When I was a child, I used to be able to hear my heart beating when I lay down to sleep. The pressure created by the pulse of my heart in my veins pressed agains the insides of my ears and I`d hear the alternating vacuum inside my head. Back then my heart was closer to my head. This sound bothered me to the point where I couldn`t sleep. I stayed awake in bed, trying hard to concentrate, to slow down and perhaps stop that annoying sound I couldn`t comprehend. I had no idea that I`d die if it stopped.
In time, I learned to let my mind wander through other subjects, to keep me from paying attention to that sound. And eventually I`d fall asleep easily. And eventually, the problem became staying awake and not falling asleep. I completely forgot about that sound of my childhood.
Then last night, for the first time in a long while, I had a bout of insomnia. This time, the room was completely and utterly quiet. I noticed for the first time that the sound was gone. Nowadays it would have lulled me to sleep: rythmic sounds seems strangely soothing now. But I can only feel my heart through the pulse in my arm or in my chest. At times, after loads of physical activity, my whole body pulses. But I`ve never heard that sound again... Even though my heart screams, it is now too far from my head to be heard.

Another cloudy day.

I look out the window of the sixth floor down to the streets. There's a man walking a couple of dogs that are the same breed as Cowboy Bebop's Ein. I've seen them before. Sipping a cup of hot chocolate, I began to remember other interesting faces I've seen around.
I recently found a new, harder-but-cheaper route to the foundation. And it opened a new array of interesting faces to see each day. Theres a man on a newspaper stand on my way who looks ordinary, ignorant. One day I stopped to check out the magazines and we chatted briefly. What a voice... The kind you hear on the radio or on TV comercials. And I wondered what is he doing selling papers and magazines. What a waste...
On three or four occasions I ran into a blonde girl on those streets. Nothing too interesting about her except for the fact that she reminds me so vividly of the girls Renoir used to paint. Round cheeks, the soft skin, those strange eyes and lips that are, to me, Renoir's trademark.

Aside from that, nothing new. The cold keeps getting colder...

On the streets:
This week's cultural tip is the Monk's blog. The Monk is a journalism student at the university. He began his blog some time ago, around the same time we all began to blog. He began taking random pictures of things he found interesting, scenes of everyday life. But as his journalistic sense began to sharpen, he turned to more focused subjects, those things that outrage us and could be solved if people knew but are ignored by the big medias. All detailed through images that speak loudly and more directly than any written paragraph.

He is currently covering the situation of downtown residents who are getting evicted and brutalized by the police. A case that has been dismally covered in the big medias but obviously isn't getting much attention.

Fledgling journalists are so inspiring... Their outrage, their focus, their view of things, still untainted by corporate profits.

It's been a while, hasn't it??


What Finding Nemo Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ooh! Cool!


Red! Your eyes are red! You're a very distant
person, and you tend to hunger for power. In a
Manga, you'd be the sexy evil villan. Nothing
wrong with that, although you may want to think
about toning down the killing.


What Color Are Your Anime Eyes?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmm...

Para quem estudou comigo
Nem tudo está perdido na nossa antiga escola. Estive por lá hoje e recebi notícias de que nossa professora já foi operada e passa bem. Inclusive já encontra-se em casa. Agora é esperar para ver. No mais, apesar de todo o tom funesto de outros acontecimentos no colégio, há duas professoras que encontram-se em meses finais de gravidez! Lindas... E continuam trabalhando apesar do peso. Soube ainda que nossa professora de elétrica, que media seu tamanho em diâmetro, fez cirurgia de redução do estômago e já perdeu consideráveis quilos... Enfim, um post para quem estudou comigo.

Nesses dias, vovó me ajudou a ligar para um parente na Itália, para falar sobre a viagem no final do ano.
Primeira vez que presto atenção nela falando em italiano. Primeira vez que compreendo a conversa inteira. A voz dela, como a minha quado falo em espanhol, muda um pouco. Um tom diferente. E ela volta aos treze anos de idade, quando deixou a Itália para cair no meu país...

Inúteis divagações gramaticais:
Voltando da fundação de ônibus, há um cemitério com um grande muro branco por onde passo. No muro, há já algum tempo, foi pixada uma frase: Por que o ser e não o nada?. A frase, com sua filosofia barata, até conseguiu me entreter em alguns minutos de tédio no ônibus. Mas então, alguns dias depois, passei pelo mesmo muro pensando e inglês como faço às vezes. Quando vi a frase, fiquei perplexo. Como traduzir para o inglês esta frase?

Why be intead of nothing. Tradução literal. Mas obviamente não soa bem...

A resposta que salta à mente: To be or not to be?
Mas a verdade é que, no português, ler-se-ia: Ser ou não ser?

A questão é que aqui, ser é um verbo. E na frase em questão, ser e nada são substantivos. E además, o sentido muda.

Why the being instead of the nothingness? Até agora foi mais ou menos o mais correto que encontrei.

Alguma idéia?

Talking to my grandmother (not the one from the atelier...), I came to an interesting idea: it's a relation between dreams and narrative writting. See, when you dream, all you get is the general idea of things. Images, at least for me, seem a little blurry and undetailed. Let's say a person, a close friend of mine, walks through a door into the room in my dream. What I actually see is a similar humanoid figure, very few details of the face. And I have this clear intuition of who it is. The room is another thing that remains blurry. Sometimes I have this false memory of where I am, a notion of a known place. But I none of the objects in the room are viewed in full detail unless it is absolutely necessary for the dream's plot. Writting is sometimes very similar. The author writes: The door swung open and X walked into the room. Let's ignore for a moment those pen-crazy writers who tend to describe everything from drapes on the windows to the ring on the character's hand. If this single sentence is given, I doubt anyone imagines this character in his/her full details. Some people like to imagine known faces as the characters in the plot. Even so, one never imagines the known face in all it's details. Just a simpler replica, and this identification in your head that this is character X. Furthermore, sometimes an author describes his character: I wonder if any reader actually imagines that description throughout the entire story. I seem to only lock onto the simpler details like hair color, eye color or size (fat, slim, tall, short...). The rest is usually ignored.

I guess what I mean is, writting is more about conveying general ideas than complete images, just like dreaming. You jump from one idea to the next in the same manner as oniric logic. And what matters is the general concepts, not the details.

Este post é escrito em português, por que quero que quem estudou comigo no colégio consiga ler e entender bem (não estou subestimando ninguém, mas é por causa da gravidade da situação...).

Uma de nossas professoras foi diagnosticada com câncer recentemente. Ela ensinou história geral para a turma de humanas e me entregou pessoalmente meu diploma de formado. É a foto que mais preso no meu álbum de formatura. Infelizmente, tudo que posso dizer por enquanto é isso. Não tenho conhecimento do hospital no qual ela está sendo tratada ou de sua situação no colégio. Aparentemente ela tem evitado contato.

Escrevi para a Lioness antes de escrever aqui. Não sabia se eu devia escrever qualquer coisa aqui sobre isso. Se isso talvez magoaria a professora. No meu e-mail, dizia que tenho flashes de imagens do rosto dela. O rosto dela impassível em uma cama de hospital. Me pergunto como eu posso imaginar aquela mulher em uma cama de hospital. Devo ser muito doente mesmo... Gente cheia de vida daquele jeito não tem nada a ver com esses lugares de doença.

Passei esses últimos dias pensando muito nisso. Queria muito fazer alguma coisa, falar com ela. Mas não há meios. Não que eu tenha tentado muito, mas é que, ainda que eu conseguisse, não saberia o que lhe falar. Apenas diria que me coração anda apertado esses dias. Queria mesmo era tocá-la, abraçá-la. Tomara que tudo dê certo.

O frio tem aumentado cada vez mais ultimamente. E apesar do que mamãe diz, tenho a impressão de que, enquanto os verões estão de fato cada vez mais quentes, os invernos estão cada vez mais frios. O que está acontecendo?
Esse frio tinge a cidade inteira de um cinza quase uniforme. O sol fica um pouco mais pálido. E os bancos dos ônibus um pouco mais desconfortáveis. Tudo um tanto quanto Letting the cables sleep. Ou talvez um clima Gnossienne. Minhas mãos ficam com um aspecto estranho no frio. A pele como uma espécie de latex ou coisa artificial, cada vez menos orgânica, cada vez menos humana. Tem algo no ar que corta quando ando. A sensação de viver é um pouco diferente da apatia sem temperatura dos meses de Março a Maio. Ainda é apatia. Mas com um pouco daquela beleza sofrida de filmes de vampiro. Tudo frio e cinza.
Passo muito mais tempo em casa, embora aquele lugar seja aparentemente mais frio do que a rua. Assisto à TV que há muito tempo esqueci que existia. Procuro a viagem para a Itália. E no quarto, aquarelas de telas que perdi. Tudo é blaze. Tudo é um pouco doente. Só há o conforto e o calor dela, abraçada em mim. Mas de uma forma muito estranha, eu me sinto um pouco mais vivo do que de costume. O verão é um sonho bom. O inv(f)erno é acordar de manhã.

Como vocês estão suportando o inverno?

Luli Radfahrer:
porque nem tudo naquele curso de publicidade é besteira acadêmica...

Quick pointless literary note:
While we were at the restaurant with the guys from the italian course, one of them was talking about waking up in the morning and he eventually mentioned his alarm clock. Made me remember a witty little passage I never got to use on any of my old narratives:

The alarm clock woke me up with it's sour electronic sound.

Seemed like an interesting way to describe how an alarm clock sounds: sour. Except for those tacky ones that actualy say "wake up, it's XX:XX!" or some other corny sentence...

Anyway, pointles post...

And so, the italian course has ended. We went uot on the last day, after we got the grades. I got a very nice 9,3. In the end, we all wrote down our phone numbers, our e-mails... I even wrote down the adress to this blog.
I've done this so often. Writting down adresses of people I know I'm never going to see again. You cram all those adresses into a piece of paper and cherish it like your most priceless possession. Deep inside, you know you're never going to call them. or maybe you'll write once or twice. But then, eventually... Yet it always feels conforting to have that paper with all their data on it.
Once we went to summer camp. I met a bunch of people there and we got a nice gang toghether. When it was over, I had another one of those papers with about ten of those phone numbers. I never called. Then, one fine day, one of the girls calls me. I was immensely glad. And extremely surprised when she said she lived on the building in front of mine. Turns out almost all of them did. The others, obviously, dissapeared. This incident made me believe in these quick friendships for a while. Perhaps enough for me to keep in touch with old school friends like Lady Visentainer or other who have briefly graced my life like Nana-chan.

And this week's useless yet hilarious site is Matrix Ping Pong. Check it out...

I have watched The Hours...

There is so much to be said about it. And in the words of one of the characters: all I could say wouldn't be enough to explain it. My Lioness had recomended it to me, saying it would explain much about us. Indeed. It explaind much about her. As if the roles had been written by someone who knew her all too well. It was her: sliced, dissected, analized and explained. Yet it was also a tiny part of every girl I ever dated. This said, there is virtualy no space for me in the movie. Except perhaps for one character's stubborness or another's rage.
Of all the characters, it was Virginia Woolf who resembled my Lioness the most. A sick version of her, but it was her all the same. Her view of things, her poetry. Her maddness and her desire to indulge everything that had caused it instead of being healed through apathy. But there was something that made her different from all the others, including the Lioness. I'll explain.
The other two characters seem to live for their men. One in 1951, a society of masquerade and false perfection, with men on the leading roles, faced with the challenge of making her husband a surprise party. The other, an alleged "independant" woman of the 21st century, living a lesbian relationship and mother to an in vitro child, but still catering to her sick former lover. See, even if she manages to excape conventional female roles, she still lives for a man. Both live for their men. Even though their men might be so much less than them. Glorifying men who are weaker, less intelligent, less capable. And fading away in the process. This is one thing I can comprehend but not relate. And I've seen it so often... Why must they cling to men to define themselves as women? Have men ever been simplified like this on a movie?
Virginia, on the other hand, seems to have her husband living for her. And I've met so few women in such condition...
I've experienced girls who lived for me. And I often wondered when would I live for someone. Oh, it's a complicated matter. To postpone your own personal quests in order to serve your lover. And then again, living for someone else has never made anyone truly happy. Nor complete. And that's why these characters run away from this sort of life. Or at times that sort of life runs away from them, jumping out the window...

And then there are the other things.
That philosphy about happiness that had the Lioness thinking for days (and me too, quite frankly...). The memory of... winters. In town that wasn't Wellfleet. And the music by Phillip Glass. Fit for scenes of serenity with a background of insanity. Suspense. Methodology. Tension. Order.