Super-power: The awesomeness of friends

Right now, I'm feeling loving thoughts for many of the people in my life: I am so grateful for them, and for the joy they bring me.

Everyone has at least one super-power. If I had to specify mine, I'd say it's this: the ability to draw to myself, both consciously and unconsciously, the most beautiful, extraordinary and loving people in any given place, community or organization.

It's totally the one I'd choose.

Friendly flailing: the challenges of friends

It is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful to have 10,000 friends. It is also challenging to properly love them all. I live in fear that someday, some of my dear ones will walk up and deck me really frickin' hard for failing to [call them, text them, email them, visit them] back for the 6,234th time.

Actually, someone almost did this weekend. And I deserved it.

Please know that while my capacity to love is great, my capacity to respond is really kind of...[insert sad, pathetic flailing motion here].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TRf6u-zv2E&feature=related

Please don't hit me for being a dork.

******

In a pathetic attempt to procrastinate on work, I decided to count the people I have exchanged texts with in the last year.

113.

No wonder I am a crazy person.

Oye me bien...

Listening to Javier Ruibal's "Isla Mujeres," I realize that there are some things that can be truly expressed in only one language. This song, which is so exquisitely expressive of the heart's experience, would sound crazy and completely over the top in English. Yet in Spanish, it is perfect.

In Spanish, one need have no restraint.

In Spanish, everyday people can speak the burning truths of their hearts.

But in English, there is almost always this heavy sense of reserve; a kind of holding back. So many things remain unsaid in English because it almost feels as though there is no way to say them, short of poetry or song.

But in Spanish, one doesn't have be a poet. One can say anything, express anything, without being considered mad.

Sobre su perfil
un sol de bronce se derrama
la rosa de abril
desnuda en medio de la cama

se ha brindado a mí
con un amor que desarma
nubla la razón
y abrasa el alma

Y era de esperar
que yo esperara retenerla
pero todo el mar
es poco mar para esa perla

Oye me bien
Tú la reina de Isla Mujeres
y yo, si tú me quieres,
seré tu esclavo más fiel
Pobre de mí
si de tu fuego me estravío
mi corazón de frío
se olvidará de latir


Which, in English, is something like, something akin to but not exactly like this:

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