♕ Keep Calm and Kelly On

I’ve been posted up at a Starbucks near Arden for like five hours reading and people watching. I have the perfect people-watching seat…which has given me a lot of entertainment on my day off today. But besides being creepy and people watching…I’ve been snuggled up here with my kindle finishing “Divergent” this pretty good book about hypothetical societies that makes you think a lot. It’s kind of similar to “The Hunger Games” series…if you’ve read that…but different. In the book…upon your 16th birthday, you have to pick one of five factions to live in forever. Each faction has their own principals and initiation requirements, and if you can’t function or live up to your duties within the faction you get ousted and are “faction-less” and have to live on the outskirts of town basically homeless and have to make you living begging. Scary.

The five factions are dauntless, candor, amity, erudite, and abnegation. I don’t know which one I would pick if I had to. Something seems wrong about only having one principle to live by and work for in life. I definitely wouldn’t be abnegation. Don’t get me wrong, I like helping people and the community and giving back, but the abnegation people live such a plain life style with no change to the point where I think I would go crazy. The dauntless faction just simply scares me. I don’t think I could ever be 100 percent fearless. I don’t think I would do well in amity. I get super annoyed when people are overly nice, so that would rule that one out. So I guess that leaves me with candor and erudite…but I really don’t think I could do candor more that I think about it. If I always were to speak my mind people would see me as an asshole and I’d probably get ousted. So I guess if I had to pick one it would be erudite. I do love to learn and I am a nerd at heart, so I’d probably pick erudite :).

 Anyways back to reading. Hope everyone’s having a good day!
 

    The title pretty much says it all. I’ve been here since Sunday now, enjoying time with family and exploring NYC pretending like I know what I’m doing. So far I’ve seen times square, Lincoln square, the upper east side, downtown, Columbia, the NYC ballet, and Juilliard (one of many dreams of mine since I’ve started musicals at the ripe age of 4.)

But what I’ve enjoyed the most out of all those places has been hanging out and spending time with my cousins and beautiful new god son, who I’ve had the pleasure of holding, rocking and playing with the past few days. I just can’t get enough of him. Here are some pics of him so you can see how adorable he is yourself :).

           Holding Owen for the 1st time :)

           ♥

          Nap time!

For the rest of the weekend I plan on seeing friends from my South Africa and Europe study abroad trips. I’m looking forward to spending time here the rest of the weekend before I move up to Sacramento, CA to start my new job! Stay tuned for more pics!

Hope everyone is doing well and has a blessed and safe weekend. ♥

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting on a bolt bus driving from Virginia to New York city. I’m usually always in the mood to blog, and the bus conveniently has wi-fi, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to post while I’m in the middle of nowhere Delaware. I’m actually pretty impressed by how convenient and inexpensive this transportation service is. Free wi-fi, comfortable seats, big movie screens, a bathroom. A four hour drive doesn’t seem too bad with these amenities. The bus is nowhere near filled and everyone is minding their own business, sleeping, watching movies, on the computer, etc.

The driver took a vote on which movie we wanted to watch, and the majority voted for “The Switch”, which I was fine with. The movie looked funny and sounded like it could be good, and probably is. But when it started, I just couldn’t get myself to watch it because inconveniently Jason Bateman is in it, who creepily looks like an older version of a guy I dated for a while, so I just couldn’t get myself to watch it. I don’t know why, it just was weird to me. Kinda like when you read a book, and they decide to make a movie on the book and you see the cast by accident and all that you can think of while reading the book are the actors in place of the characters. And it ruins it. I’m a firm believer in imagination when reading books, and as much as I like movies, I like to keep the two separate. 

After that inner fiasco, I decided to look out the window and just listen to my iPod. If you don’t know, I’ve been dancing for about 18 years now, and as many other dancers can probably relate, I have acquired a wide variety of music from the 100 plus shows I’ve been in. Half of the shows which I’ve had no say in the songs we dance to. When describing my taste in music, I really don’t have one type I like, just that my iPod ranges from the Nutcracker, to the Rolling Stones, to Lil Wayne. So a pretty random selection. While on shuffle, “Shake That” by Eminem and Nate Dogg came on, and I couldn’t help but laugh, 1) because the lyrics are hilarious, and 2) because we dance to it in hip hop class every week and it just reminds me how entertaining it is to dance to such a dirty song. (Vernon if you’re reading this please don’t take it out of the mix its my favorite!) But anyways. I decided to shuffle through more songs to listen to lyrics and see if I could get a theme going on here today for this post. Music content.

In this day and age, I’ve heard a lot of criticism from parents about the explicit content that “contemporary rap” songs contain. A majority of parents argue that these explicit songs promote kids to swear, be violent, racist and engage in harmful behaviors.

This argument is also similar to that of parents and violence in video games. Recently this year, the supreme court voted against a California law which would ban the sale of violent video games to children. The state felt that it needed to protect kids from the violent material that could potentially turn them violent. The whole case was seen as a ‘big blow up’ (literally) and an argument of freedom of speech law and how far gaming companies could go with their material.

Personally, I think this issue like many cases today, will always be in limbo, because the pros and cons both construe very good points. To end this post, which happened to turn into a rant rather than a description of my trip (I tend to get off topic when I blog, no post is ever planned), I just wanted to post a link to a song that I really never thought was suggestive when I first heard it, but from listening carefully and reading the lyrics, got a whole new perspective. My point: its not only rap songs that have secretive meanings, bad language, and potential violent messages, like many parents argue today. There are other songs from other decades which prove as a counter argument to censoring songs. Music can have different meanings to different people, and after thinking about it, I don’t think music should be censored now a days because its freedom of speech, and also because suggestive material has been prevalent in music for a while now. Plus, I think it makes this world just a little bit more interesting. Don’t you think?

Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc-P8oDuS0Q

I always love the start of a new month. Something about change, setting new goals, and the chance to look forward to a new holiday makes me excited when the first day of a new month rolls around. But there was something that I completely forgot to do this morning.

Has anyone heard of the superstition to say rabbit rabbit rabbit the first thing when you wake up on the first day of a new month and it supposedly brings you good luck? Well, I learned this superstition at the ripe age of eleven in my sixth grade science class with Ms. Taylor. And yet I never believed at the time and always forgot about it until midway into a new month.

Now I’m not usually superstitious, but on the last day of August this past summer while lying in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep, and found myself really stressed out about the job market and being a recent college graduate. I was looking at every possible option to bring good luck to my life for the month of September, but the only thing I could come up with was to continue being persistent and to set new goals to be more successful.

I then looked at the clock, which creepily read 11:11, another good luck superstition that I find myself guilty of, making a wish whenever I see the repeating ones on the clock. I got to thinking about superstitions, and then the rabbit rabbit rabbit superstition popped into my head. I thought, with my current luck this method could simply backfire, leaving me with the worst luck ever, but instead of continuing to be negative about my current situation, I thought why not, I had never used this method before and who knows what it could bring me the month of September. I then set my alarm clock on my iPhone to get up the next day for my run, and I put the caption as rabbit rabbit rabbit so I wouldn’t forget. After more thinking and tossing and turning I finally drifted off to sleep and was suddenly awoken the next morning by my obnoxious siren alarm that always makes me shoot out of bed the second it goes off. In a mild state of disorientation, I saw the three words glaring at me and mustered enough energy to say “rabbit rabbit rabbit” in a slight whisper.

After waking up a little, I went on my usual morning run to start off the day right. I kept thinking to myself “this is my month. Something great is going to come along I know it.” I kept up this mantra daily, remaining positive and repeating this phrase in my head as I ran. Now I don’t know if it was the power of positive thinking, or just my persistence in my daily work, but I happened to finally land that job…doing exactly what I had hoped to do, in my DREAM field, in an amazing news market.

I will always question whether the superstition had helped me in a way, but I know for certain that I landed this great opportunity for my hard work, and effort too. When you work hard at something, dream big, and keep at it, you will be successful in landing what you want.

Superstitions, though I participate in them from time to time will always be one of those things I’ll always second guess. Like kissing your hand and touching the ceiling when you run a yellow light and make a wish. Or those chain e-mails you used to get and sometimes still get in your e-mail that say: “If you don’t send this to 22 people by midnight the little man under your bed will come out and kill you.” Scary? Yes. Have I sent the e-mails before? Yes. Am I dead yet? No…

When it comes to superstitions, I guess Ill never know what to believe.

I’ve been going through my Facebook photos to download and archive them, but also because I’m in a mood to go through them to remember the past 22 years of my life and how amazing they’ve been. I came across this picture and happened to get emotional, but in a good way.

For those of you that don’t know, I am a Delta Delta Delta alum from the University of Arizona and we recently had one of our sisters pass away tragically. Though this picture from her memorial service should make me sad, instead it is a reminder to me to remember and cherish the past and present moment. Though there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of and miss Kristen, I always remember the good memories that I had with her. She was one of those people that could make you laugh whenever, to the point where you would almost pee a little. I’ll never forget how Kristen and I would always sit at chapter dinner together, joking, laughing, drinking water out of our glasses like cats and playing telephone with the most random phrases to the point we would burst out laughing and have the surrounding tables stare at us. But we didn’t care, I needed the extra dose of laughter on Mondays always to cure the usual case of the Monday’s after being in lectures and class all day. They say that only the good die young, and this statement is very true for Kirsten. 

This picture is not only a memory, but a constant reminder of how many great people I have in my life. As cheesy as this sounds, I wouldn’t be where I am today without all off the support of my sisters. I know I can rely on them for anything, and I am so lucky for that. I am so fortunate to be able to say that each and every one of these women has made an impact on my life in some way or another, and I know we will continue to have many memories to come. 

This picture also serves as a lesson to me, to never take anything for granted, because you never know when tragedy could strike and change your life. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think for a majority of us, Kristen’s passing made us all stronger. I am so thankful to have had her in my life, and her passion for life will always remind me to stay positive and live in the moment. Because living in the moment could be the meaning of life.

RIP Kristen ♥ ♥

This morning I got the opportunity to help out a teacher at my cousins school. They are currently doing a fund raiser to raise money to buy winter coats for homeless children in the area. And for how cold it gets here back east in the winter, I think its an absolutely amazing cause they do. But before I helped collect and count money, I watched my cousin and the rest of his class news team, anchor and report the morning news consisting of a weather report, the lunch menu, as well as commercials and school events. My cousin Ryan did an awesome job as main anchor. Hopefully one day he will follow in my footsteps in the news business :)

    Every morning I have a usual routine, get up, check my twitter for news, eat my fruit breakfast and then write and blog, throwing in a run or yoga class sometime during the day. But this week things have been a bit different.

I’ve gotten the pleasure to come back east to be with my family, as well as to see some close friends who live in the area. I usually don’t get to see my family very much, so this was a great treat to have for the week. Especially since we all got a lot closer on a family trip to Poland this past summer, when 19 of us were crammed on a tour bus traveling all over the country in a rapid 2 week conquer of the eastern side.

                         (The traveling circus in Warsaw!)

I could go on forever about the trip, but I’ll keep it short today. I spent the weekend in Maryland seeing friends at University of Maryland, as well as spending time with family celebrating my aunts 50th birthday, making ethnic polish dishes and catching up on the gossip in our lives. For my Ciocia’s birthday (Ciocia is aunt in Polish, and is what we call all our aunts), we went on a cruise around the Baltimore area enjoying each others company, laughing and dancing the night away. And with new experiences come pictures :)

                       New friends at UMD :)

            Making amazing pierogi’s from scratch! 

  One of many boat cruise pictures! Happy 40th ;) Ciocia! ♥

                       Driving the cruise boat! ⚓

Overall the weekend events and the cruse could not have gone any better! Cant wait for more family memories in the future. On Sunday, I’m heading up to New York to FINALLY meet my new three week old nephew and god son for the first time! Be prepared to expect lots of pictures and stories! Have a great day! ♥