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. :)

Welcome back to the daily grind...

School started up again on Monday (hence my disappearance for a couple days). Though I wasn't quite ready for the semester to start, I've gotten stuff together (it seems) within the past few days and am now quite happily going along. My schedule this semester is only 4 classes - Physiology, Mechanisms of Bacterial Pathogenesis, Christian Marriage and Family Life, and Spanish for Health Services II. Normally, I'd try to find another class, but seeing as this semester I'm working 3 jobs and volunteering at two hospitals in addition to taking classes, studying for MCATs, applying to med school, running two clubs, and having somewhat of a social life...i think my schedule's pretty full already. However, i've discovered that I only have 6 courses to take over all of senior year, so that'll be fun. :)

I found a song a while ago that Ingrid had posted on her twitter called "This is the New Year" by Ian Axel.  I watched the video and fell in love, and tried to find it to download, but couldn't. Then, I get on iTunes yesterday, and it's the single of the week!! SO EXCITING! Needless to say, I now have the song and have listened to it many many times, and am currently working on figuring out the guitar chords so I can play it and maybe record a little bit...we'll see.

Here are the lyrics:

Ian Axel – This is The New Year

Another year you made a promise
another chance to turn it all around
and do not save this for tomorow
embrace the past and you can live for now
and I will give the world to you

Speak louder than the words before you
and give them meaning no one else has found
The role we play is so important
we are the voices of the undergroud
and I would give the world to you

Say everything you’ve always wanted,
be not afraid of who you really are,
cause in the end we have each other,
and thats at least one thing worth living for,
and I would give the world to you

A million suns that shine upon me
A million eyes you are the brightest blue
Lets tear the walls down that divide us
and build a statue strong enough for two

I pass it back to you
and I will beat for you,
cause I would give the world
and I would give the world
and I would give the world to you

This is the new year
A new begining
You made a promise
You are the brightest
We are the voices
This is the new year
We are the voices
This is the new year

And here's the official music video - basically a dance party and lovefest all in one...aka my kind of life. :)

This Is the New Year - Ian Axel

Peace and love :)