Volunteering and feeling home

I realised I have not posted anything for a while now, and maybe I should.

Big news: I am 18 now (something big I have been said). I guess I am an adult woman in control of my own destiny. As such, on my birthday afternoon, I went to the Bookshop and bought over 10 books on Sale. From Rosseau to Romantic letters from a Portuguese nun. I love it all and I will read it all (as soon as I find the time). At least now I have a small travelling library in my room =) How fancy.

I am actually volunterring in the Women's Center library now. Once a week, a couple of hours. I absolutely love it. Putting books on the shelves, cataloguing, re-arranging, organising, checking-in, out and what not. It's perfect.
I also starting to volunteer in this project called "Letters for the Inside", a sort of research service by students for prisioners that lack acess to any information. It is very thought-provoking and I think it will be very rewarding.

I needed to get involved into these things. The fact is that I miss extra-academics. I miss meetings, gorups, being the secretary, cordinator, participant and all that. I miss it, and now I fell much better because I am back on it.

I am in fact starting to feel at home here. Not in my residence though. God, I really hope my room switch works out... Yesterday was a bit too much. The guy next door decide to have a party and, honestly, it was not just noisy. IT was scary. Very drunk Canadian kids singing along to pop songs, shouting about sex and banging on the wall for fun. Decadence reached the bottom. And I had to put with it untill they moved the party somewhere else.

Oh, I think they just woke up. Yes, this is the sound of very hang-over semi-drunk people next door.

I have had very strange dreams. I am disturbed by them and it is interfering in my concentration. The recurrent one is me missing the plane, missing my flight home. I am a bit paranoid about it. It is not that I wnat to get out of here so badly, but I am looking forward to the break. To Europe. To my parents and to my fireplace.

This was a purely informative post, but my days are so full now that my only to time to reflect is eating and sleeping.

After all, there are only two ways to get unraveled. One is to sleep, the other is travel.


P.S. My new obcession: Cary Elwes (when young)

THe positive egocentric predicament.

I will be going to sleep now. But it is Sunday night and I just watched my daily fix of Twin Peaks and have my knitting stuff all around. And my body lies here so quietly, while my soul seems to dance, scream and jump to the sound of the Shins.

I don't know if I want to continue this blog. I feel it is revealing, somehow. I don't want to be revealing lately. I have paid my price for that. I still do.
I guess I keep making mistakes.

I am doing fine if you are interested in that. I am. Very happy at the moment.


Thinking of the future. A bit too much. Also of the present. Of what it means to be 17, now that I am slowly moving to the next number. I am a teenager, it is sooo true. More than ever, I am 17. There is so many things I don't know and I am trying to figure out. .. (cheeesy) At some point I belived someone would come along and help me out on that, someone to hold me and point the way. Doesn't happen. Only leads you astray. Last Spring I woke up from that fanatasy. This Winter is being a bit hard on me just because it is so real. I got real. It feels liberating to think so.

Maybe Descartes was right in the beggining of it all. There is you, only you. At least first and foremost you. I woke up to my little positive egocentric predicament.

A night of wonder, happiness and excitment seen by old grumpy woman

I appologise. This is not a well thought of post, it is not that relevant and it is not that srtuctured.

It is 8:30 a.m. I got up na hour ago. I am sick, my throat hurts and my body ackes all over. I am eating cereals with some dubious milk that I was left on my fridge. I have to work on my Philosophy assignment and I don't want to right now. I just want a nice blanket, a warm room and somebody to make me a cup of tea. When you live alone, things suck when you're sick.

I realise that I live really too alone. People next door don't know me, don't care about me. I don't care much about them either. I am trying to change somewhere where that mutual lack of concern does nit hold.

I think I know now why people say, with that 50's voice "don't you want to have a loving husband and a nice loving family?". Yeah, when you're on your own at 7:30 a.m., sick and sleepy, it sounds verrryy alluring. Problem is, the people I know that followed that ideal are also in problematic and unhappy situations. Anyhow, you can't win.

This all starts sounding grumpy.

Well, I can tell about Saturday night. I went to meet my aunt and my cousin for lunch downtown. After that I went to a coffee shop where they were playing jazz and read some school stuff. And then I went and saw a François Truffaut double-bill! I could have seen a triple but I would be late to catch the last skytrain. Started off with 400 coups de vents. Very beautiful, and has haun ting meloody to it. Then I watched Tirez sur le Pianiste. It was such a good film, full of excitment and good scenes. I loved it. When I went out I felt so happy. People must have thought me crazy, in the middle of the night running thorugh the streets, jumping and imitating ballet dancers. I was happy, and no one on those streets knew me, so I was free to make a fool of myself. I was young, I was living in a most exciting city, the world was beautiful and I was too. I was proud to be 17, not ashamed anymore, I was proud and content. All the way in the skytrain I smiled. I couldn't stop smiling. It felt like I had just kissed someone I cared about. I felt a rush of energy, a feeling I was going to explode with happiness.

And when I went to bed on Saturday night, I dreamt of being in a movie by Truffaut.

The adorable post

I am in the middle of planing my presentation for tomorrow. But I have to write, I must write. It is sort of like knitting, a therapy we all need. Because the most important thing I have learned recently is that keeping yourself together takes time and you just ahve to write it down in your timetable.

I have a problem. I have many.

Who doesn't?

Why do I feel like writing about them and not about other people's? Someone once gave me a good answer to that eternal question. My problems are more important to me because they are mine. There we go, that little pre-problem aside, we can get into the real thing.

It is about being adorable. I have been thinking. That is what many people say I look like, that I am. Adorable. I used to get along with this. But I don't anymore. Simply because I have not understood it! Why do people call me this when I make a joke or a comment? Why do people say I look lost and confused and that thus I am adorable. I don't know if I like this word anymore. It makes me feel small and slighlty clumbsy. It seems like I don't really make sense. That worries me. And I can't helped but be worried. After all, I might not be getting accross as the person I am.

And that means so much to me. I think it does to everyone. Sharing who you really are. But then, who are you? I find myself thinking that so much these days. Problem: when I am being clumbsy or childish or weak or awckward or something I don't like to be depicted as, I think of who I really am. but what if I am only that, that adorable (whatever that means) person that acts in a social setting. Because that is what I do all the times. Well, except for when I am with a person I love. That seems to be the exception: when I fall in love is because I feel different, I act like I like to act around that person and that person likes me to do so and enjoys it. That is why I don't fall in love very often, maybe?

I stay here for today. Just a little song, the best song I have hear in the last 2 days. It is beautiful, it is the most beautiful song about a three way love affair. And it sort of reassures me of what I think, what I believe in and the fact that, at some point, someone believed it too.


Because that is what life is about. Getting out of yourself by formulating sentences ending with "too".





TRIAD
by David Crosby
Performed on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album "4 Way Street"

You want to know how it will be
Me and her or you and me
You both sit there with your long hair flowing
Your eyes alive, your minds are still growing
Saying to me what can we do now that we
Both love you -- I love you too
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three

You are afraid, embarrased too, no one has ever in your sweet short life child
Said such a thing to you
Your mother's ghost stands at you shoulder
Got a face like ice -- just a little colder
Saying you can not do that it breaks all the rules
You learned in school
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three

You know we love each other, it's plain to see
There's just one answer comes to me
Sister lovers -- some of you must know about water brothers
And in time maybe others
So you see what we can do
Is to try something new - that is if you're crazy too
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three

A song for all of us

This is the song that echoes my thoughts in the Fall. It' s for everyone who just doesn't seem to follow the socially excepted seasonal trends.
Because there is nothing better than romance in the middle of a rainy winter =)

I Didn't Have a Summer Romance by Simone White

They're always writing songs
about a summer love
that never seems to last
beyond the fall
but i've a different reason
for crying this season
a reason that can hurt you
most of all

I didn't have any summer romance
nobody bothered
to break my heart in two.
While others were fooled
by the sweet words
someone vowed,
I was the one who made
company a crowd.
I didn't walk down the beach
in a trance
or listened to little white lies
that sounded true,
and no one could be as blue
as I was in the fall
'cause I didn't have any
summer romance at all

And no one could be
as blue as I was in the fall
'cause I didn't have any
summer romance at all.

Black and White - on old School cinema

I was here knitting and thinking about the movie I saw last night - " A street Car Named Desire".

I watched (rather accidentaly) a "Walk to Remember" and got so sick (physically, mentally, spiritually) by the Nicholas Sparks distinct mark of lack of quality.... I was laughing at the most tragic moments, I skiped like 20 minutes simply because they were too dull.

So, I need to watch something of sublime quality to compensate. And there we go. You get a good play by Tenesse Williams, a superb director like Elia Kazan and you add Vivian Leigh's old school charm and Brando's classical quality. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Life should be directed by Kazan... With Brando or Dean or Newman going around...

There is a dramatism, an irreal, yet very human, dramatism to the whole thing that makes it magically vibrating, exhilarating, you run out of breath from watching those scenes! Those 50's movies... "The Wild One" , "East of Eden", so many others... No special effects, just acting, a lot of good shots and a good story. At that point, if a book was made into a movie it didn't almost automatically mean it was going to be ruined.

Besides, watching movies in those days is something I would kill for. No laptops, no popcorn commercial cinema places. Small leather seats, a big attentive audience, images striking the big screen like lightning.

I miss it.

Sex and the City: Why Carrie got it wrong

I have seen too much of it. I hate it. I hate it. I profoundly despise "Sex and the City".

I once read an article called "You can be a feminist and still like Sex and the City!".
I tell what you cannot be: a healthy, self-loving 17 year old that whatches Sex and the City!!!!!

Carrie and her friends are part of the 40 year old American woman imaginary that doesn't have much to do anyhow. Let me list the reasons for all this remarks against mainstream.

1- Their concepts are old fashioned. They think of marriage as a goal. The only who doesn't is Samantha, who seems to constantly be depicted as vulgar and rather dumb and superficial. Today I heard a shocking line in which she says that women are not supposed to be human for men and that one of her boyfriends borke up with her because she missed a bikini wax. I am the only one who thinks this is ridiculous talking about mature adult people?

I know, I know. here is Filipa listening to Velvet Underground and completely alienated from the world. Let us continue.

2- Carrie. She is sucessful? They are the sucessful women of our day? Excuse me? Carrie writes a column in a newspaper (which gives her apparently looooads of money somehow). They don't have major carrer expectations, tehy don't have idological interests. They don't have a critical eye on their society. THey are well within the framework of feminine normality of American society. I wonder, what is the value of this success.

3- Shoes, clothes and other assorted things. It is not a bad thing. I love clothes. But why should a life revolve around it? Why is everything about shoes and make up? If you count the number of sequences in which that is a main theme in the background... it ammounts to a lot.

And now, my favourite reason to dislike SAC.

4- they are in their 30's, 40's. I am 17. Now, what does this tell us? A gap, huge one. Yet, many girls my age identify with them. What happened to us? Did we leap 20 years?? I do not believe so. Why then are we trying to be so adult, so grown-up? They are not better. There was actually once a time when being young was great by itself. We did not need to compare. Teenage sexuality was something of its own. Why do we now not want to have a space for ourselves, a generational space?

And, again, it is not because they are women talking about sex that makes it a forward-minded show. They play in the system, they are not critical. That makes it conformist and establishment defending. It is the way you talk about it. For all I know I can be having a 6 hour converstaion about sex and be a totally alienated and oppressed female member of society. It does not matter.


Once, I read Jim Morrison's quote about sex. one of them. He said something along the lines that, if we were to truly open up to all the sensory festival that is sex, we could be having some incredible mystical experiences. But people get entangled in rules, in lies. I think we might be doing just that. We might be defining what our life should be like and neglecting living itself.


It is my belief that, if human beings truly embraced sexual experiences independently of social restrains and subtle institutional control, revolution would be on the way.

What keeps consumer capitalist society stable is just the fact we do not feel. We do not respond and we do not want to respond.


And yet, we walk around so sexually liberated...Or do we?