Mind expanding and the inevitability of St. Valentine's

Many Many Many ideas have come to my mind in the last couple of days. Many bloggable.Let us choose one at random....


I am having a mind expansion. Yes, that is what I believe in: not God, not fate nor destiny. I belive that the mind is able to impose meaning in such way upon the world that even Hume underestimated it! Things follow patterns, we see what matters, and we don't even know why....
So, I go walking in Lougheed Mall looking for a bathroom, totally lost. First shop in front of me: SUZY'S. I laugh. I take the stairs up there and next shop I see: SUZZANE's....Alright, so yes, I was thinking of myself, thank you world for acknowledging it. But the world seemed to have something else to say: and there goes a shop with another very familiar, yet new, name. Seriously, I am expanding meaning into the world: let us hope I do not burst, that is when it gets ugly.

I get out of the MAll and I go to the SKytrain platform. Valentine's is everywhere: ballons, couples holding hands like they have never done it before, chocolates and derivated general crap. And no, I am not bitter. No, I am not alone. And no, my lovelife is not non-existent. I am doing great, better than ever I believe.

I was oblivious of the day untill I met my aunt for lunch and she explained that, , it is not Christmas, nor Easter, it is ST. Valentine's. On the platform a couple giving "FREE HUGS" made me sick.

No I don't need a hug. No I do not need ice-cream or a party with my friends. I don't need to read your stupid edition on "love and sex". Because being "single" is not a disease nor a sticker on your head. It is a word applied to describe a person in a social context. Nothing more.


And for your Saint Valentine, whoever that is (nobody really knows), check this:

Patronage: affianced couples, against fainting, bee keepers, happy marriages, love, plague, epileptics

Romantic no? Epiletics and bee keepers.... plague...sexy, what can I say!
And this is why I go for originality and not for empty celebrations.


Because red roses don't mean anything...
Because cheap chocolate is even offensive...
Because going out to dinner is boring at times...
Because this is all sooo predictable....

a verse, a thought

Sometimes it's physical
But I want supernatural
I don't have wings but I'm ready to fall
I deserve it all




Pop music can be quite something....

Essays, cakes and old tapes : travelling back in time

This weekend a lot of things have gone through my mind.

Most of them related to Moore's common sense and his proof of an external world.
I could go on for ages, publish excerpts of my now finished essay, but I will do so when I get some feedback on it. I could alter it for ever. But essays must be finite and imperfect... a bit like me or you, unfortunately.

Ah, next topic: legalization of prostitution. (notice: 1) the blank in my head when I say I must hand this in next week 2) the z in legalization and my pseudo-rejection of British spelling)

I also baked a cake. My ego was therefore raised to a level of great happiness. I know... it sounds like I am training to be a Portuguese housewife or something. I argue differently. I am training to become a human being able to give myself culinary pleasure independently of others. I am also enhancing my ability to give such pleasure to others, increasing not only their well being but also mine, through a generous function called "sharing". Thus my interested in baking the perfect cake.

Music

This weekend I came into "contact", with the help of my laptop, with the complete discography of THE SMITHS.

My father had a couple of tapes with copied music, back from the 80's. When our car only had radio, we used to play them. One of them was "The Queen is Dead" by The Smiths. We used to play it when we went on what seemed never ending trips to my grandmother's . I remember falling asleep with Morrissey's voice, hearing the melody... Last year I came accross the Album, by chance. Hearing the songs again was magic. It made me go back to the time when I was 8 or 9 and realise how I had memorised all the sounds in that tape, made them correspond to the mountains on the way to my grandmother's. The sounds that smelled like my car, that looked like the Portuguese villages we passed through at night. And, even though I did not know anything about the lyrics, I now am certain that I did. When I read them I was not surprised. That was such expressive music that I felt what they meant even without knowing English.

And now I hear the Smiths again. 18 now. Not so small anymore. But still fascinated by Morrissey's voice, by the guittar sounds, the intoxicating ambience of some of those songs. And I close my eyes and I am in my car again, in Portugal again, the tape playing, and all I hear is this....


Take me out tonight
Where theres music and theres people
And theyre young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I havent got one
Anymore

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please dont drop me home
Because its not my home, its their
Home, and Im welcome no more

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I dont care
I dont care, I dont care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought oh god, my chance has come at last
(but then a strange fear gripped me and i
Just couldnt ask)

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I dont care
I dont care, I dont care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I havent got one ...
Oh, I havent got one

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Oh, there is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out

(There is a light that never goes out - The Smiths)

Answers, troubles and observations on a cold morning

After waking up upside down in my bed at 7 a.m., freaking out over my essays due this week at breakfast, realising I have brewed the blackest coffee in the history of Humanity I realised the answers:

1 - My posters are probably either in
a) the garbage
b) someone's room
c) no other interesting place

(Yeah, I bought new posters, so my mind rested on the issue. My room is now proper and nice with Jimi Hendrix looking at my mirror, very dreamy, and Jim Morrison looking over my bed - to protect me against the monsters in the closet)

2 - People prepare their meals on the superfast microwave that I have issues with. I am such an old-fashioned lady. That is for sure... Heating up the milk on a little pot and hopelessly trying to bake cakes and other unsucessful projects (I swear it's the oven... I will tame it someday)

3 - Ah ah! I know where I will go this summer! I just bought my sweet, (relatively) cheap tickets home for the end of May. In April I am spending a couple of weeks just going to Portland and wondering around in San Francisco. SOmehow I feel like Jack Kerouak is my mentor and I all have to do is take the train... And then I will bagpack around British Columbia. It will be me and my litte pocketbook, and any random strangers I might meet. WHo knows what is out there...

4 - Who reads this? Silly Filipa! You had it on facebook! Everyone you knew could and many were reading it. So, now it is a more mysterious thing. I like that "bottle into the ocean" type of writing. WIth the usual people taking a look once in a while.


Concerns. Concerns.

1 -I have too much work. I have too much work. I am drowning....

2 - I have to read for my Philosophy about Prostitution every week. About relationships, sex, romance, men and women and so on.... I don't know, but I feel that any possibility of a relationship in the next couple of years (whenever I don't have to work since sunrise to sunset!) is spoiled by my now acquired tendency to overanalyse any action and its effects on social held belifs, patriarchal capitalist exploitation and what not. Yep, it's an issue.

3 - I miss people. Too much, too often.

4 - I want to live in a room on top of a building in a Parisian street with a typing machine and a couple of cigars to smoke wearing a XL white blouse, loads of papers all around me, a great idea in mind, a cultural easiness when I go down to the local boulangerie, to class, or to meet that special friend with green eyes and dark French hair.... there's a plan for either
1) a short story
2) a life
3) a surrealistic painting
4) an acid trip



Oh, look at the window,

Here comes the sun!
Time to start the day.

Questions

Oh, I ask, to that overidentified dubiously existent entity(ies) in the sky(/heaven/underground/nature/cosmic dimension)

1 - where are my posters?????

2 - where does everyone in my floor prepare their meals (they're not in the kitchen!) ???

3 - where will I go this summer?

4 - Who reads these things anyways?



Life poses the questions,

sleep holds the answers.

ME and the cruelty of this world - a wondering of Sunday night

What can I say...


Hours and hours in the plane. Hours in the airport, hours and hours in the plane. Look out the window.

White white white white white white territory of northern Canada.

(2 days after)

My whole body is messed up from sleepping on airplanes and I am still tired and sleepping under jet lag.

I didn't believe in jet lag. I had a revelation.

I had to unpack and rearrange all my material possessions again. And, once again, I understand why it is that some people would like to settle down for good. Moving is inconvinient, even painful. It is work, it is memory, it is uneasiness. What can I say... I love it.

A friend asked me a question some months ago.
IS our world more immoral today, than before?

Here I am in my little room, in Vancouver, seeing the snow falling outside, reading my books, freaking out about my dinner and about my classes. Is the world more immoral?

Difficult without going into a moral relativistism kind of wave. But I want to try.
Can we be more...sensitive?

Control has become more capilar, Foucault. So, could it be that atrocities now are so horrible to us becuase they are so blunt, so raw and so plain?





I am going to rearrange my jewelery. I should

the 2009 post

A pedido de muitas famílias... (Portuguese expression that acknowledges that this post was written under requests from ...* many families* = that person that wrote some strange Galician sounding suff on my wall)

It is the first day of the year and I realised I haven't done 2 things since my birthday in November:

A - written to some regular correspondents

B - written on my blog!

Where am I? Right now, Portugal, at my house enjoying the last evening of fireplace, at least 15ºC outside and nothing of schoolwork to do. I will miss this. Tomorrow, Amsterdam and then Vancouver after 9 hours which I hope will enable me to produce a scarf and a hat for myself.

I came home for the holidays after a quite busy exam period (it paid off on the grades). I went to my grandmother's for Christmas and the next day I flew to Paris. Spent the weekend there with my family and met Valerie, her sister, Maria and Kathu for a very nice tea time near the notre Dame. And I also went to the Cinematheque and saw an amzing exhibition : Dennis hooper et le Nouvelle Hollywood. It was like being in Disneyland for me. Just way better.


NEW YEAR

No I didn't party. Yes, I watched a Western on TV. Yes, I drank champagne, had cake and watched the guys on the building in front of mine walking on the roof. It was lovely.

But it meant a bit more this year, maybe... (I am working hard at giving meaning to this socially accepted celebrations). I made a sort of forcible start over.

This Year I had a "How idiotic of me!" moment. A big one. So, I have been working all year to do two things.

1 Get rid of melancholy for no reason and pseudo-teen angst of any kind. no, i don't have to be smiling all the time, but I can be a grown woman about some stuff. This makes me stop annoying friends family and strangers on public transports.

2 Forget. Eliminate. Obliterate from memory.

About the second.
People go on and on about facing reality, facing the truth and your biggest fears. Bla bla bla.
I disagree. You can forget stuff. No, not alchool or drugs. That just makes it blurry! you got to work hard at mentally lying to yourslef so that you will eventually have made a new psychological truth. Pretend it never happened to yourself! And then, it never did!

to quote Morrison. hatred is a very underestimated feeling. Why hate, why feel disgusted at thoughts. just cut it off your memory.

And if others remind you, eliminate their messages, never answer their calls,etc. After all, silence is golden! And you can keep the silence, you have the right to it.

Wow, sounds like a cheap self-help book. But it is a stance about life that I am embracing and that I truly believe gives us a stronger sense of authorship and control about our story.

must go, pack my bags. pack up the show, cross the sea...



Someday I will be an old lady with long white hair and rose shades.

And I will have pearls around my neck and a turtle on my bed.