Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007)

Caught the news earlier tonight while I was having finner. Today was my last day at work, during the whole day I'd been busy tying up loose ends, the final frantic hour after almost a month of ease came somewhat unexpected.

Trying to get through all the procedures of the resignation process left my occupied mind little room to manoeuvre, it wasn't after 1600 when most of the people were gone and me found myself closing the doors for one last time that I was capable of appreciating the fact that it was the last time I was doing it, the thing I used to call, with no little amount of disdain, "routine". I didn't want it to end here, I liked the job despite some of its less than desirable elements. If it wasn't for my blasted thesis, no, if it wasn't for my incapability of studying while working, I would still be seeing my students merrily in less than 2 months...

It's too late for that. The future will not be avoided. One more extra year or not will inevitably meet its end, and you'll see yourself bitching about the bloody routine again and tying up the loose ends in the final frantic hour.

A couple of days ago I accidentally came upon Bob Marley's "No, Woman, Nuh Cry" and it brought me immediately back to Spain, to the smoke, to the strolling quietly in the beautifully illuminated streets under the moon, to her, to them, to memory, to me bitching about my flatmates, to the sky-high dirty plates in the sink, to spending too much time wasting it, to being in a bad mood constantly, to fooling around aimlessly, to finding the end fast approaching, to leaving on a jet plane, to moisturized cheeks, to remembering it fondly afterwards.

To remembering fondly that in the best year of my life I was bitching about nothing of critical importance. Of course, I didn't know during that time that it was going to be the best time of my life. But it was. And now I can only remember it. Would it be better that I stayed in that place and time complaining about things for all the eternity than remembering it, recreating it in my mind, with such fondness in years to come without being able to actually relive it?

Sometimes all you can do is laugh

When I saw her this afternoon in the office I thought my mind and my eyes were fucking with me. Dumbfounded, I stared at her incredulously... But it was her!

The realization didn't came with a light punch, it literally knocked me off my chair. Few years back shyness prevented me from talking to her and I paid the price for that afterwards. She disappeared, and I thought it was the last time I was going to see her.

This afternoon, despite being caught off guard, I initiated the conversation with feigned ease, and to my surprise, she knew my name and stayed there chatting with me long after everyone was gone.

But neither of us is going to stay here for too long, about 2 months or so for her and 2 weeks for me. Then it would be years before I had a chance to see her again. In between, there will only be recreations of her in my head.

What if this is as good as it gets

What's so incredible about your life so far is the fact that you only fall for those that will send you back into the self-pitying hole from where you've just managed to dig yourself out. Of course it's no comparison to the sufferings in, say, Darfur or Iraq, but it's just so fucking frustrating. Knowing that someone's dying of hunger, diseases, bomb attacks, or whatever somewhere in the world right now does little to help you feel a little bit better.

The outside world ceased to exist and a wave of tiredness rise up and enwrap you and you can only hear the music of sighing. It's pathetic, you know it, but you're helpless when frustration gets to you. Then you see that it's more convenient to blame the society, the world, life itself, and with every disappointment you become more and more cynical, and it goes on like a perfect circle.

You see a cockroach on the darkened floor, scuttling hurriedly to safety as you draw closer, and you think to yourself how easily you can squash that tenebrous piece of shit, no effort at all. In fact, all you have to do is to just lift your leg somewhat, reposition it, lower it and the bottom of your shoe will be juicy with roach rest. It's that simple. But in reality, you're no more robust than that piece of shit and someday you'll be the juice under somebody's boots, or probably, your own.

Cluttered Space

The act of navigating through the WWW is no longer suitable to be described as something as exciting and enjoyable as surfing, but rather as being stuck in the traffic jam. This is what I don't get - is it so much better to squeeze all that irrelevant informations into a single page?

Here at the uni we have like 2 glassfibre connections, 9 ADSL and VDSL (abbreviations for FAST, other than that, Google will appease to all your inquiry needs) and still sometimes I'm witnessing less than satisfactory pageloading performances.

While back home we have only 56k dial-up.

So these couple of days, to make the most out of the annual Dragon Boat Festival, I was back home watching the telly and playing computer games for days on end. However, as you may well know, nothing good lasts forever, my gamepad-grasping paradise was then relentlessly shattered when I switched the modem on and wait for the dialing shriek to die down. What followed was worthy of death penalty, or any of the cruelest form of "twist-and-turn"s ever devised by man - it took literally ages to open just one blog.

So what's wrong with blogs? You might ask. Well, nothing's wrong of course, it's your personal page and you're entitled to do whatever you please with it. But, I just have enough with those that force you to listen to songs and whatever else when you just want to see whether it's been updated. Besides, these pages look utterly ugly, not at all user-friendly, unaesthetically designed, or perhaps made with cunning criminal intents conceived to fill you with rage.

Firefox crashs quite often when I open them all in tabs, looks like it can't stand it either.

What We See and What We Seem is But a Dream - A Dream Within a Dream

Apt in Brooklyn

It's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the smell of rain is in the air, it's quiet, cool and surrounded by a light tinge of blue. I like that. It's not saying that I'm addicted to sadness (or am I?), rather it's the feeling that I'm familiar with. The impending onslaught of rain, the darkened land, the odor of rapidly moisturized atmosphere and the actual descent from heaven. I like looking at nothing in particular through the weeping glass.

It's one of those times that you are so occupied, yet without having the slightest urge to comply with the obligations. You're not in a great rush to go anywhere, you're content with staying right where you are (but of course, it would always be much better if she was here with you. Unfortunately, it's rather unlikely, of which you are aware). Maybe we can coin this mood something like ah Pacific Islandish, hmmm... Pacific Islandish... or perhaps Oceanicish... anyway, doesn't matter, you get the idea.

It's the kind of cozy and lazy afternoon feeling, like you've just had a cuppa, some sandwiches, ham and cakes on a nice shaded lawn ah what a lovely afternoon don't you agree my dear while soft breeze murmurs lullaby at your ears, inviting you to sink into a world of unchained fantasy. When you find yourself caught in this kind of mood, you know you're not necessarily happy, just sort of not-completely-of-the-negative-side-of-inactive.

Got an email from Rebecca the other day telling me that she was looking for someone to share the flat with. And even though Brooklyn was not among the most exotic of places in the world, it is for me at this very moment. It seems so distant and faraway, so unreal, it's one block from Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Library, with the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanical Gardens a few blocks away. On the 2, 3, B, Q subway lines. I have no idea what that translates into geographically, but it hardly matters. It feels so totally from another world, and, well, it is, after all, which helps me, for a while, to forget about my own troubles.

Monsoon Wedding

I find myself overdosing on motion pictures these couple of days. Motion pictures with emotions that I myself can't manage to muster. Gloria said that she'd been in the mood and that she'd cried. Well, I told her that it was something worthy of celebration because she was still capable of crying, for some of us can't. It's a luxury that is not to be luxuriated in by some.

At 47 minutes into the movie I checked Ailing's MSN alias, damn fool you're torturing yourself. At once, an overwhelming wave of vomiting sensation hit my brain and I was force to cut off every moving motion, I knew I shouldn't have looked, but I did, and the remaining 67 minutes of film seemed like 67 million years.

***

Fictions are magical, they present you with a world that is faraway, objective yet at the same time intimate and exotic, not matter how miserable and familiar the world in which the story unfolds is. That's why I love it. And you get to cry, despite being cinematographically induced, that's another bonus.

She said she was afraid of my dark side. Yes, she was being honest, I appreciate that, but I did scare her away, eh. I just screwed it up. Yes, the opposite of sex loves you when you're easy, and they're out of sight faster than the ray of light at the faintest hint of something foul. I know I shouldn't be cynical, but once you made a mistake you don't get a second chance, like you simply can't step into the same river twice.

Implosion

I've failed in foreseeing the same reaction. I didn't see that her presence would trigger such an inward rage, a rage of not foreseeing the forming of the same result. It's a rage that's hard to explain, whose shape is no easy task to grasp, nevertheless I will try to do so and hopefully in the process would be able to achieve that now sitting alone in the office with the residue of that rage.

It's, what can I say, irrational. It's a mixture of many things, but mostly her constant refusal, her unwillingness to express her thoughts, the lack of information and my nonstop guessing. Among them, I suppose it's the guessing that finally gets to me, it's endless and tiring. And I think I'm finally over quota.

I need a confirmation from her part, yet am unable to do that. Her attitude is ever ambiguous and this ambiguity is making my already troublesome organ even more troublesome. The sad thing is that I can't just go knock on her door and tell her that I want to die because I'm in love with her. But I need her to know that I'm suffering. So I didn't do anything, not the least reaction at all, when she said that her legs were killing her and that she was tired. I didn't do anything, not responding to her question why I was in a bad mood, not greeting her, no smiles, not looking at her, nothing.

Of course I know that this attitude of mine is stupid and won't achieve anything but the contrary, because he who plays it cool to make his world a little colder is a bloody fool. And I'm, most of all, angry at myself for being one, for not being able to care about her when I find myself getting caught by such emotions. The residue is nothing but remorse. It's like setting the hard works of your whole life aflame and see them disappear amongst the dancing flare in front of your very eyes.

What I need now is a truck that goes at 100km/h. One that is overloaded and comes towards me.

Contaminated

After going through all the mid-term exam papers, I squeezed my I-want-to-retire-to-bed-right-now head into the headset and rang Ma to wish her a very happy birthday. She recognized my "hola" immediately and cried out my name, even though we haven't seen each other for almost 4 years.

She said that by the end of 2007 she was not going to be in Salamanca anymore because the contract will end by then and her heart yearned to go somewhere else, the north, she said, San Sebastián or Bilbao.

Then after a couple of goodbyes, if you know how spanish goodbyes are, which are generally made up of at least 2 or three or more "goodbye"s interlayered by more but not exactly related conversations, to my head's content, it finally hit the pillow. But it was a short-lived one because I kept thinking about her leaving Salamanca. And I just can't get over it. It's not just her leaving that's bothering me, but everyone else's.

By the time I do get back there, there's not going to be much people, if any, left to walk the familiar streets with me, to be in the piso, the resi, the campo de San Francisco, the bus station, Madrid, and other millions of places that had been contaminated by memories. Yes, I will get to know someone new, but as you know the new can never truely replace the old.

So, despite the threats from the head to stage a strike, I got out of comfort and woke up Argo, the iBook, which was sleeping, and spend more or less 2 hours in front of the desk in the middle of the night (still have to work tomorrow) keyboarding this latest entry which is not going to be read by too many people on earth. Think about the facts, the chances really aren't that high that you will come across this blog, first you'll have to go through billions of years of evolution, then make sure that all of your ancestors reproduced at exactly the same moment with exactly the same person, and when you've accomplished the mission impossible to be born into this world you will have to accumulate an extraordinarily rich reserve of patience to put up with all the shit that I've written to reach this final word.

Obituaries

It's a morbid habit of mine to read about people's death. And, no, it's not like what you might think, I don't clap my hands or let out a joyous cry nor does it arouse me in the way you might be thinking, of which I'm of course not referring to anything.

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) died yesterday and then I found myself spending hours reading about the man and his work. Well, of course I knew who the hell Vonnegut was, but who he actually was only till now do I know. Interesting, isn't it? You have to be dead to catch the attention and interest of certain people who would otherwise never spend a damn second on you.

Why is that? Is it hindsight? Hypocrisy maybe? Probably both. It could also be that you're just too small to notice something that is not in the immediate precinct or of any actual tangible advantages. Just too damn bogged down in your goddamn little world and imagining and fabricating the world of wishful thinking. Once in a while the death of someone pulls you out of this shite and for 5 minutes you're all enlightened and all that, then you slip back to the hole, till the next death takes you out for another ride. So life goes on like that until one day it's you who would be taking someone else for a 5-minute-ride. And it ends there, as far as we know scientifically. Bravo.