Tangerine's PoV

This is not an English lesson. It’s just a life lesson, one that took me too much time to learn.

Sometimes I want to turn past into present and I finally get tired of trying and trying and not achieving it. I am perfectly aware of the fact that this is not possible, but I tend to live in the past, it’s just one of my methods to bring the past back into the present thinking that this would make me happier or something. It’s wrong. It took me time to understand, but it’s wrong. I now know that the sun in spring will never look like when I looked at it during the Romanian literature class in college, and my mother’s sarmale will not taste the same as when I lived with her. The reason is quite obvious: I’m not in the Romanian class in college or living in my mother’s house anymore.

The present is never enough, you have it so you don’t miss it, while the past is gone and sometimes you’d like to turn back the time and feel again what you felt in the past, live again those moment when you didn’t have to worry for the rent and other day-to-day responsibilities.

Living in another country made me miss more things that I ever thought I could miss, and this made me want to go back to Romania, but then I realize that if I’d go back I would probably miss living here much more than I now miss Romania. Present is now and here for me, past is gone and I keep all the good memories which come back to me from time to time with a smell, with a dream, with a call, and future… oh, future is brighter than Orange.

This is just a note to tell myself that present might be here, and I might not miss it but it’s much better than past so I wouldn’t change it for any of the good moments I have lived before.

Now it’s all said and done.






Just let it flor. 24/11/2007

Do you want to turn your blog into a book? Now it’s possible with BlogBook.

If you’ve always wanted to write a book now you’re just a step away from it.You already have the chapters written, you just have to turn them into a book. It is a nice idea because there are lots of people who would like to keep the entries of their blogs in this format so I guess it is an idea that really works. In this world any idea that gives you money is a good idea, and I think this one is one of those ideas.

In my opinion blogs are to be written/kept on Internet, but if you want to have them in a book, like a book of your memories, you an have it for a decent price (starting from 12,95$). I don’t know if I’d do it, maybe for Sabado Tarde which is where I sometimes let my creative side take a walk, but I’d do it just because I sometimes delete the blogs I start and then I’m sorry for it.

Enjoy!

This is Mario Vargas Llosa’s last book, published in 2006. I recognize that I felt curiosity for this book since the first moment I’ve heard of it. And I also recognize that I knew from the beginning that this was not the greatest novel of all times, nor his greatest novel, but still, I wanted to read it. So I did.

WARNING: This part of the post might contain spoilers.

They say it’s a love story, but I still can’t see any love in this novel, at least my eyes cannot see it. The story starts when Ricardo was a teenager living in Lima, in Miraflores, the neighbourhood where he grew up. He knows Lily, a Chilean girl and he likes her. All normal until now. Ricardo always dreamt about living all his life in Paris, so he eventually leaves Peru and moves to Paris where he starts to work as a translator for the UNESCO. A few years after he moved to Paris the false Chilean girl, now a young woman, appears again in his life. This time as a guerilla fighter. They meet, they spend some time together, they share the bad a few times and then she leaves. This is when the story becomes a repetitive description of all the appearances and disappearances of the bad girl whose name is always different, whose stories are always surprising (and invented most of the times). The only thing that is constant is her cruelty and her coldness towards Ricardo, “el pichiruchi” who is always trying to forget about her but as soon as she appears again he becomes one more time a foolish lover who believes again and again the lies of the bad girl.

I said that I see no love in this book, it’s true. In my opinion Ricardo is not in love with the bad girl, this self-destructive feeling cannot be love, but a sick obsession who makes him forget all the mischiefs of the bad girl as soon as their lips come together into a kiss to which most of the time the bad girl doesn’t even respond. The guerilla fighter, than wife of an important UNESCO representative, than lover (slave?) of a japanese gangster named Fukuda who almost kills her with his passion for perversions always came back to the “pichiruchi” when she had problems, or when she didn’t have them, just to hear some of those nice things that “men nowadays don’t say anymore”, but she wouldn’t stay with him forever because she couldn’t get used to a mediocre life as a “loving” wife of a two bit translator. Ricardo knew that from the beginning: she would leave again in search of a rich man to make her feel like a queen, but as much as he tried to he never really managed to forget about her, or at least stay away from her. There is still a good part for Ricardo in this story: even if she could’t live as a loving wife of a two bit translator, she could die this way, so at least he had her with him until the end.

This is not the greatest love story of all times, I have heard of better stories, but still, Mario Vargas Llosa does a very good job in writing it. Even if the story itself is not great, the way in which Vargas Llosa writes it is quite peculiar and I can say I liked it. Every time he starts a new chapter he does not start from the moment in which the previous chapter ends, but from a subsequent moment so you cannot avoid asking yourself what happened in this lapse of time so basically you cannot stop reading. He then comes back to what happened and then continues the story. This happens in almost all the chapters and for me, this is what made me read the book in three days (which is quite fast taking in consideration the fact that Alex doesn’t leave me much time for reading).

Also the book has lots of historical content, which is easy to read and quite revealing, and this is what makes you say, when you finish the book “At least I’ve learned something”.

Although, as I said before, it’s not a great novel, it’s an easy reading book which might entertain you for a while. So if you have the opportunity you should read it to see a completely different Vargas Llosa in action.

We’ve finally decided where to spend our honeymoon. I actually didn’t know if we should go or not as I’m very afraid to leave Alex here, but I have to overcome my fear so I bought the tickets to make sure I won’t change my mind. We’re going to Hel… Helsinki. I know… everybody tells us… “but what will you do there? It’s freezing there”. It’s true, but we both wanted to go to Finland so if we have this opportunity we’ll make our dream come true. And after a cold day out we will get very close to each other at night in bed so what could be better for a honeymoon? I think we have chosen wisely .

And I’ve already chosen my wedding dress. I don’t wear a dress since I was 14 and my mother forced me to, but this one will be the best thing I’ve worn in my whole life. And definitely the most expensive thing.

As for Alex, he already learned to laugh. He’s so cute. Everytime he laugs we laugh with him. If I’m taking a walk with him and he suddenly starts to laugh I laugh too. Maybe people who see me doing this think I’m crazy. If so, they should have a son. These are the happiest moments of our days, when we see him laugh. Here you have a photo of him laughing.

WARNING: Don’t fall in love with him, he’s too young to taste the women’s cruelty.

Yes, Alex is one month and one week old. Time passes by and he is getting bigger and bigger. He now wieghs 5.730 grams. I wanted to post on his one month anniversary but when you have a baby plans don’t work out as you’d like. For his birthday he got a Pocoyo toy and he became a Barça member. We thought that when he’d be 15 years old he’d be proud to be a member since he was one month old. I hope he will not be a Madrid member because then we’d have a problem .

How is it to be a mother? I could say a lot about it but I will try to make it short and simple: hard but wonderful. You get no sleep: the first month we only slept two or three hours per day. He cried a lot and we had him in our arms without knowing what to do. You get desperate, you think you’re not a good mother, you cry, you want to get away but then you realize that he needs you so you spend the night with him in your arms, talking to him, trying to make him feel better. Now he sleeps more and we’re starting to forget those days, things are getting better and we are starting to enjoy this new stage of our lives. I hope it will stay this way and we will not get back to those sleepless nights and sleepless days as now we have lots of things to do.

Next month we’ll get married and we have to prepare everything. We don’t even know which restaurant to choose. I hope this week we finally decide and start to prepare everything else: invitations, rings, dress, suit, etc. Fortunately it will be an intimate ceremony so I hope it will not be very difficult to organize. We’d like to go somewhere at least 2 or 3 days after the wedding, a kind of honeymoon, but I don’t know if Alex will be fine those days without us. We’d like to go to Praga or Dublin, we still don’t know exactly which one to choose. If any of you has any recommendation please send it to us. Alina, I count on you for this one.

Well, nothing else for the moment. It’s dinner time for Alex so I should get going.

He is the best thing in the world.

Welcome Alex! We hope you will enjoy your stay in this world as much as you shit and cry!!

This is the end. One of these days you will decide to live on your own, you will decide you don’t need my belly to hide yourself anymore, you will decide I’m no longer a comfortable place for you. I’m scared, I don’t pretend to lie and seem strong, I’m not. I’m scared because I know it will hurt so much I won’t be able to think of you, I will only want you out. I’m scared because I know our lives will not be the same with you out. Your daddy is dying to see you, your grandparents also, as for me… I don’t know. I want to see you but I guess I enjoy having you inside, I am the one priviledged to have you inside, I have a special communication with you and you can only beat me. In a somewhat selfish way I’d like to enjoy a little bit more this special relationship because I know that we will never feel this connection again. It’s a quite strange feeling, I’d like to see you but I’d also like to keep you inside. Inside there you’re so innocent, so untouched, so pure… But you have to get out, it’s time now… Get ready and please push with mummy, I will surely be grateful for it all my life.

I’d like to tell you more things but it seems you are not very comfortable when I’m sitting on this chair and I have to take you to bed. I’ll tell you a story until you fall asleep now that I can still talk to you without saying a word.

I’ll wait for you to give me a sign. When you’re ready, I’m ready.

…and his only one. Martin Scorsese is a great director, this is something I know, you know, he knows, everybody knows. Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator are just some of the titles that impressed the public, the critics, but that didn’t get to be read during the best director section of the great ceremony. Despite that, Martin Scorsese always kept on directing movies and his movies were still very very good movies, movies that didn’t leave us indifferent until one day the title of one of his movies was read during the best director section: The Departed. But still, there is a but. After Titanic I swore I would not see again any movie in which Leonardo di Caprio appeared. It seemed to me a very bad actor. I don’t know why. Maybe because the movie was very bad, maybe because of all the advertising stuff he was involved in after Titanic, the sex symbol he turned into after dying in Titanic. I remember I was 15 when I saw Titanic and I remember that half of the girls in my city were like “Wow” every time they saw him on TV or whatever. Anyway, independently of the reasons, I refused to see any movie in which Di Caprio showed his face since then. I have seen Gangs of New York in the meantime in which Di Caprio appears and it was not bad, not bad at all, but still it did not convince me. So here comes the doubt: The Departed was the movie for which Scorsese finally got the Oscar. If his other movies were brilliant this one should be at least amazingly brilliant to get the Oscar, so I must see it. On the other hand, in The Departed Di Caprio shows his face almost during all the movie, and I’m talking about 2 hours and a half. Should I see the movie? I have asked myself this question in several occasions until we finally decided to give it a chance and see it. It couldn’t be bad. It actually proved to be more than amazingly brilliant in the end.

The Departed is a movie of endless action, a movie with a crazy rhythm that doesn’t let you even breath during the 2 hours and a half that it lasts. A movie that needs your total attention and that gets your total attention without you even noticing it (something we’ve got used to in Scorsese’s movies). A movie that surprises you with changes that no one would expect. A movie with very deep dialogs, with a quite strong vocabulary which is still not exaggerated, a movie with a very good soundtrack, very very appropriate music. Scorsese finally found perfection with this movie, but he did not find it alone. The cast was a very important ingredient of this success and without it the movie would not have been even half as good as it is: Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Leonardo Di Caprio (who really really surprised me with his interpretation in this movie) they were all brilliant actors.

The Departed was the movie that taught me to never judge a movie I have not seen and always give a chance to a movie independently of the actors that appear in it, a lesson I have learned before with other movies but never applied. I promise I will apply it from now on.

Now I recommend you to go to the closest video club, or start a search in Emule or on your usual torrents page and get this movie. But take care: Demonoid is under maintenance. Good luck and enjoy the movie!

I have never been a fan of the circus. I remember I went once or twice in my life to a circus show and it dissapointed me a lot, I found it fake, I found it deceitful. I have heard of Cirque du Soleil in the past but I have never seen one of their shows as, as I said before, circus was not one of my interests. Last night I had nothing to watch on TV so I decided to see a circus show. It was Cirque de Soleil’s La Nouba, maybe one of their most impressive shows. I loved it, I loved it so much that now I just can’t wait for them to come to Barcelona to have the opportunity to see them.

In the meantime here you have one of the best moments of La Nouba show: