The Nightmare

The Nightmare

waiting and waiting for days (cold November days) for a foreign film to download...

Malena, 2000

Il Postino, 1994

La vita è bella, 1997

Cinema Paradiso, 1988

Italian and nostalgic, these films have one thing in common
that is remotely Italian and nostalgic: bicycles scenes.

...only to discover it doesn't have an English subtitle.

Gorge

Gorge

I have this craving for a while now: a spice in the tongue, a fill in the gut, something stuck between the teeth, something I cannot put my fingers into.

Just saw the movie. Must try this and figure out what's the fuss is all about.

But I am not starving. When I wake up, the food is already out there. All it needs is to for me to ask for it. We dine day in and day out. We eat everywhere we could: the restaurants, the fast foods, turo-turo, Italian servers, steak houses, and even in bed – especially in bed. He always has something extra: extra rice, extra viand, extra cola, extra soup.

Relationships make people fat and make them forget how it is to crave. Before, when I wake up, I think of food automatically: if father has something already cooked, if mother has canned goods stored in the cabinet or if there’s still leftover in the fridge I can nibble on and swallow cold. I watch one-minute cooking shows to see if I could stir up "food" with the limited ingredients in our basket. I used to cook, I used to experiment, I used to create something that only I can understand.

Maybe it was for my part that he buys the extra; I lack the lust to keep us satisfied so he buys the extra. Before, I eat because I am hungry: I thirst, I crave, I desire. I take several servings. He saw me do it, his mother noticed it, the world is disgusted by it. But now, I only eat because I follow the idea that the body needs it three times a day. Before, when I am hungry, I don't know where the food goes. It doesn't matter because I don't bulge, so I take another serving. I do not bulge because the food is consumed and digested other than my stomach. But now that the body only subscribes to it, it stays in the midsection as fat.

Fat, like love, is only a feeling. I am craving for something but I forgot what it is. Maybe I need to stop eating to figure out where this hunger comes from. Maybe I should start cooking again, experiment and create something. I should go back to those unfinished stories and chew those blotted papers to see if they could nourish me.

Bon appetite!

"Addiction"

"Addiction"

Had been watching So You Think You Can Dance. Finished Season 5 in just 2 days. :)

This routine called "Addiction" choreographed by Mia Michaels and performed by Kupono and Kayla is one of my favorites. The song "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles used in the dance is also sweet, if not painful.

Enjoy.

The Joy of Writing

The Joy of Writing
Wislawa Szymborska

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

From "No End of Fun", 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh