"A picture began circulating in November. It should be "The Picture of the Year," or perhaps, "Picture of the Decade." It won't be. In fact, unless you obtained a copy of the U.S. paper which published it, you probably would never have seen it.

The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner. The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb. Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta. She knew of Dr. Bruner's remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile.

The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, "Hand of Hope." The text explaining the picture begins, "The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life."

Little Samuel's mother said they "wept for days" when they saw the picture. She said, "The photo reminds us pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person" Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful. Now see the actual picture, and it is awesome...incredible....and hey, pass it on! The world needs to see this one!"

‎"This, then, is my final piece of advice: tell your story. Rage against the impulse to forget. Commit everything: each burnt-out house, each broken body, each wailing mother - all your grief - to memory. Live with your anguish, with your questions, even where there are no easy answers. When you find your voice, sing. It's your responsibility, your spiritual burden to speak up, to bear, if you can, moral witness to the new tragedy of your generation."-Andrew Lam

i had a weird experience today. wrote for a long time this morning, working on that memoir. writing it was easy, it came naturally, it felt good. then i finished and started to read it and that's when the panic attack came - started getting really shaky and feeling super nauseous. right then my dad texted me and said "don't put anything about your memoir on facebook, moms too sick to handle it." that was the last thing i needed to hear at that moment. full panic attack started. plus a headache. i tried to keep reading what i had written, but i couldn't. i had to put it down. i took my dog around the block to get some air. i used that neck massager i bought recently from amazon to help the headache. suddenly, i just felt like i had to lay down. i put on pajama pants and crawled into bed. i felt so sick. i ended up staying there for 3 1/2 hours. it's crazy how much just reading what i had written impacted me and what an effect it had on my body.


laying in bed trying to calm myself down:

memoir

so for my craft of creative nonfiction class, i have to write a 15-20 page memoir piece. i've been wanting to write a memoir for a long time now, and i'm getting REALLY into it. it's really cleansing and healing. i feel like each scene i write is one that i can now let go of from inside of me. i can feel that pressure slowly emptying out, trickling out like air escaping from a balloon. it feels so good. i don't want to stop at 20 pages. i want to keep going until i write the whole damn thing. it's also gonna be pretty damn intense though because it's pretty closely tied with family. i let my advisor read the first five pages and the first thing out of her mouth was "wow, what a crazy family!" and, i mean, she's right. but aren't all families crazy, with crazy stories? i'm slightly nervous at the reaction that this will get from my family (more so my extended than my parents), and i mentioned that to my advisor. i liked her answer: "you're allowed to tell your point of view." and she is absolutely correct. plus, i always have the fiction degree to hide behind :) and, there's always little things an author can do, like change names. but what's the point in that? everyone who would be offended or care about anything in it would know exactly who was who anyway. anyway, like i said, this is so healing and it's making me feel so much lighter with each word i get out. maybe this is what i need to do to finally overcome my past and to be able to permanently let it go. anyway, i'm loving doing it right now!

random!

i'm reading a collection of personal essays right now about a Vietnamese American man who escaped Vietnam as a refugee during his childhood, and there's a part that I'm at right now where he has gone back to Vietnam and is walking admist a farm of rubber trees. all at once, this silly song from my childhood that my mom used to sing (that i completely forgot existed) came flooding back into my head:

once there was a little old ant
thought he could move a rubber tree plant
everyone knows that an ant
can't
move a rubber tree plant
but he had high hopes
he had high hopes
he had high apple pie in the sky hopes
so when you're feeling blue
just remember that an ant
can't
move a rubber tree
oops there goes another rubber tree
oops there goes another rubber tree
oops there goes another rubber tree plant!


lol hahaha that kind of made my day :D


UPDATE::

woah i just googled it and it's a frank sinatra song?! wtf! i thought it was like a kids song hahaha that just made it so much better! wow.



i'm literally busting up laughing so hard watching this video that i'm crying lol

you may say i'm a dreamer, but i'm not the only one. i hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.

Loving Life!

i have to start out by saying that i feel great right now! i am at this high that i havn't felt in so long and i am just riding the wave of it. it's been gorgeous out the past 3 days - 70s/80s in SF, 80s/90s in oakland. hot weather makes me so incredibly happy just on its own. then my professor last night used my work as an example. then last night after class i had the most incredible experience ever. i'm taking a craft of creative nonfiction class (so basically think memoirs & personal essays if you don't know what that is), and we were given an assignment to write a 20 page memoir piece this week. i've been wanting to write a memoir for a really long time now, and kind of figured i would do it after i finished my novel. as i was driving home last night, though, i started writing the story in my head and could hardly wait to get to my computer. i parked my car, took my dog out, and planted myself on the floor, first typing in the notes section of my iphone so i wouldn't forget. i couldn't stop, so i emailed myself what i had so far and then opened up my computer, copied it into a word document (it was already a page), and kept going. i wrote frantically for an hour and a half, my eyes not leaving the screen, my fingers not pausing at the keyboard. it was like i was channeling the story, like everything else around me - the room, everything - blurred and dropped away, i literally felt high, like i was on drugs, and i just HAD to keep going. it was so charged. it was fucking incredible. i finished a whole scene. wrote 5 pages. and i'm loving them. apparently that was a story that i REALLY needed to tell. i immediately had to share it with someone and sent it to shane. i love that i can share my work with him. anyway, i'm still buzzing from it, still riding the wave of highness. i feel great. those moments come so rarely, yet they are indescribable and are what remind us writers of why it is that we write. i love writing so much. i've been loving this semester. loving my classes, my peers' work, my professors. i've felt so inspired lately.
so last night after all this i had a freakout moment of omg if this is what is taking my attention so much right now and where all my energy is going and is having this affect on me, then maybe this is what i need to focus on right now for my thesis. and don't get me wrong, i love my novel, my heart is in it, i've been working on it for so many years and i HAVE to fucking finish it. i can't set it aside right now. but i've also been feeling dull and uninspired by it (although my fiction workshop has really changed that the past few weeks - i've been getting super into it again). so i had my first thesis meeting today and printed out both the manuscript of my novel so far (about 50 pages) and these 5 pages that i wrote last night. cornelia (my thesis advisor) made my day even better. she told me to work on both pieces, whatever takes my attention on a given day and that i could turn them both in for my thesis. i already have surpassed the required number of pages, so now i can just write and enjoy it without having to stress about anything. that was so freeing to hear. and writing last night was so therapeutic and cleansing. so now i feel freed and cleansed. and i just have unlimited energy and my heart is pounding and i feel like i'm rushing forward go go go! and i am in just SUCH a happy mood right now! :D i'm loving my life!!!!!

seasons changing in my body.

i don't know if it has something to do with my sinuses, or just my body knowing that it's september, or being back in school but it feels like fall is in the air. which is weird, because it's our summer now out here in sf. but i feel really nostalgic, and smells and memories keep swirling up - nothing specific, just that FEELING of autumn in the midwest. it's almost like i can smell the leaves changing, and feel the brisk air, and i want to get all wrapped up and cozy in a big comfy sweater. in my mind i feel like there will be fallen, brightly colored leaves everywhere when i step outside, and that halloween is coming up soon, and the days are getting shorter. i guess part of that applies still, but it's so strange that i just have that feeling in my heart and in my chest and just in my body in general. i suddenly am finding myself excited for thanksgiving. i'm longing for pumpkin pie, pumpkin ale, sweet potatoes; overnight, my mouth is watering for them.
it's strange to be in a place without seasons. well, without real seasons. in the beginning of the summer i wanted hot weather SO BADLY (which is september & october in SF), but now, i'm craving the coolness of autumn. maybe it's because i went to hawaii & chicago twice over the summer so i already got that fix of hotness, and i'm ready to cool off now. i was so excited to wear all of my summer clothes, and now i find myself wanting to ditch the summery stuff and wear more fall styles.

oh, and as we were waking up enjoying coffee this morning, my boyfriend did this:

decided i'm still gonna post on this. i'll just put personal stuff on the other blog.

my life lately:

last weekend:

sat: went to a 9am bags tournament at the A's stadium, followed by an A's game. lots of tailgating. oh yeah, and mike (shane's roommate) made us t-shirts.
sun: hopped on a plane to san diego with shane. we were supposed to go to a wedding but it got cancelled, so we just took a little mini vacay together. it was perfect. exactly what i needed, and i have been feeling myself again ever since.

all this week:

scrambling to catch up on homework since i did none that last weekend.

here's some pics of it all:

(click photos to enlarge)

quote.

just finished reading the memoir Fierce Attachments. my favorite quote from it:

"...Sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I'm alone in the middle of the world."

9/11 search & rescue dogs

http://blogs.discovery.com/daily_treat/#mkcpgn=fbapl1

i'm gonna stop writing in this blog for now. it connects to a blog i have to do for class, and that makes me uncomfortable. i'll start a new one up, though. email me if you want the link.