Letter to my seventeen years old self

 

Hey you! How are you doing? First things first, how old are you now? Just to help me recall what is going on in your life. 17? Wow! Almost an adult, soon enough you will be able to vote! Yes I know, a little too late this time, you will turn 18 in July and this super important election, the first one you old enough to understand and care about is happening in May. It’s a shame but don’t worry, there will be plenty of others.

I know it is a bit frustrating. I know also I am not being super helpful right now and you resent me for putting pressure on you, as I said earlier that you are “almost an adult”. I should know you don’t want to hear that, especially from me, you are hearing it enough all day long and it starts to get terrifying. In June you will have this big exam in order to finish high school. Don’t worry about that please, you will pass it. Even if teachers and parents are babbling about it since you’re eleven, it is actually not such a big deal. You are a good student, you own a good memory. So just learn, they are not even asking you to understand anything about what you are learning, it will be enough for this.

Hey you!

(This article will be filled with pictures having absolutely nothing to do with each other whatsoever) 

September has arrived, and it was for a really long while the real beginning for the year for everyone, even more than the first of January actually, because of school starting again. Funny how I still do feel this little heart pinch at the end of August every year, even if I am working since quite a while and basically all this summer.

But this heart pinch is really here, the same one you feel when something is getting to end and you don’t really know what will happen next. A bit like at the end of December when you think about what you learned the past year, but without the feasts and parties. At the beginning of September you don’t really have the mind to party and it is a shame, it would help to swallow the pill.

September is here so, with this feeling of new and this article is actually the number 50 on this blog. It is a lot! When I opened it last year I would never had imagine I would reach this point so fast!

These movies about love that are not rom-coms

People usually talk about “rom-com” this way: the most important is the trip, because the end is evident and well known even before the movie starts. We know than both characters gonna end up together, happy and infatuated no matter what separates them at first, in the middle or even at the end. Even better, if they hate each other or don’t seem to assemble at all, difficulties will even be more interesting.

 

(I am not gonna talk about this movie because it was less important for me but I could have: Celeste and Jesse forever, by Lee Toland Krieger)

 

This might be the reason why this type of movies were particularly popular in the nineties and 2000, at a time when we could have had a more optimistic vision of life so we would accept better the identification with characters whom had a very different life from our own. For example I hear a lot about Sex and the City about it. It is true that it seems than lives of these wealthy, sexually liberated New-York women drinking expensive cocktails wearing expensive high heels while dreaming about Big Love had nothing to do with lives of most viewers. They were probably seen less as caricatures and more like potential futures I guess. Nowadays we watch Girls or Game of Thrones and we identify also but it is not such a pleasant thing.

 

 

Things have been changing nowadays indeed, with crisis raising, ecological, economical, consciousness and it is a good thing. Could we even talk about sentimental crisis, or even revolution? In this context, rom-coms showing Big Love’s arrival, the One and Only that Will Last Forever and “Olala I was so not expecting this!” are not so accurate anymore. We now watch them with the humid eye of disillusioned cynical guy who still believes in great love although we don’t want to.

Contradictory injunctions #3 : the slut paradox

Here is the translation of a chronic for a paper magazine coming out every 2 months in Montpellier area in France, Le Tafeur, this one came out the 27th of June. 

 

 

If there is a domain where contradictory injunctions are plenty although they should not be (here is first), it is our sex life. More than ever, we get encouraged, or should I say harassed to blossom, to sweat happiness from every part of our skin and it is necessarily coming from a crazy sex life.

Crazy indeed, I insist, because if you are perfectly happy fucking in missionary position once a month with always the same partner, you will be labelled as very boring person, no matter your gender or sexuality.

Of Monsters and Men : we sink

I do not practice music. No instrument, no composition, it has never been my thing. But I can hardly imagine a day without listening some, something would be missing. Plus I am the music monomaniac type, meaning that I like a song, an album or a band, I can listen to it on a loop until wanting to throw everything by the window (which was easier by CDs time, with computers it is not such a good idea anymore, stating than such a breakthrough would be a good idea so far, which I doubt by the way but let’s go back to topic).

I have quasi permanently a song in mind but I don’t get bother by it, quite the opposite actually. I sing a lot too, in the street, alone, in the bathroom, anytime someone is saying something matching the lyrics of a song I know (yeah, I can be a pain in the ass sometimes), I just cannot focus without music, especially for writing. As a summary, it is important in my life.

And some styles, types, some bands or singers are even more. Some, without us knowing really why, are touching us right in heart, making us cry, laugh, warm inside without any logical reason. It is a bit like meeting someone you like immediately, sometimes you don’t really know why, it might be something in the smile, in the repartee, spontaneous and sonorous laugh, something in the eyes, no matter what we got caught.

Phone, street, the big misunderstanding

Another weird story, the kind we think are too much if we would see them in a movie

(500 days of Summer, by Marc Webb)

I moved out and in at the beginning of June, with (among others) someone I met a few weeks ago. This person is named Pedro (I will write full names today, you will quickly understand why) and we had to talk a lot on the phone for obvious organizational reasons.

The day right before me moving in, I receive at work a phone call from an unknown number. Answering, I hear a man voice I cannot identify. Following my question, I get the answer “It’s Pedro”. I don’t even think about it because even if more or less 15% of Portuguese men are called this way, only one is normally having my phone number. I am busy, ask if I can call him back later, he is ok.

FOMO : what is it? Where does it come from?

Among all troubles generated by modern life, I do believe none of them can influence us on the daily basis as FOMO can. What is FOMO? For a start it is a disgusting acronym meaning Fear of Missing out, this very common affection making us projecting mentally ourselves to another place where something else is happening than where we are right now. Disconnecting us in the meantime from what is happening to us. FOMO is helped for that by its best ally: connected smartphone.

Partner movie of today: What if by Michael Dowse, best comedy about love and FOMO

I gave in Internet connection out of home not such a long time ago, 2 months actually, the same way I gave in smartphone itself, more or less a year and half ago, in preparation for my travel in Brazil. It was a fine excuse, I needed something to keep contact with family while not having to carry a computer with me. I discovered Whatsapp, Messenger, it was perfect. For that matter, going back to my old phone without Internet, apps or touch-sensitive screen seems impossible now, once you get to taste technology. Then thanks to programmed obsolescence, consumption is continuing.

Nice, discreet, uncertain people: the new heroes

To R., for the idea

(Theme-movie of today : Frances Ha by Noah Baumbach)

The less we can say is that nowadays nice people are not exactly popular within our society. Being “too nice” is often seen as an insult and “Too nice for your own good” is notoriously said about someone generous whom believes everyone else is acting the same way.

Or again “you believe you live in Care Bears world?” that we hear so much lately (at least in France), another saying to definitely shut your mouth up when you dare to believe you live in such a world, or wish you would (mind you though, the very idea of living permanently on a cloud surrounded by multicolored bears with a plastic diamond on their chest eating candies all day long seems more like Hell to me but fine).

I mean, seriously

Metal music and escapism

Amazing Polish band Behemoth

I like most of music types. I know that when you ask someone what they usually listen to, this is the answer you get most of the time. It doesn’t make it an easy answer though so I would like to bring some nuance to it: I like most of music types as long as they make something inside of me resonate. Obviously I like more some music types than others, like everyone who has ever said “I like all type of music”. Music in general and countless genders coming with it are wide enough for everyone to decide to become an expert in a specific one or to keep giving a surface interest to all of them, keeping just what they prefer in it. After this comes the spiky question of genders and sub-genders, as in science the study of infinite small becomes as mysterious as the one of infinite big. For me, to discuss music as well as any other topic, is always at some point bringing to this conclusion: if we get to know enough about something, it is only to realize we know nothing about it (a not so famous dude, Socrates I believe, was saying something like that but I am not so sure).

 

Contradictory injunctions #2 : comfort zone

Here is the translation of a chronic for a paper magazine coming out every 2 months in Montpellier area in France, Le Tafeur, this one came out the 15 of April. The first one was also published on this blog so the translation will come!

We get to hear a lot, a lot, a lot about comfort zone. Really. To a point that we start to feel guilty about it, especially when it is starting to become a bit too precise about what is it and what it is not.