Girl Talk

‘That’s what it’s like, girl’ said a mother to her child.

‘You don’t need much help in looking beautiful until you turn forty or so. Don’t waste your time striving for it, you already have it. After that, age with grace. Us women have the privilege or curse of living physical decadence very closely, more than men who don’t lose shape over pregnancies and don’t really need good shape in order to reproduce.’

‘While you have beauty’ she continued, ‘strive to gain things you don’t have: skills. If you go the other way around you’ll be wasting time. You’d be looking for things you already have, and then things you can no longer get.’


D.

Kudos

People build up too many expectations around life.

It’s made of, what? Eight decades, tops? Then everybody gets all worked up about what you are going to do with it… I really don’t get it.

If I were to plan a great deed I’d need the first two decades to figure myself out, then another two to study everything that has been done in the past and what improvements I can make, how to be original and not just do something that someone else did exactly like me a couple of thousand years early. There goes four decades down the drain, only in preparation, you got half in front of you.

But then, that half has been possibly damaged by environmental factors, so you’ll lose between five to ten years to cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and stress. Which brings me again to the next half: generally, we fall in love. There goes four decades for you, between falling in love with your spouse and falling in love with your grandchildren.

Just a simple little life, that’s what you get in the end, no big plans, ‘cuz you didn't have time to see them through, that’s for the highly lucky, exceptionally talented or extremely well positioned people.

To you and me, kudos, we get life.

D.

New Year Kind of thinking .2

By D. Salazar

As in every beginning of a new year, I tend to allow my head to roam around all possibilities of life design, working status, learning experiences and cleansing rituals I can get my hands on, convinced that, even if I can’t do them all right now –how impairing that feels- at least I’ll be able to do the ones I truly like the most. For this I rely solely on that power we humans have, the power of will, to keep attracting those things that attract us.

Choosing a working path is not easy, paradoxically enough we are forced to choose one at the same time our raging hormones can’t even decide on one romantic partner. University age is not a choosing age, at least not for us humans with a foggy but pleasant path spread ahead.

I prefer to live day by day.

While trying to decide a working path for this new year, I realized that the one that seems both intelligent and attractive to my intellect at the same time, requires money and time, maybe too much money and too much time. Considering that I also chose to pay for an activity that makes me incredibly happy and keeps my over enthusiastic head away from dark thoughts about the emptiness of life –and how we came to die and everything is useless and other fatalistic thoughts of the sort- I’m gonna need tons of money.

When you realize you need money to get money through a better job, and you also need money to have fun so that the process of getting money is not so tiresome, you fall into depression. A little voice awakes in my head and says “wtf man! When do I get to live and enjoy living?”

With some effort, I extracted the voices –real or imaginary- of the various people I deeply admire. I find they are the best resource against depression.

One of those voices, raspy and smoky, coming from the kitchen table, said “I have never concerned myself with the reasons I would be remembered by”.

Another one, rather sombre and smelling of wine, said “I only attempt to expose the manner in which I have come to certain truths”.

And then, the greatest woman who has ever lived says, while sitting in a corner sipping tea from a delicate porcelain cup, “Freely be, whatever you are”.

Like a mother’s lullaby, these words clear the dark cloud of depression and get my ass on my working chair again. Whatever my choice of work, whatever the amount of money and time I need to spend to achieve that choice, doesn't really matter.

We admire in others the qualities that are inside us, yet unexplored.

The Powerful Will

By D. Salazar

I read online that feeling suicidal comes from the existing relation between pain and the ability to cope with pain. If you put both in a scale, and the amount of pain surpasses the ability to cope with it, your system may shut down, causing a suicide.

Suicides start in your head.

I’m not suicidal, I’m merely dramatic and unemployed.

Nevertheless, when thoughts of emptiness and visual representations of drastic suicidal techniques appear in my head –generally while I’m getting myself from one place to another- I do tend to desire a shut down. It may be in the form of sleep or a very long vacation. It may not be death but it does require a solitude that comes close to it. Social death, complete disappearance… and then I picture myself requesting it to someone, “at least for a while, may I please? It’s only a short death!”

A number of images cross my head, Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life, Hermes, Hermetics, Morality, the Network, Catholicism, life after death, Eternity; then they transform into a blurry headache and a stomach ache.

When thoughts turn into aching, you are clearly worrying too much.

The truth is that you are going to die. You don’t realize it yet, because you’ve never been in a position to do so. Since you will inevitably die, you may do one of several things: i) despair, ii) have fun, iii) do something useful for humanity, iv) devote to children, v) search glory, vi) play golf…

There are two things that one must understand, first, that whatever you choose is fine as long as it’s fine with you, and second, that no one said you have to choose now.

I feel like I’ve been choosing what I have to do with my life since the age I could walk, but my decisions change rapidly, so I can’t really cling on to any of them. I’ve grown used to not caring about them and only go with the flow.

When I feel suicidal, I generally feel I’ve lost my flow.

My ability to cope with pain has leveled. I feel that, to increase it, I must find a purpose, it’s the one thing that seems logical, but not make it “save the world” or “cure cancer” or “devoid the world from all demons”, no, something for mortals. I thought that maybe I could just make something beautiful.

I thought about all this during a bus trip. I focused on the image of beauty, pure beauty. The image that each of us finds in unique.

I pictured that something beautiful had to begin with a falling spiral.

The image may be different now, but it is still perfect.

This little mental token started to clear away some of the clammy headache I was feeling. Now I could concern my head with more practical things than Hermetics and Morality. I wanted to find a way to bring it to life, to make it exist in the physical world.

So, humbly, wrote this article.

(It works)