Sikh-ing Dil

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

- Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji

A few weeks ago at an international gathering I met a guy who cracked me up: a self-confident young man with an irresistible British accent, a long nose, gorgeous smile and light brown skin. He is full of energy and wit and he looks like a skillful womanizer, though he says he only enjoys the challenge of getting a telephone number. 

The hours spent with him and his friends in a few occasions were so pleasant that I was looking forward to seeing him again at a party on Saturday. He had given me his card and mobile number last time, but with a guy like that, I thought, if you in fact use that number, you´re like yesterday´s bread. So I never did.

His way of talking to people and flirting with girls together with his attitude and self-confidence craved into my mind the idea that he is some kind of hipster from an alternative London district. Therefore the omni-present beanie on his head despite the hot temperature of the overcrowded bar, I thought.

As a teenager I had a boyfriend who never (never!) took off his baseball cap. Not even as we were plunging in his swimming pool. So this British youngster wearing a beanie made me curious and, as he came to me the other night (probably while hopping from one woman to the other) I asked him to show me his hair. “I can´t. It´s long”, he replied. My hair is long too, not a reason to hide it, I thought. And then he added "I am Sikh", taking off his beanie and revealing another cotton cap, protecting his hair.  Millions of questions corwded my mind within 20 seconds but it was definitely not the best location for a philosophical talk. We then agreed to meet the day after and I let him go back to his flirt-marathon while I went on talking to my cool Tartar friend. As I left, he was dancing quite closely to a Romanian girl. Pretty, by the way. Good choice. 

The next evening started with him coming late - very late - (he had fallen asleep) to the appointment and, on top of the delay, having trouble finding the agreed meeting point. I normally get so pissed off by disorganization that I was really tempted to blow everything off and go home, but eventually we manage to meet. Or at least I think we did, for the young man standing before me me looked exactly like the one I had met a few times before. But he was also another person. Much shier, not so fresh and bold. During the evening, his attempt to concisely explain to me his "religion" ("I don´t like to call it religion") was more than a little confused but his tone of voice and the way he tried to express his ideas struck me: it was full of respect and...feeling. Just charming.

My British friend was my first contact to Sikhism (but not the last: sounds like something I am going to further explore, let alone out of curiosity) 
My sikhy friend. A funny, witty (sham?) gangster womanizer. 
Sometimes. 

Tschüß

DumboDreaming

I dreamt of Dumbo, last night.

Or, actually, I dreamt I had a cute little baby elephant that everyone adored and even my bank consultant wanted to take a picture with.

And since last night I could not fall asleep, torn by the dilemma whether or not to accept the offer to move into a new flat abandoning the one I have shared with friends for 7 years, I decided this morning that the adorable baby elephant that eventually made it into my dreams was Dumbo, encouraging me to hold my feather tight and…fly. With no fear.

So it looks like I am probably moving into a new place, my place!, in January. 

Clap clap and thanks, Dumbo.  

Tiny beautiful things

I have the impression that the quest for happiness becomes more and more complex as years go by. Adults (me, jaw-dropped, in the first row) are mesmerized by the capacity of kids to find the most common things whimsical and magnetically fascinating and I have heard many parents proclaiming what a bewildering experience it is to re-discover the world through the eyes of their offspring. No breaking news for sure, rather a trite consideration that has found in the past centuries revered voices, for instance that of William Blake, who urged us to rediscover the child within ourselves.

I have stopped being a child many years ago and I don´t have toddlers running around chasing ants or talking eloquently to a potato chip, so basically it seems like I am doomed to be a quite rational grown-up, nailed to the idea of life as I decided to regard it. Yet, last night I was playing tennis (very generous definition of my attempt) with three friends of mine in a poorly lit indoor court and there I was, my knees slightly bent, holding my racket tight, looking at my Indian friend across the net smiling his gorgeous, elegant smile while getting ready to serve. And suddenly it started raining and the ball was flying over the net in very creative twirls and my Canadian friend was doing her funny jump-serves and my London mate was running wildly around the court yelling “Mine! Yours! No, no, mine!” and that rain…the rain kept tapping tenaciously on the plastic roof, producing a warm, reassuring music, transforming those apparently meaningless bunch of minutes into…pure bliss. 

purple rain

collections and recollections

I have a friend who is a deltiologist. If you are of average intelligence like me, you probably don´t know what a deltiologist is, like I did until a few weeks ago, when a definition question came up during the Monday Pub Quiz and this incredibly smart and cultivated man, being one, obviously knew the answer: “How do you call someone who collects postcards?” 

A deltiologist.

Though the vision of any kind of collection gives me a sense of smothering and I doubt I´ll ever start one, I find the idea of boxes and boxes of postcards (as long as in someone else´s home) romantic and enthralling. It surely has to do with the “object of desire” itself, for I am one of the few remaining people that loves to send and receive real letters and who still sends postcards who are actually physically carried by a mailman. Quite sad – though somehow understandable – that the new technologies are killing older epistolary traditions but indeed I had to acknowledge that “times they are a-changin´” when in a post office in a southern European country, last year, I had to wait over 15 minutes for the clerk to go dig, in some dusty back office, some postcard-suitable stamps. Had I asked him to please bring me some tea and Parisian macarons, it would have been easier, I reckon.

Finding out that this friend of mine is a passionate deltiologist was for me delightful, for it gave me a chance to…send postcards! And not only once or twice a year from some exotic holiday venue to some friends who would open their mailbox and look at this rectangular piece of paper with baffled surprise, No no! I could send nearly every week a postcard to a man who would open his mailbox, smile his little oh-so-mannered British smile and then climb the stairs to his flat wondering in what box my postcard would better fit.

I don´t always send the best postcards, and sometimes I play the ninny by sending the most kitschy postcards I can find. One of my favorites was from a former military and now low-cost airport in the middle of nowhere. The layout, the graphic and the picture were so appalling, that I was almost ashamed as I handed it to the cashier to pay. The postcard was so ugly, it literally made me laugh.

Today´s postcard to my deltiologist friend is an old one which has been sitting, lonely and bored, in a drawer for years. It´s a postcard depicting a glass door of the Casa Battló in Barcelona. I have been to that splendid city only once and only for a handful of days. I remember I was happy. I remember strolling down the Ramblas with a light heart. I remember standing in front of the Sagrada Familia with unexpected and overwhelming bewilderment. I remember secret codes, cheerful nights, carefree days, full of energy and hope. I remember walking on the top of the Casa Battló and thinking “I am in a fairy tale and this roof is a benevolent dragon!”. I remember leafing through the guest book and reading, with a full heart, “we are here, and we are in love”.

I would have never imagined that deltiology would indirectly carry me to sunny, lively Catalan streets on a dreary September afternoon. Pleasant surprise indeed. 

savoir baiser

Some time ago I kissed a boy. To me, he was really just a boy though, in fact, for the society, a full grown up man. What can I say? Every male who is more than 4 years younger than me, to me, is a boy.

The boy and I inhabit different planets: he belongs to the skaters sub-culture, dropped out of college because “he makes his videos anyway, what could they possibly teach him at school?” and we have so little in common that it´s for me still quite inexplicable that we reciprocally found us funny and kind of liked each other. 

Fact is that the boy is, in a very uncommon way, sweet and pretty fascinating in his slightly arrogant yet somehow low key self-confidence. He loves to flirt and he seems to have a natural talent for that. 

Doubtlessly, he has a talent for  kissing. So, a late summer evening some weeks ago, this silly red fruit inexplicably found herself in a park, with the sun setting, kissing this boy.

For hours.

Nothing more and nothing less.

One beautiful and somehow forgotten pleasure; it was like being 14 again, blissfully enjoying the moment without thinking of any potential evolution of the situation. Since there wasn´t any possible evolution of the situation. 

Today I was thinking of the Synagogue in my town and I remembered that it was in front of that building that I met the boy the first time. And it made me think of the evening at the park. Though I will quite probably never see the boy again, the recollection made me smile, like a dreamy teenie. 

So, boys and men of the planet, I have a little suggestion: never, ever ever ever underevaluate the importance of the tiny, dazzling, simple things in life. 

And the importance of learning thoroughly - and never unlearn - to kiss well.  

the art of writing

I stole this picture from the web. It was in an article about an abandoned, decaying mental hospital around NY.

I fell in love with the shot, the shape and light balance, the soft, dusty colors; it´s almost as if I could reach out my hand and scratch the peeling walls, breathing in the dump air of the solitary place and hearing the echo of the clicking typewriters.

So sorry not to be able to give credit to the author of this picture. But thank you, for your art.

Visual Poetry

When aesthetic pervades, even the most unfamiliar topic becomes incredibly fascinating. 
Thanks Wong Kar Wai, for a beautiful evening. 

   

“Remember when I told you that there is nothing to regret in life? 

It's all bullshit. If life had no regrets it would be really boring”.

“No news is news”.

Letters to Milena

"I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful"

Franz Kafka - Letters to Milena