Tripping

Sunday, 4 in the morning. In a few hours I'll be pressing 4 and 5 to choose São Paulo's mayor.

Been to The Institute twice this weekend. Nice place but I'm getting tired of it.

"Pi": apart from its bad trip aspect, I strongly recommend you watching this movie. I did it last night, alone, in my bedroom; almost got nuts but now I'm safe back.

Hope this Sunday to be as good as last Friday's night.

Monday and Tuesday: thank you for joining my extended weekend! What do you want me to do with you, guys?

Still haven't opened my white-Maltesers. Perhaps later today...

Didn't read a single page since Friday.

I'm sleepy. G'night...

Mine...

Think about it

Nothing, NOTHING in this world is perfect! I am not neither are you; my job is not neither are my family and friends. Why should one think that love relationships, with all the complexity involved, could be?

The conclusion that something cannot be perfect shouldn't make one think it's not possible.

"Quero fatos reais pra me basear."
  -- Fatos by Du!! - April, 2004

Happiness is loving the quotidian

("yeah, now she's got really nuts")

I thought about this yesterday, on the subway platform, coming back home from a tiring but amusing day on duty. I was reading a 1-day old article about Chico Buarque's 60th birthday. In a great discussion proposed to find out why women love the guy, one of them answered that it's because of his way of making poetry of the most simple things, like "todo dia ela faz tudo sempre igual" ("every day she does everything the same way").

Then I thought exactly that: happiness is loving the quotidian. I thought of how we do not depend on vacations, on the dream travel, on the ideal partner nor on winning the lottery to be happy. The world would be an extremely unfair place if it were this way, if we couldn't be happy in the daily routine.

What we have every day is what we have and that's it. It's the woman that shakes you at 6 in the morning, the kiss with coffee or mint flavour. The alarm clock at 7:30, the delayed bus, the fights with photographers, the bad food in the common restaurant. But it's also the newspaper section going well, the cups of coffee in the middle of the afternoon and the beers in the middle of the week, the family chats in the evening in front of the TV, the amusements at working time, the free weekends, the friends.

Who can love all these things is happy, I'm pretty sure.

  -- Mariana Sant'Anna (or "Little Mary" for closer friends), June 21st, 2004 - translated by Du!!

"Come on!" he muttered, staring about. "Where are you? Dad, come on --"

But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear -- but no one was coming to help this time --

And then it hit him -- he understood. He hadn't seen his father -- he had seen himself --

  -- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, chapter 21

"Said I'm not gonna give it it it up, I'm not goin'..."

  -- Not Gonna Give It Up, by Peter Tosh (what I'm listening right now!)

(After 3 unsuccessful attempts I've just given up writing now! I want to say something but don't know exactly how to organize the ideas at this moment. Perhaps it's the excess of caffeine in my veins... there's a certain friend I miss now more than I ever missed a friend in my life, there are some stuff about the past 2 years and the next one, other stuff concerning the past and next weekends and also some specific things I just can't explain, things I'm the only one who knows, who understands... "it doesn't work", pragmatic time has arrived. Ttyl, bye!)

A Bic pen, a sheet of paper and a 2-hour software planning meeting...

"When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical..."

Imagine a game played by 10 people. They are put in line one behind the other and over each head a black or white hat is put. Each person sees the hats of the people in his front but not his own, so the 10th one sees all hats but his, the 9th sees 8 and there it goes.

Each person is allowed to say just one word which can be "black" or "white". The goal is that each person will say his own hat's color. The group plays as a team and they must think of a way to get the biggest accuracy. Before the game begins, they are allowed to meet and decide how they are going to play to achieve it.

Now I ask you: what's the maximum they can score for sure and how can they do this?

"...but then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical."
  -- Supertramp, The Logical Song

Soundtrack

"Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky."
  -- Dust in the Wind by Kansas

(just to register something)

"I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot...

when you think about the consequences you always think of a negative result.

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
  -- Michael Jordan

"A felicidade, aquela imensa árvore repleta de pomos; ela existe sim, mas não a encontramos pois há/a pomos onde não estamos."

(impossible to translate from Portuguese, sorry...)

2 months later...

(or Concerning Love)

Toronto, August 19th, 2004

From: !!
To:
Subject: 2 months later...

"True love that now exists is the love I can't resist."
-- Bob Marley, "Jamming"

How many more times will I pass through this in my life? This feeling of rediscovery of love, believing now is the first time I really feel it...

This is simply amazing about love: every time you feel it, it's as if it was the first. That's why lovers always think they are loving more now than they did before. When one says he/she loves somebody more today than did yesterday he/she is not lying. Love causes this sensation. Could this be true?


Two years ago I was pretty sure I loved a girl more than I'd loved her predecessor. Could my love for the one now be exactly as big as my love for her predecessors had been? Maybe yes. However, I don't think so due to a simple fact: I'd never, in my whole life, had such a feeling that I'd just found The Girl. Never!

Don't try to convince me I love her today as much as I loved her yesterday! I have no doubt I love her much more today than I ever loved anybody, including her!

(actually, I don't think I ever really loved someone before her...)

Du!!
18 August 2004
Toronto

---

...thoughts, words for myself, yesterday, locked in the bedroom. We can't touch each other, but you can read my thoughts...

Love,
Du!!


São Paulo, October 19th, 2004

(...)

I don't play nor make games. I won't make swords and shields from blogs. You have on this letter of ink and paper my truest words.

From that one, probably the only one who really loved you one day; to you, undoubtely the only girl I once really loved.


A very tight and sincere hug,

Du!!

I am the only who knows which pair of glasses suits me fine.

If I were to follow every piece of advice I receive...
Just happy I don't.

Spielberg's The Terminal

Excellent movie. The 6th I watched this weekend. The 7th (and last) was Dona da História, very good too, also watched in the movies. Of all the 7, The Terminal, kinda related with some of my routine in the past months, was the only one that made my eyes produce some tears.

  "Why does love end?"
  "Everything ends..."
  "Why couldn't it be different with love?"

São Paulo, localtime: about 4 in the morning

5 (yes, five) movies later, fever gone and I feel much better now! Just ready to come back to the good things I once had in my life here in Brazil.

It's unfair to say that real life's got no happy endings. Sometimes things can be just exactly like in the movies. The secret is in our minds. Always. We've got all the ability we need to make our dreams come true. Did anybody say I should dream more? Not because I'd rather turning my dreams into my reality one can say I don't dream.

(Welcome back, dude!!)

Not homesick, just sick at home

Fever, cough... I hope it's not an Asian flu or sth like that. Well, the doctor said it mustn't be anything special and I should rest till I get better. That's what I'm doing.

Two entire days at home, in my bedroom, doing pratically nothing. Been chatting for a long while with a great friend, watched the movie Baby Geniouses ("cute", nothing else), read some Dalai Lama words, and now, Friday night, the best I can do is go downstairs and rent some DVDs to be my friends for this weekend.

Hope to be better soon. Hope to be able to accept another friend's invitation and eat Japanese food on Monday.

To be honest, I'd like to be better tomorrow and go run for a while at my club and, if there's enough shining sun, rest a little bit beside the swimming pool... just dreaming...

(37,6°C, dammit!)

.BR

I'm tired.
I'm going out tonight.
I have to go back to work tomorrow.
I really feel sick.
I'm not sad. Not at all.

"The more you know yourself and know what you want, the less things upset you."
  -- Bob (not Marley, but the character of Lost in Translation. You should watch this one too.)

(body's time zone: GMT-3; brain's one: no idea. Fuck off, anyway...)

"If you feel saudade it must have been a good experience."

  -- Marianinha, a couple weeks ago.

It's over. I'm still here, but the thing itself has just finished. Although that old and known feeling of saudade is once again starting to make me sad I cannot disagree with "Little Mary": I only feel this way because it was an amazingly unforgettable experience! Surprisingly not the first on this year. Perhaps not the last.

I never wondered I would pass through so many intense experiences in such a short period of time like in the last months. Once again, I'm not the same.

I must thank God for everything.

154

"Amor sem palavras, cinema mudo; não falo nada, você sabe tudo."
  -- Os Paralamas do Sucesso, Cinema Mudo

"Todo mundo espera alguma coisa de um sábado à noite..."

("Everybody expects something from a Saturday night...")

Meanwhile, in the Asian Institute of Technology...

"What's your name?"
"Eduardo."
"Sorry, I can't pronounce."
  -- an Asian colleague.

"We all travel thousands of miles...

...just to check in to some place with all the comforts of home, and you gotta ask yourself, what is the point of that?"
  -- Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio), The Beach

(my brain's time zone: GMT +7)

Bangkok, localtime: +10h

I'm here, safe and happy, blogging from my notebook in my hotel room. I'll go for a walk now. See ya!

Frankfurt, localtime: +5h

Yes, I'm alive! The plane landed here about 7 hours ago and after that I got some Euros and decided to have some fun before taking off to Bangkok. I took a train to the center, walked for a while, talked to some Germans, had breakfast with an Australian couple, bought a small FM radio just to listen to some local stations, took some pictures and now I'm back in the airport surfing the web for free while I wait for the next flight.

Frankfurt is a beautiful city and, apart from some immigration officials, most of the people I met here are very kind! I never wondered I would once be so interested in coming back to Germany as I am now!

I wish I could speak German but it was pretty easy to get around just starting conversations with 'Bitte, do you speak English?'. About 2 out of 3 people with whom I interacted here today could speak English enough to help me.

Well, folks, that's it. I'll come back later with news from Thailand.

Auf Wiedersehen!

PS: European Maltesers are much better than the Canadian ones. And this time I have a lot of free space in my luggage!

My brain's time: totally fucked!

No English-speaking countries and no Portuguese speakers except for some folks from East Timor. No friends at all. 10-hour jet-lag. 10 days.

No tears apart from mine. No "save tonight", no "love me two times" and no "baby, I hate to go". Just "leaving on a jet plane" and "I do know when I'll be back again".

No "fear of the dark" but, more then ever, "I am the man who walks alone".

Wish me luck. I'll do my best.

Luana lives!

Yes, she does. No more details. G'day!

"Your bedroom is certainly one of the top-10 craziest places I've ever been!"

  -- Pinguim

My brain's time: +2h