El Espinazo del Diablo

I haven't been writing here forever but my senses are so awakened right now that I need to pour them down somewhere before I explode or implode or whatever. We just finished watching "The Devil's Backbone" with T and boy! What a movie! What a movie! It was fucking awesome! It killed me. 

It was one or two weeks ago I guess that after watching another Spanish movie, "Snow White", both A and T talked about how sad and depressing all the Spanish movies they have ever watched are and it was just then that I realized I haven't probably watched any product of the Spanish cinema. Such a shame! This movie haunted me with the very sentences that it starts and happens to finish as well.

"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive? An emotion suspended in time? Like a blurred photograph? Like an insect trapped in amber? ..."

The subtleties, the level of symbolism, the dialogues, the suspension, the complicated characters, everything was so admirable. Don't miss it, just don't. 

It was quite a day today. It's already past 7 pm right now and I've locked up myself in my bedroom to breathe some solitude air before our Halloween Party starts. My brother came over last night and I made him stay overnight. I made a potato salad in the morning to give him some to take home and after it was all ready he told me he never eats potato salad! We had a good brunch at Pekara and against all my expectations I was the one who had "La Parisienne" crepe not my little Francophile monster. Man! I feel our relationship is getting better and better day by day and now we're even enjoying the time we spend hanging out with each other. It's interesting...

After the brunch I could make it to one session of the tango workshop and boy, the instructor was great! I can't believe she was dancing with such an ease in those tango shoes with that baby belly she got. She was just amazing. I didn't see her actually dancing, with a partner I mean, and I have no idea how could one dance close embrace tango while being pregnant. I gotta watch her dancing probably tomorrow night if I can make it to the milonga.  Man! I really love tango even though I'm not good at it at all; well, at least not yet. Too much confidence, I know! :D Just watch how beautiful and graceful today's workshop instructors dance.

I was done with the workshop ~ 2:45 pm, so I ran to the town's children museum for the annual genome day. So thanks to M, I learned about the event and that I could volunteer to teach kids about cells, ... We had to walk them through making a collage of one type of cell with all it's major organelles. We had three different patterns, for three different types of cells, for them to chose from: muscle cells, macrophages and nerve cells. Here's the confession: I learned about what macrophages are just today! I also had no idea what the functions and rules of golgi, endoplasmic reticulum, lysosome and phagosomes were prior to today. There was this kid who knew really too much about the cell. I was really shocked. At some point she said that the mitochondria (mitochondrion) had been basically a bacterium and it has evolved over time! Can you believe that?! I still can't! I don't think she was older than 9. There were a considerable number of shy kids, a few hyperactive ones and some that at least seemed to not give a shit. It was cool, I really liked the experience. Teaching is really fulfilling and depleting at the same time for me. I guess when I teach I put too much of myself into it that I wanna die afterwards even though I feel really really good while longing to die! 

I guess a part of my fatigue and headache and not being in the mood is due to the fact that today is the second fucking day of my period. The party is supposed to start in less than half an hour and I haven't dressed up yet and I'm not sure if I even want to. The thing is that I hate being a party spoiler. "Rosie the riveter"?! Boy! I really don't wanna do it. The problem is I know, actually with every fibre of my being, that even with all this reluctance I got, if I dress up and join the people in the party I'll have so much fun. That's the thing. Without even thinking about it I kinda find a way to enjoy myself in almost any situation but I always have an enormous inertia before doing, hmmm..., almost anything?! All I want right now is to sleep. Good night!

Every now and then, all I want, and I really mean all, all the all I want from my life, from the whole universe, is to crash on my couch and stare at the ceiling; ... no, actually not even that; it is to crash on the couch and be; yeah, do nothing else but just be. That's what I have been craving all day today, all the "labor day" * ! 

* Tell me life is not just a huge irony!

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P.S. Wrote the above post yesterday but got to publish it after midnight. 

Have been away forever, I know. Moving and being homeless for a while and then having my brother move to this town for grad school and trying to help him out with basic early stuff totally occupied me for the last say one month. Also since last week I have had to work like crazy for a collaboration. Anyways we have settled in an extremely beautiful and adorable house now and by we I mean my roommates and I who have been living together for the last two years. I can't imagined if we could have found a better place than here to live. Seriously! 

Yesterday we went to watch this movie "BoyHood", and boy! You gotta watch it. It's truly amazing.

In case you didn't recognize the director, Richard Linklater is the director of the trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. 

28 years and still counting ...

Here I am, at the age I have always wished to be.
Wish me a good year. I really need one! I want one! I got to make one! Hopefully I will make one!

"The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities. Aureliano sympathized with the Liberal attitude with respect to the rights of natural children, but in any case, he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand." -__ From "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

The Allerton Park

I haven't been seeing aspects of my spontaneous self for quite sometime. Very recently I've seen some sparkles of it and I'm so damn happy that it's not dead, the spontaneous self I mean. I was going to accompany my friend, who was visiting from Iran, to Chicago. A few days before he arrived here he said something in his text messages that implied he has been assuming that I will go to Milwaukee with him and I thought well, we'll see and I ended up going to Milwaukee with him and we stayed with a mutual friend and it was hysterically fun. Thankfully I didn't hesitate to go. Also a few days before going to Milwaukee this other friend of mine called saying a few friends have rented a cabin in the woods near Asheville and it will be cool if I could join them. He generously invited me to go to his place in Atlanta, spend a day or two with him and another mutual friend and then we drive to Asheville and join the other two friends with whom we were planning to stay in the cabin?! What did I do!? Got a plane ticket from Milwaukee to Atlanta that very night, a few hours after my friend's call! 

Today?! I was sitting in my office not doing shit and it was too cloudy and depressing; I was down and all of a sudden I decided it's such a shame that I've never been to Allerton Park in nearly four years that I've lived in this town. Fortunately I had a friend's car borrowed for today and I simply drove to Allerton. The best thing I have done in quite a while. Isn't it pretty?!  The interesting thing was that once I got to the park it stopped raining and it got quite sunny and beautiful as you can say from these two photos:

And below is the same scene but this time from the top of the white folly in the Fu Dog Garden. 

Look at the photos in this blog post so you will get a better feeling what a heaven I've been to today. I would recommend reading the post as well; she has written pretty well about the park and Robert Allerton. The white folly I talked about earlier is captured in the first photo of the post. 

On my way back I was so charged that once I got to Champaign I realized I had driven 28 miles in 17 minutes! 

I just learned today that Robert Allerton has donated a substantial number of artifacts to The Art Institute of Chicago. Such a shame I didn't know this person before.