Tuesday, July 31, 2007

tpm

desde sábado numa irritação crescente...
tô me sentindo insuportável. além disso dei de ter raiva de quem no momento merece mais é pena mesmo. mas nem sempre eu sou boazinha...
principalmente nesta época do mês.

Friday, July 27, 2007

plim plim


momento propaganda. tava eu no aeroporto e um homem bem lindão e gringo ficou me olhando e dando sorrisos. eu virava pra trás e ele sorria. eu desvirava engervonhada. virava de novo, e lá estava ele.
até que descobri o que era: ele tava louco pela minha bolsa de gatinhos. mas felicidade dura pouco. chegou a mulher :-( e a filha dele. e a filha ficou hoooooras olhando, sorrindo, comentando com o pai dos gatinhos. quase que eu fui lá puxar papo. mesmo com a mulher do lado…

Friday, July 20, 2007

hoje


feliz. muito feliz.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

pensamento do dia

quem come prego sabe o cú que tem...

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

a tentação de ser muito feliz

devagarzinho as coisas vão se ajeitando.
isso é bom.
comigo, o devagarinho é sempre o que tem mais realidade.

Friday, July 6, 2007

pronto!!!


como não sei importar os posts automaticamente do outro blog, migrei pra esse copiando os antigos manualmente. claro, dei uma editada e peguei só os melhores.
mas a partir de agora nada de escrever em inglês. agora que o tempo na gringolândia acabou vai ser tudo em português mesmo.

On our amazing ability to deny our craziness

I know I tend to exaggerate my problems and think of myself as the most neurotic of all people. And that too is part of my own craziness.
Still, I am often amazed by people's ability to rationalize their craziness. I mean, I might do and think crazy things, but I am quite aware that they are not very reasonable. Some people just don't.
Anyway, I love to read the weirdest news of the newspaper. Like the one about the garbage lady. She's a Spanish old lady who lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Since her husband died she started accumulating garbage in her house. She'd say it was for recycling, but if someone is recycling how can one accumulate 258 tons of garbage in one's house? She's been doing this for 20 years now, the house had this terrible stench, there were rats and cockroaches all over, and yet, her family does not seem to think it was that bad. According to the newspaper her son was surprised with the recent police intervention. After all, it was only a "bit of garbage", no need to such drastic intervention. Meanwhile the police finds out that she even had 24 bottles of gun powder. She just collected everything she could put her hands on.
I'm amazed.

nem sei onde achei isso

"O caos interior. Tirar um dia para arrumar a cabeca: espanar o consciente empoeirado, remexer valores esquecidos no subconsciente. Rasgar rancores, arquivar magoas, catalogar defeitos, suprir carencias, desempacotar amizades esquecidas, dedetizer grilos escondidos dentro da insonia. Passar a limpo rascunhos de velhos conceitos. Regar a pureza murcha pela falta de uso. Lustrar gestos de amor refugiados no egoismo. Abrir o pensamento para arejar a sensibilidade. Olhar no espelho, pentear os cabelos, sorrir para o proprio sorriso e sair em frente com a mesma cara - mas nova!"

the work of imagination


“From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journeys you will see if they exist.”

But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.

“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degrees from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”

“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”


(in Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, p. 69)

dream


the long and beautiful strands of the plant i resuscitated a while ago were cut. the plant was reduced to its invisible roots and the strands would eventually die.

In the wonderland

`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

life as a hyperlink

t's not that i don't have more than enough to read. sometimes i feel so overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that i have to read, plus the even larger amount that i want to read, that i end up watching TV. or reading blogs.
my friend rosa got me into that. at first it was only her blog. and i saw it more as a friend related activity. in other words, i read it because she's a good writer but most of all, a good friend.
but then, as a lot of things in my life, one thing led to another...and naturally one blog led to anohter. now i find myself reading blogs of complete strangers.
i was going to write about blogs and my still incipient but yet incredible adventures in exploring this world. yet, i just realized that this is how i've always lived my life - as hyperlink. one random thing leading to another and next thing i know i'm transported to different lands and different friends.
ps: i dedicate this post to my dear friend lynn, whom i met through her ex-boyfriend who was a friend of the ex-girlfriend of the friend of my friend's husband.

happiness relativity

i keep reading about "cultural relativity" in anthropology. usually that means that those Others, who are different and exotic, have different beliefs and different worldviews.
i never quite liked this. i guess it's the otherness that is very problematic for me.
but i'm writting all this because now i'm extremely happy about something that is hard to explain to other people. it's like my own private happiness. and boy, am i happy about it!! but what's the fun if i can't share that with others?
i try to describe it - "listen, it's like this - i've been extremely miserable for the past year and a half, trying to finish my qualifying exams but just hitting dead ends over and over again. and now i'm finally crossing this dark tunnel. do you get it? no, you don't understand. it's not that i'm just finishing it. it's more than that, i'm slowly giving birth to something really cool."
i feel like talking about this all the time but it feels kinda silly. people are interested in knowing if i had any major adventures recently, if i'm dating some amazing guy, if i'm going out and being loud and social, if i'm making lots of money (or will make, after i'm done with this agony).
i've been thinking about this a lot recently - why does happiness have to mean only one thing? and why do people run after this ideal frantically without quite realizing why they're doing that?
i know i've been neglecting other parts of my life and i plan to take care of that soon. but i'm also working on building my very own ideal of happiness and finding the right crowd to share that with me. plus, one more adventure in new zealand and australia is happening soon. and i admit i'm pretty excited about that too.
oh, and i can't wait to have friends over again in my house!
happy day for you too.

transa

"You don't know me / bet you'll never get to know me / you don't know me at all."
I have a Caetano's album (Transa) on repeat mode in my boombox.
It's a sad feeling to be a foreigner in a strange land for so long. Your mind start playing tricks on you.

Lispector

"And I must not forget, at the start of the work, to be prepared to make mistakes. Not forget that mistakes had often proved to be my path. Every time what I thought or felt didn't work out...a space would somehow open up, and if I had had the courage before I would have gone in through it. But I had always been afraid of delirium and error. My error, however, had to be the path of truth: for only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If 'truth' were what I can understand...it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized.
Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand."
(from Passion according GH by Clarice Lispector)

invisible cities by calvino

"Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.
At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: "You advance always with your head turned back?" or "Is what you see always behind you?" or rather, "Does your journey take place only in the past?"
All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always someting lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. (...) Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

cities

invisible cities, by calvino, is one of my favorite books.
marco polo describes to kublai khan the cities of his empire. each city is like a web of meanings, fragments of perceptions and fleeting impressions.
i too have very instinctive reactions to different cities. i wonder how i would describe los angeles a la calvino. yesterday i drove to the other side of the city and saw one more of its facets.
and now i'm thinking about it...
one thing i know - it is definetely a woman, LA woman...

people watcher

my friend rosa first told me about this. she considers herself a "people watcher". i immediately identified as one too. not because i spend hours and hours watching people (which i would definitely do if i had the time or the people to watch), nor because i'm an anthropologist, but because people fascinate me. i'm not a voyer. i'm just constantly amazed on how different people can be - their personalities, their stories, their problems, their goals, and so on and so forth.

of course, being in rio i have to visit my old friends. and these yearly visits, even if brief, are always interesting. one friend is still dealing with divorce, another one is still single and progressively more neurotic, and yet another is dealing with a career change. they may have children or not. and there's also some new babies coming (always). some stories repeat themselves a little bit but are never exactly the same.

but there's more than just their big stories - there are all the little stories of people in that kinda situation, these ordinary events of daily life and mental lines that give color and shape to the big stories in their lifes.

at moments like this i become more aware that my life is also a story, a big story unfolding through the little stories of daily life. and that like my friends i made choices that led me to where i am today, for good or bad.

it's pointless to compare myself with them. i would never have married who this friend chose to marry, never work with what that friend chose to work with (or not work with, and just get married and have babies instead), if i was that other friend i would not be single by now...but i am my own self and that's why i have my own big and little stories.

it feels good to be me when i think that way. it feels just right to be exactly where i am in life (wherever that is).