watson for her speech to the UN on feminism.  Part of this smear campaign is the threat of posting nude pictures of herself to the internet.  How distasteful can people get?  And why threaten someone like Emma, who is peacefully making her voice heard about a subject she cares about: women's equality and feminism?  How far will someone go to make sure a woman's voice is shut down permanently? This corresponds to a topic I was reading in Psychology about conformity.  In society, women are expected to be the weaker sex, the submissive sex, the docile sex.  As the generations passed, women are evolving into strong, proactive, intelligent thinkers, movers and shakers, and as we all know evolution is a process in the change of the world.  Yet there are people out there, like these users, who feel by smearing Emma and her speech, they can make women li...

This week, Emma Watson gave a powerful message about women and equality.  It brought me back to one of my first writing assignments about women and feminism.  Below is the writing assignment I did regarding radical heterosexuality.  Enjoy!!! Naomi Wolf's article, "Radical Heterosexuality", brings up a grey area of how a woman can be feminist woman and yet still be a wife to her husband. She brings up a question in the beginning of the article: "By day, they fight gender injustice, by night they sleep with men. Is this a dual life? A core contradiction? Is sleeping with a man 'sleeping with the enemy'?" (1) In other words, how can a woman be wanting gender freedom and equal rights if she is also affectionate with a man? How can she have the same power and freedom as a man when she is also seeking affection and attention from them and giving them the same? Is it possible to have it both ways. Wolf brings up a point that being a radical femi...

I have seen magical realism prominent in many of Isabel Allende's novels such as House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's short stories and novels such as In the Time of Cholera . I have also seen it in American novels too, such as Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen . It is a genre I love because it brings the fantastical inside the reality of the novel. Magical realism has the power to grasp the reader into the story or novel and get a dose of reality mixed with fantasy. What exactly is magical realism and how does it fit in with Garcia-Marquez's story? According to Postcolonialstudies.emory.edu, magical realism is a literary device that brings out two perspectives: “ one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality”. In other words it is the merging of the supernatural with the actual existence in the story. The reader can see this firsthand in the story ...

Another assignment post that I think is relevant to this blog because it focuses on literature and is related to my writings on Latin American writers.  Enjoy!!! What is the definition of a Latina writer? How is it different from being a Latino writer? In my Week Two response of what is a Latino writer, I had concluded that “besides the author that wrote it, it must be a piece that Latin-Americans can relate to, like history or experience.” I still stand by that principle with a Latina writer, like Sandra Cisneros. Why would our publishing want to distinguish Latina writer from Latino writers, just because of the gender? Do they thing this will make it easier to sell a book just because an author like Cisneros is a woman and cannot be in the same category as Junot Diaz and Roberto Bolano? Just because the gender of the author changes does not mean she is less of a writer than a Latino writer. Unlike Bolano and Diaz, who were born outside the United States, Cisnero...

This summer I started an attempt on a reading project for myself and read Marcel Proust's famous In Search of Lost Time, the six volume novel of gigantic proportions.  I had taken interest in this series because I had already owned the first volume and decided to get the other six for my collection (all of them match by the way).  I also decided to read this because a friend had suggested them and has my same tastes for literary and classic fiction.  I have had them on my shelf for a while and when I finally finished Tropic of Cancer and some light reads, I wanted to take on something ambitious.  Thus, I gave myself a project and a goal: to read this six part novel in six months. Unfortunately, this goal has changed immensely.  Here are the reasons why: 1) This is not a light read novel.  In fact, a few times I had to go back to try to understand what M. Proust was saying when my mind wandered off the page to images that captured my mind.  2) Becau...

This is an assignment I just completed for my Latin American Literature class and felt this was a good topic to put up here.  Enjoy!!! When reading Junot Diaz's, “The Pura Principle”, I was noticing that Diaz went back and forth writing in English and then using Spanish phrases to capture the authenticity of the story. I say authenticity because most households that speak both English and Spanish speak with a hybrid of both languages. Though this was never practiced in my immediate family, my father's cousins' families did use a hybrid of both English and Spanish when speaking because they grew up learning both Spanish and English. It was more dominant when expressing emotions. Only my father and his siblings were able to keep up with their cousins in the interchanging of languages. Like his story, in the interview, Diaz switches back from Spanish to English on occasion. This is because this is authentic for him as he is familiar with both languages due to “...

This was taken from my previous blog, written in 2011 when I decided to go back and get my bachelor's degree.  Enjoy!!! It's been a long time since I have done anything with this blog, in fact I have ignored it for a long time, but now it is time to get the juices flowing and get back to writing again. I have decided on something that has been on my mind for a long time. For the last couple of years, okay the time, I have been not writing in here, I have been attending college in a library tech. program. Well, after some thought, and some inspiration from my lit class, I have finally decided to go back and get my bachelor's degree (in Liberal Arts, with English minor). The reason for this goal: I have always been the type who that liked learning, but what scared me was being stuck in the same field all my life, never moving forward. Most of my friends went to college as business majors or as education majors, which never appealed to me. I wanted a career that woul...

Flannery titled her poem “Half-Baked” because she is describing her life as she is writing this poem and remember how her grandmother baked her bread. Before baking, dough must be prepared by mixing the ingredients, forming into a mound, and kneading the dough so it is just right for baking. If one thinks about it, preparing dough is just like preparing for life, learning and growing and making mistakes. In the first stanza, Flannery description of kneading “life's dough/with one hand only” how she is slowing evolving and turning and making adjustments to life and it's lessons. It is described again as she is “holding the pen to cross out words,/ glutonous, glossy, leavened, vicious,/ record[ing] the memory of fresh bread”. Flannery uses the imagery of her grandmother's baking to make the reader understand the kneading of life.   Flannery starts her poem in the first stanza describing her life as kneading through dough, comparing it to kneading and preparing the dough ...

As part of my contribution to blog writing world, and so I don't lose these findings as I write them down, I am going to be posting some entries from school of literature and ideas that I find fascinating.  Some of these will be edited for content.   Nicole Homer  titled her poem “Pandora's Box” because like the mythical box of the Homerian era, this Pandora's box contains a secret that is feared. However, it is a mystery that is waiting to be discovered, while frightening, is also exciting. In the first stanza: “& the whole world feared/what Pandora kept in her box/& if they only knew/if they only knew/ it was only perfume/ & sweat inside.” The mystery people fear is not really a mystery at all.   At the first glance of the title, I thought the poem would be an epic like the Homer epic Iliad. However, the narrator is only describing Pandora's box with the first sentences how mysterious it is and at the same time intriguing. This poem is not an...