Farewell, big fish

Can you imagine a fish with legs? A fish who could live in the ground, without water? Yes, he was a fish like this. A fish who could live outside the water, but was only happy when he could join his friends in the ocean.

But this fish, besides living among the humans, was special, unique. He was also a brother, a leader, a son and a father. A very special one. A brother who would guide me and comfort me in the  hard times, a leader who would guide a hundred people to something bigger, a son who would guide his parents to a place that they could finally rest, a father who would guide and teach one of the most amazing kids I have ever known.

But as a fish, he needed gills, I think he was not used to have lungs to breath. With gills he could go back to the sea, and breath under the water, and be happy again. With gills he could be free. With gills he could still be with us.

Brother, I know I cannot write even a small part of what you meant for me and for our family. But I want you to know, that wherever you are, you are in my heart, forever. I don’t know if I was able to say to you how much I love you. But I hope you know it. I hope you can understand that seeing you in that condition only hurt me and I was not able to be strong enough to be at your side and let you hope that you could make it.

I hope that where you are now, you have those gills, so you can swim freely in a very deep, blue and magical ocean. Because for me, you are still here, with us.

I hate love

“Have you ever been in love?  Horrible, isn’t it?  It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up.  You build up all these defenses.  You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life.  You give them a piece of you.  They don’t ask for it.  They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.  Love takes hostages.  It gets inside you.  It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like ‘Maybe we should just be friends’ or ‘How very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.  It hurts.  Not just in the imagination.  Not just in the mind.  It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.  Nothing should be able to do that.  Especially not love.  I hate love.”

Rose Walker (Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman: The Kindly Ones”)


– I gave up. I gave up on believing that somehow you will be seeing by my point of view. That someday I can listen a “I’m sorry”. That I can have some of the feelings that I gave you back. It’s easier this way. I gave up on love.

10 days

Tell me that everything will be alright when I come back.

10 days to go. I feel weird. I don’t feel happy neither sad.

PROcrastinating

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?

So, here’s how it works:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool..

* Opening Credits: Pink & Black – Caroline Lufkin
* Waking Up: The Sweets – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* First Day At School: Always on my Mind – Elvis Presley
* Secondary School: Yellow Dog – Millencolin
* Falling In Love: More for Me – Tegan & Sara
* Fight Song: Everytime We Say Goodbye  – Ella Fitzgerald
* Breaking Up: When I See You Smile – Bic Runga
* Prom: Enter Sandman – Apocalyptica (hein?)
* Life: Like a Stone – Audioslave
* Mental Breakdown: Noite de São João – Vitor Ramil
* Driving: Cálice – Chico Buarque
* Flashback: Dukes of Hazzard – Less than Jake
* Getting Back Together: I Want to Be Wrong – No Use for a Name (hnnn???)
* Wedding: Crazy for You – Madonna (diva!)
* Birth of Child: Self Esteem – The Offspring
* Final Battle: Hump’em n’Dump’em – Wheatus
* Death Scene: Something to Say – Kane
* Funeral Song: Same Old Inocence – Architecture in Helsinki
* End Credits: Un Amor – Gipsy Kings (I can imagine an ending scene a la Kill Bill right now)

The End.

500 days of Autumn

Just ended up watching one of the best surprises, in my opinion, from this year. As the narrator says in the beginning of the movie, this is not a love story. Not the typical Hollywood lonely-but-strong-girl-finds-ass-but-lovely-hunk, but it is a story about a guy, who lives a really ordinary life, alone, and has a job just because he needs it, who meets a girl. A girl that doesn’t believe in love. And he falls in love. And the story is about the days he spend with her, since they met.

And she didn’t want a commitment, a relationship. And then it makes me think how true is it nowadays. You just cover yourself with lots of walls and barriers (and excuses), you don’t permit yourself to believe in love and faith. Maybe because you got hurt before, or maybe because you saw your family fall apart because your parents, your role models, they didn’t love each other anymore.

And what rests for the other part? The person can agree, believing that he/she can block him/herself of falling in love for the other person. This can happen, of course, but what if it doesn’t? That silly gesture of the person smiling at you, telling you how beautiful and sweet you are. And, as Gaiman said in The Sandman, your life isn’t your own anymore. You just gave the other person a piece of you. An unwanted piece. But it is there, on your hand, and you cannot just put it back, it sticks on your hand, and you keep waving the hand with a piece of you stuck on it, hoping that the other person will notice it. But you made an agreement, you said that you wouldn’t fall in love with the person, and everything you can do is struggle and try to hide your feelings. You try to hide your hand.

And then you get into a limbo where you don’t know how to act anymore. You just seem to be closer and closer from the other person, but you cannot say how much you like him or how much you wanted for this to work out. And then you are doomed. Someday, he will just walk away from you, leaving you in the darkness with the piece still stuck on your hand. And this piece will remain a little bit more there. Until the next season comes…

P.S.: I recomend the movie soundtrack. It is lovely. And I loved the IKEA scene. Just loved it.

One-man-state

Driver: Are there still borders? More than ever! Every street has its borderline. Between each plot, there’s a strip of no-man’s-land disguised as a hedge or a ditch. Whoever dares, will fall into booby traps or be hit by laser rays. The trout are really torpedoes. Every home owner, or even every tenant nails his name plate on the door, like a coat of arms and studies the morning paper as if he were a world leader. Germany has crumbled into as many small states as there are individuals. And these small states are mobile. Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter. A fly caught in amber, or a leather bottle. So much for the border. But one can only enter each state with a password. The German soul of today can only be conquered and governed by one who arrives at each small state with the password. Fortunately, no one is currently in a position to do this. So… everyone migrates, and waves his one-man-state flag in all earthly directions. Their children already shake their rattles and drag their filth around them in circles.

Der Himmel über Berlin, a film by Wim Wenders.

Borderlines, limits, big walls, whatever they are called. Some are thicker, others are so thin that can be tore down with a simple blow. And they are there, to protect something. To protect themselves from the others, or to protect the others from themselves?

And what about passwords? What is the code to get to know someone, to just trespass the barriers of each person? Is it a smile, some dumb action, or you have to read the whole “War and Peace” from Tolstoy? Sometimes I feel that there are more than one or two passwords, there’s a whole spaghetti with puzzles and passwords that you have to resolve just to get closer someone. And sometimes, even when you try really hard, you are still in the surface.

P.S.: I’m not talking about Germany. I just thought it would fit with the all modern society situation we live. I live in a one-man-state, and I think that there are more people who also do.

“Life should have a soundtrack”

“Life should have a soundtrack” was the name of a community in some social network that I participate. And to a music addicted like me, it isn’t different. Many moments of my  life, since I was a kid, are associated to some songs. I can remember clearly when I was a five-years-old girl and discovered In Between Days from The Cure when looking at my aunt’s old records. The lyrics didn’t make any sense to me, but I loved how the rhythm was fun and made me want to dance. The same happened to lots of songs of Legião Urbana, a really famous Brazilian band. Most of my childhood musical experience was because of my older sister.

And it was not different when I was a teenager. This phase is already known as a phase that people tend to exaggerate a lot, so you can imagine how it was for me, an admitted drama queen. Lots of Bon Jovi and Roxette played at my CD-player, as well as Green Day, The Offspring and Blink-182, when I was in a more rebel without a case phase.

"It must have been love" and "Listen to your heart" where my favorites to the platonic and dramatic loves that I had!

The thing is: for me, a song must have good lyrics. They must transmit some emotion when you listen to it. I don’t actually care if the musical arrangement is poor or something like this (or the song is really sticky), as long as it brings me good or bad feelings. And there are lots of reaaaaaally beautiful songs that I would love to have some memory associated with. But they don’t. Those are my orphan songs. The orphan songs have the most beautiful lyrics, which would be perfectly fit for that sunny Sunday with someone special. Or just a funny Saturday evening with your friends.

They are there, waiting to be adopted.

P.S.: I just wrote this whole thing because I was listening to this beautiful song of Bright Eyes, called “First Day of My Life” and discussing with a friend how beautiful the video clip was. No “thinly veiled subtleness” intended.

15 again

The palm of your hands are sweating, your heart is beating so hard and quickly that you’re afraid that someone besides you can hear it. You breath in deeply and try to think about something nice and clever to say, but you totally forget that your brain took the first ticket to Tanzania and all you get is a blank thought.

You _are_ shaking. You wonder if he will ever notice you if you pass in front of him. You wonder about lot of things. You wonder if you have something that can actually attract his attention. You just lose all your self-confidence that you thought that you had when you see him. “There, it’s not that difficult to change a few words.” You can’t even speak three simple words in that weird language of him. Not without gagging.

You feel like 15 again.

Some comments about elections at Germany

On 27th September the people of Germany will be choosing who will compose the federal parliament. It’s the 17th election since 1871, as Wikipedia says.  There are lots of posters all around the city with some acronyms that would sound pretty funny in Portuguese as, for example, FDP, which means “Freie Demokratische Partei” (Free Democratic Party), but in Portuguese is an acronym to “Filho da Puta” (Son of a Bitch). You can also find people making campaign for small parties like the Pirate Party (Piraten Partei) at the middle of downtown in the evening.

As a foreigner who used to live in a country that political campaign means garbage everywhere, the impression I have is: people here are so organized. On Saturdays, when I go to downtown, I can see tiny tents lined up side by side, each with a party symbol, people with T-Shirts, discussing about proposals and ideals. It’s not intrusive like in Brazil. In Brazil you can find lots and lots of tiny papers with the candidate photos dancing in the streets, which will of course end in some manhole and take the place where the water from the rain should go. Or maybe that noisy truck with some little devil pictures painted on that plays some soccer team hymn and makes campaign for some tires store owner.

Even the protests, they are organized. You can see lots of material at Internet too. They even have an Internet test or so that you can decide on which party to vote after saying if you agree or not with some topics.

I’m not much into politics, I’ve never been. All I can affirm is that communism in China isn’t something beautiful as some lunatics say. But I would like to understand more about how the government here in Germany works. I have a feeling that things can actually work here. Just a feeling.

New ideas for this blog: maybe a new direction?

Ok, I know I should be posting more from my life here in Germany. I actually LOST the timing when the things were actually new and I was fascinated about how living abroad can be cool. I must confess that I still am fascinated for many aspects of living here, but it would take a little longer to write about it.

I was thinking about three main points. The first point is, as I’m pretending to speak speaking more German than English, my written and spoken English is worsening. I should write more, so I can exercise this sleeping part of my brain. The second point is that I spend most of my day in front of a computer and in consequence listening to music. I try to be up to date with what’s happening on the music scenario, but as I am busy with other activities, I got a little bit lost on what’s going on. I used to read blogs that bring new stuff everyday, but they’re now just accumulating unread feeds at my Google Reader. And I love music. Really.

The third point is that I miss writing. I’m not a good writer, not at all, but writing always kept the good ideas in my head and let me evolve them.  So I was thinking about joining those three points and try to write about new things that I hear or discover. Of course, I will try to come back with the original subject of this blog, which is life in Germany and my travels around Europe, but I thought about starting to write about one of my biggest passions: music. And maybe some other little things too. Not personal stuff. My dear diary bla bla bla will be in the same place as always: here and here.

So, what do you think? Does anybody read this blog at all????