In Betweening

Dear blog (it's like bog but with a beautiful extra "l", in the mid-el),

This past week has been hell (rhymes and all). Fucking October, you're always pulling on my existential braids mercilessly.
Time for mental mirrors and birdlike reflections: My remaining granddad passed away, literally away... far from here. It's as if someone invisible just suddenly removed the carpet from under my tiny incoherent feet only to be left there, as pathetic as can be: floating around in a void of hermetically aimless psychological spaces.

                                      (Yeah, classes are so boring I'm doodling like a boss)

First came the unexpected birthday crisis regarding my body's senescent condition, revealed, and now this. Death is pounding at the door, this time of year, anyways.
My thoughts are spinning like delirious flies around the subject of life's finite nature overall. But also and most importantly, I've been pondering over the human need for exercising compassion in general (while life lasts) and specifically as a way to achieve forgiveness, before the end.
Then again it's the in betweens that are sometimes hard to swallow: the liminal spaces. In this particular one I happen to have been hurt by misleading attitudes and under-grounded narratives dealing with colleagues of mine. Phew, Santiago sometimes sends you a personal black cloud to look over you, literally and in the most negative of ways.
I guess it's a matter of realizing that every person is only looking to satisfy her/his own needs and purposes, sometimes regardless of who they're stepping on along the way. The complexity of social interactions as a whole is a mind-fucking trip... talk about psychedelic experiences! In the end I guess we always tend to assume that others are Machiavellically plotting to make your life living Hades. But, the mission here lies in the fact that it's every person's responsibility to look at each situation with the eyes of a fluorescent spider (oh, so many, and so creepy, eww); and from every angle that's attainable. Oh Kant, what the fuck was your maxim? categorical imperativeness: "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself" or in a cheaper and more self-help kind of way: "Treat others how you wish to be treated". Oooooor if you want to go extra mustachy nerdy: "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law". Whatever, dude, nobody's listening. Besides, determinism sucks.

Will Eisner said that life and art have a similar condition in the sense that they both rely so much on an acute use of perspective. I always remember my painting workshops, where the pretentious teachers lectured us on how we're supposed to look at our canvases from the different positions our bodies could manage to take, within the available space. One must pull away in order to see the whole picture... Atferwards one must once again plunge into the contents of her/his creation, with a brush in one hand and a joint in the other. It's a never ending fight against one's own demons, Sisyphus. Sissy pussy. The more you get used to facing the taste of your liquid madness, your horror, the more emphatically autonomous you'll become. Since you'll be fearing less and less that which becomes more and more familiar to you, pathos-wise. For real, y'all, it's THE infallible recipe.

We do not own each other, oh, but how do we desire one another from time to time! Mundus masters sometimes turn into a real-bizarre sort of Televisa soap opera/reality show, where everyone speaks with a funky Spanish accent (myself included).

But anyways, I just wanted to invite you all to look beyond your obvious/apparent impulses. BE SILENT, BE STILL. As a drawing exercise, for life, I want to observe more closely at the people I'm hanging out with... I'm finding out nothing is what it seems, and I love it!
We are all oh so fragile and imperfect... I want to learn how to expand my understanding of the other person, I'll try that this week. Instead of reacting like a constipated bureaucrat I shall breathe and buy the fucker who's grinding my gears some un-poisoned doughnuts. The fancy kinds.
Will we ever be able to completely empathize with someone else? Since we'll never be that person, we can only be ourselves. But don't you worry, gramps, like I promised you; I shan't stop making an effort to become kinder and kinder, therein lies the real challenge, like you well taught me.


Anyways, stop fucking around (literally). I'll write more about Santiago this week.
 :)
Stay clean! (conscience wise)

Santiaguirri

So yesterday I ninja bombed-my way out of my own birthday party. Am I a dramatic nutcase? Yes. I have to admit, this was an entirely different event compared to that other crazy Scottish celebration that happened exactly a year ago.

27. The number pushes the texture of whatever's under my skin towards an effervescent edge, to the point that it's starting to tickle the hinges of my personality: this is something I've never felt before. I'm like an old teenager learning to breathe by snorting lines of blueish steam.

This is my second semester in Santiago de Compostela, but I shall write about the first one first, "second things third". Yesterday one of the newbies (yes, there are freshers now since/hence we have become the older generation) told me that my blog helped her cope with the anxiety of not knowing what to expect from this masters course. Therefore I'm writing a bit more, since at least someone's reading. Anyways.

My first impression of Santiago was lucidly dreamy. The wetness... Everywhere you look there's green, and blue, and yellow, and gray in all sorts of organic brush strokes that build up the tactile/visual character of this charming medieval-ish labyrinth. It rains so much you start to feel as if you're growing scales, or squamous flakes. Adaptation. Evolution. This is the mise en scene, a psychological madly-driven Antlantis whose streets are packed with (extremely) slow and irritable old people.

After a rather nerve-driven flight, (I almost didn't get my Spanish student visa, fuck bureaucracy everywhere) I arrived at Carmen's humble abode, where I was to stay until I found a place of my own. The "piso" was, and is just ad hoc: her personal empire of a doll's house, where her coloured pencils live in symbiotic harmony along with various postcards and other echoing remains of her (very) disordered European journeys. We both hang around to chat and draw around the city. And we always end up arguing about everything that we do, since we do it in opposite directions of thought. Yet we always meet in the middle, where we create enough arguable space for tea, and differing peace.

Some of the gals that had studied here during the previous semester lingered in town long enough for us to meet and learn from their experiences. We squeezed as much info out from them as we could, before entering the madness of the Galician Academia at USC... geezness, we had heard so many things already that had alerted our survival skills.
Our first nights out were quite subnormal (what isn't in this nomadic chronotope of a masters degree) yet we enjoyed the weirdness that each moment brought to the table. For example: one time my Thai and my Chinese friend were kind enough to accompany me to the Botafumeiro ceremony. So we entered the illustrious cathedral only to be greeted in smokey-funky English by the hosts: "Güelcom!" the robed figures muttered kindly, to what my companions reacted with expressions such as: "This is so exotic!"

*CATHOLICISM. IT'S EXOTIC*

Yeah. So there were three girls from the Saint Andrews gang that were also coming to study here in Santiago, all of whom were fantastic. Together we roamed through town, becoming familiar with our new surroundings, and trying out the gorgeous little coffee shops that dappled the whole of the historic cask. After some days we found out that other three gals from Sheffield (2) and Bergamo (1) had arrived to town to study here as well, so we decided to have a little meet-and-greet reunion in order to experience our existences in the flesh.
Our first dinner together was memorable: the (then) unknown lasses had, so amicably, fixed some yummy tapas for us to munch on while exchanging information about our first semester mishaps, and to test our overall compatibility, taste-wise. We are so similar and nerdy... it's disgustingly comfortable talking to any of these wonderful human beings :)

Anyways, my first impression of the three of them is worth writing about: I entered the fancy fucking apartment wearing my Japanese fisherman's trousers (they're orange and have a million pockets, very un-girly) with my usual disheveled hairstyle (slacker look Xal), dirty sneakers, and a regular tee. The hostesses, on the other hand, looked as if they were carved out from a magazine. Boy, were they intimidatingly pretty, the malditas lisiadas. However, as we got to talking a little I slowly realised these people were not the usual poshy-stuck up kind of girls, the ones who think they can own the world with their looks. Quite the opposite! We ended up engaging in diverse and fluidly interesting conversations that covered the topics I most enjoy discussing about. APPROVED. My heart had spoken. And I was truly surprised, for the good.

Day after day our interactions became more frequent as we kept sharing the good stuff until we finally decided to include the BOOZE factor, and BAM! we became the best of friends in no time. Social lubricants rule.

Brazilian Ana is dearly missed (just graduated, sadly and happily at the same time), one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. Her taste in music should be canonized. Yes, I just said that.
Romanian Cristinushki is just grand, every person in the world should get to meet her, she has a fairly contagious smile and loves reading Zadie Smith. Her sense of humour blows my mind to bits. Period.
Belén. The Murcian lady in the greenest of dresses, she is my daily inspiration for achieving greatness. I feel truly blessed to have met such an unbelievably extraordinary human being. I'm flabbergasted for life.

Tapas in Santiago are sort of a daily activity thing, therefore wonderful Isa, Carmen, Connie and myself now hung out with our new acquaintances and eventually became shoelace-tight, for we were to fight together against the horrid negligence of the academic zombies that passed themselves as postgraduate teachers.

TO BE CONTINUED.