audacity in love

flipping through my journal last night, i found this excerpt from audacity of hope that i jotted down when i read the book a couple summers ago. our president, the romantic.

"eventually i wore her down. after a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment, and i offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the baskin-robbins across the street. we sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and i told her about working at baskin-robbins when i was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. she told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. i said that i'd like to meet her family. she said she would like that. 

i asker her if i could kiss her. it tasted of chocolate. 

we spent the rest of the summer together. i told her about organizing, and living in indonesia, and what it was like to bodysurf. she told me about her childhood friends, and a trip to paris she'd taken in high school, and her favorite stevie wonder songs."

in a name

last month i read the namesake by jhumpa lahiri. my initial reaction: it made me miss my parents. although just a bart trip and a car ride away, it's so easy to get busy in my own little world of work and friends. the holidays, thankfully, have been great time to take advantage of the proximity to family. the time spent is simple but so special. take last friday: a birthday dinner at a cheap vietnamese restaurant followed by squeezing onto the couch on a cold, rainy night to watch the "expendables" with 3 of the most important people in my life. maybe i'm romanticizing the mundane moments, but i can't deny that at that moment i was truly happy.

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the book also made me consider all the nicknames i have or had in my lifetime: cj, camel, c-dawgg, cam, mealy/meal, camiye, camizzle/camiz, homie, c, etc. some have stuck while others have been lost in memory, but each name is relegated to specific person(s), places, times in my life. it is interesting how a nickname is not just something someone calls you, but reflects a relationship, an intimacy, an inside joke that you share with certain people.

"there's so much in a name and so much more in you"

living and dealing with hypocrisies

EVERYBODY has them.
some hypocrisies are too deeply ingrained in my life and personal history to even do anything about. i mean, how do i justify...

...practicing a religion that was imposed on my native people by colonizers?

OR

...a berkeley education paid for my father's pharmaceutical sales income?

i'm fully aware of these hypocrisies (or maybe they're more ironies?), but i have decided to leave those be.

then there are those that i know i can choose to make different. what is integrity and credibility anyway? in my mind i know it includes deed following word, and vice versa. which is one of the main reasons i'm planning on making the move back to the east bay. i work for an org that hopes to decrease the effects of climate change by creating better transportation and land use options. all the while, here i am driving my mini-suv to bart and commuting 2 hours a day! some people (esp. my family) don't understand my logic on this. bottom line: i'm living with these inconsistencies and will adjust for them as necessary.

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came in late with watching "the wire," but enjoying it so much now. i love the bits of street philosophy especially when it speaks to what i've been thinking. just watched episode 6 from season 2 where d'angelo in a prison book club discusses the great gatsby:

He's saying that the past is always with us: where we come from, what we go through, how we go through. all that shit matters. It's like you can change up, you can say you somebody, you can give yourself a whole new story. But what came first is who you really are. And what happen before is what really happened. And it don't matter that some fool say he different...cuz the only thing that make you different is what you really do, or what you really go through...Gatsby, he was who he was and he did what he did. And cuz he wasn't ready to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him.

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in other camille hypocrisies...WHAT THE EFF was i thinking on saturday? had a fitness afternoon running around gg park and playing soccer & ultimate with the co-workers. then ruined it all with an evening of over-partying that ended badly (to say the least). sore muscles and hungover is never a good combo. that ish caught up with me, and i paid for it.