My dark hour

As all people, I have an addiction: self pity. I hate that feeling and manage to avoid it most of time, but some days I just can't. A part of me loves the relief and the sick comfort that it brings to my heart. Yesterday night, it was one of those days.

People usually go out on Saturday night with their family or friends to pubs or wherever. I also wanted to go out last night, but the problem is that, as I'm a lonely and introvert person, the couple of friends I have were going out with their other friends whom I don't know much. But this not an obstacle to me, so I put my make up on, dressed a bit more carefully than usually and left home to wander around town on my own. I walked by the local pubs, but some of them were closed for holidays, so that the rest were crowded and there wasn't any table left for me. Finally, I ended up in a pub far away from downtown where they were celebrating a soft stag-party. Luckily, there were some seats for clients that weren't in the party. I ordered a rum with lemon and took a seat. I looked at the pub terrace where the people invited to the stag-party were. All of them were in white, like if they were in Ibiza. Then, I paid attention to the music: in the terrace, they were playing today's shitty pop music, but other group where outside, in a car, playing an album of a metal band I didn't know. I heard a mixture of the two kinds of music, the strangest mixture I've ever heard in my life, although I would prefer to listen to the metal band only. The waiter brought my drink and I relaxed while contemplated the sky. But I started getting depressed, I was in the mood for it. And, again, I wondered what if I could have been another person and have a better and perfect life where everything was as I dreamed it. I know it's childish, but sorry, sometimes I can't help it. After that, my thoughts flew to nowadays decadent world and my struggle against been caught by its hypocrisy and got even more depressed. To that point, someone has turned up the volume of the shitty pop music and I couldn't take it anymore. I finished my rum and came back home throught the lonely streets.

Once I was back, to cheer up, I tried to buy online tickets for a rock festival I wanted to attend, because, totally by chance, next week I have to travel to the city where the music festival is celebrated and some of my favorite bands are playing, so I was thinking about going in my free time. I know I'm old for music festivals, but I don't care. Unfortunately, I have confused the dates and the festival is not the week when I going, but the next, and I realized it last night. So, it makes me get more depressed, is that was possible, and went to sleep feeling so sorry for myself, dreaming of another life in another country in another easier time with a more encouraging future...

Arcturus, the guardian of Ursa Minor

Yesterday, the day of the summer solstice, when it started getting dark around 22:30, I went out of the house, looked up to the sky and there, in the West, it was the star Arcturus. I always know that summer has begun when I can see early in the night this star. Of course, I could have known it using any other star, but Arcturus is special to me.

The window of my bedroom in my parents' house in the village is in the West side. When I was a little child and didn't know anything about astronomy, in hot summer nights, I used to sleep with the window opened to get the night air cool the room and I contemplate the clear summer sky and the stars through it. But a star shone more than the rest, shone like a lamp, shone with an intensity that I thought it was so close to us that I could reach it with my hands... And I thought that star had to be Arcturus. One day at school, the teacher told us something about planets and stars and said that Arcturus was the guardian of the Ursa Minor. I liked that of 'guardian of the Ursa Minor', so I happily assume that the star I watched trough my window was Arcturus. And I found, years later when I started to develope my interest for astronomy, that, in fact, that star that I have been contemplating during summer for years, was Arcturus. So every year, when summer comes, I look for Arturus in the sky and wave hello again.

A new life

Now, I'm ready to say goodbye to life as I've always known it and start from scratch in a new place where nobody knows me and doesn't even imagine how my life has been before get there. And, again, I wonder if I'll do it right this time, if I'll find that that I've been lacking during too much time, if there I'll finally find a home for me.
This is the third time I get a new start, but not of them before has been as great as this. But I promie myself that I won't wasted and for once I'll do what I want without thinking about anyone else.

On the other hand, this morning I was packing and keeping all the remains of what it's gonna belong to my past soon and I felt sad cause I have to leave behind the people I love here and an important part of my life, and I know things and myself will never be the same when years pass by and I come back here, but I must keep on on my way.
I feel a bit scared too, cause what if I do it wrong this time again? What if I can't hold on and give up? What if I break myself again?

Anyway, I have hope on the future... I have a bit of time left, but my new life will start soon, and this time I can't fail.

Living in a ghost world

One of my favorite comics and movies of all times is Ghost World, written by Daniel Clowes between 1993 and 1997, the heyday of generarion X, in the underground zine Eightball. This comic is a master piece about the always inspiring issue of the end of teenage, the lose of innocence and the entrance into the adult world and the alienation that comes with it in a monoculture society run by the media and the consumist interests, like the colors used in the comic show (blue, green and white, colors than the TV set reflects at night).

If you haven't read this comic yet, I recommend you to do it. I'm not gonna tell the whole story now, but they show some episodes of the life of two friends, Enid and Rebecca, during their last teenage summer, after graduating in high school. These too young and intelligent girls are kind of outcasts who are able to see the decay and mediocrity of the customer culture and prefer to not take part on it. One of them, Becky, is more likely to betray herself in order to get acceptance, while Enid stick to herself and deny joining the rest of the world, fact that ends up distancing the two friends till they lose the connection and friendship between them.

The main reason why I love this story is because I see some parts of my life reflected in it. Me and my all life best friend used to be like Enid and Becky, two freaks always wandering and making cynical jokes about everything and everybody. But, as in the story, my best friend was a Becky, more dazzled by society lights, while I was a denied and stubborn Enid. I guess sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

There are some differences about the comics and the movie of Ghost World, and also in the feelings they brought to me. I remember the first time I read the comics, a lot of years ago, they made me feel empty, kind of depressed, something close to a nihilist feeling. It's difficult to describe, but I'd say it was like listening to a Nirvana song. And, on the other hand, the movie has a more focused plot, there're no caothic episodes. And the feeling it brings are quite different. The only word that comes to my mind to describe it is 'painful'. Here, the sense of nihilism and emptyness is replaced by desolation and pain, and I think this is because the movie shows the loneliness, sadness and struggle that Enid carries inside of her, and that doesn't appear in the original comic.

Maybe some other people wouldn't find this movie painful, or even they'd hate the character of Enid. I have to say that when my friend watched it, she didn't like it at all, and she didn't understood Enid. But I can't help loving this tragedic character. And this is because I feel so related to her, that character is a more self-assured version of myself. But I still recognize me in Enid's sarcasm and cynicism, same as mine, in her view of the world, in her hidden sensibility, in her weird likes, in her loneliness and in her struggle to find something authentic in the modern world. As she does, I tried to feel the void with contraculture and weird stuff, in a try to develope my own. In conclusion, I tried, as her, to still loyal to myself and my sight.

But what is the message of Ghost World? Maybe that you must follow your dreams and what is in your heart and deny what others wants you to be or do? This has been the message of most of books, songs, movies and other cultural products during the modernity. But, in the case of Ghost World, this is not the what the story means. The message here is hopeless and pesimist.

What does Ghost World present to us? It shows the boring life of a girl who tries to stay truth, to do what her heart feels. She exactly does what modern books and songs have been telling for decades. If you do it, they promise you that you will be forever free and happy. And Ghost World is exactly that, it shows that this is only a lie, it shows the consequences of that behavior in real life. And they're negative: a future of loneliness and isolation in wich you'll be a loser. This idea is what the character of Seymour represents in the movie, he's Enid's hopeless future and I used to see in him my future too when I was young.

Of course, Ghost World is not the only work which shows this. I'd like to do now a little comparative between some other well-known works belonging to different fields of arts which are about the same topic and have similar plots. The two that I'm gonna choose are a literary one, The catcher in the rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger, and a music one, American Idiot (2004), by Green Day (I'll refer to the story plot of the album, not the music aspect). So we have now three works all of them written by American artists, two of them modern and one more classic. If we examine the story of the three, we'll find that they have many points in common, The three have young adults main characters (Enid/Becky, Holden Caulfield and Jimmy) who have grown up in customer American culture and see its mediocrity, rejecting it, reason why they all three are social outcast. At the same time, they desperately want to find a place to belong, what leads Holden and Jimmy to escape to find their place in the world but, instead of that, they find a person who seems to understand them or relieve them: for Enid, this is Seymour; for Holden, her innocent little sister; and for Jimmy, an extraordinary girl who also tries to find her way and, at the same time, stay true. But the three of them are taken away from the beloved person because of their struggling and their attitude: all people abandon Enid and she realizes she will keep hurting everyone if she's herself; Holden sees her sister's innocence like something he's lost and will miss forever; and Jimmy breaks up with his rebel girl because of his doubts about who he is. At the end, they're all alone, everyone has left them. And the heartrending message is clear: sticking to yourself will lead you to anything. Reflecting this, at the end od the three stories, it's not clear what happens to the characters. Holden maybe became mad and Jimmy went back home. There's no real conclusion cause their attitude has taken them to anywhere, there's only emptiness left.

So we have here three works by different artists and designed in different moments and we must recognize they have the same fitures, proving the important and worrying that topics like alienation, identity and authenticity are for modern man.

Oh, I have forgot to talk about the ending of Ghost World. No, the truth is that I was keeping it for now. The comics and the movie have different endings, both of them poetic in their way. 

In the comic, Enid walks besides a coffee shop and sees Becky trough a window. She thinks something like 'You've become a beautiful young woman' and walks away. This shows perfectly how Becky has betrayed herself to join the adult world, while Enid still being an outcast. On the other hand, in the movie, when all people has abandoned Enid, she decides to make true her dream of run away (one of my youth dreams too) and she takes a bus to wherever, making so clear the idea of the nothing where her fight has lead her.

While reading Ghost World, I wondered what was going to be my own choice, to join the mediocrity or fight against it and become a teenager forever. But you know? It's a lost fighting, at the end we can't choose. So I then wondered how much time I had left before I betrayed myself and became a sad shadow of what I was, how much time before I lived in a ghost world, how much time before my face was lit with blue, white and green light by the TV set, like the face of many others before me.

Balloons factory

Last Sunday I saw in the paper a report about child labor and it got my attention, so I read it and, I have to confess that it moved my conscience till the point that this issue has been around my mind for some days.

In the report, the journalist talked about his visit to countries such as Indonesia, where multinationals hired labor, in many cases children from poor families. So, he explained that when he asked these boys and girls what they wanted to be when they're adult people, they answered, with all that misery around them, things like doctor, engineer, teacher, etc. although they don't even attend to school. He told how young girls, almost children, forced into prostitution, dream about that one of their clients will be a prince charming who takes them out of that nightmare. The contrast between their terrible situation and that innocence in their sad eyes seemed to me the most cruel thing in the world. But one of the stories who moved me the most was about a boy who worked in a balloons factory. Balloons are for us something happy and funny, colorful, and if we ask any of our children if they want to go to a balloon factory they will answer yes. But for this boy, balloons and factories are not funny at all. Everyday he has to work hours and hours breathing all the chemicals needed, and has his skin whitish because of that. The balloons he's almost dying to do will decorate the parties of children luckier than him, even they used to decorate my own birthday parties, but those balloons are made of the future, the health and the hopes of a child as innocence as any others.

And all this only brings one question: who is to blame? When I finished reading the report, I was feeling guilty. It's not nice when someone comes to remind you that for keeping your life level, in the other side of the world millions of people are dying or living badly, it's not nice when you remember that your hands are stained with blood. But we must accept that we're in part responsible of this tragedy because, at the end, customers are the ones who choose, although the temptation of buying cheap is so big, isn't it? And, after all, what can we do to change that? We don't control multinationals. And moreover, if just one person deny to buy their products, will it make any difference?

This leads us to a new question: are all we to blame or are we just victims of this unfair system too? We're constantly wanted to buy new products to keep or improve our social status, we're constantly told that we need this or that to be complete human beings, although the truth is that it only makes us less human. If it wasn't for some heroic journalists who show us the truth, nobody would tell us. These poor children spending their lifes in factories don't appear in tv ads or on  billboards. When you go to a shop and you buy something, no one warns you about that shirt has been made by children. Could be more sick a society that donates money to charities and at the same time is accomplice of a productive model who is going against the people charities help? But I guess we live happier closing our eyes to this. Because, after all, I can't do anything about it by myself and you can't do anything by yourself as well... or maybe is it a lie? Who knows?

Letter to a friend

Soon it's gonna be my best friend's birthday, announcement that summer is here again, and, for this year, I decided to write her a kind of letter about our long friendship.
I know I could have done something better than a letter written with a cheap pen, like a slideshow with photographs, music and all that, the kind of things that people do these days, but I have reasons for my decision. The story of why I choose the letter and the cheap pen is quite long and I'm not gonna tell it here now, but, in a nutshell, I almost lost something my friend did for me years ago because of the computer and a data error. So that's why I wanted to do something which doesn't depend on electricity, or computting or whatever, something that my friend can read whenever she needs or wants to. Moreover, although it's the key of progress, I think technology has taken away a lot of the romanticism of life.
So in the letter I wrote, I told my friend that the problem of any long friendship is that you get used to have that person by your side and you take for granted that he or she is gonna be there always, so that you forget how to say the important things, things that maybe are evident, but it's good to remind them sometimes. And this not only happens between friends, but in all kind of relationships.
As I'm a very reticent person, I'm so used to keep my feelings for myself that I find strange and difficult to express them to someone I know. Then, I'm not a person who tends to say nice things to everybody and, although I'm sensible, I always hide that part of me. In conclusion, writting that letter wasn't going to be an easy task for me. But, after write about the problems of long relationships, I started with something easy: make a travel through my memories of my friend, from the earliest to the most recent ones.
I forgot a long time ago how we became friends, although the first memory I have about her is from before that, when we were three and attend playschool.
I remember I wanted to play with a toy, so that I went to look for it. But I found that my friend had it. Then I stared at her for a while and thought something like 'I've never played with this child'. Then, my next memory is from when we were already friends, at four and a half years old, more or less, and we were in the playground laughing together. It seems to me it was spring then, I don't know why. And, after that, all the memories come together: the summers in the pool, she and I playing in her house garden, the concerts, wandering around town with no place to go, talking in the bar on Sundays mornings, rememebering the old times, our programme in the local radio station... always struggleling toogether for so much years.
Finally, I wrote for her five pages with our memories, just to tell her at the end the important things I wanted: that I love you and you appear in most of the happiest memories of my life, that you're important to me till the point that I barely can imagine how my life and even myself would have been if you hadn't been here. Since we're born, all things change around us: years goes by, summers passes, birthdays passes, schools passes, works passes, stages passes, friends enter and get away of our life, people who we used to love have changed or have gone and they're not with us anymore, even we have changed a lot since that fist mememory... all passes, but you've always stayed in my life. As Nietzsche said (he's not one of my favorite philosophers, but I consider he was right about some things), we must accept life with its tragedy, and as long as there're friends like you, this would be easier to do.
Thank you for all these years of friendship.