C'è il profumo della vita nel caffè
To boldly go..
We are so clever, looking back.
Seeing things with extreme clarity, judging ourselves and others equally harsh
but also forgetting so many of the errors we made in favor of the glamour of the past.
It always comes back to this. Past versus present.
But now it is all about the future and I am not used to it.
I am all about the futile hoping. I am shyly waiting around. I, the hopeless romantic.
But now I have to raise my glance, look to the future and step into it
I will, indeed, go confidently in the direction of my dreams.
Thoreau uses all the right words:
- How vain is it to sit down to write, when you have not stood up to live?-
Now is the time to live. This may not last, but this is now.
Forever is composed of nows.
V for Vendetta
There's a bitter sweetness in receiving calls from old lovers
in realizing that they are understanding for the first time what they have lost.
And there's a relief in the moment you let go of all your complexes
accepting what you thought was perfection, was really destruction.
It is a sort of self-affirmation, although it doesn't come from yourself
and somehow it means more than the affirmation you can provide for yourself.
Is my happiness never really complete unless I can rub it it someone else's face?
Can my success ever be fully satisfactory unless it impresses someone who hurt me?
Why do we kid ourselves, calling us independent..
when we aren't even responsible for how we feel about our own accomplishments?
There are always those who say that life's no competition
funny that it's always the ones who aren't winning.
You play you win, you play you lose.
You play.
And hope that your victory will be seen
by the one who caused your failures.
bibliophile
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction,
a fascination, an absurdity, a fate.
It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet,
bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
viva la revolución?
All the struggle in the word
serves to remind me how minor my own stuff is
the things I call problems are just points of view, detours and time-lags.
Sometimes they are just my own thoughts,
which makes me feel vain and spoiled.
Thoughts now go to Egyptians, Tunisians, Algerians and the likes
who face their fear and demand what should have been given to them a long time ago.
The dream about another life is materializing for them
but the struggle is just beginning.
While we sit here and discuss how good it is that the riots are finally starting
picturing it as a necessary evil that comes right before democracy
But God knows how long the transition will be
and how bloody.
accidental hindsight, purposeful vision
open up new worlds.
I should know.
you know.
only,
there's no such thing as accidents
I make my own bed, he makes his.
he makes hers.
I tuck myself in,
wake up in a new world.
/No quiero ver lo que pase todos los dias afuera/
In a surreal world between facts and fiction. past and present.
yes, I get attached. Yes, it happens a lot.
Like, when you don't want to read the last page of a book,
cause you know you 'll have to go back to your own life.
Or when you've had a certain song on repeat for hours
and it's no longer just a song but the soundtrack of your life.
When you flip through photographs
of what seems like past lifetimes,
even though the smell is still there.
ah. the smell.
______________________________
Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated,
undetected and undetectable order;
but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.
inertia creeps
(things that creep: nostalgia & inertia)
I am confident that if we could find the andidote to the specific chemical
that illuminates the past and puts it on a pidestal,
there would be a great increase of success, happiness and self-realization in the world.
Just now, while doing laundry, of got to thinking of Vienna.
How I did my laundry in the bath tub for 2 months.
And horrified I found myself thinking fondly back and this primitive procedure.
Let me tell you, there's nothing romantic about zealously washing your underwear in the tub.
Nothing glorified about your room constantly filling up with wet clothes to dry,
with the constant smell of washing detergent.
But even so, I smile when I think about it.
like someone might when thinking about an old joke, a familiar face, a close friend
My memory is clearly distorted.
I am not surprised, but I am alarmed.
Erase/replace or Repeat/delete
The word is yours (mine)
No man is an island, this has been said and written many a times.
Inevitably, this means that nobody can be seen as completely independent,
not his personality nor his personal development; they are both fruits of his environment,
his network and the values to which he has been exposed.
As you might know by now, I am very much dependent on literature.
On the written word, stories, descriptions and alternatives of the so-called reality.
But contrary to so many other bibliophiles, I have not built my personal bubble
by surrounding myself with the great literary personas as my allies.
Holden Caulfield, Marian MacAlpin and Dorian Grey, though important protagonists in the stories I know so well,
are not the most valuable imprints I have chosen to take with me from their stories.
I indulge in the words.
I rarely remember the names of ficticious characters at all, but I can quote more phrases than I've read books.
As I re-read my favourite books, these phrases become my fellow conspirators, my friends.
I think of them often and fondly and gradually they became my own. It's not really stealing, is it?
It certainly is not intentional...
One day I merely find myself answering to an enigmatic question in the words of
Milan Kundera, Jeanette Winterson and Anaïs Nin.
Yet they feel like they arise from my soul.
Meaning is never absolute nor definitive.
and words are signifiers only.
My signified is my construction, even though I borrow the signs from the masters.
These are the special times
Big city life
nothing compares.
or perhaps really great Friendship.
So the two of them together; fireworks!
/To avoid discovery I stay on the run,
to discover myself
I stay on the run./
Merry Merry Christmas to
old and new friends,
near and far away,
past and present
These are the special times, treasure them.
our burden is our blessing
Amidst the high ideals and ambitious plans of De Gaulle that I have been concerned with lately,
I started reflecting over my own ideals and ambitions.
Now, I am only at the beginning of my life (mashallah...),
but I think I've managed to gain some useful experiences and insights along the way.
And I suddenly realized that the common denominator of those is hard work.
All the important things I've done in my "real life" have been really hard work. A few examples:
I slaved away for years at McDonald's for a bad salary and without gratification
I worked day and night as an au-pair in Italy for a very modest compensation
I definitely slaved for months as an entertainer for lazy Italian tourists and their spoiled Neapolitan brats.
I sold my 24-hour-day to the United Nations during my internship while simultaneously taking courses.
Now, this is not a bragging post.
Hold your horses, contemplation, analysis and conclusion will follow.
Just because I worked my ass off in a slave-like manner, that doesn't mean there were no benefits.
My UN internship was the very most rewarding time of my life, no matter how long my working days were and how tired I was in the morning. Getting dressed up and singing for a bunch of sunburnt Italians might not be the dream of my life, but the time at La Serra gave my self-esteem an enormous boost and I met some amazing people. As an au-pair I not only became immerged in the Italian culture, met my first love and mastered the Italian language; it was also- up until then- the best time of my life. And although it is difficult to see the clear positive side of working at McDonald's, it was my first real work experience which over time gave me some sort of work ethics, pride and even professionalism.
I don't want to go through life the light and easy way. I want to remain faithful to difficulty, because it makes us noble. But the trick is not to expose yourself to suffering and difficulty intentionally. For me, the most important thing is to find the positive parts. They say that if you can't do what you love, you must love what you do.
And maybe you can't love all of it, but they you better find that tiny part of it that you can love, because it is going to make all the difference. And even though I never consciously thought about this before, I think I just have that capacity to fall in love with whatever thing I have to do and it helps me be fully satisfied with whatever that is.
And,
The heavier the burden,
the closer our lives come to the earth;
the more real and truthful they become.
- Milan Kundera.
In vino veritas.
There is something braver than dying for the truth;
living without it.
Every step leads closer to reality and simultaneously further away from the past.
Finding all my previous motives growing increasingly unclear.
I've been thinking. All this business about the breaking.
"If he broke her, where would the pieces go?"
And I figured it out.
The breaking happened a long time ago and the pieces were scattered all over.
Flying about, dissolving into the air without me noticing it.
And not until now have they begun to gather again. Crawling back.
Every day I am finding more and more of them and the puzzle is getting big.
Bigger than before, stronger than before.
So, yes it's true.
All those silly things about getting better and not getting killed.
The clichés about creative destruction.
I am a revolution....
evolution
it drives scientists crazy
because change is literally the only constant in all of science
energy, matter; it's always changing,
morphing, merging, growing, dying.
It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural
The way we cling to the way things were instead of letting them be what they are.
The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones.
The way we insist on believing- despite every scientific indication-
that anything i this lifetime is permanent.
Change is constant.
How we experience change, that's up to us.
qué ironia
one moment we smile, trustingly, hopefully, knowingly.
the next we don't recognize each others features,
hiding away from one another as we are forced to walk the same streets,
to COEXIST in this world that is too small to escape.
We think we know someone, but all we ever know is what we want someone else to be
and sometimes what we want them to be, is what they want us to see.
I wanted to see, so I saw
In the end I saw too much, I saw the huge castle i the air.
You play, you win; you play, you lose, right?
But you play again.
And we choose our strategies to best prevent us from waking up in the morning
feeling like there's no reason to get up.
I chose mine.
You chose yours.
You play, you win; you play, you lose.
Vieni a vedere perché.
and I've said it enough times to make people's ears bleed.
But there's something about repeating something long enough
that makes you think maybe you're just trying to make it become true.
And even when it is true; you can't hide from things forever.
Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost.
Why is it that some things appear to us as black or white?
It's all or nthing, there can be no middle ground,
no compromises or due process.
What had begun as a comity of sovereign states had ended in invasion.
He had invaded me but who was arguing about the boundaries?
Contemplation in retrospect
I let it go too far. This stupid idea, this illusion of "What if?"
Illusions and What ifs are just a way of coping with disappointments
They are the mechanisms that allow us to escape the harsh reality
-What if we could put our lives on hold and meet somewhere inside of the world-
I let it become the truth, twisted my world so what was hopeless became possible
and everything else had to stand back and wait
I forgot about myself because I was busy looking for that park bench, that skyscrape, that mountain.
Would you meet me?
-It is better to entertain an idea
than to take it home to live with for the rest of your life.-
Now, I took it home alright.
I took it home and I built it a little nest in my bedroom.
Not realizing that there are no parks to put a bench in.
No city to build a skyscraper.
And no mountains anywhere in sight.
I write emotional algebra
Lately I haven't been writing well here. I am still adjusting.
Adjusting from having a unit of analysis to searching for one.
Time, so much time went to analyzing it,
writing about it, dissicating it, predicting it, interpreting it.
And passive aggressively describing it.
And so I've been struggling with how to proceed.
How do I get back to that level of contemplation?
How to reach so deep down again?
Can I write about something else? Can I think about something else?
It feels like something was unplugged and all the water ran out.
I am lighter, easier; but something went lost.
The copper coil of desire conducting my anger.
So, no. I am not angry.
- just a little void.
(temporary) relapse
- He's so fluffy, I'm gonna die!
Very Bearable Lightness
And since nothing has been released, I guess I must have repressed it.
Now, repression is never good.
then I thought about all those other times when I let things be released.
how good it felt even if I never achieved the desired effect.
About how a small witty blogpost can put so many things in motion.
All the drama.
I dont want it back.
Liberation is the key
and whether it's done through repression or release;todo queda en nada.
And my body is so much lighter.
