The Classics

During the last two years, I have had more interesting and truly intelligent conversations than in the years previous to that all together, believe me...
Over that period of time, I come to realise, to have those converstaions with those people, to study Philosophy and Literatue and all, you got to have seen, heard and watched the classics.

This is a self evident truth. But that is the beauty of it: realising the obvious.

Anyways, I found out I had not read the stuff everyone had. I had barely heard of some. In my school we never had to read anything, especially foreign books. I was mad, at my upbringing and my shcooling, even at my previous friends. But, moving on, I realised I would just have to catch up.

That is what I am presently doing. Reading Orwell's 1984.

I am 3/4 done with it and I already have some 5 pages marked as potential Philosophy material. The best part is about Epistemology. It used to be the most boring thing, but I have come to discover it matters more to me than I thought.

A particular question is posed that I will really develop. If you alone hold a believe, if it cannot be empirically veriefied or inter-subjectively confirmed, how cna you know it is truth? Can it then never be knowledge?

In my recent encounters with missionaries, priests and the like I have learned something about my own idea of religious knowledge. I used to consider that this was a case in which knowledge has special characteristics of individuality and privacy that made it possible at a purely isolated subjective level. However, people tend to organise themselves in churchs, to build mythologies, describe signs of confirmation fo their faith, etc. Tendentially, people are not content in just believing alone.

Does this say something, as a test case, about purely subjective believes. We tend to try to expand them into the world, to make them supported by others, by evidence, etc.

This might be the beggining of something. that is it, tomorrow I will take time and write a proper small essay.

thanks for helping me stop procrastinating. Sorry for any bad spelling, I just didn't fell like re-reading.

good night, I'll see u tomorrow

Underfined limbo post

Vaida spent the last week and couple of days around here. We had so much fun and did so many things that I did not write on this blog - an evident good sign of recovery.


Anyways, there are a couple of items on the agenda of this post.

1. Harassement and cultural issues

I need to expand on this one. Later, pherhaps. It is long, complicated and unberably annoying. basically it is the reflection on spending one week walking around with another young girl in Portugal, being subject to comments shouted out of any nearby café that we approached by any group of middle aged men. People say it is a cultural thing. I am moving to Vancouver.

2. The Mormons and all the others

In a couple of hours I will be meeting this girl I first met with Vaida on a train. nothing unusual: she heard us speak English and she was an American. Thing was that she was also a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, known as the Mormons.
We talked about many things, decided to talk some more today. Vaida was very skeptical, so was my family. They fear me listening to a Mormon and I don't really see why.
I went to a Mass in a Catholic Church just thsi weekend. I find it all inetresting. i continue to be an atheist. I doubt that will ever change ( unless I get spoken to be God, as some have promised me will happen soon) . But I want to know more about other people's belives, to the extent I cna understand them. Besides, Mormon's stories are not more far fetched than Catholic ones...
I will see how this goes this afternoon.

3. Belle & Sebastian

It's the soundtrack in my mind. "The State that I am in". Sounds good on your head in the mornings, when you wake up at 11 a.m. and still feel like sleeping.
No i'm not partying. I just read till one or two in the morning. Some say is much more exhausting.

Going to go eat and change my clothes... Livin' is easy..

on being homeless and taking a bus to Lisbon

Re-reading my last post I realised the ammount of anger release and even the tip of teenage angst there... Not my intention, I swear.

It just is difficult to live as a foreigner in your own country. That is who I am and I accept it now. I have different dress norms, I tolerate heat differently, I listen to different music, talk to my friends in a different language, dedicate myself to activities descredited by the community (like Philosophy or knitting) and am generally not comfortable with what is described as a regular conversation. The other day i shouted out "But it is my country!". Yes, I was born and raised here, but it doesn't matter. As someone told me, it would be the same as going to a place like a rural village in Afeghanistan and wear a bikini. It works exactly in the same way, even though this ougth to be my culture, my people.

Culture is what gives you a feeling of being "at home", familiarity and comfort. In some sense, I am homeless for now.

To get away from this potentially angsty discourse, I am moving on and taking a bus to Lisbon. that's it. When you feel bad just go a couple of days to a very big city. Somehow it helps.
I am meeting Vaida today at the airport. Very much looking to it right now.
Well, I 'll go get ready, the bus leaves in a couple of hours and i still ahev to fill up my MP3 player with new stuff.

The Look on the bus

In Flekke, the tiny little place I lived in for two years, people complained. There was no privacy, people talked about you, there was gossip, etc, etc. With all the due truth in that, there is no way to compare it to this.

Imagine a medium sized town. Around 90 000 people. Has a big University and is well known for its cultural life (which I have been searching for, but fail to find most of the times).
In a normal place, you would think: cosmopolitan, anomimous, diverse.

Forget it. It is Portugal we are talking about.
And in Portugal... there is the look.

The Look

The act of staring at someone, evaluating their physical appearance in an obvious and unpleasant manner. It is not meant to be discreet or curious, it is meant to be what could be considered in other parts of the earth, rude. It tries to vex you, to separate you as if you were a threat (becuase you kind of are). Moreover it reveals intuitively a sort of intellectual work inside the looker that is obviously trying to classify and explain you as if you were a strange species of animal.

Welcome to, what a wise man once called, "the culture of the look".

When you sit on a bus, open a book and whenever you look up you see the same people staring at you, it starts being creepy. Everyone notices it, but if you ask about it, they will just say is normal society and adult-like behaviour.

Sartre used to talk about "the look" as a way to try to capture the other's freedom, to transform them in a "en-soi" rather than a "pour-soi" like our selves. It is as if, in the consumer's society, we need our social environment to be a super-market shelve and everyone a product, with some very understandable big letters labelling it. Otherwise, you will just have to stare to see if you understand it and can avoid asking for help to the shop assistant.

I don't want to be understood.

In the beginning... there was a bright pink neon light...

So, I am starting a blog.
I must confess I am new to genre and the concept. I once had a photoblog, which is way easier to keep : post a photo and a very vague comment of maximum 2 lines and you have a post.

Well, a blog like this should be interesting to read (not just look in a glance), which makes it much harder to write. Specially when you don't know why you are writing it. Is it because other people I admire or relate to do? Partially, perhaps. And partially because of circumstances, and in the end because of nothing you can really name. That is why I called it a flight at 5 a.m. Because I know the times when I wonder "What on earth am I doing?" are when I catch flights in the middle of the night. There is when the non-sense comes out, the uncontrolled emotions, the pseudo-philosophical reflections burst out in a sleepy tone. It is that fine dimension that you enter once you have been sleep deprived enough, where airports seem endless and timezones melt together.
So, I guess that is what anyone can expect: a weird sequence of remarks.

I decided that, if this is to last a while, I should write in English. Right now Portuguese feels too distant (even though it is my native language, i.e. I am reaallly lost..), even though English gets me to do way more mistakes, for which I appologise from this very beginning.

Well, at least I will keep busy during the holidays.