back from the dead

It's been two years since I last posted something here. And of course, as it normally happens every new year, I've been hit by a bout of nostalgia that led me into googling my name and finding my old blogs (including this one, in portuguese, that goes back almost 10 years), which led me into a whole night re-reading several years of blogging, which, well, led me here. I miss writing these mostly pointless diaries. If I should follow the right order of things, I should start blogging again somewhere else, for ritual sake (and not to risk readers linking new phases into cringe-worthy-old-phases), but since this one already holds my name and not some silly uninspired of-the-moment name, I decided that I might as well start again here.

For tradition sake, I should also say that I don't know how long this new-found enthusiasm will last, so I'll lower any possible expectations of continuous updates (I have a tendency to disappear from time to time), but I won't. Let's live in the present.

Hello, again.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

For a couple of weeks I've reading all over the british press about Wetlands, a novel that will be taking the country by storm this month, and I can't bloody wait to get my hands on a copy. It has already done the whole brouhaha in Germany, where the author Charlotte Roche - born in England but raised in Cologne - has originally published this little controversial volume. Apparently, the novel is about an 18-year-old girl who has been hospitalised after a shaving episode gone wrong - which is kind hilarious - and goes on about her sex escapades while still in hospital - which made me raise an eyebrow - to her weird hygiene habits which include rubbing her genital parts in public toilets - NOW, that's got my attention.

In terms of books and films revolving about sex, I've always had this feeling that it would take a LOT of creativity to make me interested (full-on porn, animal and scatological fetish need not apply - they belong in the "yuck" category, which means I will look at out of curiosity before scrunching my face in distaste. Pedophilia is absolutely out of question). The last films I remember being attracted by were Bitter Moon and Last Tango in Paris, maybe Eyes Wide Shut and The Dreamers. Books... I can't remember much other then Susana Moore's In The Cut, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and maybe some of Anaïs Nin's work. I was never interested in that french bestseller written by a certain Catherine M, nor the real-life sex adventures of ladettes and middle-class girls turned strippers.

I think my taboos have been broken quite early in life.

But THIS book is something else.

The author says she started with an idea to comment on society's obsession with female cleanliness and it evolved into an altogether study of all things supposedly stomach-churning for the average individual: hemorrhoids, "smegma", "slime", and other detailed description of bodily fluids and Helen's (the protagonist) straightforward relationship with sex and her own body.

I suppose doctors won't find any of this too out of the ordinary, but I'm quite interested in what kind of impact this book is going to cause now that so much visual information is available and so many moral values don't stand their worth.

I'm ordering my copy right now.

This idea goes hand-in-hand with my new approach to life

The point, as [Virginia] Woolf suggests in Orlando, is the thrilling experience of the present moment. Everything else is a sort of dry dust that falls away, insignificant and distracting. Many of Woolf's famous works move fro character to character, moment to moment, attempting to capture and renew the sense of wonder that exists apart from and inside of social, cultural, and political arrangements. Woolf is, in this sense, apolitical. But in another sense she is very political, because the logical outcome of her method is a radical democratizing of the novel. No consciousness is privileged. No class, no degree of virtue or talent, no amount of money, no uniqueness of perspective gets to own the depiction of consciousness. [...] The author's job is to preserve exceptional moments, no to award them to exceptional people.

J. Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Happy New Year

I had one of the best end of the years in a very, very long time. It probably was the best, considering the level of general optimism radiated by me. I worked hard, felt that I was being (reasonably, but not sufficiently) rewarded for it, and finished the month full of energy and ideas and plans for the new year. I finally made my peace with Christmas, throwing a lavish party for 18 close friends and family with all the expected treats: an enormous turkey, lots of alcohol and chocolate, two whole days of eating and watching It's A Wonderful Life. And then, four of us went to the Scottish Highlands, as north as it could ever be, to hide away in a beautiful cottage and do nothing other than rest, read, drink, eat, take long walks and baths, and think about what's coming next.

Then, I realised I wasn't prepared for what was coming next.

On Saturday the 3rd I sat down to write New-Year resolution and To-Do lists, and felt sick inside. Suddenly, the carelessness and the freedom I was enjoying for the past 10 months did not feel right anymore. It seemed like 2008 had kicked me out of the house, like a loving but tough parent, and shut the door, leaving me alone in the street and the cold. It's like it was saying to me,"It's all nice and fun, darling, but this cannot go on. You better make some decisions to move forward, and you better do it now."

On Sunday the 4th, my mind was racing the entire drive home. Thirteen hours of restlessness. When we got home, still inside the car, I looked at my boyfriend and my new great friend, and said: "Guys, I don't know what's gonna happen to me this year". They burst out laughing. "Oh god, here we go again," they said, and I laughed with them. But inside, I was suffocating. I felt the shadows of my previous crisis creeping up, whispering in my ear: "Did you miss us, hun?"

I didn't. I don't. I thought I was the one who had shut the door, locked it and thrown the key away. No more sleepless nights, no more crying fits, no more distressed, desperate conversations in a bed that felt, at times, too big and empty. I got out of the car and thought to myself, "We'll deal with it tomorrow."

Then, Monday, Black Monday, arrived. My first conversation with the boyfriend ended outrageously in tears, followed by his arms around me saying we were gonna work something out. It felt like déja vu. I half-expect his hand pulling my hand, my whole diminutive body under his weight, whenever I finish a spectacle of self-pity. It was a pattern that repeated itself one, two, three times, and then at the remain of the day we worked something out. We set up a plan that will certainly soothe my mind for next months ahead, but it won't be enough to silence The Shadows that insist on throwing me off balance.

So we're gonna go away. Again.

a brief note about the end of the year

So, the end is nigh. This is my last week of official work, then from the 22nd to the 4th of January I'll be away from my regular duties, worried only about Christmas preparations, and then off to the remote cottage we've rent in the middle of nowhere in North Scotland. I'm already anticipating the many reflections and wonders that will certainly happen, as for the first time in years I have managed to accomplish, if not all, most of what I've decided to do this year. The strange thing is, although 2008 was the "No-plan Year", it gradually became the "Decision Year", as month after month I had to make decisions to climb steps, but only when they appeared at my feet. I loved living like this, wanting more from life, but waiting for it (her?) to point the directions. I can probably count the days on one hand when I wasn't happy to wake up and go about my day, doing what was expected of me. Of course, my errands and general routine were probably not ideal, nor were they amazingly satisfying, but the consciousness that they were results of my choices certainly made everything else easy.

I'm starting to find that happiness is partly created by being approved of by surrounding peers and loved ones, but on the other hand, if you're convinced that your acts and choices are the right ones, the idea rubs off on people, and approval becomes not a possibility, but a certainty.

--

And 2008 was definitely a good year for books (and almost no gigs or clubs). There was the beautiful Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, then Donna Tartt breathtaking college novel The Secret History. There was the sweet and heartbreaking Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, the memorable and relevant To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and the surprisingly enlightening A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. And now, having just finished the masterly written and romantic Austen novel Persuasion, I felt I'm finishing my year in style.

I've read many others that I can quite remember just now, but most of them were books that I grived after turning the last page - a sensation only replaced by the thrill of reading the first page of another great novel.

It feels great to know that I'll have to choose the next ones to take with on my holiday away from civilization.

8

years, today.

That's how long we have loved each other for.

It doesn't feel long. It feels timeless. And with each year, the thought of a life without you seems more and more unbearable.

te amo.

Let Joy Be Unconfined

It's the challenge that makes me adore this city. Not the kind of defined ones that we set for ourselves (as in "I'm gonna learn how to play the banjo" or something similar - although i do DO that all the time, just for the sake of having a taste of it), but the daily challenges, visual challenges, thrown at your face constantly. Only yesterday, I saw this lady, mid-30s, fully clad in spandex and gym gear, jogging WHILE pushing her baby pram. The baby was IN it, of course. And she was going up the steepest hill near my house, the muscles on her tights bulging out with every pounding foot, while I was walking down the same sidewalk, feeling slightly out of breath. I grinned to myself - that sight was not only hilarious, it was also humbling. Until I went to the bus stop and saw two old men sitting at the bench, both mumblings haste remarks and sighing to each other whenever the wrong bus showed up at the bottom of the road. One was a tiny, meager Chinese looking little man; the other, an enormous, protuberant and heavy Black man, his hair and beard a blend of grey and white. When the bus arrived, the small one climbed up and offered to hold the big one's plastic bags, as he tried to negotiate the step at the entrance. It wasn't my bus, but I've got in anyway, if only I could observe them for a few more minutes, sitting next to each other, the big one nearly crushing the small one with each road curve. On my way home, I saw this Indian looking man stepping in. He had the appearance of any other Asian man, moustache and all, except he was wearing, unselfconsciously, an Indiana Jones sort of hat and sturdy, pointy, brown cowboy boots. He looked like he had just dismounted his horse and got on the bus, all imposed respect and expertise. It wasn't a costume, they were very expensive looking pieces. He looked to the floor without bending his head down, in the manner of a soldier. I had never seen anyone like him before, and neither those three other people, all on the same day. It warmed my heart, and although not in a immediatly significant way, it changed my the way I look at life forever.

And this is just a glimpse of what happens here, everyday.

\o/

But of course, tired as I am, my eyes shut at about 2am. Watching the little map of the States flash blues and reds every hour on about five networks' and newspapers' websites, I just felt pangs of anxieties. As Juno would say, that red colour is so unholy - and at first, it seemed to cover one stretch of land too big. Then, at 3:52pm, I jumped awake, sending the laptop flying to the wall next to the bed. It landed on top of a half-drunk glass of red wine, shattering it to pieces, spilling dark liquid and shards of broken glass in every direction under the bed. I stood up swearing (lost another f*ckin' wine glass - I manage to break one per week) to clean the mess up, and then I hear the BBC presenter: "It's 4 o'clock, UK time, and Barack Obama is the new president of the United States." Damn. It felt like Brazil had won the World Cup. I shouted "Holy SHIT," getting a harsh "SHHHH, AMOR, it's 4 AM!" back from the boyfriend, who was pissed off at being woken up by the noise of laptops-hitting-walls-broken-glasses-BBC-man-announcements. I whispered back : "I KNOW! Isn't it amazing?"

As the Kung Fu Panda would say, there is no secret ingredient. All you've got to do is believe.

Obama all the way

I'll just say this: I'm tired. Really tired. I haven't slept properly since friday, and that's certainly not due to too much parties. Working really hard. But I won't go to sleep just yet. It's 11:45pm, and I'll stay awake as long as my eyes don't close involuntarily, following the American elections through the blogs (I don't have a TV). I even texted the Americans I know, in an effort to make them vote. That's my little bid for change there.

Tomorrow things will be different. For good.

From the Urban Dictionary

deja moo

The feeling that you have heard this bull before.

Katie: " How come you guys didn't go out and celebrate your anniversary?"
Nicole: " We were going to, but he had to take care of his little sister again."
Katie: "That sounds like deja moo to me."

A big MISS-take

But of course, the whole shebang had to be a mistake. It was from the start, when I my friend offered the gig. Being a gathering of semi-illiterate Brazilians being pushed and shoved and shouted at by a dude (not Brazilian - who knows where he was from) with self-importance issues, delegating irrelevant orders while seizing his employees shoulders like they were little gypsy children who didn't quite comprehend the robbery lesson - of course it wouldn't work. As soon as I arrived, I felt a little impulse to do a little U-turn and break free from that hellish scenario, but my inner boss told me to be cool and get through this. What a nightmare. Five hours standing up at the entrance of the place with a bitter cold wind blowing in our faces. My joints ached, but not as much as my pride for being treated like all the other airheads who had as much self-respect as they had appropriate vocabulary (and English was their native language). Don't get me started on the show itself, which I only managed to get a glimpse of. A parade of frightfully pumped-up and oiled "beauties", desperately competing for a return ticket to Brazil - or most probably a one-way ticket home, as I bet a great deal of them would not be able to afford a "return" to the UK for financial AND legal constraints.

I was peeved last night and made sure some people knew it. Determined not to go back, I sat down this morning to write an email to the organiser stating my claim (and asking for the money owed to me for such a torture), when there it was, in my inbox 9 o'clock in the morning, an email from said person: "thank you so much 4 last night i did not see u when you don any way i am going to pay you 4 lat night and i do not need you work from next week my girl friend will do the job 4 me."

So to finish it off in style, I got sacked. From a job I didn't even wanted, by a person who can't even write an email.

It made my day.

beauty contest

Since I've decided not to work for anybody else unless on a short term, temporary basis, strictly for cash, I get whatever comes my way. So tomorrow, I'll be at the door of the only tolerable Brazilian club in London as hostess for the Miss and Mister Brazil UK 2008 contest. I know. Isn't it wonderfully ironic, though? One of my bests is going to be the stage presenter, and I'll be also acting as her stylist and speech writer. Ain't I a little crackerjack. Je sais.

+

and I heard today: "why aren't you competing, darlin'?" HÁ! That was a good one. Surely the guy was out of it on champagne. Damn good foundation, that Kate Moss' one, though. Will be paying a visit soon to a Rimmel's counter at Boots to stock up.

++

ps: i'm totally pro-blogging these days, I had no idea how much I missed it. So expect tons of silly little posts like this one showing up on a screen near you.

Obessed about the Obsessed

I used to be obsessed about obsessed people. People with obsessions, who went any lengths to do whatever it was they were obsessed about, or to be near their object of obsession. I had a special predilection for insomniacs and drunks, but not so much drug addicts and self-harmers. The first ones seemed romantic and idealists in their pain, suffering for a purpose, whereas the latter ones always looked pathetic and self-indulgent, lost and unaware of their own reasons, and I could not relate to that. In fact, my obsession with obsessed people comes from the fact that I myself was never obsessed about anything. I have certain interests and passions, but I’ve always seemed to accommodate them around my life, not the opposite. For instance, I LOVE reading and will avoid running any errands or complete any project to finish a good book, and will walk in a busy street holding an open book risking eventually running into a lamppost, and will pretend I’m sick so I can sidestep meaningless conversations and hide in my bedroom with a novel. Likewise, but in a much smaller amount, I LOVE fashion and sometimes will run a massive credit card bill that will take me months to pay in order to have that ridiculously sexy pair of shoes and that stupendously gorgeous dress (not so much these days, as I work with clothes and have them around me all the time as part of the job). And I LOVE my man, and although we shut ourselves off inside a bubble with no friends in the beginning so we could live off nothing but love, these days we're comfy and cosy and confident in our solid eight-year history, choosing instead to meet as many people as a 7-day-week allows. That’s about it really. I love certain musicians, but will go days without any music. Love films and watch repeatedly some of them until I absorb some of the lines by osmosis, but now the chances are that I’d fall asleep in the middle of, say, True Love. In fact, I sleep like a baby. Always have. I’m one of those people that sleep standing up if needed, that needs a solid eight-hour to avoid headaches and tired eyes, that feels lethargic in the middle of the morning, after lunch, at the end of the afternoon, and after dinner. I could never stay awake for anything, and there was a time that even my sex life was suffering because I would fall asleep 30 seconds after I got in bed. Passionate, I mean, obsessed people don’t sleep. They pull all-nighters in front of a computer, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap alcohol. Which is another thing I can’t do. I do smoke and drink, a glass here and there almost on a daily basis when I’m in London, but I will never become a hard smoker and drinker because I am asthmatic and hate being hangover. Truly hate. I feel like killing myself when I have one, and I always regret and curse and stay away from any sort of alcohol for several days. That rule, in fact, applies to almost anything in my life. I’ll be bad, but just a little. Just a little bad. Just enough so I can maintain the edge, the sense of danger, to spice things up – but I’d never completely fuck up. I think I did sometimes when I was still growing up, but the guilt and the shame and the pain were too intense for my petite frame. I couldn’t bear to repeat major fuck-ups, to keep hitting my head in the wall like an amnesiac retard. I’ve always cared too much about what other people think to let them see me was a thickheaded fool (isn’t it all the people who repeatedly fuck up?). All that a result of that inner complex of inferiority, a characteristic deeply infused in my still-to-be-formed personality as a small child (but that’s material for another long post.) I could never allow myself to be obsessed because I could never allow myself to be a nuisance to others. Isn’t it all obsessed fuck-ups, insomniacs, drunks, drug addicts and self-harmers a burden to others? They are, which I discovered only after living in London. My heroes, all artists, all looked good on paper. I craved their passion. I wanted to give my blood and flesh and soul and hours of sleep to express myself too, I wanted to understand what it was to go hungry and desperate and physically sick because those were simply consequences of being passionate about something or someone. I wanted NOT to be afraid for once of those consequences, of losing everything, of being hurt. How divinely artistic and exquisitely appealing that pain seemed to me. Could I please be one of them? I couldn’t. Something, a barrier, a fence, a wall, never allowed me to go the extra mile for self-expression. Instead, the only length I ever managed to go leaded to a stupid dump called Depression (in fact, I have TONS to say about depressed people, material for another long post too).

Then, gradually, I met some of my heroes. And all I can say now is that I felt a mixture of surprise, disappointment and relief, both intertwined and tangled but absolutely comprehensible to my confused mind. My objects of obsessions, the obsessed, were flawed. Not in the romantic sense I imagined them to be; they were flawed in all the wrong ways. Egocentric, repetitive, selfish, self-indulgent, exhaustingly self-obsessed, and not so obsessed about their own art. They were marvellously human. Imagine the dimensions of the disappointment in my over-imaginative, insecure little head. Now multiply this by 100 and you have a glimpse of the dimensions of my relief. My heroes, the people that emulated my ideals, stepped down from the pedestals I’ve put them in and joined the world of humans. My world.

So, today, gradually and then suddenly, I stopped becoming obsessed about the obsessed. I was right, all along. While I remain intrigued by those who are not afraid to make a fool of themselves or loose everything, my new obsessions are the hard-workers. Those who, instead of just burdening everyone around them with their immense egos, simply shut themselves up and work hard, so hard they are nearly consumed by their own idea of perfection. Again, something I’d probably never be.

I just want to be blown away, all the time.

The new Kings of Leon

I'm listening obsessively to the new Kings of Leon album. It's heartfelt rock'n'roll, the kind that asks for big stadium gigs full of adoring singalong fans. I didn't like Kings of Leon much before, whereas J. had their previous album on repeat mode in his iPhone for a long time. Until I read this raving review in a Sunday supplement and, since I haven't listened to anything other than 80s pop these days, I decided to have a go. Apparently, this album got very mixed reviews, many of them leaning toward the thumbs down road than anything else. Who cares. These days I see music critics as irrelevant as everyone else's opinion about music : they're only purpose is to inform you of artists and their output. Their personal tastes are pointless. Music to me is about instinct: it either rocks your world or it doesn't. It either makes you feel happy, or sad, or sexy, or it doesn't. Stuff like "the track starts on the right note but it doesn't hold to the end" or any scrutinising production bollocks is only interesting for people who work with it. I just care if it makes me dance, if  it makes me cry, or if it makes me forget my own thoughts for a while. 

And I'm not going to feel silly for that.

Having it All

The other day I came across an article in a fashion magazine about that old feminine ideal of having it all. The myth that we, the fragile sex, can have a successful career, a family, a stable relationship and money while still managing to be pretty, sexy, fashionable and intelligent. Note that I say myth, and not concept, because that what it is, and will always be, if you, stressed out folks out there, haven't realised yet: being good at everything is nothing more, nothing less than pure utopia. It is a phony ideal of life. And more to the point, it's utterly unfair to women. Men don't go through this kind of dilemma - or at least, not the ones that I know. Most of the men around me (the non-gay ones) are either focused in 1)Make money, 2) Have sex, 3)Be recognized for whatever they do so they can have numbers 1 and 2, and 4)Have a good time after and while they're working at numbers 1,2 and 3, which includes drinking, drugs, bungee jumping, gambling in Vegas, or whatever takes their fancy. The ones with kids and relationships are either 1)Bored, 2)Too busy fucking around to care, 3)Thinking they're too hot to be having sex with just one bird, so they better get out of it ASAP. Some of them care about their looks or think about clothes, but never more than once a week, and even them it takes a right pickle for them to do anything about it (say, a girl that looks horrified at the sight of their naked beer gut, or a pair of torn jeans that exposes their disproportional god-given male qualities). So I suppose, with few exceptions, men in general don't go about fretting that they can't have it all, simply because they don't want to.

Now, in my case, the have-it-all ideal assumes an entirely new proportion. On top of wanting all of those things that make up the myth, each category is divided into several sub-categories, making the whole thing sound, well, decidedly AMBITIOUS.

I'll give an example (the most obvious of the other obvious ones): career. I don't want to have just ONE career, for many reasons, the strongest of them being that 1) I have way too many interests, 2) Which makes me want to be able to explore at least some of them at lenght and 3) Which also scares the monkeys out of me to be defined by any single one of them.

I'll translate: right at this moment I'd very much like to write a novel and short stories, colaborate with magazines, create an ethical fashion label, learn to knit, sew and draw properly, take street fashion pictures on a weekly basis, and become an assistant of someone with an established career in any of these creative areas. In my little deluded head, I believe I am perfectly able to do all of the above at the same time, so I've written a weekly schedule in which I dedicate a few hours everyday to each task/project, carefully designating special slots for exercising and socialising on a regular basis.

BUT - and there's always a but - on top of everything I also need to find time to run a small (tiny) business in which I buy, style, photograph, edit, update, promote and send vintage clothes to remote corners of the world, and all on my own.

The result: a frustrated, overly disquieted version of me at the end of every single day because OBVIOUSLY I cannot complete 25% of my meticulously drawn daily schedule.

It goes without saying that each and every aspect of my life suffers too. I skip daily runs and yoga sessions because I'm already late to finish whatever I'm working on, I neglect friends and boyfriend because I always think I could be carrying out a project instead of engaging in meaningless chit-chat, and when I am around other people I struggle to pay attention to what they say because my mind is racing with things I ought to be doing.

The relationship part, I don't even want to go there. My other half favourite choice of words is "What did I just say?", because he knows I'm endlessly pretending to listen to him. Not to mention (the shame!) my nightly predilection for books or another episode of Six Feet Under instead of sex.

God. My neck hurts.

So how on earth I'm gonna manage to have children and a house and (oh, I forgot), enough money to support this insane lifestyle, that's what I can't even think about thinking.

And there are still women out there who say we can have it all. I'd kill whoever invented that.

Impressions from an Italian holiday

Last weekend we went for a road trip around the north of Italy and it turned out to be one of the most fantastic trips I've ever been to. This time, we hadn't planned absolutely anything, and I was almost certain things were going to go wrong - last time we went for a road trip (around the UK), we ended up in obscure, cold towns, getting car-sick and bored to our hearts' content.

Amazingly, this time everything rolled smoothly. We simply picked up a car in Milan, looked at the map, and someone pointed a finger randomly at the map, saying "Let's go there." After six hours driving through stunning landscapes we arrived at a tiny touristic town called Levanto near Cinque Terre and the Italian Riviera.  

And our luck did not finish there: after knocking on some people's doors asking for a hotel room, we managed to rent this superb three bedroom flat 2 minutes from the beach. I was in heaven.

We spent 2 days soaking in the sun in Levanto and Buonnasola (another beautiful beach 10 minutes away), had dinner in Vernazze, an even tinier village with one of the most fantastic sunsets on Earth (the other one being my Dad's hometown, Campo Grande, in Brazil), watched shooting stars lying on the rocks (I had never seen one before, until my new friend C. told me to keep looking at the same point in the sky for 10 minutes. I screamed when I realized it was true.), and ended the trip with late drinks in a medieval city called Lucca and the best risotto in a restaurant in Milan with a view to the Duomo.

Now. The fun part: (Before any Italians read this, please note I am totally generalizing).

1- Tanning is SERIOUS BUSINESS for Italians. They surely don't give a rat's ass to that whole nonsense of sunbathing before 11am and after 4pm, or using SPF 30, or things like wrinkles  and, uh, CANCER. Why, if they can turn into a 70% dark chocolate version of themselves? I've never seen anything like that shade of tan. They were all something like this: 

(That's the only picture google came up with when I typed "super tan". And that picture is probably from someone's granny in the 60s - which gives us an idea of how crazy must be these days to go this dark :).

Everywhere there were ladies toasting away midday, with a cigarette in one hand and baby oil spray on the other. And their faces MATCHED their bodies. Damn, I don't think I've come across anyone that, uhm, ruthless since the 80s. 

2- Young men in Lucca ALL have long hair scraped back in a (yes) BUN. I'm not making this up. We went into the town center at night for drinks and we encountered this corner full of boys and young people standing in front of pizzarias and gelaterias (apparently their saturday night hangout of choice). And a whole group of them had their hair UP, loosely tied with the ends sticking out. Something like this:

I've seen men wearing their hair this way occasionally, but I never thought this was a MAJOR trend anywhere since the... what, early 90s? Oh, and all of them also wore knitted jumpers tied around their shoulders in a preppy sort of vibe, even though it was 35ºC outside and there wasn't any remote possibility of temperatures falling.

3- Italians can be quite scary sometimes. Everything seems to be "private" or "exclusive", and you have to pay to have to privilege to be at this places. Every beach has a private area with sun loungers (30 euros a day), and we were kicked out of all of them. You cannot order an espresso at the bar and take it to a table without someone screaming at you that you need to pay a fee to sit down, and don't even try to use their toilets or (the heresy!) throw a can of coke in their rubbish bins if you haven't bought it there. 

4- Italians like their buildings to be grand and embellished, but it seems that around the riviera and Cinque Terre they don't want to spend too much money on sculpted ornaments. Instead, they paint extra windows, balcony columns, adornments and bricks on the walls in 3D style, so from a distance it's like you're looking at carefully built antique architecture. Marvelously kitschy. Something like this: 

That's all I can remember now. But I'll never see Italians in the same light after this trip. They surely are peculiar people.

The Raconteurs advice

Everything's OK
As long as you're inside my blue veins.

Elephant's Memory

Since we moved to the loft/studio/live-n-work unit, things have changed for the better ... and some for the worse. I can't remember if I said that before, but after 6 years living abroad, this is the first time we're on our own. Just me and him and the cats. I don't want to dare say it's anything other than wonderful, because that's all it has been for most of the time. But reality always warms her way into one's lives eventually, and now there are no flatmates to blame for the unfairness and arduousness of it all.

In one sentence: when shit hits the fan, sometimes I just feel like killing him.

Don't get me wrong, though. I am doing nothing more than venting here, because almost 8 years down the road, in terms of relationships I can honestly declare that I am NOT a quitter. Just because in times of trouble, when the clothes rail breaks for the second time and everything is gathering dust on the floor, when the Ikea cupboard is faulty once again and we have to return it, when the washing machine is leaking, the ceiling is leaking, the shower is leaking, the bloody London sky is leaking!, it doesn't mean I don't want to be with him anymore. Being - as in the act of existing - without him is a condition I have no intention of pursuing ever again. This is one of the major changes I've gone through since I started seeing him, because my original nature (if I can put it this way - surely one's nature changes along the way?) is one of a quitter. It's in my genes. For most of my teen and early adulthood years, when there was a remote possibility, a looming idea that things might go wrong, I would simply jump in and out like a frog who jumps inside a boiling pan. That is a classic example of immaturity: someone who just doesn't want to deal with too much pain. It's okay to get slightly injured, hurt and cry for a couple of days, but then life is too short to stir away in a pool of sorrow. Bring fresh blood in, please.

Then, I met him, and when it comes to loved ones, he is not a quitter. He just doesn't switch off his phone and disappear when jealousy and bitterness and anxiety broke all at once. He doesn't run off to someone else's arms, someone else's smell to forget the frustration. He was the first person to smile straight in the middle of a row and say "ok, I'm sorry, lets start all over again".
He says, "Even better, let's just forget everything", because he probably knows quitters like me have elephant's memory and tend to build a wall around themselves against eventual threats.
So gradually, brick by brick, he razed my wall down and taught me that love is about sticking together, specially in times of hardship.

On the other hand, I'm convinced that I was not the only one who learnt important lessons throughout our almost eight years together. I, with my extreme tendencies to over-analyse stuff, have always needed to talk things through, specially when I'm not putting them down as rantings in a journal or blog. Which means that whenever he would hold me by the collar to not run away, I would sit there and say "Okay then, let's NOT start all over again. I wanna talk about it." The quintessencial, old-school "Let's discuss our relationship." I like to believe he is not like the stereotypical man who avoids this kind of situation. Instead, he simply was, years ago, unfamiliar with this habit. It certainly became a habit. And because of these two rules (1. do not avoid problems, and 2. confront and talk them through), established steadily by both, we managed to change our "original natures" - at least, a little.

Today, when life comes crashing in with bills to be paid, cats to feed, cleaning to be done, things to get fixed, projects to be carried out, all accompanied by the ghosts of failure and frustration, we try to stick together.

And talk it through.

Penelope Fitzgerald's writing advice

Today, in the Guardian:

"I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken."

In this light, I should have had TONS of inspiration. At least for the novel part.