Who says you can't be in two places at once!

Last month was my dad’s birthday. My mom organized a small gathering with their closest friend to celebrate another year of my dad’s life. My eldest sister came over from Tijuana to be there, one of my mom’s brother also travelled to be with him. And where was I? Do you have any clue?

Yeap you guessed right, I was in Manchester, pretending to study. But that could be solved. Amongst my various qualities, I have the capacity to be in two places at once, the proof is just here.

BTW, let me introduce to you my sisters, Itzel and Nikté.
And before I forget, let me tell you about another quality I have, the gift of mind reading. So I am sensing your asking yourself: Are they really from the same parents? The answer is YES. There's no doubt about that.

Little Joys

The other day I was watching Amelie for the n^th time. One of the things I like about this film is the way the director introduces the characters, by what they like and dislike. The ways each of them find little joys in life, e.g.: by plunging their fingers on a bag of lentils, waxing the floor with a pair of slippers, taking old wallpaper of the wall, the sound water makes in a glass bowl. On the other hand, there are the ones that make you go mad: wrinkles on your finger after a bath, people who crack their fingers, etc. The uniqueness of these peculiarities makes you identify yourself with the movie. Well, at least I did.

Some of these little details that you enjoy or dislike tend to change with time. When I was growing up, the things I disliked were:

• People with cracked lips. I used to carry an extra lip gloss with me, in case anyone I saw had cracked lips. At first people that did not know me would be suspicious, especially boys, but as they realised it was part of my tics they will consent on putting it on.
• The sleeves of trouser (pants in American English) sticking in sneakers.
• Squeaky sounds (it does not include my voice).
• The smell of ketchup or tuna.
• People hugging me when they are sweaty.
  

Things I still enjoy:

• Smelling other people's clothes.
• Mushy textures on my hand, especially mud.
• Sitting on a coffee shop and watching passers by, when I was younger, it was on top of a tree.
• Finding different shadings of light.
• Skipping the cracks or separation on the floor.
• Walking on the ledge of the boardwalk.
  
• Putting my head on my dads belly and hearing all the sounds his stomach makes.
• Laying beside my mom when she is reading a book.
• Finding new hiding places.
• The face of people when I tell them my age, it cracks me up.
  

As I am writing this, I am wearing a scarf with my mom's smell, under the reflected shading of my nightlight covered by a palm hat, drinking a comforting cup of tea. Could this get any better?

Right in front of you.

For some time now i have consider that men cannot look for things around the house. They could live there, but that doesn't give them any reason to know where things are kept. I will give you some examples of my experience with men and there lack of capacity to search for things.

Example no. 1. My Dad.

Dad: Nalleli could you get me some batteries.
Me: Yeah dad, I'll be right back.

5 minutes later, my dad is nowhere to be seen. After waiting for more than 10 minutes for him, I decide to leave the batteries some where it would be obvious he will find them, INFRONT OF THE THING HE NEEDS THEM FOR (do not remember what it was).

30 minutes later

Dad: Nalleeeeeeeli (screaming), where have you been? Where are the batteries I asked for half and hour ago?
Me: Dad, I left them in front of the thing.
Dad: Well I can not find them (angry tone).

I walk to the place, very slowly pick up the batteries and hand them to him.

Dad: mmmmhhh ( blank look). Well, you should have told me you where going to leave them there.

As always they find an excuse to blame it on someone else.

Example no. 2. New Housemates.

Yuca: Where is the DVD control?
Mex: I do not know.
Yuca: I had it a minute ago, help me look for it?

10 minutes later

Yuca: where could i have put it?
Mex: Did you check under the sofa?
Yuca: Yes, i even moved it, and check between the cushions.
Mex: Well, we can not find it, it will reappear.

5 minutes later

Me: Did you find the control?
Yuca, Mex: NO
Me: But you did look for it?
Yuca, Mex: Yes, we just couldn't find it.

1 minute later

Me: Found it.
Yuca: Where was it?
Me: Under a piece of paper... (with a big smile).
Mex: What type of paper was it?
Yuca: But, we did look for it. (Bewildered complexion.)

Searching for somethings doesn't require any physical strength. They moved sofas and coaches to look for the control, when they only thing they needed was to move a piece of paper, a baby could do that.

Example no.3.

Sailor: Land ahead.
Crew: Hurray!!!

Cristopher: Where are we?
officer: I think its India.
Christopher: Why do u think it took us so long to get here?
Officer: dunno

A few hours or weeks or months later.

Christopher: I think this is not India?
Officer: So, where do u think we are?
Christopher: dunno.

If it wasn't that the damn continent was so big, I think America wouldn't have been discovered. Ohhh...but i forgot, they where not looking for that.

Men can be helpful: fixing things around the house (though if you want a good job, call professional help), killing bugs and carring heavy loads; but the moment you tell them to look for something, their observation skill and patience just isn't enough.

Good Beginning

After a week of changes in my residential status, thing are starting to settle down. I have a lot of work at school and I seem to make no progress. My new house is now taking the shape of a home and I am getting acquainted with my new housemates and their friends.

Today, after two, three or maybe four months of being a couch potatoe (pronounced like tomatoe with a british accent) i went for a swim. I have joined a charity thingy (to lazy to look up the name of the thingy). The goal is to swim the equivalent distance of the English channel in three months, 22 miles. I proudly can say, I swam 1200 m or 0.75 miles for non-metric folks, that leaves 34000 m (21.25 miles) to go.

If anyone is interesting in supporting this noble cause and give me some money, i will appreciate it. It will help with your Karma. And to prove to you that I am not conning you, I'll attach the page of the thingy.

http://www.aspire.org.uk/channelswim/

Nomad

I’ve always hated packing, I mean I usually just throw everything in my luggage, shake it a couple of times to make room for more stuff and throw more things in. But, it doesn’t work like that. My mom or my younger sister normally would prepare my luggage. My little sister did it because she’s an organized freak and anything that has no order or symmetric pattern will cause a nerve to pop (you wouldn’t like to be near my sister when one of her nerves pops), so seeing that my luggage was a total mess she would voluntarily make my bags.

I do not understand, after living in 8 different houses in a period of 3 years, this would make me and expert in packing, as they say: “practice makes perfect”, in any other case except in mine. So, knowing the complete mess I am, I decided to start packing with time (last week); make a list of all my things (never happened), arrange every item by category, separate and tag luggage and boxes, etc… It’s Wednesday and all my stuff is on the floor, gosh, how I miss my sister and “mi ama” (mum).

Puppet

How does our mind work? I question I often ask myself. I was getting off the bus on my way back from school; I suddenly realized that I am bribable. I mean I always thought I had strong convictions and in a situation where my moral fiber would be in question I will succeed and overcome the circumstances. But it’s not true; there have been a lot of times I’ve been persuaded in doing things I disagree with.

Manipulated, seduced, talked into, brainwashed; how often this occurs on a daily basis? How many times I’ve modified my way of acting, to make my parents happy, to be liked by my friends, to impress my boss, to be accepted by society, some people will call this flexibility. I’m just the weak link in a long elastic chain.

Weekend Summary

It is 30 minutes to midnight. This week was quite busy doing absolutely nothing. If you read my previous post u will remember that I came back from Amsterdam, and being, as always, paranoic (or paranoiac) about my work, I erased two weeks of work with no way (por wuey) to recover it. Friday, was great though, getting an early star at the weekend, not so early I woke up at noon. Eating junk food, which was disastrous for my stomach, kept seeing a black spot everywhere I turned, followed with 2 hours of surfing the net, and searching for useless junk, that was quite useful. I discovered that I have read 30 books of the 200 best books of the BBC list. Though it helped that 5 of them where the Harry potter one’s. On the other hand, it is quite depressing that I still have to read 170 books more before they change the list, mhhh… I ended my Friday celebrating my friend’s b-day with tequila. Saturday was the proper celebration and quite unexpectedly it was already Sunday, which is about to end in about 10 minutes, if I can read through my post, find all the mistakes, correct them and post it, before Monday.

Ohh… and the reason I wanted to write this post. I just finished watching “Four weddings and a Funeral”. This is the first time I see it, so I really did not know what to expect. I saw it with my housemate, Jessy, and her boyfriend. I just found it funny Jessy's comment at the end of the movie. It went something like this: “bloody Americans, she ruins the wedding and gets the boy at the end”, or something like that, hopefully I didn’t distort it, but u get the idea.

Okey…its 5 minute for a new day almost going to make it.

What if...?

I’ve just returned from my trip to Amsterdam, it was great. I had a good time, met really nice people and ate like a pig, from Argentinean cuts to Dutch pancakes, mhhh… good.

As I was coming from Liverpool to Manchester, I was thinking about my “to do list”. They were two things that had top priority and needed to be done as soon as possible. So, I decided to go to school after I’d dropped my baggage at home. I did what I had to do, and decided to get some work done. After three hours of hard work in front of my computer, I typed I wrong command and erased all the work I did today and the work I did last week.

That’s when I wonder, What if I have stayed home and just have been a proper bum?

Still here!!!!

I’m still alive. I have a lot of work. No money and planning a mini holiday to Amsterdam. I’m truly looking forward to it.

It still feels and looks like summer here in Manchester, nice sunny weather. Good for BBQ’s and hanging out in the park.

Resemblance

It has been a long time since I last wrote in my blog. A lot of things have been happening in every aspect of my life, economically, sentimentally, intellectually, existentially, etc. The good thing is that I have a lot of work, so my mind is occupied and I don’t have too much time to think about what things are troubling me. But this post isn’t about all of that. It’s a sort of a follow up from the previous one.

As a mentioned above, I have a lot of work and mainly because we are preparing an equipment for some test next week. I’m supposed to be helping out, but I really do not have the slightest idea of what they are doing; the guys I work with are quite efficient. Anyway, one of these guys (the one who is doing all the work) is really good with his hands. I like seeing how he works, chiefly because his hands remind me of someone I cared for a lot. Most of the time, I find myself staring at his hands. It’s really weird, physically he doesn’t look anything like “him”, but the way he grabs, touches and moves his hands, seem so familiar. I can’t stop imagining the other person. I think I’m in love with both their hands.

Curiosities

I find it strange sometimes, how things that have no relation with each other can have some similarity in the eyes of certain observers. Let me know what u think of the following comparison.


So what do you think, is there any resemblance or I'm just seeing things that are not there. Gooosh hope not.

Cat's thoughts. Part I.

Have you ever wondered how others perceive us; I, usually, imagine creeping up to well acquainted friends and ears dropping (eavesdroping) on a conversation about me. Normally, they speak wonders of me, saying what a lovely person I am…But, I have never asked myself, how does my cat see me? I know I wasn’t a very good owner; I was quite negligent with my 2 cats and dog.

In the new kid movies, where the main characters are animals, the qualities imprinted on them are human like. What would happen if Dumbo, suddenly, decided to make a movie about humans? What would be the outcome? Would they use sarcastic humour to describe us? Would it even be a kid’s movie?

Amongst all the different curious points of view I have encountered about my race I bumped into the following nameless cat's thoughts. He has just heard a conversation of three peculiar humans.

"I merely concluded that human beings were good for nothing except for the strenuous employment of their mouths for the purpose of whiling away their time in laughter at things which are not funny and in the enjoyment of amusements which are not amusing."

"…the urge to compete and their anxiety to win are revealed flickeringly in their everyday conversation, and only a hair’s breadth separates them from the Philistines whom they spend their idle days denouncing. They are all animals from the same den. Which fact, from a feline viewpoint, is infinitely regrettable. Their only moderately redeemed feature is that their speech and conduct are less tediously uninventive than those of less subtle creatures.
As I thus summed up the nature of the human race, I suddenly felt the conversation of these specimens to be intolerably boring; …"

Hopefully, other not feline species have a better concept of the human race, though I doubt it.

Click !!!

I’ve wanted to blog this very long post several weeks ago. I’ll discuss these three books with u. The name of the Rose, written by an Italian called Umberto Eco; El Anatomista (the anatomist) written by and Argentinean, Federico Andahazi, and Justine from the well known French writer Marqui de Sade.

It all started a few years ago. I considered my self a feminist and anything or anyone that talked or denigrated the image of women was a direct insult to me. Anyway, I bumped into three books when my poor soul was going through difficult times. I read them in the order in which I mentioned above and suddenly a lot of things fell into place. Maybe what I am to write here does not make sense to you, but my little brain processed the information in a very illuminating way.

The Name of the Rose, the year is 1392 during the catholic inquisition. The place is somewhere in an abbey in Italy. The main characters are William of Baskerville a Franciscan friar, and Adso of Melk a Benedictine novice and William’s apprentice.
They are there to solve some mysteries murders (which is the main plot of the story). While investigating, Adso has an encounter with a young woman and ends up having relations with her. He seeks advice from William. Now, this was the first click in my brain. When he tells him what had happened between him and the young woman, William responds that he has no experience with this kind of things. He refers to the original sin that led to the bad reputation of women, to be considered a sign of sin, evil and temptation. But when Jesus was born from Mary (the fact that she was a virgin), God redeemed the image of women as something pure.


Now, its 1559, we are still in Italy. The church is still a very powerful institution. The main character in this story is an anatomist, his name Mateo Colon. He falls in love with a very young and beautiful prostitute. He tries everything to conquer her heart, but she has been trained very well in her profession and will not open her heart to anybody. Mateo is determined to find the way to her heart. After long years of research, he discovers by pure coincidence the organ that governs a woman’s heart; he names it Amor Veneris. Well, you will imagine what it is. He wants to tell every man he meets this great discovery, but the church silences him. This does not bother him, because what he really wants is to go after his true love, confident that this time he will be able to succeed. He searches for the young prostitute and reveals his secret to her. The only answer he gets from her is the bill for her services…hehehe, second click.

And last but not least, we travel to France, the year is 1791. In comparison with the two previous books, the main character here is Justine a sweet girl. At the death of her parents, she is separated from her sister and passes from home to home. She has to endure with horrible people and terrible situations to get through her days. And despite all this she does not loses her faith in the goodness and kindness of God. I will not ruin the end for you, but its really unexpected (laughable). The ending was the final click.

Finally, I will draw the conclusions of all the clicking. Women are not evil, men are just weak (Adam did not have to except the apple from Eve). Most women know what they want and what they are worth, so do not underestimate our value. Men think that they can solve everything with Amor Veneris, when most of the time we just want to be listened to. And finally, I just realized I am not making any sense out of this. Well, just read the damn books, they are really interesting. If you already read these books post some comments and if you haven’t the clue about what this post was about, also post your comments.

It's ALIVE!!!

Guess from where I am posting this... Yes, you guessed right, my computer has been brought back to life. Thanks to a new power supply and the help of a good technician.

Hope it would stand my magnetic and electrofying personality, :D.

Les ordinateurs sont mauvais!!!

Four weeks ago I needed my hard drive to be partitioned. It seems a very trivial task. Well, the damn thing didn't recognize its other half. So, they told me, they needed to play around with it, but everything was going to be fine. That, of course, was 4 weeks ago. Finally, this monday I got my PC back; glad to be able to waste my time in the office surfing the net, instead of getting some actual work done. Tuesday went smoothly no problems at all, Wednesday came and I actually thought that "computers were good". I went out for one hour, left it running thinking nothing could stop us know. I am so naive!!! I came back, after enjoying a very interesting talk to find that my PC was dead, dead I tell you, completly dead. And to make matters worse, my stupid watch also died on me, its been 10:55 since 10:55 this morning.

There must be a logical explanation to this sudden suicidal of electronic and electrical gadgets around me. I arrived to the following conclusion: I have a magnetic and electrifying personality, therefore no electrical gadget can stand the amount of radiation that emerges from me, making me irresistible. Left with no other option, as I am forbidden to them, to terminate their existence.

I really don't care what anybody thinks, I'm sticking with my version of the story.

Cycle of life!!!

Have u noticed that everythings tends to repeat itself. So, I shouldn't be surprised to find that i have no money in my bank account, #:(.

Table philosophy

Dinning out or just having a homemade meal with your friends or group of people leads sometimes to interesting conversations. As beer flows and in this particular case, the group was integrated by a dutch, a german, a turkish and a mexican, the exchange of ideas and philosophies lead to the following citations:

"...it shows how artificial border lines can be".

"...there are only two sins in the world: to throw away beer and turn down a woman".

I found it quite eloquent at the time, though the second one is not applicable to me been a woman.

Road Trips

I’ve been traveling by car since I could remember. I lived on the north of Mexico and my grandparents live way up in the south, it was a four day drive, so most of my holidays were spent traveling from one place to another.

I once heard that there are two ways to really get to know someone, the first is to live with them and the second is to travel together. The first trip I took with friends was when I was an undergrad in Mexico city. The trip was to Veracruz (Golf of Mexico). By bus it was a 5 hour trip to one of the main cities of the state, from there we had to change bus and take one (not very modern) bus to a little town on the mountains. Most of that trip we walked to the places we wanted to visit and camped out, so we could have a fresh start the following morning. At one point my friends wanted to go fishing and we had to look for worms to use as bait (not a very good experience). The landscape was really beautiful, crossing from sugar cane fields to mango tree plantations; picking up fallen mangos and eating them while we passed through, refreshing ourselves on the different rivers we crossed.

With the same guys we then went to Baja California, the main difference from the previous trip was that we took my dad’s car. The weather down there is very different from Veracruz. There we saw how one of the largest deserts of Mexico merges into the sea. It was astonishing to find the variety of fauna and flora you could see in a desert. And at nightfall the sky was completly covered with tiny sparkling lights (I’ve never seen so many stars), the stillness and silence is overwhelming, it makes you feel so small and insignificant. We headed south of the peninsula to see the beaches. This part of mexico has been neglected for a long time (not a bad thing); we would drive for hours with out encountering any populated areas. In the middle of the peninsula there is an Oasis (so cool), the beaches there are just lovely and the best part of it was that we had them all to ourselves. I remember one night in particular, we were camping by the beach, the sky got really clouded, it started raining and the wind was blowing the tents out of the ground, we had to pack everything as soon as possible and get to higher ground before the storm hit the beach, we slept in the car that night. After the storm, I saw the most breathtaking sunrise; it was still clouded, a part of the sky cleared out and a ray of light hit the clear crystal water changing its color. I regreted not having a camera with me at the time, but some things are better left to oneself.

After two weeks of eating, sleeping and traveling together we were so fed up with each other, we couldn’t wait to get home. The ones that survived that trip are now the best of friends.


The latest of these road trips was to Cornwall with to of my friends, Lety and Victor (if you want to know where we went, check the following link, Needless junk and more). We went in Lety’s car, Victor was the co-pilot and I was sitting on the back seat. I kind of screwed the booking of the hostel where we were staying, so we had to travel approximately three hours to get where we originally planned to go (another thing I learned about me was that I’m a really bad planner).

A brief summary of what I really wanted to emphasis about road trips is: you learn a lot about the people and yourself from sharing this kind of experience; after something goes wrong and seems that this will spoil your trip, when you get through them, they are the things that you remember the most and laugh at. You learn to be patient and to see things a different way, you improvise when needed and invent knew ways to cheer or entertain people, silences become bearable and you explore your creative side to impress people with your photographs.

Nogales, city of the border.

Sundays in Manchester are normally spend: watching a movie at NopalJol, doing nothing at all, surfing the net or now that I have a blog figuring out what to write about. But this Sunday was different from my typical end of the weekend. I went to a concert with a friend. This of course brought lots of memory of my days when I was entering puberty.

My best friend (Briseida) and I, local outcast at the time, entered the underground world of music when we were 15 (it seemed the logical step to take). You could feel the uniqueness of each individuals trying to rebel against a society that considered them social rejects, because of there appearance or preferences. Yeah, the feeling of power it gave you being in an old, humid and abandoned warehouse located outside of town. Well, that’s what I felt, but actually I had my dad’s permission and he would promptly pick us up at midnight to go home. Hehe

We met several bizarre and weird people on those nights. Most of them had really rough lives (we were the good kids trying to fit in with the bad kids). Oaxaca (Lupita, but she was from Oaxaca so we just called her that), whom we met when we started going to “gigs”, had left her parent’s house when she was 13 or 14 years old, she worked as a babysitter for a family. On weekends (her days off), she would normally crash where anyone would let her. She had brought one suitcase with her, but all her important stuff were kept on a hand bag that she always carried. It was like a magician’s hat, she took whatever she needed out of the bag, it seemed bottomless. As time past and we became good friends,Briseida and me used to flips coins to see in which of our houses she would stay (not very nice). The last I heard of her, she had crossed the border (illegally) and was pregnant, but that was when I left home to go to study in Mexico city, 9 years ago. Ohh…How time flies!!!


Then there were the local groups, hahaha…at that time I could tell you the name of all the groups, in what order they were playing and which songs they were going to play (not much variety). What is really funny is some groups would try to create a new sound and ended up combining folk songs with metal-punk-rock. At the time I thought it was amazing what they did, but know I realize it was crap. Some local radio stations trying to encourage new talents would play their songs; they specially played one that had the name of my home town “Nogales, ciudad fronteriza” (Nogales, city of the border). Imagine the faces of those who really knew about music. Looking back at those days, I realize I was quiet naive about the things that surrounded me. Okay, still am, but now I can tell you I'm naive,hihihi...

Well, I’ll leave it here, it’s late and I’m not as young as I used to be.

BTW, the group I went to see on Sunday is called “The Secret Machines” check them out.

Ironic, hehehe

Le sens de l'ironie est une forte garantie de liberté.
(A sense of irony is a strong guarantee of liberty.)

Maurice BARRÈS, Sous l'oeil des Barbares, 1888