Recently Updated: 02.12.08

Well, it's not a blog anymore, that's for sure. (I took it way too seriously. It lasted 7 "seasons", for crying out loud. Seasons? I was the Creator and Executive Producer. There was a cast list... blah, blah.) This AFL, as of right now, is in a weird state of transition, but ultimately it will be All About Me. Oh, excuse me --- it will be about my writing. Sorry, slip of the tongue. Mmm... tongue.

There are times when I think that AFL has been a ridiculous undertaking, especially in comparison to the achievements of people I know from my past. I just heard that a girl I went to high school with is going into family medicine. Medicine! And one of my oldest friends is getting into law school. If I had applied myself more, could I have made a good doctor or lawyer instead of a perpetual blogger? (Scratch that. I worked in the legal industry long enough to know that it isn't the world for me.)

I started the old blog itself back in 2000. I was in high school at the time, and I didn't know nothing from nothing. I still don't, but I'd like to think that I've learned a thing or two since then about life.

And what, pray tell, are one or two of those things or two that I may or may not have learned? You might not be able to tell so easily from those old blog entries (which will probably remain hidden, for the most part, until I decide when it might be a lark to unleash them again), but through all those convoluted thoughts and feelings, maybe I've become a little more mannered and measured. Maybe life isn't one big melodrama anymore. I'm still young (for as many years there are left in this ongoing syndrome known as the Quarter Life), but I'm a little more seasoned. I was wild back then. Impulsive. Stupid, is more like it. Yeah, stupid. And less stupid now. It's all about picking your battles. And being less stupid.

What do frogs have to do with all of this? In my last months of high school, I got sucked into a Jesus Freak craze. Adolescence, plus the stress of applying to college, had turned my world upside down and I was convinced that my life was beyond salvation; that is, until Christianity came along. (Or rather, one version of Christianity, which so happened to be too conservative and narrow for the kind of person I was becoming.) In January, during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, I went to a religious retreat that changed my life, at least momentarily. By the end of the retreat, I was crying my eyes out and convinced that anyone who wasn't "Christian" was evil.

I've since grown out of that phase, although Christianity is still the base of my faith. In fact, I identify more with Catholicism, which is the religion I was born into, and I respect Catholicism for it's importance as tradition in my family. These days I've combined my faith with facets of other spiritual beliefs, but back in my senior year of high school, Christianity was the only way to go. When I came up with the name of my diary, I thought back to my Bible study days from when I was just a kid of eleven years old. Back then, one of my mom's best friends had been transformed into a Born Again Christian, and she was desperately seeking to "save" me and my family. From what I saw, my mom never seemed to buy into anything that wasn't Catholic, but she did make me attend these Born Again Bible study groups.

The Bible studies were terrifying. Although I studied such traditional fare as Noah and the Flood, David and Goliath, and Jesus and the Gospels, the main focus seemed to be on the end of the world. I remember the prayers we would recite at the end of each group. The youth pastor would say things like, "And Lord, if the world should end tomorrow, may you lift us up into Heaven..." As I stood there with my eyes closed, holding hands with the others in my prayer circle, all I could imagine was the sight of bombs dropping and buildings exploding while the spirits of us "Christians" floated obliviously into the sky. I wanted to be one of those "saved" Christians, yet at the same time, I could never quite suppress my worry about the zillions of others who, through no fault of their own, had no chance to become educated about the faith. Imagine being afraid of all of this each and every week, at the close of Bible study, which would end as soon as night fell. (The worst part was watching the movie A Thief in the Night, a hokey 1970's precursor to the Left Behind series.)

According to the pastor, when the Saved Christians arrived in Heaven, their souls would be cleansed from the drudge of worldly life that was similar to frogs arriving from a muddy swamp. So that's where the frog reference came from: in high school, I saw myself as my pastor's version of a frog, my soul simply waiting for the day when it would be gloriously cleansed. Do they have industrial-strength ammonia in heaven? Lemon-scented, preferrably.

Below: (some of) the many faces of AFL