The Sleep of Reason
There’s this atypical Gothic statue of a virgin in Barcelona that, it’s like, half turned to one side, like it’s stuck in the middle of an unfinished movement. Instead of thinking that the artist was ahead of his time or that was influenced by other art movements, people in the Middle Ages believed that the statue had been originally made straight but that one day she had turned to look an innocent condemned man on his way to be executed and that way everyone knew he wasn’t guilty, was released and she stayed in that position forever. The guide is telling this story as we gaze up at the statue of the virgin, we all laugh, feeling so superior and smart. I do too but the laughters ring in my ears, bittersweet and shallow. I’m thinking that we haven’t changed that much. I can picture in history museums from the far away future, a group of people just like us and a guide just like our laughing at an empty horse shampoo bottle behind a showcase:
“They say that women from the 21th century used horse shampoo because they thought it would make their hair grow faster!”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.
“Oh! And this is what they called a “Power Balance”. People would pay a considerably high amount of money for that time just to wear this piece of plastic. It was supposed to help you feel better with that hologram there, but the truth is that it was a placebo effect.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.
“They were credulous, weren’t they? Even politicians wore it!
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.
I keep having this dream in which I am out for a walk with my mother and sister when we find a huge fountain that appears to be a lake but that it is actually a swimming pool. It is full of fake plastic fish that shine in fluorescent lights and that swim on the surface like ducks. As I warn them not to dip their arms I realize that my sister is holding a hand coming out from the water, she’s helping someone out. From the water arises a completely dry Nick Carter straight from the 90’s: blonde, mushroom hair, baggy football shirt and thin.
Maria’s blues
I spend Saturday night on Omegle, solid evidence that I’m finished as a human being.
Omegle is a text version of Chatroulette and the hardest place on Earth to really talk to someone, but I still keep a secret hope that I will.
I don’t.
I skip people who ask me “what’s up?” or any of its graphic variants, a/s/l people and, in short, anyone that likes describing themselves only using the first letter of words.
I tell someone, somewhere that I’m eating a turkey and cheese sandwich.
F 16 USA asks if I’m a fat guy, fatties turns her on. I tell her that it’s her lucky day because I’m a gorgeus obese boy. She starts then making fun of the fat that I don’t actually have and calls me donught dough or something. In response, I try to reproduce sexual moaning in a onomatopeia involving a lot of letters”o” and “h” and I ask her to please keep going with that dominant stuff while I masturbate but she reports me due to inappropriate behavior.
That means that I won.
I try the spy feature. It allows you to ask two strangers a question and see their conversation as they discuss it. I go for the biggest dilema of humanity since “to be or not to be”: melons or watermelons?
I ask it to several pair of strangers, they all say they prefer melons.
I do too.
I see the potential in this tool to discover the truth in life. My next question is real: can someone love two people at the same time?
It’s the weekend that I found out there wasn’t another girl, it’s the weekend I found out I was the other girl, the week I found out I’ll be failling at college.
I’m the saddest kid, the saddest kid in grade number four.
DRAMA
Yesterday we visited a nearby monastery that I don’t remember the name of it but it was a crazy mix of styles from the Middle Ages. The place had like the most dramatic story that I have ever heard, for real… It seems that when the Moors were trying to conquer Spain, the eleven nuns who lived in the monastery at the time mutilated themselves to discourage the Moors from raping them, so they cut off their noses, one of their ears, etc. But when the Moors came not only did they rape them anyway but they killed the nuns afterwards.
It was so sad and dramatic that I couldn’t help but laugh. Life is a bitch…
Don Quixote of La Mancha
The world’s top authors chose Don Quixote as the best book in history. Neither Shakespeare nor proust, they chose Cervantes, the Spanish writer.
Cervantes invented the modern novel with Don Quixote because Don Quixote is the modern man: he is alone against reality, his world is falling to pieces and there’s no one there to save him. Given these facts, he only has two options: going crazy or try and change the world, so he goes for both.
Don Quixote distorts reality and makes up his own fantasy world to survive his disappointing life but, through madness, he achieves his dream of being a knight and help making the world a better place by defending honor and justice.
The vision of the world that Cervantes was trying to show us is that reality is not something clear; it varies from multiple different points of view.
The world’s top authors chose Don Quixote as the best book in history. Neither Shakespeare nor proust, they chose Cervantes, the Spanish writer. I wanted to remember that now that my country has been reduced to numbers and fear of recessions and interventions as if Spain was a country inhabited by the economy and not by people whose hearts are broken watching how they are slowly taking it all away from them.
I really think that Spaniards need to remember that we are able to do big things, we already did; Don Quixote of La Mancha is an example of it and maybe there’s an inspiring message in it…
Siblings
My flatmate says that her brother is able to understand her when she speaks with her mouth full of food and that he’s the only person on Earth able to do so. She can understand him as well, so when they are at the table and they have their mouths full, making it difficult for their parents to understand their speech they automatically repeat what the other was trying to say. How sweet is that? I wish there was someone able to understand me with my mouth full of cereal in the mornings. We all should.
