Nostalgia for a city I haven't left yet

Sorry I haven't been posting anything for a long time. I haven't had much to say, to be honest, and every time I sit down to write I seem to run out of ideas.

It's weird because right now I feel like I'm in some sort of in-between place. What had driven me before for so long, the race to get into college and get scholarships, is over. Now I feel like I'm simply waiting for August to come.

The funny thing is that at the same time, I've begun to feel nostalgic about the city I've grown up in my entire life. I'm starting to realize its value. While before I used to hate the city, its traffic, the people, the heat... I've come to the conclusion that I still hate those things about it but also how much I love Miami in spite of it. I love the massive sky above it, almost always so blue and infinite. I love the palm trees spiraled with fairy lights during Christmastime. I love the closeness of the ocean, the way I could always run down to sit by the bay at night whenever things get too hard at home.

I guess that's something I'll always pursue in my life, no matter where I go. The soft whisper of the waves beating against the seawall. The bright lights on the horizon, rising up so high they consume the stars. Now my time is coming to venture far from my city. It's much colder where I'm going, and the nearest body of water does not compare to the ocean I have come to see as my own.

However, the leaves there turn gold and crimson in the fall. The hills rise and fall for miles and miles. There's history everywhere I turn, the history of a state of pioneers and my family. I find Indiana beautiful as well, and I might come to see it as a second home soon enough. But second is not the same as first in my heart.

On my flight home from Indianapolis in December, as the plane was banking over Miami and I watched the grid of city lights draw close, tears began to come to my eyes. I think it was then that I realized how much I would actually miss my hometown and my childhood, despite the excitement I felt then and I feel now for the future.

I hope I find something akin to the beauty of the ocean when I go to Bloomington.

Rant - People's curiosity and long distance relationships

Today during JROTC, one of my friends started asking me about my boyfriend. Which is all well and good but it seems that lately any time anyone brings him up in the conversation, they ask me what will be happening seven to eight months from now, when I leave for Indiana for school and he leaves for basic training in Georgia.

The answer is simple:

I. Don't. Fucking. Know.

I know that people's intentions are mostly good, they're concerned about my well-being and want to make sure I make what they see to be as the right choice. But honestly, it's getting old.

I don't know what will happen. I never did know what would happen. I've never been in a relationship this serious, I've never loved someone like I do now. I don't know what I will be feeling months from now when the time comes to actually part, I don't know what I'll be feeling when I'm at IU and he's hundreds of miles away. I don't freaking know. That's the bottom line.

In the meantime though, I plan to spend as much time with him as I can. I plan to make the most of the time I DO have with him, and I wish people would just stop talking about it. It's like they keep bringing up what they see as the eventual demise of my relationship, and while I know that whenever you're in a relationship there's only two outcomes (you break up or you get married), I don't know why people keep bringing it up.

Later, after that one friend finished talking to me about the long-distance thing, another friend brought it up and started speaking strongly against it, and just kept going on and on about how he disapproved of people staying together after high school and whatnot. I know the vast majority of high school relationships fizzle out, and before I used to be totally against staying with someone past high school, especially if it would turn into something that involved long distance. But now, things are a lot more complicated before. Emotions can make it difficult to think clearly, and what might seem like the right decision from the outside can end up being the totally wrong decision, in the end. Right now, I'm thinking that if you really love someone, then it's worth a try. You never know what will happen, and if you don't even try to see if it would work, then you'll always be stuck with that "what if?".

In any case, I dislike it when people constantly try to push their opinions on me and to convince me to do something without having in mind what I want in my life. I dislike it when people bring up things that are very personal to me like they're things that they are qualified to comment on with complete confidence. It's bullshit. Every relationship is different. Every situation is different, the people are different, the motivations as well.

Unless I bring it up, either to rant or to seek advice or just to talk about it, I'd appreciate it if people would refrain from talking about long-distance relationships and all that jazz. It will be difficult enough to deal with once the time comes, but having people bring it up just out of curiosity or to push their opinions onto me makes it even worse.

Some things just shouldn't be brought up out of sheer curiosity because they are difficult issues to deal with on their own.

Anyways, I'm tired. Sorry for the rant, but that's honestly how I'm feeling right now.

The intricate and unavoidable part of life

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my friend Alex Berman. You see, both the anniversary of his death and his birthday are coming up now in January.

I met Alex during one of the most intense musical and personal experiences of my life, the Eastern Music Festival 2013. He was one of the many Floridians in my dorm, and we all immediately bonded given our provenance from that insane but beautiful state. We went on a fro-yo run that night, and that was when I began to get to know him. I admit that initially I found him to be kind of annoying, given his constant "thirstiness" and we had a bit of a falling-out the first week, because of an incident involving a group of boys in our dorm and their comments regarding me. However, as time went by, he grew on me, and I began to care about him a lot. He was a generous and kind person, and although I wasn't always around the dorm, whenever I spent time with him, I enjoyed the stories he told and the pranks he'd pull. Once, Alex and my friend Gabe found a friend's silk Victoria's Secret robe and dressed up like male strippers and forcefully entered one of the girls' rooms, declaring to the six or seven girls that they had "the right to remain silent" and that they were under arrest for "being too sexy" and then proceeded to dance. It was one of the funniest moments I remember at EMF.

Some of my friends still get angry when they think about what happened to Alex. I understand that having someone that young and good being taken from this earth so violently is senseless and beyond understanding. I understand being angry at God (or the universe or whatever you believe). I was angry at God when my cousin died. In a weird way, I was mad at my cousin too. I couldn't believe that he would leave me when he was the person I always thought would be sitting next to me when I imagined myself as an old woman, sitting on my porch and sipping teréré while watching the sunset. I don't have any brothers or sisters, and he was pretty much my surrogate brother, so losing him was one of the most difficult events I've gone through in my life. For a long time I would stay awake at night and talk to him, hoping somehow he would hear me. I did that again almost five years later when Alex died. However, losing Alex was different than losing Rodri, for some obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. Of course, I had known Rodri my entire life and spent a lot of time with him and he was family. I had only spent time with Alex for five weeks, and I considered him to be a good friend but our relationship didn't have the history and depth as that between Rodri and I (which is understandable). Although Rodri wasn't the first loved one to die in my lifetime, he died at a time when I actually understood what death was and the seeming finality of it. While Rodri's death was sudden for me, he had been sick for most of his life so the shock wasn't as great. Alex's death came out of nowhere, and the brutality and awful absurdity of it was difficult to comprehend.

Once I got to the point where I could think more clearly about the whole situation, however, I came to a certain way of thinking about death.

Sometimes we feel that the time we had with our departed loved ones is too short, that we deserved more time with them, that THEY deserved more time here on Earth. For me, it's not a matter of what we or they deserve, it's more of a matter of thinking about how lucky, how blessed we have been to have had the pleasure to have someone like that in our lives. God, the universe, or that great flying spaghetti monster, whatever you want to call it, has connected us in infinite ways, and the fact that, out of seven billion people on this Earth we found that one person, astounds me. Their presence in our lives, in the lives of others as well, has set in motion chains of events that we would never fully comprehend.

A conversation, an adventure, a loving moment, even a fight has the power to change people's actions, and we will never completely understand how big an impact someone else has had on us. So basically, I try to be grateful for having had the great blessing of having found the people I love and of having been able to spend time with them, and although I would've loved to been able to spend more... my dad always tells me, "Sometimes you only get a little." Sometimes though, a little can be a lot. And no matter what you believe about the afterlife (or the lack of one), I think that as long as you keep someone in your heart and mind, and remember them often, with tears or laughter or maybe even both, they still live on.

I'm sorry if this seems simplistic. I haven't lost a spouse, a child, or a parent. I haven't had that experience, and therefore my writing is limited to what I know. I know that death is an incredibly complex and difficult matter to discuss and that we can never fully understand its workings. I can only understand the way I feel about it at the moment.

In any case, I miss my friend. I miss my cousin. I miss my grandpa. Death may be an unavoidable part of life but it is hard to deal with, even when you try to think of it in a more positive way (to save your sanity).

I hope this post doesn't ruin anyone's day due to the subject matter, and if you have any thoughts on it, please comment or let me know. I'd love to hear another opinion. Peace out.

My Impossible List

A couple of weeks ago, I came upon this website Impossible HQ where I read an article about the Impossible List. Rather than a bucket list, an impossible list has goals that are seemingly impossible (hence the title) and is constantly changing and expanding. This appealed to me because you could break down these impossible goals into stages to make them manageable, track your accomplishments, and overall help me grow and become the person I'm meant to be. So with that said, here is my Impossible List.

Life

•  Change one person’s life in a good way
• Build a treehouse
•  Create something that changes more peoples lives in the years to come
• Do one random act of kindness a day
• Make someone cry of happiness
• Adopt a child
• Build and design my own house 

Fitness

• 50 consecutive pushups
• 100 consecutive squats
• Run a mile in 7 minutes
•  Run a 5K
• Run a Half Marathon
•  Run a Marathon
•  Swim 20 consecutive laps
•  Do a Pullup
•  Do Zumba or some crazy dance workout
• Learn how to Belly-dance
• Get a black belt in Karate (Currently a Purple Belt, one more level to go) 

Travel

• Study abroad
• Backpack around Europe for a few months
• Backpack around the world for a year and make a film or write a book about it
• Visit every continent (3/7) (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Antarctica)
• Visit every country in Europe
• Road trip coast to coast (U.S.) and make a film or write a book about it
• Visit all the states in the US (Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri)
• Live somewhere in Europe for at least a year (apart from study abroad)
• Own properties in 5 different countries (2/5) (US, Paraguay)
• Visit the ten most beautiful places in each continent.
• Europe (Mykonos, Provençal hills, Capri, Venice)
• Visit 10 countries (11/150) | 20 countries | 50 countries | 100 countries |150 countries
•  Go on a Safari
• Go on a pilgrimage
• Live on a boat for 3 months 

Minimalism

• Go without a phone for a month
•  Go without a car for a month
• Go without internet for a month 

Adrenaline Rushes

• Give a speech in front of the United Nations
• Go Skydiving
• Go Bungee Jumping
•  Go on a Trapeze
• Go on a tightrope (2014 (get specific date) – FIU Ropes)
• Go on a tightrope without any handholds or exterior aid
•  Go Paragliding
• Go Parasailing
• Learn how to Surf
•  Go Scuba Diving
•  Get PADI Certified
•  Climb a Mountain
• Climb a Volcano
• Go Rock Climbing
• Explore a cave

Miscellaneous

• Meet Meryl Streep
• Meet the Dalai Lama
•  Walk out the door and start walking without any destination in mind.
• Get something named after me.
• Have someone name a character in book after me.
•  Go to the airport and buy a ticket without knowing where I’m going.
•  Go into the Peace Corps
• Vote in every Presidential and Midterm Election and make my voice heard.
• Learn how to do calligraphy.

Events to Attend

• The Christmas or Easter Mass at the Vatican
• Participate in the Tomatina in Spain
•  Palio di Siena
• Venice’s Carnevale
• Brazil’s Carnival
•  A U.S. President’s Inauguration
• Coachella
• Bonnaroo
• Sundance Film Festival
• New Orlean’s Mardi Gras
• Junkanoo Festival (Bahamas)
• See the Northern Lights
• An Eminem concert
• The Weeknd concert 

Music

• Put on a Senior Recital
• Learn Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto
• Learn Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto
• Learn how to Accompany People
• Perfect Sight-reading
•  Learn Beethoven’s Appassionata
• Put on a concert with the Quartet 

Become Fluent in 5 Languages

•  English
•  French
• Spanish
• Italian
• German
• Portuguese
• American Sign Language 

Academic and Professional

• Get a freaking job
• Start my own club or organization at Indiana University, either that or be President of something.
•  Graduate college with honors
•  Begin an organization that provides children in developing countries with instruments and musical instruction
• Start my own law firm (with an emphasis in human rights)
• Do work for the UN
•  Put $100,000 in the bank
• Give $100,000 away
• Make a million dollars.
• Write and publish a book.
• Create and maintain a successful blog. 

       So there you have it. An Impossible List by yours truly. It'll grow and expand and I think that maybe in six months I'll post it again and show you guys what I have done and what I've added. I'm so excited. Excited about life and its unlimited and beautiful opportunities. Sure, I might not end up accomplishing everything on this list, and some goals might fall by the wayside because other goals will replace them but that doesn't mean I can't have an amazing, frustrating, exhilarating time accomplishing crazy shit. We are constantly on the road to become the people we are meant to be, and sometimes people take hidden paths or even step off the road entirely but I sure as hell want to become someone who might not change the world, but will definitely have her impact. 

     Sorry for rambling, it's late at night and I'm tired. To whoever takes their time to read this: I love you. Thank you. People like you, who take the time to read and to learn something new about another person or about the world are my kind of people. 

On New Year's Resolutions

In the weeks leading up to the beginning of 2015, my Twitter and Facebook feed was flooded with posts regarding New Year's resolutions and how 2015 would be so much better than all the previous years. While I appreciate the notion of rebirth and beginning anew, I find it silly that people assign so much importance to a date that really doesn't have much importance in the grand scheme of things. Dates and years are a manmade concept, just like time is. December 31st is no different than January 1st, really, yet people go on and on about how what is effectively just one more terrestrial revolution will give them the impetus to become a whole new person. I don't think that a date should influence someone to become someone new. Maybe that's why New Year's resolutions are abandoned so often.

I think that becoming a better person should be a constant goal. We should constantly search for more lessons to learn, for more places to see, and for more people to meet. That is how we grow and expand our minds, and it should be more of a concrete and internalized goal that goes beyond our perception of time. It shouldn't be left behind as January 1st gets farther and farther away. 

That's why I simply have one overarching goal for this year and for all the ones to come: to continue to be a badass mofo. 

Being a badass mofo (sorry I can't help saying it without italics) is more than just an attitude towards life. It means keeping all aspects of your life in balance while simultaneously maintaining momentum and being open to all available opportunities to learn and kick ass. Right now, most aspects of my life are balanced: I have great friends, I feel satisfied with my current relationship, my frantic search for the right college is now over and done with, and I'm working on all the projects I've started in the past months regarding community service and music. However, I do want to work on my relationship with my parents, which, while relatively stable, still needs some help, my relationship with music, and most of all, my health and fitness level. So I definitely have stuff to work on, and I hope that I will continue to have stuff to work on, because once I don't, I might as well be dead. 

However, I know that I might be talking out of my ass about this whole thing, mostly thanks to the fact that it's so late right now and that I might not be thinking everything through. I know I used to make New Year's resolutions left and right but I never completed them. So having this overarching goal and the mentality to always strive to become a better person will definitely be a learning experience for me, and I know that many great and awesome things will come of it. 

Let me know if what I'm saying makes any sense to you guys, I'd greatly appreciate it! Thanks for reading :) 

Thoughts on Blogging

So obviously this is my first post ever, and I honestly don't know what to write about. I know there's lots of people out there who blog and even maintain several blogs at the same time, and I admire them because it takes discipline. Even though I've been told that I'm a good writer, I rarely ever write for pleasure, and I feel that starting a blog would help me work on getting over this weird revulsion I have for writing. Well, revulsion might not be the right word for it, but lately it's been so hard for me write because my mind seems to have some sort of mental block when it comes to writing.

Anyways, I guess that this is supposed to serve as an introduction to me as well. 

I'm Maya, a teenager from the beautiful and sometimes ratchet country of Miami (it's a running joke here that Miami is like a separate country than a part of the United States). I've been a pianist for over twelve years now, but I'm not planning on having a career as a musician, because I feel like my true passion lies elsewhere. However I love being a musician, so I will definitely continue studying it in college as a minor. I'll be studying to become a human rights attorney at Indiana University starting next school year, and I'm extremely excited about college. 

Well, it's getting late so I'm going to have to sign off. I'll tell you guys more about me later, and thanks for taking the time to look at my blog! :)