Lo Larocque

My life has improved since last year... I think

2007-01-04T14:37:00.001-09:00

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8.5
Mind:	7.5
Body:	8.6
Spirit:	8.8
Friends/Family:	6.5
Love:	6.9
Finance:	7.4
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

I will try to update more - I will!

2007-01-04T14:23:00.000-09:00

Hi. I have not written on this in OVER A YEAR. My friend Katie went to Africa, and over three days of travel she wrote two entries. I'm much more of a slacker. A refined slacker, I must say, as I am including a picture finally.

Update: I work for the University of Colorado at Boulder doing Human Resources work. I love it. I think it is the path I was meant for. I am no longer seeing Les. However, before this new turn, we went to Indian Creek, Utah (see photo) for Thanksgiving to camp, climb and eat a crazy camping T-day feast.

I will desperately try to be more like my friend Jeff M. in NC and write more. But not political rants - I'll leave that to "Heffe," as we call him. Jon, Carrie, Liam and unknown Howard #4 will be visiting in March, and hopefully so will Jeff, Kelly and Graham. That remains to be seen. Mom still loves it here and Claire and Suzanne are now here too.

Hope all is well with you and yours.

My life rating

2005-11-01T14:50:00.000-09:00

I think this is supposed to be prophetic about this time in my life. Or just really silly. Either way, I was entertained while I took this quiz:

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.9
Mind:	7.2
Body:	8
Spirit:	7.1
Friends/Family:	6.5
Love:	6.9
Finance:	7.1
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

What does all this mean? Here:
Your Life Analysis:

Life: Your life rating is a score of the sum total of your life, and accounts for how satisfied, successful, balanced, capable, valuable, and happy you are. The quiz attempts to put a number on the summation of all of these things, based on your answers. Your life score is reasonably high. This means that you are on a good path. Continue doing what is working and set about to improve in areas which continue to lag. Do this starting today and you will begin to reap the benefits immediately. (Read more on improving your life)

Mind: Your mind rating is a score of your mind's clarity, ability, and health. Higher scores indicate an advancement in knowledge, clear and capable thinking, high mental health, and pure thought free of interference. Your mind score is within a healthy zone. This means you have achieved a level of mental balance and harmony consistent with living a healthy, happy life. Continue doing what works, and keep your focus. In our fast-paced world, mental clutter is all too common. Be vigilant in maintaining healthy mental function.

Body: Your body rating measures your body's health, fitness, and general wellness. A healthy body contributes to a happy life, however many of us are lacking in this area. You have a rather good body score, which is an indication that you take care of yourself. There is room for improvement, however. Please keep doing what works. Eat right, exercise, reduce your stress, treat any illness. Doing these things will help ensure your body will be in good working order for a long time to come.

Spirit: Your spirit rating seeks to capture in a number that elusive quality which is found in your faith, your attitude, and your philosophy on life. A higher score indicates a greater sense of inner peace and balance. Your spirit score is relatively high, which means you are rewarded by your beliefs. Spirituality is clearly important to do. Never let it slip, and continue to learn and grow.

Friends/Family: Your friends and family rating measures your relationships with those around you, and is based on how large, healthy, and dependable your social network is. Your friends and family score is not bad but can be improved. Maintain your current social net, while you try to expand it. Try new things and form new friendships. You will be rewarded greatly.

Love: Your love rating is a measure of your current romantic situation. Sharing your heart with another person is one of life's most glorious, terrifying, rewarding experiences. Your love score is in good shape, meaning that things are going well. Do all you can to maintain it, and continue to grow and move ahead.

Finance: Your finance rating is a score that rates your current financial health and stability. You have a rather good financial score, which is not all that common these days. Keep doing what works. Avoid common pitfalls and save for the future. You will be glad you did.

Today or tomorrow?

2005-10-21T10:34:00.000-09:00

After hanging out with my friend Jen last night, I just realized something especially elating. Friends are wonderful. They help us not only relate to the world we are in, but they help us relate to ourselves - to see the inner sanctum of who we are and what we mean to the world. I realize this is a silly subject to write about, but I am determined to make some sense of my life here. I have been blessed with a large quantity of completely fantastic individuals that comprise my friends. My father used to say that you will only ever be able to count your "friends" on one hand. In my case, I have to say my dad was wrong. He was never close to anyone in his life and even struggled to keep a closeness with my mom due to the loss of his identical twin. My mom and I read excerpts from a book about it in order to bring some sort of closure about the man we all loved to much. My father could get so angry. Not in any harmful way; just a way that let us know he was carrying pain inside. He was sick and in so much pain, but the largest amount of pain he carried was the loss of Dale.

Since I never had that kind of pain, I feel lucky in that I have always been able to open up and relate to those people I trust. I trust a lot of people, and perhaps that might be dangerous to some, but it hasnever been that way for me. I can count my friends on both hands and both feet. I am filled with their love and care, and I hope to fill them with mine. There are people in my life that I meet and know they will be an integral part of my life. Eva, for example. She and I knew we'd be best friends from the moment one of us dropped a pencil in class (I'm not sure which of us,) and the other picked it up. "Hey, I'm Eva" came out and we were attached from that moment on. Sometimes when either of us are especially sad or down, the other calls, as if we felt their need for us rising. After talking to Jen over tea and letting out tidbits of emotions in stories and grasping some sort of understanding about our town, our world from one another, we left feeling especially grand about letting go and letting out. Feelings, opinions, stories... they come rushing through us and we tell them to each other as if for the first time. But they're not the first time, and nor will they be the last. They are all part of this universal language of closeness. We desire to be close to something we can label as "real." That's what friends are: Real. And in their presence we feel real, and it feels amazing. Closest thing to a daily ritual I will have: connect to a friend today. Change our world tomorrow.

Mayhem. Madness. Spiritual Experience.

2005-10-17T15:33:00.000-09:00

Mamooshka is arriving in T minus 1 day and questionably few hours. GiGi is in attendance with her (My G-ma - entitled GiGi due to her Great Grandmotherly status...) It will be a lovely day in Boulder - perfect weather.

Never question that life has a plan. My mom is proof of that - I'm so happy to know she made such a huge cross-country move in her life even though she was scared at first. She's so brave! I now know that anything (be it circumstance, decisions, changes) which seems questionable for us in the present, seems to always end up the way it should be. I learned that lesson today. Hooray fate, Hooray change, Hooray beer. (a brilliant ad campaign...)

Nonetheless, life is madness, mayhem, and random spiritual experiences.

I am a slacker.

2005-08-30T16:45:00.000-09:00

Wow - 5 months later and I'm just now putting up a new post. What's new? Not too much, but some big things have been in the works...

I just bought a condo in Boulder. It's purty and I'm very happy with it. The City of Boulder and some crazy mortgage company took pity on me and helped me get a condo. Congrats to them for being so bamboozled as to my net worth. Yee-haw.

I'm in a play right now at Openstage Theatre in Ft. Collins. www.openstage.com It's my favorite Oscar Wilde play, with my favorite part-- I'm Mabel in An Ideal Husband. I just got another acting job for a graduate psychology student's thesis project at CSU in Ft. Collins that pays pretty well, at least well enough that I feel like a film actor. I'll be a graduate student interviewing for a teaching assistanceship. It's really too bad they did not have any need for gay male cats, because I have a feeling Andre would have been a shoo-in. (See how I can tie in my last post from 5 months ago? - oh, so clever!) AND I will be helping a friend in Boulder film a movie. I hope to be the producer, but will Ray be sorry he ever asked me to participate? Of course! It's a great script, which Ray wrote himself, and we're coming along in the process pretty well thus far. Perhaps I shall write new posts strictly about the movie. They'll be entitled "Things you should never do while trying to film a movie." I'm sure I'll be an expert in the "oh shit" handbooks soon.

All of the above paragraphs have started with "I," so you can see I'm still vain and self-centered. I know many of you already knew that and aren't surprised. (Who's the many? No one reads this thing..)

For my birthin' day I went to the large metropolis that is Cedar Rapids to visit the pregnant Carrie and Jon. They gave me a wonderful birthday weekend while I tried my best to convince them to move to Boulder. My plan of making everyone I love move here will continue, so don't think I'll stop...

Mamooshka (my mommy) will be moving here in two months! Mover #1 is successful. Isn't that just awesome? She will live in Boulder and I will finally have some where to do my laundry! Okay - just kidding - I'm a responsible homeowner who just bought a "laundry center," so I will no longer burden my mom and will stop shipping out my laundry to her in NC.

The cats are well. Andre is still gay because he flirted with my friend Patrick yesterday. (It's actually "Pat" - but I thought I'd have to explain that he is not ambiguously asexual. At least not that I know of...) I think Dre feels more open about his gayness now.

I hear-tell that the rest of the Larocque clan are well. Cris is in complete Tile Heaven as his plans to remove all carpet from his condo and replace it with tile continues. Dale got a new jobby job working in the aviation industry on those briliant little things called Black Boxes. Del is happy as a clam in CT where he is stationed now that the naval base is not going to be closed. I'd say more, but then he'd have to kill me. Suzanne and Joe have gotten approval status for financial assistance from the VA to eventually buy a house. Sweet. I need to talk to Jesse to find out his status.

That's it! More to come, although who knows when. I am a slacker.

My Cat Andre

2005-03-24T12:50:00.000-09:00

Andre has been keeping a secret from me. I want to to tell the world, because I feel that he has not told me the truth all along, and now that he has- well, who better to share it with?

I always wondered why Andre was so smart, and charming, and well-bred. Sometimes he gets into trouble, and well, let's face it, Andre can be really sweet, but he seems to pick fights with his sister Leu a lot. Where does this aggression come from? I found out at the vet.

It seems that in order to take a kitty's temerature, the vet has to insert the thermometer into the unmentionable area. And when Andre had his temperature taken, well folks - I know this will be hard to believe - Andre started purring. It turns out that Andre is... gay.

So that's it. Andre has unchecked aggression due to the fact that he's been trying to keep this secret for so long, and perhaps Leu had found out about it before he was ready to tell. I'll never know.

Now we can all sleep better at night knowing that Andre is out of the closet.

Ski Trip!

2005-03-23T11:37:00.000-09:00

And now for the WAY overdue post! Dale and Cris came to ski and visit with me a few weekends ago, and we had a blast! We stayed and skiied at Breckenridge, which got the most snow of any resort the weekend they were up. In fact, Breckenridge got a total of 10" of snow while we were there.

So the skiing was great, but the company was even better. We told lots of family stories, and of course made fun of each other. If you see Cris, ask him how is the Colorado vodka, anyway? They got to see where I work, where I live, the kids (Dre and Leu - no oher kids as of now...) and met some of my friends. The best part, I must say, was skiing with Dale on Monday. We went to Peak 7 at Breckenridge - hard to get to, but absolutely worth it!

In fact, there may be a plan in the works in regards to getting the whole Larocque family to go on a ski trip next year.... Perhaps Mom will be out here by then, so there'll be two Colorado locals to visit!

Work has been insanely busy, as per normal, but I don't really have any excuses as to my poor communication. I heard from Eva the other day, and Jackson Lee McLean is a full 20 pounds now! Who knew he could be so big, so fast. He turns one in May!

I have decided I want to be either a professional skiier or mountain bike racer - we'll see how this season pans out. This way I can get *free* gear and mucho time to pursue outdoor activities. No pressure; I just have to be the best.

I'll be in NC soon - for Jeff and Kelly's wedding! They're tying the knot in Waynesvegas and we'll be doing tons of celebrating. Not to mention celebrating Jackson's first birthday as well, and Memorial Day - it's going to be a full week.

Hope to see you all then, but before I do I'll give more updates as they arrive. Oh, by the way, I have decided that boys are not good for me at all right now. So don't expect me to be coming home to NC with a boyfriend or anything; I like being single right now :)

Random Notes from CO

2005-03-07T17:05:00.000-09:00

So - my family is wonderful. Really, they are. Two brothers and one sis have decided to post blogs! Here they are:

Jesse is at www.jessedog.blogspot.com
Del (Darrell) is at www.monsieurl.blogspot.com
Lesli is at http://leslilarocque.blogspot.com

Check them out; they are really cool. I, however, have not figured out the best way to post pictures yet, as you can see. But the day will come soon, I promise.

Work is going exceedingly well. I have no complaints. I went to downtown Denver Saturday and had too much fun. The architecture is amazingly different from anything I have ever seen. Of course, living on the east coast my whole life did not prepare me for seeing a town full of buldings built after 1900. We get so used to certain types of buildings back east that new architecture seems surreal.

One local news item I've been meaning to write about is a professor in the Ethnic Studies department who has come under fire for several weeks now over a sentence he wrote. Ward Churchill currently teaches at CU Boulder, (the University of Colorado at Boulder for those not in with the Boulder slang,) and was the head of the Ethnic Studies Department at CU until recently. He holds lectures around the US often, as his primary focus is Native American Studies, and was commissioned to speak at a college in New Hampshire several weeks ago. Before he was scheuled to appear, however, a professor (or was it the dean?) at the school read an essay of Churchill's published in 2001 after September 11. He cancelled Churchill's lecture on the grounds of one line in a very long essay that compared (as this NH prof/dean put it) 9/11 victims to "little Eichmanns" who deserved to die.

As you can see, this caused quite a stir. How can an Ethnic Studies professor, a man who has championed the rights of Native Americans year after year say something so terrible? Some of the community and some students went crazy. One reporter from the Denver Post glommed on to the story and never let up. In fact, here's a quote from the Denver Post that sums up their position, dated Feb. 26, 2005:

"Since it was first reported that Churchill, a CU ethnic studies professor, had demonized some of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the university has faced relentless scrutiny of its hiring practices and faculty qualifications. Churchill has undergone an extensive media review of his scholarship, artwork and genealogy, while everyone from radio talk-show hosts to syndicated newspaper columnists have questioned his integrity, his ancestry and his military career."

Wow. Political backlash at its best. What concerns me about this whole thing is the actual whiplash from one essay WRITTEN OVER THREE YEARS AGO. Three actions of the backlash: 1) Ward Churchill resigned as Head of the Ethnic Studies Department. 2) The insane reporters from the Denver Post have questioned Ward Churchill's Native American Heritage, saying he is not Cherokee. 3) The reporters have questioned his military background. See how #'s 1 thru 3 have nothing to do with that darn essay he wrote three years ago? In fact, I guess I haven't mentioned it yet, but Ward Churchill's "Eichmann" sentence has been taken out of context. For the real, actual essay - if you're interested - please see: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html

For a summary of the essay and the "demonizing" sentence: Churchill was saying that the powers of the US, or the "Christian West," have constantly been attacking the Middle East, or the "Islamic East," for years, through several presidents, and the terrorists saw the buildings of the Pentagon and the Twin Towers as military targets-- not all who were inside were innocent civilians in the terrorists' eyes.

I find it fascinating that the First Ammendment has been ignored. I find it fascinating that a Native American Studies professor has had his Native blood challenged over a single sentence in an essay that had nothing to do with Native Americans. My favorite comment from Ward Churchill's mouth after this entire wreck of a situation: "Native Americans are the only race who have to prove their blood like dogs." How apropos.

This is my diatribe for now. I suggest you read some other Ward Churchill essays, especially an essay about cultural anthropologist Robert Thomas on the CU website: http://www.colorado.edu/EthnicStudies/faculty/w_churchill.html

My opinion, (as we know everyone has one) is that Ward Churchill has gotten a very raw deal.

Beginnings

2005-03-04T09:51:00.000-09:00

Since I am horrible about ongoing communication, I have decided to set up this mighty effort to restructure my multiple scant communications to the few in a mass device for all. In other words, I'm lazy. Not just in communication, but slackness in general. However, after meeting a marvelously connected and intelligent friend named Jacob at Sundance this year, I now know all that setting up a blog spot is e-a-s-y. Thanks Jacob!

As most of you know, I live in Boulder, Colorado now - home of the Republic of Boulder. It is here where an overwhelmingly white majority try to focus on the voices of the minorities everywhere. Sound odd? It is.

But more to the point, I have updates. I work for an awesome advertising firm in downtown Boulder, Greenhouse Partners. Colorado is home to many outdoor sports and I am trying them all. Acting in the big CO has eluded me thus far, but be prepared for updates on gigs I may get soon... I miss acting very much and I can't believe it has been almost a year since my last play, Cyrano, in Charlotte. I am no longer with Jeff, but things are looking up. I'm at work right now, typing this, and loving that it is 60 degrees outside and a walk to the local hot dog stand is timed for 1:00 pm GMT. Ya gotta love Colorado blue skies and sunshine. We get 300 days of sunshine a year. Jealous?

One person who is not jealous is my Mommy. Why not? Because she is moving out here. Yes folks, another Larocque will be joining the Colorado faction, but it's up to me to try to steer here out here sooner rather than later - right Mom? Added bonus: two fantastic Larocque siblings will be out here shortly to visit at the same time! Dale Larocque will be travelling from heat-ridden Florida, and Cris Larocque is coming from North Cakalacky where both willl enjoy two fantastic days of skiing. I AM SO EXCITED! (Plus it's another chance to work on talking more family into moving out here.... beware!) T-minus 8 days and counting!

Jesse Larocque will be finally be living in the same country as his fiance Ivy (hopefully!) very soon now. Suzanne Larocque-Tetrault is in the huge metropolis that is Marshville, NC with little Claire and husband Joe -all doing quite well in their new digs, I hear. Darrell is in the Navy, on loan to the Air Force, and in Turkey. Confused? Yeah, we are too.

So we're all well. I hope that this may eventualy be a group forum for the Larocque Clan to post our journals of woe and wonder, but for now I am the lone pioneer. I hope you all can join me soon; feel free to post comments, questions, and whatever crazy sentences you've always wished to write.

I hope all who read this are well, happy, and healthy.