Society, crazy indeed...

I was pondering on the nature of things, and all my pondering lead me to one conclusion: we are wired for our own unsatisfaction.

I'm sure you've heard more than once that humans are creatures of habit. I guess this can also be seen as a good thing, we follow patterns, but mainly what it means is that we are design to adapt. There are very limited circumstances to which humans could not adapt to and continue to survive in. This means anything new you're experiencing now, every new sensation, will become dull and common with time. It's meant to so you can deal with different temperatures, light levels, noises, anything surrounding you, even if extreme, if you should need to for a longer period of time. Hell, you'll stop eventually feeling fire if you were to walk on it often enough. Not that your skin will thank you.

So what does this lead us to? We're constantly adapting to new things, which makes anything exciting or thrilling stop being exciting and thrilling eventually. I see all around me people trying to get new thrills on new things: travel somewhere new, jump out of a plane, learn a new dance. We need to get a jolt of that here and there, it's also in our nature. There's no easier way to get me depressed that doing the same things over and over. The majority of people I know (if not all) subscribe to the same notion.

But what have we done? We've built a society based on exactly the opposite idea. Society subscribes to the notion that someone who's "got their shit together" has a permanent place where to live, a permanent job, a permanent relationship. It makes good terms of "contract", "full-time", "long term", "monogamy". And yes, I know all the different lifestyles within; I live in San Francisco, and I surround myself with people who don't agree with any of the above. But still, they fall in the same patterns. We all get a job, a place, a relationship.

But why? If all we crave for is the thrill of the new, why not work contracts here and there, move from place to place, country to country, and hop from bed to bed, from arms to arms? All I could really think of is: it's just too damn hard. We've built ourselves into rules and laws that make going against it all perfectly unpractical. We laid down a road with fences on each side that points in one direction. You can try to hop over the fence here and there, but eventually, you just get too tired.

If I had the will or patience, I would build a Second Life world where all different rules applied. Where we had a different job to do each day, a different place to live, and no limits to our love. I'm not saying it would be satisfying either, but it'd be an awesome experiment.

In the end, I guess I know it wouldn't work. And I know the reasons why. I am, after all, one of those humans.

Erinnerung an die Marie A.

I recently watched "The Lives of Others". While watching it something very strange happened: I found a bridge to my past.

I have a cousin who sings. She has a beautiful voice and plays about every instrument imaginable. She encouraged me to play while growing up, and along the way I did. The piano, the sax, harmonica, bass guitar, guitar. I was surrounded by music. One time she made a demo tape. I had it at home and played it often. I didn't know the songs, but I started learning them. That's how I discovered "The Rose" and "River". That's how I discovered blues and gospel.

But up until that moment in "The Lives of Others", I had completely forgotten about that one song I used to sing. Up until that moment. One of the main characters lays on a couch and reads from a Bertolt Brech book. He was reading a poem in German. I was reading the English. And still, I remembered the Spanish:

Fue un día de un azul Septiembre cuando
Bajo la sombra de un ciruelo joven
Tuve a mi dulce amor entre los brazos
Como se tiene a un sueño calmo y suave
Y en el hermoso cielo de verano
Sobre nosotros, se posó una nube
Era una nube altísima y muy blanca
Cuando volví a mirarla, ya no estaba

Pasaron desde entonces muchas nubes
Navegando despacio por el cielo
A los ciruelos les llegó la tala
Y me preguntas, que fue de aquel amor
Debo decirte que ya no lo recuerdo
Y sin embargo entiendo tus palabras
Pero ya no me acuerdo de su cara
Y sólo se que un día, lo bese
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Little research showed me the original. And although I didn't know the source of this song, this poem, up until that moment, exactly at that moment, I got a little piece of myself back.

I don't believe in Sundays

This used to be my Argentine blog. I used to write here from my friends and family in Argentina to be able to have an idea of what's going on with me. After a while, I realized that none of them really knew what a blog is, or what I was talking about. For a while there, I just wrote for myself. For the sake of putting it out there. Felt good.

Now I find myself missing a time when I had something to write about, or the will to write about nothing. I figured I'd give it another shot. But this time, in a different language. I wanted to keep my old posts, though. It's part of my history now.

I thought about some words for a while, to make myself understand what I'm doing. I thought about the word reinventing. Reinventing? But if it's "re" is it really "inventing"? I thought about contradictory words. I thought about change and about time. I thought about my nature, our nature. I thought about motivation, and goals. I thought about words. I thought I'd put some down here in the time to come.