30 Things

I've posted a lot of random stuff about myself on the blog over the course of the last two years especially, so it was interesting coming up with this list and making sure it was stuff that my longer term readers hadn't heard before.

Most of you know about my art, for example.
Shown here at one of my mom's art workshops at the art museum of Ponce in PR.

1. I had my own solo art exhibit at the age of four years. Yes: an entire gallery full of my drawings. At age four. I was, indeed, considered a child prodigy when it came to drawing.

Different art exhibit. I was 6 years old here. The top two drawings behind me are mine.

2. I didn't have dolls as a kid. I didn't like them; they creeped me out. I had Hot Wheels cars, My Little Ponies, a bazillion stuffed animals, and was really into He-Man, Voltron, The Transformers (I had so many of them!), the Dino-Riders and the ThunderCats (I wanted to be Cheetara).

She was such a badass. She was the only adult female in the ThunderCats for a long time. Remember this for later.

I also really liked Rainbow Brite, enough to have the plush version of her horse Starlite. Guess why I loved Rainbow Brite: because of the wingless flying horse!

Featured: me with my Starlite toy. And a dress with sneakers because #tomboy.
Also featured: dancing to Walk Like an Egyptian.
I was an '80's kid through and through! And the little guy next to me with the book is my younger brother.

My favorite movie was The NeverEnding Story: I watched it countless times because I kept hoping that maybe this time Artax wouldn't die.

So fucking traumatizing.

I also loved The Last Unicorn, The Secret of Nimh (I later read the book and loved it even more. I owned mice as a kid because of that movie), The Dark Crystal, and Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. I was really, really into dinosaurs for a while there and went through a phase wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up.

Baby. I thought he was the cutest brontosaurus ever.
It's crazy how far special effects have come since the '80s.

3. I loved kayaking as a teen. I did flatwater ocean kayaking for a while, and developed enough upper body strength that one of the recruiters for the UPR Mayaguez rowing team wanted me to join them when they saw me in action during a group rowing event at the Condado bay. The problem was that I was already assisting the UPR Rio Piedras campus. I tried transferring to Mayaguez anyway: at the time, I was looking to switch from Biology to Livestock Industry (Livestock Industry was only taught on the Mayaguez campus) because I had realized Biology was not the thing for me. The agricultural and livestock field had always been one of my many many interests. (I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up. There were too many things I liked.) The transfer ultimately would have involved only partial credits and a long waiting period to get into some of the required courses, which would have meant having to pay out of pocket for school: it wasn't enough coursework to be covered by my grant at the time. I had to be taking a minimum of 12 credits. So I decided to stay at UPR Rio Piedras after all, and switched to Fine Art (my other main interest) instead. Things happen for a reason.


4. I have a hard time maintaining friendships with women. From the time I was very, very little, I've been known to have one good female friend and a bunch of guy friends.

With my one bestie Beverly in the first grade. If you recognize the outfit, yes: this was on the same day as the Walk Like an Egyptian pic above. The occasion was a school trip field trip to the local zoo. I was 7 years old here, and we were stationed in San Antonio, TX.

(See #2: very few of my toys were girls' toys! Also: I identified with Cheetara, who was surrounded by guys. Notice the trend?)

With my one bestie gf from high school, Piqui in 10th grade. Her and her twin sister were the new kids in the 8th grade. Piqui was another nerdy introvert while her sister was a nerdy extrovert and had no issues making friends. I had no friends at the time and saw a mirror image of myself in Piqui: I went up to her and introduced myself and the rest was history.  We were best friends for the entirety of high school. We both graduated highest honors.
Piqui got into Paso Finos because of my love for horses and would go on to become a research veterinarian.

In general, I tend to get along better with men and identify more with their personalities and ways of coping than I do with women. I always feel I can be more "me" when I'm around guys. I'm not sure if this stems from having been raised by a trio of very strong driven women that, in essence, function in society like highly driven men. Or if it comes from my instinctively seeking out male role models as a kid when my dad stepped out of the picture and I was looking for someone to take his place. Or if it's genetic: my mom was the same way growing up too. Regardless, it continues to be true to this day. (Interestingly, Carlos is the opposite: he has always had more female friends than guy friends. Maybe that's why him and I get along so well? We prefer to hang out with members of the opposite sex?)

My adventure buddies when we were in the Sea Scouts: Carlos on the left, Tumbark in the middle, and Marcos on the right. Carlos and I were the ring leaders of a group of 6 friends where I was the only girl, and we were always getting up to all sorts of trouble when the grownups weren't looking. Diving into the ocean from the marina dock? Check. Wandering off to explore Mona Island's unmapped interior cavern system? Check. Climbing up 100' sinkholes without rope or equipment? Check. Trying to swim a mile out into the ocean to get to a partially sunken ship we could see from the shore? Also check. I used to joke that I was Wendy, Carlos was Peter Pan, and these were our Lost Boys.

5. While I've always loved running around with the boys and identify with them, I did not want to be one of them. I have always loved the fact that I am female. As a female, you can transform. In my book, it's pretty awesome to be able to be physically strong and enjoy getting dirty and sweaty and gross, and then turning around, taking a shower, and becoming this goddess in eyeliner, a tiny dress or painted-on jeans, and a pair of strappy heels that has the power to turn heads when she walks into a room.

I love this dress.

6. The most upsetting thing for me about puberty was not getting my period for the first time. That, I knew would happen. I've never had an issue with it. In fact, my period has never caught me by surprise, not even the very first time: even as a pre-teen I was already highly tuned into my body and I knew when it was coming so I was ready.

What really got to me was growing boobs, and it was upsetting because it meant I couldn't run around shirtless anymore. *insert laughing emoji* But then I discovered sports bras and that fixed the problem. Plus my boobs stalled out at A cup size, which has always made happy. I've never had an issue with being small chested.

Actually...this is how I sleep. Pillow over head included.

8. I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was in my 20s once I was living in Florida with Carlos. I had had a really hard time trying to learn as a kid: we lived on a mountain with no flat land around us to practice on. As an adult though, I took to it like I'd been doing it all my life. Maybe because by then I'd been riding for 17 years and had developed my balance? In Tampa we lived across the street from USF, so I bought a little mountain bike from Walmart for $60 that I took on the campus trails. (Har har...a mountain bike on Florida trails! Get it?) Cycling on trails was my main mode of exercise other than horseback riding while we lived in Tampa.


9. Dogs were the first animal I loved: I ran around on four legs with our dogs when I was tiny and pretended to be one of them. They were the first animal I drew with consistency.

With my Hans. I was around 3 years old here. Hans was my parents' Dobie and technically their first kid.  He was the sweetest dog. My mom was sent this pic to my dad when he was stationed in Korea: she wrote on the back of the photo, telling the story of how I would hug the gentle giant in the evening while telling him all the details of my day.
"She thinks he is her brother!" my mom wrote. Which is funny: at the time she was pregnant with my human brother. :)
I adore Dobermans to this day.

Cats were the second animal I fell madly in love with, and horses the third. I still love dogs, but I vacillate with whether I will ever own dogs again. Dogs and their problems are basically the reason why I have a job: they constitute at least 75% of our patients.

Since age 7, cats have been and continue to be my #1 favorite animal. I love cats even more than horses. You know how some people stop everything when they see a dog and want to go pet it? That's me with cats. "Ooooo a kitty!!!" I have to make friends with ALL the feline patients in hospital. You'd think I'd never seen one before in my life.

Plus: cats are speshul.

10. I was a late bloomer in every aspect. Despite having guy friends all my life, they were all geeky, nerdy types into video games, D&D, and the occasional outdoor adventure. In other words: most of them were shy introverts too. So I didn't have a boyfriend until I turned 17. Gus was one of my friends and everyone knew we liked one another, and so at our mutual guy friends' encouragement, I finally just asked him out on a date. Me, the shy girl, asking the guy out first. He said yes.

My best guy friend from high school, Anibal, is the Care Bear. (We were all college-age here.) I'm the hawt vampire on the left. (That outfit was amazing. The cloak was hooded and floor-length, the skirt I was wearing was...15" long? Tiny. And I was wearing knee-high high-heeled boots. It was the first truly sexy thing I wore in public as an adult...and the first time I ever drew that much attention!) The curvy witch on the right is the girl that Anibal would marry a few years later, and the mother of his son. Gus, my first boyfriend, is the tall mysterious guy with the fedora hat in the background. Anibal was our mutual friend.

We were together for two years. He set a precedent: every serious relationship I've ever had except for one, was initiated by me. Once I was at least 90% sure that a guy I was interested in liked me back, I'd die a thousand deaths and just ask him out first. (That shit is hard, guys! Just because they like you doesn't guarantee they'll say yes...but then again, I never had anyone say no.) I'd still be single if it wasn't for that. But it allowed me to have control over who I was with because I was the one doing the choosing. I wasn't wasting time waiting around for someone to decide to choose me. It's a healthy perspective to have when it comes to dating. Plus, it's the 21st century. I'm with Carlos because I was the one that proposed the events that led to our being together. If you want something to happen, stop waiting around and make it happen. ;)


11. I am, at heart, terribly shy. You'd probably never believe it to read my blog posts.  I've spent my whole life fighting to come out of this shyness shell. I've succeeded to an extent: on personality tests I used to come up as 100% introvert. As of the last two years, I now come up as 50% introvert, 50% extrovert. Social situations don't give me the level of anxiety that they used to, but I still need to be able to go home and decompress afterwards.


12. I used to be SUPER self conscious about my accent when I first moved to the mainland. I have thought in English by default my entire life (I learned to speak Spanish first but learned to read English first), but would (and still do) mentally switch to Spanish when speaking in Spanish. You might be fluent in a second language but if you stop using it all the time, you will develop an accent in that second language. Your mouth gets rusty about shaping the words. When I first moved here, I was so self-conscious about my accent when speaking in English that I wouldn't talk much at social gatherings. See also #11. Once I was out working in the real world and forced to speak all the time, the accent diminished and I stopped caring so much. I've been told I now sound like I'm from out of state, not necessarily Latina, when I speak in English. The fun thing is that now I have accents in both languages: I have a subtle accent in Spanish from speaking English 75% of the time. I really hear it when I start speaking in Spanish with Latinos from other countries. You just can't win. Elsa, Trainer's other female client, is German and knows five languages. She has accents in all of them. So yes, this is typical. #polylingualproblems

13. Speaking of accents, it is because of #12 that I hate having my English pronunciation corrected by English speakers, and I've seen the faces of other foreigners being corrected by Americans: this feeling is shared by many of us. It is a huge pet peeve that thankfully doesn't happen very often nowadays, but it feels like a slap on the face every time it does happen. Why? Because it is incredibly demeaning to a foreigner that is trying, especially if that foreigner is 100% fluent in English. Just don't do that. I am speaking your language! I am allowed to have an accent. And it just makes you look like a pretentious asshole for correcting me, especially if you can't speak my language. I will pronounce something with a question mark or outright ask for a correction if I'm not sure, but I can't tell you how many times I've had a pronunciation corrected by an American, only to realize later that the way I'm pronouncing something actually IS the way an American would pronounce it...in a different state. Because y'all have accents too, you know. (Fyi: the Boston accent is one of my fave US accents! :D ) And the general consensus is that it is a rude thing to do, period. The worst is having my pronunciation corrected by someone and then being put in a social situation by that same person that corrected me and told, "Here! Go talk to everyone!" Are you fucking kidding me? That's the best way to get me to not want to say a peep to anyone.


14. #13 is the reason why I am The Worst Grammar and Spelling Natzi EVARRR. If I have to know a second language so well that I can't have an accent in it, those that only speak that language better be able to both spell and write it PERFECTLY. If you're only going to know one language, you have no excuse. (Yes, I have an enormous chip on my shoulder about this, mmkay?)

I had a supervisor that had a serious problem with the use of apostrophes. She had a bachelor's degree. You wouldn't have known. Every. single. plural word in her e-mails had an 's. I would have to read her e-mails 3 times before I could actually comprehend what she was writing about because the 's would distract me so much nothing else would register. That's all I could see when I read her e-mails: the apostrophe abuse.

15. I have a sweet tooth but I don't like fruity/sweet drinks or cocktails. I prefer to eat my dessert. ;) Bloody Marys are my favorite mixed drink, the spicier the better. This might be one of the reasons why I enjoy restaurant brunches so much... ;) Otherwise, I'll take a beer, a dry white wine or a tequila shot over cocktails any day.

Yes please.

16. Right up until I was 18, I never cursed and never swore. I was a Good Girl.

Books as awards for good grades? HELL YES! And yup: that is a Catholic private school uniform. I went to private Catholic school from second grade all the way to my junior year in high school and wore the damn uniforms throughout. I HATED the uniforms oh my God. Private school in Puerto Rico = Catholic. Private school in Puerto Rico = better education. Also, private school in Puerto Rico = less chance of ending up preggers at age 14 because higher standards of education all the way around. I was in 4th grade when we were first given the "birds and the bees" talk in school The best part was that it was nuns explaining the ins and outs of sex...
Good Catholic girls with good grades weren't potty mouths.

The cleanliness of my speech changed after I graduated high school, when I started hanging out with Carlos's crowd and my language started to become more and more...erm...colorful as I became desensitized to the words. End result: I swear a lot. I live with the culprit that made me this way, so it's not surprising. I modulate it depending on the environment and can revert to being Miss Straight Edge that Never Drops F-bombs, Ever. It cracks me up when people start apologizing for cursing around me. I'm like, "Dude. If you only knew..." If I swear around you or while talking with you, it's because I feel comfortable around you and think you're cool: it's a compliment. I swear even more in Spanish, though when it comes to choice of words, I prefer English curse words. Go figure. *shrug* Carlos says that I talk like a pirate, that it's horrifying that I'll kiss him with this mouth. I tell him it's all his fault. He says he couldn't be prouder. :P

Case in point: The public gym where Trainer is now working out of has the most God-awful selection of music. Of course they play it mainly over the lifter's area of the gym, which is where I do the brunt of my workouts with him. Trainer and I have similar tastes in music, right down to the shared hatred of country music. (I used to like it in small amounts but it now has multiple bad associations for me so the genre has been crossed off of my music list entirely.) Guess what they love to play at this gym? Country. I'll take industrial or heavy metal any day over country music, but this is an older, mostly middle-aged crowd from downtown that goes to this gym, so country is not a surprising music choice given the type of people that go there. (One word: Frednecks. It's a thing.) The problem is that whoever is manning the music station will often hit "shuffle" which I'm not sure is any better...you'll then get country music mixed in with oldies like the Rolling Stones and the Carpenters (I like both of those, so that's fine) along with some really random current pop music that often is whatever song I hate the most on the radio at the moment. You know, it can't be something like Sia or Ed Sheeran, no. It has to be Miley Cyrus or Chris Brown. And if you know me, you know I am incredibly sensitive to music: it can have a major effect on both my state of mind and performance. (More on that in a minute.)

So on this particular day, we were on the last exercise of a Death by Leg Day session which had ramped up to this monster Drop Set from Hell on the leg press machine that involved twelve 25-lb plates for a grand total of 300 lbs as the starting point. I was three drop sets from the end, and had my eyes closed so I could push through the burning fire that had consumed my entire body by then, when the song Never Be The Same by Camila Cabello came on the speakers right behind my head.

That forced high-pitched voice in the second stanza is like nails on a chalkboard to me to me on a good day.

On this day, the burning in my body took on the form of rage at this song that now seemed to be playing with the sole intent of mentally defeating me when I was almost done with this exercise. My eyes flew open and I snarled, quite loudly, "THIS. SONG. CAN. BLOW ME!"

Trainer, who had been standing next to the machine to spot me, threw his head back and roared with laughter.

Yes, I am that comfortable around him.

Did I mention the part where the gym was pretty full on this day? It was. And the leg press machine is right smack in the middle of the gym. I got some shocked looks from the middle-aged crowd.

Whatever.

19. Speaking of sensitivity to music: synesthesia is yet another weird thing that runs in my family. My mother can, to a degree, taste what she touches. Bleach is like the worst thing that can fall on her skin because she can immediately feel it on her tongue as if she had outright licked it. So of course cleaning often involves gloves. In my case, I can sometimes see/feel sound. This has a name: chromesthesia, and is quite common. Music is a very powerful example of this: I associate music with colors. If I close my eyes, music makes me see colors. With my eyes open, if I think about it, I can feel the colors that the music invokes. Nope, I'm not tripping: this is my everyday existence. My mom read about this when I was little and had me do an exercise with it: she played instrumental music (it was Yanni at the time) and I was to paint the colors that I was hearing. I didn't like the exercise because it meant painting in abstract: I have always preferred figurative art. But it was a fascinating experience nonetheless, and one that was repeated every once in a while once I got the hang of it. Intuitive painting was good for me because I had to go completely off of what I was feeling through the music I was hearing, instead of what I was seeing in front of me or imagining in my head.

Now as an adult, music can be, for me, a full body, multi-sensorial experience depending on how profoundly it affects me. EDM can take my breath away: it's made to do that in people that are using ecstasy and/or LSD. I get to experience it sober. Bass beats, bass lines and guitar lines can make every hair on my body stand on end, depending on how it affects me...when this happens, it's crossing over into auditory-tactile synesthesia, which is considered very rare.

Lindsey Stirling's music has this effect. Every. hair. stands on end when I listen to her work. It can get overwhelming. 

Sarah McLachlan's music is another example. Featured here: Trainwreck from her Afterglow album, which I have on CD so I can play over and over when I feel like it.

I get obsessed with specific songs and I'll play them on a loop in the car or while working out (aka when I'm alone so as not to torture anyone else with my obsession...lol) until I hit whatever it is that makes me feel "full" from that specific song. There aren't really specific terms in the written language for describing any of this. I lean towards music that makes me see/feel deep blue-violet, black and indigo blue, but have been known to listen to music in the sky blue and yellow-green spectrum. How else do I describe that? I don't know. Right now I am absolutely fascinated by the Tom Kaos remix of Glass Animals' Toes. It is a velvety black background with burnt orange dapples and streaks of emerald green sparkling throughout. Each bass beat creates silver ripples that overlaps with the ripples of the next bass beat. I love closing my eyes and rowing on the rowing machine to it when warming up.

Toes. I also really like the bizarre imagery of the lyrics. The song is based on The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Another example: I have zero tolerance for Nirvana because they are huge fans of using discordant notes in their music. Listening to their guitar lines makes me want to climb up a wall. It's upsetting. Carlos teases me about it but changes the station anytime Nirvana happens to play on the radio.

In my situation, not all music causes chromesthesia/auditory-tactile synesthesia to this extent. Instrumental music is more likely to have this effect, though the combination of voice and choice of instruments can also make this happen. Sometimes I just really like the lyrics of a song (like a "normal" person). Sometimes I really like a song because it just makes me want to get up and dance (also like a "normal" person.) Just because I like to dance to a genre doesn't mean I like listening to it: I love dancing to merengue and salsa but you'll never catch me listening to it for funsies. I do have entire stations on Pandora that have been carefully curated for how the selections make me feel.

Depending on who you ask, synesthesia is sometimes classified as a neurological condition, except it doesn't really affect normal daily function so it's not a disease process per se. It's just a variance of perception. I'm sure it's linked to the same neurological condition that makes me cringe every time I hear snoring or someone chewing noisily: both of those things make me want to jump out a window.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about chromesthesia (Link here). It's pretty accurate:

Another common form of synesthesia is the association of sounds with colors. For some, everyday sounds such as doors opening, cars honking, or people talking can trigger seeing colors. For others, colors are triggered when musical notes or keys are being played. People with synesthesia related to music may also have perfect pitch because their ability to see/hear colors aids them in identifying notes or keys.^[22]

The colors triggered by certain sounds, and any other synesthetic visual experiences, are referred to as photisms.

According to Richard Cytowic,^[5] chromesthesia is "something like fireworks": voice, music, and assorted environmental sounds such as clattering dishes or dog barks trigger color and firework shapes that arise, move around, and then fade when the sound ends. Sound often changes the perceived hue, brightness, scintillation, and directional movement. Some individuals see music on a "screen" in front of their faces. For Deni Simon, music produces waving lines "like oscilloscope configurations – lines moving in color, often metallic with height, width and, most importantly, depth. My favorite music has lines that extend horizontally beyond the 'screen' area."

Individuals rarely agree on what color a given sound is. B flat might be orange for one person and blue for another. Composers Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov famously disagreed on the colors of music keys.

I don't like creating abstract art but can appreciate it from others. Kandinsky is my favorite abstract artist: he is considered the first purely abstract artist. Not surprisingly, Kandinsky had synesthesia and this is what helped him create his work.

I didn't realize any of this was unusual until recently. It's all just part of my normal everyday existence. *shrug* I do think all of this is more common than people want to admit.

And now you understand (I think?) what I mean when I talk about how music makes me feel. It's a pretty profound thing.

Fun fact: Carlos has the chromesthesia version of synesthesia too. We're all freaks in my world, apparently. Like attracts like?


20. I have one of those faces that shows everything I'm thinking, and then my body language will inadvertently confirm it. It's irritating as all get-out because I have no such thing as a poker face. Once you learn what my expressions mean, you can basically read my mind. Interestingly, none of my female friends have ever picked up on this to its full extent. They can tell when something bothers me but that's kind of it: I can usually talk my way out of it. My mom is the only woman I know that can read me like a book, but then again she is my mom. And she's also an empath so she could also feel when I was up to something. Nothing like your own mother being able to feel your emotions to keep you straight-laced growing up! (My life is crazy weird guys, mmkay?)

Maybe I'm just surrounded by some really perceptive, sensitive guys, but my brother, my grandfather, my riding instructor Ron, Carlos, my mentor Dr. C, Mark when we boarded together in Florida, Alexei back when I worked with him in Surgery, and now Trainer have all picked up on this with an accuracy that is nearly hair-raising. It means I can't lie, which means I am forced to be the real me around them because there is nothing I can hide. It's not a bad thing, honestly. I can be as goofy, nerdy, awkward, potty-mouthed or outrageous as I want without being judged.

21. When I was in college, I used to paint my fingernails a different color every day and would often match my nails to my clothes. (The matchy-matchy game has always been strong in this one...) I loved shocking colors like black and metallic silver and dark blue and glitter and crackle effects. Once I was working in the real world, that stopped because I just didn't have time for it anymore. Working in the veterinary field now, it is impossible to keep my nails painted for more than a day because of the rubbing alcohol. So I paint my toenails instead, in the same array of wild colors.


22. I've only ever had three pedicures at a salon/spa/whatever you call it. The first one was for my wedding at age 29. I love transforming but girly-girl, I really am not.


23. I LOVE MY SHORT HAIR. LOVE. IT. The shorter the better, and I've only half-joked about one day shaving it all off for funsies. I had it down to below-waist length until I was 16 years old.

Me at age 14 with my super long ponytail.
I rarely had it loose because I had SO MUCH HAIR that it just made me hot. In the tropics it took forever to dry after washing it: I'd have to blow-dry it to make sure it didn't stay damp for days. Drying it was an hour-long ordeal. I'd read a book while sitting on the bed blow drying my hair. Not even joking.

Age 16 with long hair, loose for once because both of these pics were taken over the holidays when family was visiting. I also had braces. You can't see the glasses because this was around the time I started wearing contact lenses. Yes, I was SUPER nerdy! (And you can see the degree to which my brother has been my lifelong sidekick.)

And then one other girl in my class grew her hair out that same length and I was like, "Nope! There can be only one!" So at age 17 I had it all chopped off instead because, while a life-long introvert, I have always liked standing out in subtle ways. I was the first girl in my class to have hair as short as a boy's...and I loved it even more than I had thought I ever would. I have never fully grown it out since and have no intention of ever doing so. It's awesome to be able to just wash it and go! Fortunately, Carlos loves the way it looks short. Not that it would change anything if he didn't: I look better with short hair.

My dream haircut at the moment is something this edgy:

Long bangs...

...and sides shaved in a fade.
Yes, that would be a faux hawk.
I want.

I'm just slowly growing the balls to outright ask for it! :D

24. Back in PR, I went through a phase where I experimented with shocking-colored highlights in my hair. Brunette is a pretty common hair color there so I didn't want to be one more in a million. My favorite color for my hair was crayon red. I did the highlights myself that first time, and they came out fantastic. #artist The occasion? A Halloween rave in the Ocala woods with Carlos (we were in our long-distance relationship at the time), the same one where he asked me to be his girlfriend that would set our anniversary date in stone for forever.

I didn't get to play around with this again until we moved to Maryland, where they don't care as much about that kind of thing in the veterinary community as they did in Florida. (I worked at a place where your hair color had to be "natural" and tattoos had to be covered up if you had them.)

I started out with crayon-red highlights (Carlos had been begging for their comeback for years):

Return of the red highlights. Done by myself.

It has now morphed into whatever the hell I feel like when I walk into my favorite salon to get my hair cut. My stylist is a riot and she gets excited about some of the whacked ideas I come up with color-wise. My hair is so dark naturally that you kind of have to see me up close in just the right light to notice anyway. I only highlight the top layers, and sometimes only my bangs, not my whole head. And because I'm low maintenance and sometimes two months will go by between haircuts, I tend to stick to colors that fade well, like red, copper, and caramel: most of them, except for the deepest reds, ultimately end up some shade of blonde anyway.

Hanging out with Shanna at Alive @ Five with my blonde highlights

I would love to do blue or purple but they don't fade well on my hair. I currently live vicariously through the many colors of Funder's mohawk.


25. I dream in color, and I am also bilingual in my dreams. If I know you in English and I dream about you, I will speak to you in English in the dream. I know a few bilingual people that only dream in their first language. There is this coast that I go to in dreams when I'm troubled. I used to meet Carlos there when I first realized I was madly in love with him but that at that point in time, it just wasn't going to work. We would walk along the shore and just talk. To this day, I still dream about that coastline's beaches when I'm worried or profoundly upset about something going on in my life. I've gone there to say good-bye to people that mean a lot to me when they're about to step out of my life, or to try to resolve some major issue with them. This is all probably a dream manifestation of the fact that I need to go to water when I need inner peace, but I know that coastline like the back of my hand from having dreamed about it for the last 28 years or so (these coastline dreams started when I was in my late teens.) The real life beaches that look like it the most are those of Hatteras in the Outer Banks.

Hatteras, near the lighthouse. I cried when I first saw it. This is very different from Puerto Rico's beaches, and it was my first time seeing a beach that looked like the ones I'd been dreaming of for over two decades.

I felt like I had come home.

I sometimes have premonition dreams. They are unexpected and uncontrollable, and they are distinctly different from "regular" dreams in that in premonition dreams I am a bystander, simply observing events happening around me, like a ghost in the room whom no one knows is there. In the dream I can vividly feel what every person is feeling as if I was that person, which is why I don't need to interact with anyone in order to know what is truly going on under the surface. They tend to be incredibly real: I'll wake up from them and have a minute where it's difficult to distinguish the dream from current reality.

Every. single. premonition dream I have ever had has come true later. My mom used to call me "The Oracle" when I was a kid. I've made the mistake of telling people about my premonition dreams in the hopes that the dreams won't come true, and have instead succeeded at freaking out some of my closest friends. Jess is always saying that she hopes I never have a dream with her in it.

It's not a fun thing to have. Superpowers are so overrated.


26. I chose to be homeschooled my senior year of high school so that I could ride all the time: I had serious Olympic dreams at the time and a trainer willing to take me there. Except said trainer was assaulted in a hotel room and shot in the head. He should have died but he survived...with permanent brain damage. He was never the same again. "Devastated" doesn't even begin to cover it. My terrible fear of voicing Big Plans in advance started with this event. So I picked up the Sea Scouts instead, which led to all sorts of honest-to-God adventures (like the one where we were legit stranded on a deserted island for 4 days, which I've mentioned before). The Sea Scouts is where I really got to know, and fall in love with, Carlos. Again: things happen for a reason.


27. I took a semester of Latin my senior year of high school. It was a homeschool elective. The Latin was enormously helpful when I switched to vet tech since so much medical terminology is Latin-based. I also took three semesters of French in college and was 75%  fluent in it as my third language. Most of my conversational French has fallen by the wayside from disuse but I can still understand written French pretty well. "Voiture" (car) and "l'oisseau" (the bird) are my two favorite French words. I don't know why; I just like the way they roll off the tongue.


28. I used to enjoy going to the movies a LOT and would have an endless list of films I wanted to see at the theater. It was easy because when I lived in PR $5 was all you needed to get in. My brother and I would do our own sibling movie dates when we were both single. We'd go to Plaza Las Americas (the biggest mall in the San Juan metropolitan area and one of our favorite hangouts) to one of those assorted candy stands where you buy whatever you want by weight, and we'd each get a pound of candy to munch on while watching our movie of choice (milk chocolate break-up and red Swedish fish were my faves). We would walk out of the theater afterwards with massive sugar highs and then step into the Borders bookstore across from the movie theater so we could sit in their cafe reading books and sipping fancy lattes.

With my brother, not at the movies: doing homework in Mom's classroom at La Liga de Arte on a Saturday. My brother was my sidekick.

When I moved to Florida, Carlos's and my idea of a perfect date night was sneaking a bottle of wine into the movie theater and bouncing around from one movie to another for the entire evening. Now it's just too expensive, so we rarely go to the movies anymore.



29. I debated writing this one, but I am because it's a silly, minor thing that gave me SO MANY HANGUPS and maybe reading this will help someone else.

I have had keratosis pilaris on my upper arms for my entire life. I get it from my dad, who also has it. It used to make me super self-conscious as a teen and I hated wearing sleeveless tops because of it. I've gone to dermatologists and tried every prescription (and non-prescription) topical acne medication/scrub/soap/ointment/whatever under the sun for it. I eventually just gave up and decided to stop caring so much about. It's a pretty common issue: it didn't bother me when I noticed it on someone else, so why should I care so much about having it? Tank tops and camisoles are now my favorite thing to wear. Going on the birth control pill didn't make a difference but it did improve to a degree when I went gluten-free. It just didn't disappear entirely. It improves more when I'm eating low carb in general. Sun exposure is the only thing that truly makes it nearly disappear: this is one of the main reasons why I like being as tan as I am in the summer. Even then, it is very noticeable when I'm hot (as in working out) because my upper arms get red. I give exactly zero fucks about it and continue wearing thin-strapped tank tops for working out anyway. Nobody cares.

Plus: I've got guns, yo. ;) Gotta show them off!

You can barely even see it in these pics. Transition of the color of my skin: June (early summer), August (late summer), and February (late winter). That middle pic is 100% my natural tan, achieved from days upon days of being outdoors (with sunscreen!) This triptych was originally meant to showcase my arm development over the course of 8 months, with far left being the "before."

30. I think you now know that I was the epitome of shy, awkward nerd in school. My favorite movie as a teenager was Grease with Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. I very secretly wanted to be like Sandy: the good girl that transformed into a hot badass that snagged the Bad Boy that changed for her.

Olivia Newton-John as Sandy in Grease, and the character's before & after.

"I got chills...they're multiplying!..."

That's not supposed to happen in real life. 

Or is it? :D

Tiny black dress? Check. Strappy heels? Check. And anyone that thinks Carlos is/was a saint...oh man, you have no idea HOW BAD that boy used to be! *rolls on the floor laughing* His ability for making me laugh and his naughtiness were a huge part of the allure.

I also dreamed of participating in one of my high school's Talent Shows and doing this on-stage performance that would make everyone's jaws drop. The kind of thing that blows people's minds because it's so unexpected. I just never knew what the hell I would do, so I never signed up.

It wasn't until recently that I realized I did that too!

(Talk about before & after when you compare the me at age 38 vs the me at age 24 in the pics with Carlos above...)