STOP KONY 2012

Ingrid's new album...and COVER!

Ingrid's new album came out yesterday...so in honor of her musical brilliance, I did a cover of one of the songs off of it. It's called Ghost...

Enjoy!!!

 Peace & love,

 me. :)

Psalm 24

we have a book of some of the Psalms adapted from the Hebrew, and this one really stuck out to me as I was flipping through it this morning. I've been ruminating on it all day.

The earth belongs to the Lord,
  and everything in it is his.
For he founded it in empty space,
  and breathed his own life-breath into it,
filling it with manifold creatures,
  each one precious in his sight.

Who is fit to hold power
  and worthy to act in God's place?
Those with a passion for the truth,
  who are horrified by injustice,
who act with mercy to the poor,
  and take up the cause of the helpless,
who have let go of selfish concerns,
  and see the whole world as sacred,
refusing to exploit her creatures
  or to foul her waters and lands.
Their strength is in their compassion;
  God's light shines through their hearts.
Their children's children will bless them,
  and the work of their hands will endure.
                                   -Adapted by Steven Miller

What do you think?



peace. :)

a drop in the ocean

Since my last post, both pre-K and elementary programs have started, and life has gotten pretty crazy. In the elementary program, I have the 1st and 2nd graders, which is wonderful but exhausting. I've had 6-8 students every day, and they've gone from angels to screaming and running in circles around the classroom. I have discovered, though, that the more prepared I am for homework time (i.e. the classroom set up, extra work for whoever finishes their hw, distractions out of reach), the better the kids are.

For the most part the kids are pretty good - there are a couple of trouble makers, one little boy with a short attention span (think "i'm bored" every five seconds), and another who is easily distracted (by anything and everything). One of the six year old girls, Kenyatta, has been consistently good every day, even when everyone else in the class is running and screaming. She is just the cutest, most precious girl. And another boy, Z (the easily distracted one), is precocious and so darn cute that I can't even really get mad at him when he gets distracted.

Z, eating his birthday cupcake!

The pre-K program started the 14th instead of the 12th, so we've only had two days of program so far, but they were super fun. We have 6 students signed up, but only 3 have come so far - Najamoney, Christina, and Nakeem. The girls are good - they've been best friends from day one - but Nakeem can get a little whiny and throws temper tantrums if he doesn't get his way...hopefully he'll learn quickly that that's not going to work in pre-K. 

Overall I feel like I'm starting to settle into my place at BFF nicely...I'm still getting used to program, and there are new experiences every day. Today, for instance, Kenyatta told me that her mom never wanted kids and is annoyed by her and her twin brother Kimball. It blew my mind and broke my heart that a six-year-old would ever hear her mother tell her that she was unwanted, and especially that she was so matter-of-fact about it - she just accepted that her mother didn't want her. I had no idea what to say to that, but I think what ended up coming out was that I didn't think she was annoying, and her mom was lucky to have her and her brother. It's strange to me that this sort of announcement and experience is normal in these children's lives...it makes me want to take them all home and tell them how special and good they are. I'm praying that by spending time with them and working in the programs at BFF, they'll realize that.

There are times when I feel like what I do or say at work isn't truly going to make a difference - that whether my kids sit quietly and do their work or run around the room doesn't matter - but I keep telling myself that it does...I guess I'm just hoping that I'm right.

I find inspiration in this quote from Blessed Teresa of Calcutta:

"We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."

peace. :)

is this real life?

I started work at my site, Bishop Foery Foundation, on Monday. Lucky me, I'm basically a pre-K teacher for the year in the mornings, and then I get to work with K-2 graders afterschool! I'm super pumped to get to hang out with the little ones - they're my faves. So far at work, I've looked up lesson plans, crashed internet explorer 7 times, discovered that my key to my office doesn't in fact work for my office (but emily's key does), and heard wonderful and horrifying stories about working for Catholic Charities in the South side of Syracuse. I have not, however, been priveleged enough to see the kids yet - pre-K doesn't start until the 12th and elementary program starts the 7th - but TOMORROW I get to go to the NY State Fair with a bunch, so I'm SO excited!! (And a little worried - 8 hours at a fair with young kids will be exhausting).

The house has been awesome - all 11 volunteers have clicked almost immediately and we're getting along really well. It's weird (and sad) to think that the Costa Rica chicas will be leaving on Sunday...it's so great having the whole community in one house! It's definitely bittersweet though - I know they're all anxious to get to their sites and start work too.

As everything starts to get busy, I'm realizing that time management is going to be key this year - knowing when I need to get to bed to be energized in the morning (and I'm going to need my energy - no time for RedBull breaks in the middle of the day...), and knowing when I need some me-time. I'm not very good at me-time, but I'm learning.

I've been spending my down-time at work reading this blog. It's highly entertaining, and actually fairly enlightening (when it wants to be). My favorite article today was one about preschool (for obvious reasons).

Finally - I'll leave you with some new music (because that's really what I'm all about)...

one you probably already know

one you maybe havent heard yet


peace :)

i think you'd like my new hair.

i'm in love.

(it's new music, of course. the whole album is good, but my faves (for now) are single girls and wicked world.)

you'll like it if you like: priscilla ahn, joshua radin, regina spektor


peace. :)

13 is a lucky number.

On Saturday, I moved into the Syracuse house for my year of service with FrancisCorps. Already, it's so much fun! There are 11 of us in FC '13 - 5 Costa Rica volunteers and 6 Syracuse, and only one of them is a guy...he'll be living with the 5 girls in Syracuse, which will definitely be an adventure for him.

We had a BBQ on Saturday night for all the volunteers and our families, and then on Sunday we were commissioned at Assumption church - we all received Blessed Tau crosses to wear. After, we blessed our house, and then the parents headed out and we were on our own. Now, we're on retreat for the week - at Alverna Heights retreat center until tomorrow, and then headed down to Seaside Heights in NJ for the rest of the week. It'll be wonderful to be at the beach again!

The view from the house at Alverna Heights...so gorgeous.

You know in Annie when she moves into Daddy Warbucks' house and everyone offers her stuff and she sings "I know I'm gonna like it here"? Well, this is only my 4th day, and I'm definitely not living like Daddy Warbucks...but I'm pretty sure Annie was right - I'm gonna like it here.

peace.

of course she did.

did anyone else see Sonya Tayeh's outfit on the SYTYCD finale?! actually, if you watched there's no way you didnt because it was BRIGHT YELLOW and absolutely fabulous. the second i saw it, I was like - OMG WHO MADE THAT DRESS?!?

Betsey effing Johnson made that dress. of course she did. AND the tiger/leopard accessories were hers too. obviously.


brilliance. (sigh).

brilliance.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/

please?

anybody want to give me a job where I can listen to new music everyday and then tell people how awesome it is? I think that would be pretty awesome.

how does one go from the girl her friends go to for music suggestions to someone whose opinion people actually want?

thoughts?


also (and totally unrelated) - watched Finding Neverland today. Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet are brilliant. (incaseyouforgotorsomething).

peace.

PS has anyone else noticed how the Farmers Insurance commercial jingle ("we are Farmers, dum da dum dum dum dum dum") can be made to fit absolutely anything? it is CONSTANTLY stuck in my head and I sing it all the time, but with words like "work is boring, dum da dum dum dum dum dum" and "i love ice cream, dum da dum dum dum dum dum." absolute genius.

more ingrid gorgeousness

this will probably be the song I walk down the aisle to. or something like that.

peace.

new music from Ingrid and inspiration from tragedy.

I found an article on msn last night about a little girl from WA who asked her friends to donate to charity:water instead of giving her presents for her 9th birthday. Her goal was to raise $300 and give clean water to 15 people in 3rd world countries. She was tragically killed in a car accident last week, but from her death has come such an inspiring outpouring of love - her birthday wish was publicized on the news and all over facebook and twitter and such, and people have begun donating to help her achieve her goal. So far she's raised over $300,000. The goodness in people amazes me - I feel like the public opinion is that people are inherently awful, but things like this give me some hope. :)

Also, Ingrid's newest single was released recently - hopefully the last of the album will come soon, but for now I'm perfectly content to listen to her gorgeous voice over and over again in this song. Perfection.


"I don't know when I will be completed. Maybe I will never be completed. And maybe, it is ok if we are never complete.  Maybe our completeness comes in the incomplete. Chocolate helps." - Ingrid Michaelson

(LovelOVelovE).

funny.

yay for non-pc, tell it like it is comics.

I think I'm done pretending this is going to be a reliable blog...

Time to recognize my limitations - remembering to post more than once every few months is one of them.

So from now on, this is going to be a place for me to post anything and everything (maybe not that exhaustive) that I find online/in the world that makes me want to tell people about it.

Starting with these:

1. TWLOHA Fears vs. Dreams Campaign - watch the video here, and then post your fears & dreams here. :)

2. Peace Love World Clothing - Jeanine Mason (winner of SYTYCD Season 5) is one of the spokespeople (is that a word?) for this line, with the mentality "a day without love is a day wasted." I like it.

3. TOMS Shoes just came out with their fall collection - my bank account is waiting, terrified.

4. Just finished reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young - please go read it. It's a story of a man who loses his faith when his daughter is kidnapped and murdered, only to find it again in the most unexpected way. AMAZING.


"i am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." -m.a. radmacher


peace. :)

it's me again.

Well, I'm back. Miss me? Last time I wrote, I was about to start my senior year, and now it's over and I've graduated!! I'm spending the next two months at the Marianist Family Retreat Center in Cape May Point, NJ, which is beautiful, peaceful, and across the street from the beach. I got here last Friday, and have since run a retreat and welcomed 3 more groups that are using the house...and been useful in the kitchen, for once. I'm the summer intern, which loosely translates to "I do whatever anyone tells me needs to be done." Granted, today what needed to be done was transcribing a song and making up dance moves to it, so I'm not complaining one bit.

Yesterday was beautiful - after dinner Eden (my roomie until tomorrow) and I went down to the beach. No one else was there, and we both just chilled for an hour until it started to rain. I jammed out a bit with some P&W until my fingers were dunzo - it seemed so fitting. Between the peace of the empty beach, the calm of the water, and the beauty of the sun shining down through the clouds, it was so easy to feel the presence of God, and it felt natural that I should praise Him for it.

Tomorrow we start really planning for the summer retreats - I'm excited to get to really see this place at its finest. But here's a pic to leave you with for the day (taken on my phone - digital cam's STILL out of commission...) from the beach this afternoon.

peace. :)

the big one

Fail. sorry. Apparently, blogging once a week or even once a month is too much for me. these random sporadic entries will have to suffice...

Tomorrow is the first day of Orientation training back at CUA, and after a long summer of nannying and biology-lab-working, I'm not quite ready to devote all day every day for the next week to Orientation. We'll see how this goes.

In exactly 9 days I start my senior year of college. Oof. Where'd all that time go? I'm excited and nervous all at once, but it should be fun.

Anyway, it's now 1:30am and I have to be awake again in approximately 6 hours and 15 minutes, so I'll post more later (probably after Orientation), but I'll leave you (as usual) with a quote and some music. Have a great week!


"Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion." - G. W. F. Hegel

The Kids - B.o.B. feat. Janelle Monae
Pursuit of Happiness (Remix) - KiD CuDi feat. MGMT and Ratatat
We Didn't Start the Fire - Billy Joel


peace. :)

Snowpocalypse 2010

I'm sorry I've been such a horrible blogger - it's been 3 weeks since my last post. BAD Carolyn...

The past 3 weeks have been busy busy busy... I'll start at the beginning, back in January.

March 22 was the March for Life, with the Vigil for Life the night before. I helped out at the Duf, where we hosted about 1200 teen pilgrims (and their chaperones) overnight before the March. The March this year was AMAZING. More than half a MILLION people came out to march, including over 500 students from CUA. There's no way Obama won't hear us now...hopefully, he took this outpouring of love as a sign that he should really start loving (and stop murdering) babies... I mean, they're BABIES. What's not to love?! (by now, you should have figured out my love of all things baby). 

The CUA Cares Novena for Haiti ended, fittingly, on the day of the March, and Fr. Bob announced that the CUA Students raised $28,500, which the university is matching. That means that CUA is donating a total of $60,000 to help Haiti. I love my school. 

As I'm sure you've heard, the past week and a half were pretty fun for DC. Since last Thursday, we've gotten more than 4 feet of snow, resulting in an entire week of cancelled classes, and a bit of cabin fever. Instead of taking advantage of this extra time to catch up on schoolwork, I caught up on sleep, hot chocolate-drinking, and movie-watching. By Wednesday, I was going a bit crazy. BUT, yesterday I managed to be productive and got a little work done. And now, I'm on a bus (with WiFi!) on my way home to CT. Tomorrow night is the ceili, my dance school's fundraiser for the girls going to Nationals!! This year, my sister is one of those girls, so it's going to be an exciting ceili. 

Of course, this wouldn't be a post by me without some sort of music discovery, and I won't let you down. :) My new obsession? United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop) by DJ Earworm. It's a mashup of the Top 25 Pop Songs of 2009, and is brilliant (way better than his 2007 & 2008 mashups, although those are pretty stellar too). You can find (and download!) the song and music video here. (Do it. You won't regret it.) 

Have a great weekend!!

Peace and love,

me. :)

Make the Most of this Life

I talked to Lauren today for the first time since she's been in Spain - two weeks is a really long time to wait to talk to your best friend... apparently all is well (you can read all about her adventures on her blog here) and she's having the time of her life. I'm glad...and I'm so excited that I finally got to talk to her (it was getting quite lonely back here in the States without my media naranja). This earthquake in Haiti has really brought my own life into sharp perspective - what if that happened here tomorrow? What if I had been there? Would I be ok with the mark I've left on the world so far? I can't even imagine not seeing my family again, not seeing my best friends again, never getting married, never having children, never saving lives...never doing all the things I want to do before I die. My iTunes was on shuffle (as usual, everything in my life relates to music...) and the song "Live Like We're Dying" by Kris Allen came on. I listened - really listened - to the lyrics, and found myself crying. Here they are:

Sometimes we fall down and can't get back up
we're hiding behind skin that's too tough
how come we don't say I love you enough
till it's to late, it's not too late

Our hearts are hungry for a food that won't come
we could make a feast from these crumbs
and we're all staring down the barrel of a gun
so if your life flashed before you
what would you wish you would've done

Yeah... gotta start
lookin at the hand of the time we've been given here
this is all we got and we gotta start pickin it
every second counts on a clock that's tickin'
gotta live like we're dying

We only got
86 400 seconds in a day to
turn it all around or throw it all away
we gotta tell 'em that we love 'em
while we got the chance to say
gotta live like we're dying

And if your plane fell out of the skies
who would you call with your last goodbyes
should be so careful who we live out our lives
so when we long for absolution
there'll no one on the line

We never know a good thing till it's gone
you never see a crash until it's head on
all those people right when we're dead wrong
you never know a good thing till it's gone

For more songs with amazing, heartfelt, meaningful lyrics, check out Brett Dennen, especially his songs "Nothing Lasts Forever", "Ain't No Reason", and "There Is So Much More" (I'd post lyrics here, but really, that'd be soooo long....) Seriously though - look him up. ah-maze-ing.

Peace and love,

me :)

I (still) love babies! :)

We've now started the second week of school after a long weekend (thank you, Dr. King) that consisted (for me at least) of festivities on Friday night, a pajama-and-movie-filled Saturday, an equally chill Sunday, and a few hours of service for MLK day. All in all a great weekend, but not much work done, and for some reason, still some level of sleep deprivation. Today has been wonderful though - in my Christian Marriage and Family Life class we talked about open vs closed households and the idea of communal interdependence. I'm in love with the idea of an open household - people always around & dropping by, neighbors doing favors for each other, waving to each other on the streets, having BBQs in the cul-de-sac. We went to a brunch at a friends' house after mass the Sunday after Christmas, and they had Christmas cards bordering the entire window over their sink and around the windows in their dining room. It started me thinking how wonderful it would be to be connected to that many families - enough so that when Christmas comes, you get more than 50 Christmas cards!!

Tuesdays are even better starting this week, simply because I get to babysit little Emry for 4 hours. That's 4 wonderful hours of playing, singing, adorable baby noises, and the like, that have made me fall completely in love with this little man. He's just beautiful. With the March for Life coming up, of course abortion is on the mind, and it blows my mind to think that anyone could ever not want something so precious as a child. Just thinking about anyone hurting Emry, or any of my baby cousins, makes me so upset, and they're not even my children. How could anyone hurt such an innocent, precious, beautiful little baby? Hanging out with Emry seems to have convinced me even more (like I needed convincing...) that life is so precious, and we need to do all we can to protect it. The March on Friday is so so important, to give a voice to the unborn, and to let people know that abortion isn't the only solution, and that taking a life shouldn't ever be a solution. A child is a gift, not a problem or a punishment, and we need to show the world that we care. We need to change hearts in order to turn our country from a culture of death to one of love and of life.

peace and love :)


ps. for more info on the March for Life, click here.

For a great video on being pro-life and changing hearts, click here. (make sure to watch both parts!)

Help Haiti!!

I'm sure anyone reading this has probably heard about the earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday. It registered 7.0 on the Richter scale, followed by multiple aftershocks, some measuring up to 5.8 in magnitude! The last estimate I heard of the death toll was 45-50,00 people, and is quickly rising. When I first heard about the earthquake, I went to MSNBC to get some facts. I watched the slideshow of pictures and was quickly overwhelmed by the tragedy and the sheer magnitude of the disaster. Here was a country already ravaged by poverty, and they get hit with this. What could I do to help? I went to twitter (my trusty source of information and all things trending) and clicked on Help Haiti, and lo and behold, was met with a tweet from the American Red Cross telling me that I could donate $10 simply by texting "haiti" to 90999, and the $10 would just get added to my phone bill. And all of the money went straight to the Red Cross - my cell phone carrier would keep none of it. :) So I did that, and felt a bit better.

What's more, CUA's response has been great - they've started the CUA Cares Campaign, and our president, Fr. O'Connell, wrote a novena to be prayed all over campus for the next nine days for Haiti. In addition, there was a mass today to pray for Haiti and show our support; committees are forming to fundraise and educate our campus about Haiti, and students are gladly donated their Starbucks and cigarette money to the cause. (To join in the effort or find out more info, click here) As devastating and heartbreaking as this tragedy has been, the response from the CUA and global community has been uplifting and hopeful - it's wonderful to know that our world really can come together in times of need. As for me, I'm gonna keep praying, and trust that God will provide. I found a great picture looking through the slideshow on msnbc today - great not because of the circumstances, but simply because of the message it seems to send - that even in the worst of times and the most horrifying of places, Christ is still present.

Peace and love. :)