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.

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.