Things I believe

May we resolve from this day forward to fill our hearts with love. May we go the extra mile to include in our lives any who are lonely or downhearted or who are suffering in any way. May we “[cheer] up the sad and [make] someone feel glad.”11 May we live so that when that final summons is heard, we may have no serious regrets, no unfinished business, but will be able to say with the Apostle Paul, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

“Behold ye are little children and ye cannot bear all things now ye must grow in grace and in the knowledge of the truth. Fear not little children fro you are mine and I have overcome the world, and you are of them that my Father have given me” DC 50:40-41

Love with everything inside of you, risk it all, go all in, love your life, EVERY moment, every detail, every breathe you breathe good and bad. It will all work out in the end. Stand tall. Stand true. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Relish in the moments that make your life worth living.

Learn to forgive, practice patience, do what you can with what you have, never doubt yourself….believe in who you are, what you can do and who you CAN and WILL become.

“Energy and persistence overcome all things” Benjamin Franklin

I want to teach 5th grade

There are so many things that I could say about this one statement. Let me paint you a quick picture of my day, first of all I wake up on time, get ready and am out the door in record time for my 8 o'clock meeting. I even remembered my laptop, which has been the latest victim in the things Eiko leaves behind game. As I am driving, not speeding because I am so on time, I think to myself, while singing to OneRepublic "Good Life" (yes, out loud and yes, I can both think and sing at the same time. I know what you are thinking. Pure Talent. I thought that too.), "today is a great day, I am stoked to get everything done today and I feel on top of things for next week. This is fantastic......"

Fast forward 3 hours and this appears on my work Facebook page "Eiko Espiritu has ruined my happiness". Good bye great day. Hello nightmare. Now, I know to most of you the fact that I did not post back some comment along the lines of" wow, if I am in charge of your happiness you have bigger problems than with the fact that I ruined it for you" is a small miracle. It seems that in my adult life or more accurately semi adult life I have begun to create a filter for these situations. Consequently I posted nothing. Shocking. I know. The boring part of the story, blah, blah, blah, work, legal, work, legal blah....end of day!

Now, I have a new found friend who teaches 5th grade. And while driving home he and I are talking about my new powers of controlling happiness via Facebook, while he interjects funny stories about his students. One of which is in charge of waking himself up, which means that he is late daily to class. And the best part is this little boy stole my friends happiness at 8:45 am. At which point I feel grateful at the fact that I didn't have that feeling until about 11 am. Point of my story is this. My job is fun. However, it is full of 35 - 50 year old males who when they do not get there way act like 16 year old girls. Which then makes me want to rethink my career path. And I know in the past I have struggled with being a good example to children, however in this case I would have rather struggled through a day of 5th grade or hell been a 5th grader for a day just to avoid the debacle that started as my perfect day.

**side note** This "man" will meet me face to face next Friday. I am so EXCITED to shake his hand and ask him if he is happy! And he wants to volunteer at the track?! What is wrong with this person? Perhaps I will just drop kick him when I see him.

Sometimes life is like magic...

"See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you."
— Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life)

Who is that guy??

Sometimes I make myself laugh out loud. So, had this guy message me on facebook and I looked at his photo and I thought....how do I know him?? Here is what I then realized. I had lunch with him once, forever ago and he drove a red Dodge Neon, and when I told my friend RS about it her response was "what is he a 16 year old girl?".....and that right there is why she and I are friends. So, when I am looking at his name and trying to remember how I know him I hear her saying that. LOL. I would post his photo for all to enjoy, but that is just mean. Ahhh...these are the moments that make my life fun.

Cupcakes?

So living in the industrial part of SLC does not hold as many random stories as the good ol' Aves. And apparently my brain has decided that it can create random stories all on it's own. For the past week I have been having the strangest dreams. I can't decide if I am sleep deprived or if I am silently going crazy. I actually think that I am running so fast that at night is when my sub-conscience gets to catch up. So, these dreams...well they are all over the map and mostly about things that I don't want to forget to do (unplug my curling iron, make my bed, wear a certain pair of shoes etc.) to the most random things that are not even on my radar, or at least I thought.

I should preface this with one time at band camp, okay well not a band camp, but one time, a sweet friend of mine was having some sort of party and I asked if I could bring anything. She says to me "oh yah can you bring an apple spice bunt cake". I reached out my hand and said "Hi, I am Eiko, I don't own a bunt pan and I don't even know what you are talking about". Lesson here is that I can buy you something but I most likely will not be making it.

So, today is Mothers Day and I am meeting up with my Mom and grandma. My Mom must have had a lapse in remembering who Eiko is because she says to me, maybe you can bring cupcakes. Yah, pretty sure I don't even have a cupcake pan. Checking. Confirmed. I do not own one. Mom meet Eiko, your daughter who does not bake, I thought we covered this through the years. Well let's get to the dream part....so last night....I dreamt that I was supposed to bring cupcakes to some function (thank you Mom). The dream was the most random search for cupcakes, all over town, in all sorts of stores, completely stressed out that I could not find these damn cupcakes. This dream lasted all night. At no point did my brain think, oh I can make these and save myself the stress. No, that literally was never a solution. All I can say about that is at least my brain knows me well enough to know that I would go on a state wide search for cupcakes before resorting to baking. On some level I am okay with this and on some level I feel bad for my future children.

Red Vines

So my weight has been so inconsistent lately and in the last week I gained 5 lbs. I thought perhaps it was 'that time' or maybe it was all of the red vines I consumed recently. Well, good news today while I was cleaning I realized that my scale has been bumped and it reads 5 lbs. heavier. Phew, total relief! I thought I was going to have to give up my red vines!