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Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
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8:30 pm - i don't want to die, i have eaten such apples!
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"In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor's backyard, producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line.
My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolly, a one-armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country. Yet my country cannot be found, its citizens meet in a dream to conduct elections."
(Ilya Kaminksy)
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, November 10th, 2006
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9:27 am - Collide
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Last night I went swing-dancing with honors! We were all beginners, and the guys rotated counter-clockwise, grabbing a girl's hand and twirling her through the half-measures. I spun through two songs with my final partner when he suddenly confessed that he preferred Salsa. Who doesn't?! So long as we don't get caught, I said.
edit:
Last night we went Salsa dancing (when no one was looking).
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
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2:23 am - roses
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He is- I was- we are-
I am no longer attached.
Today I called one of them back. I'm proud of the effort I'm putting forth here. My standards have been so obnoxiously high lately. But what does it take to enjoy a late-night treat out? Smile at his jokes. Endure the conversation. Watch the night eek through your fingers like thick, clotted blood...
Coffee + migraine in one shot. But he's nice, right? And sometimes he gets my mind off you.
(I keep imagining you here with me,
I see
A mi lado, in the strobe of the light
...)
I weighed the question with an ex-boyfriend the other night on AIM.
bassace: I'd only ever go for someone who'd definitely pair well with me.
RuedaCatalina: same here. I guess that's why I've felt so exasperated lately.
bassace: it's worth it, and you know it.
Today was also the last day of JA. Those- children- are- adorable. Just give them powdered donuts.
*little-girl-face covered in white sugar raises hands*
"Yes?"
"I'm a snowman!"
"...You're adorable."
"Alright, kids, give yourselves a round of applause!"
*boy raises hand*: "Can we give you a round of applause?"
-----------------------------------------------------------
I keep confusing shipwrecks with moths
because they appeared in a poem together.
[Lorca, I imagine]
I could have written you fifty pages of e-mail
Today.
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(comment on this)
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12:48 am - "I linger here,
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your ring upon my finger, dear.
And sing 'till dawn the song
of you
and me
and what
and why?
For time is all
I have to keep between these walls.
And half-asleep the days go by...
A million little nights and days go by...
and i don't mind.
Parades go by.
So many beautiful parades go by.
'Leave me behind!'"
current music: (magnetic fields)
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, November 6th, 2006
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10:26 pm - Rueda Catalina
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9:54 pm - tastes like death
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(my own in-Spanish recipe, modified over the years..)
(for example those dancing calaveras were just added today!)
current music: Hago ¡Chas! (Alex y Cristina)
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, September 17th, 2006
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11:29 pm - el arco iris
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| Friday, July 14th, 2006
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11:10 am - stranded in soto
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I only wish I had my camera with me so I could show you a day in Soto.
While my host dad is recovering from his operation, the kids and I are being passed from house to house in the amiable little neighborhood of Soto. A place where children share bikes, parents share children, and you eat fruit from anyone's tree. In the morning we dress the littlest ones and find our rackets and fix the bike chains and ride through the mazes of pavement, weeds, broken fences, and neighbors' yards to the tennis courts. We play where it's coolest. Usually garages or sheds, sometimes the sitting room if the windows are open. We count our coins for the chuchería. At 3 we eat lunch wherever we decide to set a table and raid the fridge. You have to understand that there are no parents--they're all at work--only meek, silent women ironing the clothes and washing the dishes. The authority rests on the three teenage foreigners: myself, Megan, and Tom (Tom's from England). We follow the kids on our own bikes and struggle together, laughing at our attempts, to communicate/care for/discipline them. They're easy, really. The young girls turn on their American music and make up dances; the boys grudgingly watch the girls or run off to chase cats. Anyway, life's easy right now. Easy, hot & sweaty, sometimes dirty from bike rides, sugary from visits to the chuchería, always half-Spanish/half-English, always a throatful of laughter.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 29th, 2006
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9:52 am
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Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because "friends react on
one another" and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into
wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love
God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to
any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at
which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving
some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain
whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children,
but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to
let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food
prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never
actually occurred, and also that Gandhi--with, one gathers, a good deal
of moral pressure in the opposite direction--always gave the patient the
choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the
decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal
food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to
what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this
side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the
sense which--I think--most people would give to the word, it is
inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection,
that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty,
that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be
defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol,
tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood
is also a thing that human beings must avoid.
(george orwell)
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 14th, 2006
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4:07 pm - This morning:
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An accordion hops onto the subway.
Sounds like a circus, but all the riders pretend not to notice.
Next stop, two men playing trombones
Followed by a balloon vendor,
Red, green, yellow balloons
and three dancing monkeys.
Finally, an elephant. But
Nothing could change the expressions on those faces.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
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8:42 am - my desires:
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To be the man in the black suit
black socks, black shiny leather shoes
in his own world
at the café table
with a golden spaniel leashed to his chair
as he finishes his novel.
To quiet the wrinkled woman's face
veiled in a dirty hankercheif
that wails the long
por faaaaaaaaaa
vooooooooooooor
in the shadow of tourists of the puerta del sol.
To see beyond the heavy gate
I lean against as I write this,
listening to the schoolchildren play
on the other side.
Niñas chasing niños,
Guerras de agua,
The push against my back
when they kick their ball to the door.
At 4 o'clock the heat on the streets of the city raises a foul dirty smell like pigeons mingling with beggars
and their unbathed children and the rotting food.
I sit on a concrete stoop
my senses blurring in the heat
my thoughts drowning in the drone
of the children at my back.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, June 9th, 2006
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8:43 am - Miraflores de la sierra
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| Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
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2:28 pm - half-a-portrait (of spain)
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Microsoft Word here changes all my American spellings into superfluously-lettered British ones.
Last week, near one of the touristy plazas, my purse was snatched from my arm. It was the most awful experience. I walked to the police station to put in a report, and no one there spoke English! One young policeman came up to me and stared sympathetically, begging, "No llores, no llores..."
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, May 26th, 2006
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2:04 pm - activities:
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reading of civil war in the mornings, oranges and donkeys mid-day, long distance phone calls at night.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 25th, 2006
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8:51 am - ¿Onde va, señorita?
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"Viraba la noche, lleno de hojas e insectos."
"Una mariposa de alas grisáceas revolteaba encandilada alrededor del fuco amarillento. Salté de la hamaca y descalzo atravesé el cuarto, cuidando no pisar algún alacrán salido de su escondrijo a tomar el fresco. Me acerqué al ventanillo y aspiré el aire del campo. Se oía la respiración de la noche, enorme, femenina. Regresé a la habitación..."
(Taken from "El ramo azul" by Octavio Paz)
Next summer I want to live in Latin America. Not to betray Spain-- not because I´m dissatisfied with Spain. But to see some mariposas de alas grisáceas. On a night where I wake up, cubierto de sudor, thirsty for the breeze.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, May 20th, 2006
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4:07 pm
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"The village girls were splendid vivid creatures with coal-black hair, a swinging walk, and a straightforward, man-to-man demeanour which was probably a by-product of the revolution.
Men in ragged blue shirts and corduroy breeches, with broad-brimmed straw hats, were ploughing the fields behind teams of mules with rhymthically flopping ears. Their plows were wretched things, only stirring the soil..."
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, May 19th, 2006
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4:58 pm - poetry and war
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Current music: The estribillos of palomas, vendedores, and mendigantes. The busy esquinas of an historical city. Estribillos quejumbrosos and uplifting.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
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11:03 am - por favor
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c/ Fuente del Cura, 20
28792 Miraflores de la Sierra
Madrid, Spain
I don't want to spend the whole summer in a room with bare walls and bleak dresser-tops. This isn't a request, it's a plea. Send pictures, poems, postcards, notes. If you know me, if you don't.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006
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1:29 am - Flying.
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Fall-in-love Friday
Storybook Saturday
Say-goodbye Sunday
"Trans-Atlantic Flying"
I'm baffled by the hours
of travel ahead of me.
What a bargain they seem, and we'll share
a Saturday that runs like an old-time film, as if
we never do anything but climb trees
and take hundreds of photos.
But then I'll remember
the return flight. Rising in my throat.
Suitcases rolling sobs out the door,
a new place ahead: and smiles,
a single blue bird on the lawn.
Another unread book of poetry;
on the train, French children whose chatter
makes me laugh and laugh.
Fifteen hours of flying
to return where I started:
fixated
on the smallest signs of hope.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 27th, 2006
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9:28 pm - xylophone track
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asealegria's journal
