"people pass thru life nowadays..."

I am grateful for all of your comments, emails and well wishes! Knowing you are in someone´s thoughts is one of those deep pleasures in life. Keep leaving comments, if even just to say you´re reading.

It´s funny. Sometimes you have to get out of your routine and your life to really feel like you´re exercising pieces of yourself.

On the first plane ride- really feeling alone- I rediscovered that music has and always will be one of my closest friends. It seems silly to say, but I know that most of you have felt that moment when you´re in a new place, so far from home, and a familiar melody or song can bring a flood of emotions. I was grateful.

On the second plane ride (and time in the airport, mostly) I rediscovered my love of talking to strangers and making new friends. I went from feeling alone and content on one plane to feeling like the entire world was on my side in the other. It´s what I loved about the restaurant, bartending, and living in a city. In a matter of minutes, I can form the kind of connection with someone that could last for years if I pursued it. The choice is mine- truly empowering.

(My new sister and brother are in the kitchen making me MORE food (I swear I have a belly already) and discussing where they are taking my school friends and me drinking Thursday night. See, I have already learned the Spanish that matters.)

I don´t know when dinner will be ready, or if I have time to get into it, but I have rediscovered a piece of myself already at school as well. My teacher is AMAZING' Judge Antonio Cancado Trindad from Brazil. He is really into the philosophy of law! Most people brush past philosophy just to learn hard and fast law- what needs to be applied today. But in the time of Plato, Socrates, Hobbes, Mill, and Suarez, the two were indistinguishable. Law was born out of philosophy- the idea that humans had rights and wondering where they came from is the basis of the way we govern today.

Much of the philosophy of law came out of Spain, although most Europeans don´t admit it. Victoria and Suarez wondered whether the "indios" of the new world had souls- because if they did, they had rights (they believed this to be true). Do the rights exist only because we right them down, or are they floating around somewhere above us- were they there before and despite the fact that they are written (I can´t find the question mark on this spanish computer).

ugh. dinner. more later.