Guvidissima

so… it’s a worn out cliche to say that anyone has the key to happiness, except for this guy who makes a really strong case for “the key to happiness”; loved it!

I’m still not sure if it comes with turning 30, I’m sure it doesn’t come over night.. it creeps in slowly, an idea here, an idea there.. it might be the whole biological need of… nesting??
i lived in a small two bedroom apartment in bucharest for 25 years (i have to add a “wow” to that because it seems ages ago). We were four of us sharing this space and because my brother and I were growing up and we needed different stuff or because my mom had so many ideas, our home seemed to always be changing it’s shape and form but never loose its cozyness and comfort. 25 years in the same place, and i loved it…
in the past four years i lived in three different appartments. For two years i lived in dc in the sweetest basement appartment i could have dreamed of, with a fireplace and a backyard and wonderful neighbours, and even a little cherrytree in front. When i moved to Chisinau, one of my dearest friends found me a charming old style but cozy apartment with tall ceilings and tall balcony doors which open to a backyard full of trees, summer time here is absolutely amazing… and when in bucharest I live in my grandmother’s sweet cozy one bedroom apartment with red comfy couches and a red and white kitchen. i love each of these places in their own way because each has its own charm and sweet memories attached to it.
yes, and i fancy building a house one day on a piece of land. one can only wonder where these kind of thoughts and wishes could come from?… but i keep bumping into stuff that inspires me:

this is exactly what happens when you put a lot of money, time and resources on educating only half of the target audience! it took so much time to raise awareness on the importance of birth control for women and for the society at large and now when it comes down to legislation, those who are supposed to provide good healthy legislation don’t even have a clue what they are talking about!

btw, another excellent read, on the topic of abortion:
The impact of legalized abortion on crime by John J Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf

“A given woman’s ability to provide a nurturing environment to a child can fluctuate over time depending on the woman’s age, education, and income, as well as the presence of a father in the child’s life, whether the pregnancy is wanted, and any drug or alcohol abuse both in utero and after the birth. Consequently, legalized abortion provides a woman the opportunity to delay childbearing if the current conditions are suboptimal.”

Doesn’t that just make perfect, and i mean perfect sense???

one of my favorite artistic moments is this interpretation of the Mexican song Cucurrucucu Paloma. No es solo por la voz de Caetano Veloso que es como una caricia sutil y llena de sabores, pero la manera de hablar de Almodovar que imagino este momento; parece como algo que te podía pasar todos los días, estar en una pequeña fiesta donde por casualidad hay alguien como Veloso que decide cantar y entonces todo el resto para: hablar, comer, beber,… respirar, para disfrutar este momento

en Volver, que es una película que me gusta mucho porque siempre me pareció que Raimunda, en la interpretación de Penélope, se parece mucho a mi mama (es cosa subjetiva), es Raimunda quien interrumpe la pequeña fiesta para cantar la canción de Estrella Morente, Volver. Y como si fuera un don de la naturaleza humana, claro que había entre los participantes los tocadores de guitarra para que la acompañen.

me acuerdo también de un momento muy especial en la boda de mis amigos, Valerie con Diego, en Paris, hay casi dos años, cuando, en una pequeña fiesta después de la boda, Diego y su amigo Jacques tomaron las guitarras y empezaron a tocar canciones; otra y otra y otra; que si fuera por mi me podía haber quedado allá escuchándolos toda la noche y el día siguiente

una noche fue con mi hermano a un pequeño concierto de guitarra española en Barcelona; en la iglesia de Santa Anna, en una capilla de piedra de siglo XV; en frente de una estatua de María con el niño Jesús, dos maestros barceloneses de guitarra española (Ksenia Axelroud y Joan Benejam), tocaron por mas o menos 30 personas; que encanto! todo fue tan modesto, parecía tan normal, como si te podía pasar cualquier día… o no?

needless to say, whenever i write something down, it rarely gives me the feeling i’m fixing something down for the rest of all times; most times it gives the feeling that i fixed the point down just to prove it wrong; i was writing about transcendence; of course i would love things to be as easy as that: to say, my purpose on this world is to meet God (nirvana/force/energy/light/tao/whatever…) but the moment i wrote it i knew this is not it; whatever made me write that was just another step in this crazy endless quest to find out what am i, where am i coming from, why am i here, why now, you know… all that…

so yes… as i keep reading henry miller (not easy to finish his book, some parts are so complex and complicated i tend to postpone the reading for times when i have the right state of mind), he seems to have had a major revelation when he read Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson; I could not have missed the opportunity to pick this up, so a couple of weeks later, here i am with Bergson’s book and a pencil in my hand, reading evolutionary philosophy (dear Amazon, please treat better your employees so i can unconditionally love you)

Bergson says that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment – to think matter ; he then argues that we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still with our intellect and through our intellect that we see the other forms of consciousness… i guess in the first three pages of his book he already explained to me why it didn’t feel so right to claim what i was claiming. good job! now i want more!

I will probably never stop being fascinated with airports. I’ve always loved airports, when I started flying it felt like airports were the nicest places on earth to be in; the glass and steell gateways to the skies. Not counting Bucharest, my first international airport was the Amsterdam Schiphol. It felt as if for the first time I was actually aware that there are so many different cultures in the world. I could not take my eyes off a group of Indian women which were dressed traditionally, something I have only seen on TV before. I could also not take my eyes off two wonderfully colored dressed African ladies that spoke in a language which seemed nothing similar to anything I knew. And then the contrast with what seemed to be a bunch of Scandinavian girls (if you were to believe the clichés) tall, blond, whiter than white tones of skin. These are just some recollections, and I do remember that I was so struck by finally meeting these people in flesh that I could not stop staring at them (which of course by now I know it’s far from being polite). The reason I did it, was just because they were all so beautiful. And it was so new to me to see them and hear them and watch them move. As I am standing now in the Frankfurt airport, I see the same diversity. People from all over the world, some wonder around looking at the shops, some write on their laptops or speak on their phone, some sleep on the benches. By some wonderful coincidence, we are all here, breathing the same air. I need to take a moment to stare and wonder. How come we all get along so well in an airport? I’m speaking about the unwritten code of good manners that everyone without failure finds the time and the patience and even the pleasure to respect in an airport; we all seem to find it natural to respect each other and gracefully excuse ourselves if we happened to hit someone by mistake with our carry on.
This takes me to a different occasion when we all seem to be in peace with each other: the celebration of the New Year. Pretty naïve of me to ask but still, how is it possible to have just one single day or night in a year when everyone finds something better to do than stress out, complain, argue, fight, something that puts on hold the daily disagreements and allows for celebration. Mind you I am not saying everyone; I’m just saying many, many more than any revolution would take to make any other point. And the question is, who decided that the rest of the year we should all be so busy with ourselves and our routines, and worries, and troubles, that there can only be one day or night where we can all have fun together?

just wondering…

we often times say time is running by too fast; here was summer here is christmas, here was monday here is sunday, here was morning here is night; there’s an interesting book written by a smart guy about how people perceive time; what does it mean that time is running by too fast or too slow and how do you culturally live your life? in the past, in the present or in the future? (for reference check out: Robert Levine “A Georgraphy of Time”)

for me time usually passes by too fast when i have too much stuff to do; work, phone calls, emails, arronds, and a lot of planning: remember tomorrow to do that, remember on thursday the dinner plans, remember in the week-end you have guests, you need to buy this and that, clean up your place etc; a lot of my time is spent in the future; i think and many times worry about stuff that will happen in the next couple of days, without being aware of the fact that this simple mental activity takes a lot of my actual present time and energy. (i heard someone say once: “note to self, remember to breathe” and i’ve adopted the expression immediately… sometimes i feel like i do need a special note for that);

facebook which i am a big fan of is also taking a lot of my time without telling me; first because i spend so much time on facebook and second because many of the things i find there are actually generating a lot more mental activity than i would normally have to handle; whether songs or statuses or articles or news i am basically trying to grasp what around 100 people are thinking of in a given moment, not understanding that by this i’m taking in more information than i actually need; i take in 100 times more info and emotions and expressions of whatever thoughts or feelings than what one person normally does (making a simple calculation: i have more than 300 friends on facebook, of which facebook selects maybe 100, maybe even less, a day for which it gives me updates sometimes more than one)

internet in general is taking a lot of my time; i have internet at home, i have internet at work; i was recently invited by my mobile service provider to get a new phone. I went to the shop and asked what they had in store; the guy literally threw himself at the shelves with smartphones telling me which of them will get me more connected to the network than the other; that was the point when i said no: i need a new phone, just a phone, a simple phone, no more internet, no more access to social networks or other applications. just a plain old style damn phone; we chose a model that looks like a blackberry but is not. it has access to internet, and i do have it with my plan, but i turned it off, so it works right now just like the first Nokia model i remember i saw when in i was in highschool;

another thing i learned to say no to is television; i have cable tv and i have not turned it on in months (i usually watch tv only if someone else in the room opens the tv, which is many times the case when i’m home); of course i feel tempted, but i decided i’m losing too much time watching it. i actually lose too much time filtering what’s worth seeing from what’s not. there’s also this question of who is the target audience, for which people the information (the type of doom’s day news) or the shows (big brother, the bachelor, bingo) are actually created for? if the tv programs are giving us the measure of a society, then wow!… there’s nothing more to add…

actually my point is that today information can be just as much of an addiction like alchool or drugs; information gives you the right pinch of adrenaline and it can keep you “connected” and “wired up” more than 24 hours a day; literally because you can start the 26th of december in Tokio and finish it in San Francisco, and if you count the hours you’ll spend more than 24 finding out what’s going on;

it also blurs out a lot of the material in favor of the intelect. you start living more in your mind that in the real life; it’s easier to spend a few hours on the internet and ignore the real hardships outside your house, it’s easier to check out facebook and look at smiling faces rather than get out of the house and realize your neighbourhood filled up with stray dogs and the mayor is more concerned with sending his Christmas cards rather than taking up with the stray dogs… you turn the tv on and you look at all these talk shows and you feel as if you have just spoken out on what’s bothering you, you feel you’ve expressed the anger and the frustration because those people there were doing it for you; but you didn’t express anything and the show is over and the dogs are still barking outside. someone once talked about comedies; how people are paid to laugh at jokes and make you, the viewer, feel as if you are laughing although you are actually not. and how after watching the show you feel as if you laughed but you actually haven’t moved a single muscle on your face. take that for what the mind can do..

yes, my point… my point is…

is to be able to enjoy the production of La Traviata, prepared for the 2005 Salzburg Festival, with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon.

i’m not sure how much of an opera fan i usually am; they say opera is an acquired taste; i’ve done my share of opera education but i never felt wholly entirely won by opera… until one special evening when my friend Eduardo, who’s a true opera fan, decided to show us a bit of this show… it was love at first sight… that very night i went home and bought on amazon the dvd… and the night it came, i watched it twice… it’s one of those things that you cannot take your eyes off… not just the music, which is wonderful, but her dress, their black suits, the red couch, the glass that hits the wall, the so many almost breathable shades of love … it feels as if there was only one way this show could have ever existed and that was perfection… pure perfection… the state of existence where each vibration is synchronized in pure harmony;

i am literally jealous of each and every single person that was there in that music hall that night. did they know when they entered the hall that they will experience one of the most beautiful moments of human expression? it is so beautiful that the first thing that comes to my mind is that the place where this comes from is the same place where war and famine come from…

and so how can you ever lose your sense of wonder…

dear mom,

i made it to 30 !!!
we’ve done a pretty good job with my 20s!
what’s next?

luv u!