Weekend of Art

It's a really sunny weekend, with a gentle breeze and nice Decemberish kind of feel to it. I mean "tropical December", which is what would be something like March-April in Europe, in those cases when the weather behaves properly and you get that nice little sunny day that feels good on the skin, but you still put on a light sweater and pack an umbrella. Actually on Friday someone commented somewhere - could be on Twitter for all I remember - that the day was very Christmas-like. This is our winter season, the deepest of our winter and it should be pouring like hell, and though we have had some of that too, it does actually look like we are getting ready to transition from rainy season to dry season.

Though I love rain, this weather is fantastic right now for doing laudry - which I am doing now! - but also for goint out to the backyard and do some art with my oldest nephew. We carved a pumpkin yesterday - okay, I carved it, and gutted it because he declared that he wouldn't go anywhere near that "yucky thing" we pulled out of the pumpkin - which ended up real nice - if I may say so. For today morning, however, we had to take it out to the backyard and hose it down because it was covered in ants. That didn't happen last Halloween. The pumpkin will now stay outside where any ant attack won't bother us inside the house, and where any pumpkin catching on fire wouldn't bother us either. At least not me. Yes, this pumpkin looks great, nice and plum, but it's a bit too low, so the candle in it soon starts burning the top of it. I still have one other pumpkin for carving, and since that one doesn't have a nice sticking out chunk, I might leave it with an open top (top-less? ^_^) so that it can be lighted up without risking catching on fire.

So, as the freshly hosed pumpkin was out in the nice Decemberish sun drying up, my nephew and I decided to go outside and do some art. So we opened the Box of Art and fished out water colors, trays for mixing colors, brushes and started doing some magic. He was really having fun with the mixing, enjoying how putting together two colors did yield a third one as if by magic. Making orange, purple, brown, pink...it was chromatic alchemy for him. We ripped out two pages from a new sketching pad - my bigger than the one we had been using so far, and after having fun discovering colors, we sat down creating something fun.

I was planning on making a small bag for myself, to replace the small purple Hello Kitty bag I left in Hungary - it's a small, simple tote bag I used for carrying things around like lunch and such - but haven't got to it yet. It's not supposed to be a difficult project - and come on, I've already made once a yoga mat bag! - but haven't started my little tote just yet. I haven't gotten any further with my letters, though I have already balled up several pages as none of my startings really please me. Ah mind! Maybe I should just take a moment in the moonlight to meditate, clear my head out, art up a little, maybe go back to my knitting, and then I'll be ready to pick up on things and roll with them.

Weekends, they can be wonderful!

So Much Heat

These days are hotter and hotter, and not in the good sense of the word. Goodness Gacious, when is the cold coming back! All I can think of is that in Costa Rica these days are full of passing rains, and the air is so wet, so fresh rainbows pop up everywhere, everyday.

Summer is here, and I can't wait for it to just go away. Give me Spring, give me Fall, give me Winter, but please, where can I return Summer? How can anyone love this season??? It's totally beyond me.

I've done nothing all day, just like today. I've been home, wearing as little clothes as possible, and refraining from walking around naked because there are windows we need to keep open, and reading all day. And just by reading all day I've sweated far more than I've ever sweated on a spinning class!

Nights are no better either, with temperatures around 30°C at night. Forget pajamas, forget covers, I'd rather sleep in the fridge or the bathtub. Yes, the fridge is not doable, but I've been seriously considering the bathtub the last two nights.

From here, from the unlivable, impossible heat of the summer, I'm thinking, "hey, life in Costa Rica isn't so bad after all". Then again... maybe I could move to Iceland... anywhere away from this freaking heat...

My mind is melting...

Rain Is Comming

The day has been sunny and hot, positively burning away the hours. In a stroll down my beloved Margit Island, the shade of the trees was greatfully welcomed. It should have been a great day for the many icecream sellers of the city park, but also for the many Budapestians who crowded the cobblestoned shores of the island and the Danube, to stretch their bodies in the tiniest swimming trunks and bikinis to get a tan. A young lady in a blue bikini even decided to loose her top, not minding that she was right next to one of the most populous bridges that leads to the island. This made me remember my reservations, and how much I carry still of Costa Rica and the Latin culture. Though I admire the freedom and "mind your own business" attitude, I still tend naturally to expect a given level of decorum and self conciousness proper of the Americans.

The popular, farmer wisdom talks about the "freezing saints", refering to certain days of the calendar linked to particular days. (In Hungary calendars normally still include for each day a set of names, or just one name. These are the names that parents can give to their children, and no other, unless there's a "valid reason" to give the child another name. The names have changed and many have been added to keep up with the most popular names in the country, but also includes certain traditional names, normally related to these traditions.) The sky will cloud, the winds will speed up and the rain will pour. This could seem terrible, depressing for some, but for me it's a refreshing, wonderful event, and not only because of the drop of temperature.

Rain in Europe isn't like that in America, at least not like the kind of rain I'm used to in Costa Rica, where thick, big, loud drops drum passionately on the paviment and the roofs, flooding the streets and collapsing the sewers. I remember my black rubber boots, those humble but very efficient boots that kept my feet from the rain water the last years, allowing me to walk where others couldn't. But not here. My boots are not here, but the rain is also soft, mild, nearly dew-like. With it, as I rushed to an important appointment, I found myself praying to the rain.

Wash away the obstacles,
Wash away the problems,
Wash away the worries,
Wash away the nervousness.

Let us be like the grass
Rain upon us
Fill us with Hope
Let us grow fast and strong.

For some rain isn't anything other than an inconvenient phenomenon, an upsetting event that ruins clothes and shoes, that spoils picnics and parties and gets in the way of drying your laundry. Rain, however, it's today's continual Mana. Falling from the sky, it quenches the thirst of the land and all creatures living in and on it. It washes away the dust that the hot days have sprinkled over the world, cools down the raised temperatures and makes life possible.

The cool days and the rain is coming, and I may need the power of that prayer, of that spell again. Let's hope this rain and these freezing saints will wash away the obstacles that keep dreams from coming true and working their magic.

The Fog and The Shapes in It

Mathew has dragged behind himself a long, floating, vaporous trail, fluffed and dense, light and ubiquitous. And thus, after the promised rain and floods failed to be delievered, a veil of freezing rain beads delicately from swollen skies of luxuriant silver fox furs and the dense fog descends upon us, like over a bride who walks blindly, wrapped in blissful ignorance regarding the good the bad, the delightful and the rotten scattered around her. Taking pictures becomes a futile exercise, clicking away at the furls of white immaterial halo, a milky solution splashed across the air, much like the slow, frozen breath of a man peacefully sleeping in a cold hut.

From the floor where everything was seen, nothing was seen, Argus Panoptes lost his one hundred eyes under a cosmic bridal trail. Helios, God of Watchfulness and Wisdom turns inside, and as light blinds and blends outside, opens Argos Panoptes' one hundred eyes to the insides, where the Styx flows alive, and carries death and life alive in a stream of humanity and the specks of nephilimic nature mingled in every man and woman. And thus eyes that can't see outside, turn inside, to a darkness that's no darkness, but fleshful richness.

Darkness sets heavy darkness in hearts up North, where the cold winds that cooled Annabel Lee's cheeks threaten to shun away the sparkle of life in their eyes. Paper words, bit and byte words tell me so. But in here the Algea do not touch our hearts, do not come with the change of the skies, the plunge of mercury bars. After much to see, much to picture, a swap of blank that erases the world before our eyes, leaving us on the fringe of material reality, introspection is the new place to go. In here the inner thoughts find other voices to conference with, and as banned pages flop softly, the words once prohibited, now hightened, flood faster inside and the artist leans heavily on the table before you, and as the pages wane away, the book reaches the end, his hand stretches forward fisting into your sleeve, pulling you closer to his face, and his wine stinky breath breaks on your nose in waves, spit splashing on your cheeks as his emotions climb excitement, formalities never observed as the confessions slowly come to the inevitable conclusion, remarks and anecdotes add up, and the bits and pieces that stick out slowly drip into the same bowl.

No big mysteries to be uncovered. Hatred, desdain, mockery, seedy sneers, dirt. No race is worth, no woman is worth, no person is worth, no ideal is worth, no religion is worth, no man is worth, no art is worth. And peppered over it words that collide into the matter perfect quotes are lifted from. Deep disrespect towards everything, in perfect anti-Einsteinian absolutism. Absolute hatred in the middle of which the nest of thorns has been found where the fishy can live to his heart's content.

Argos Panoptes widens his many eyes in realisation of the well known fact: wisdom often doesn't have to come from satisfaction, simply from thinking.

Chillin'

This is one of those days I don't really like. It's a hot day. Too hot for my liking, and going hot during the morning is a sure way to make a day not my kind of day. Yes, I know, I have bitched about the hot days a lot, and guess what? I'll keep doing it, so if you don't like it, go read some other blog! Nobody is forcing you to read this one! (Well, heat got to me officially. I'm in such an unsufferable mood I pick fights with... nobody.)

There's a lot of work to be done in this week, and - as it should be - none of it is really some easy pie. I'll have to wrestle again with a project for which my best and most honest recommendation is "file it and behead all those involved with the idea", yet I still have to make this surface one way or the other. Thanks Chuck I have an idea about what could be done, but for it I'll need "input". Do I have those "inputs"? I do not. Oh Goodie. But looking at it from the bright side, it's just Monday morning, and I have until Friday to work some magic on the proposal. Ideas? Well, I just hope I won't have to make use again of the Nauthilus Spiral to get things done.

Good thing is that I'm off the loop with another project, which I took home on Friday and spent all weekend working on. It wasn't easy, it wasn't small, but I managed. To my utter delight, today as I presented it to my boss, he was happy with it, quite pleased and decided that not even a comma should be changed. This lifted my spirits, not to mention that by having this done, some layers of work will be shaved off my in-tray. Right now a slim in-tray would make me happy, but that's not my case, specially when I have a deadline for a project, to be done by Friday, and there's another one that's "Super-Urgent" according with two different areas outside our area, not to mention the other scattered 3 projects that loom in the shadows over there, some of them taken over by people in whose capable hands I don't quite put all my trust. so yeah, that's my share, and top it all with the possible moving to the Babel Tower in this week, which won't be as pleasing as I would hope, specially since there have been quite some Earthquakes in these days and though in the second floor they feel horrible, in the 15th they should feel even worse.

So this is the moment when you grab your coke by the neck and pour some into your gutter. Sure feels good. Then it doesn't matter how long the day takes to cool off, because it does. It doesn't matter the workload you've on your back or your in-tray, because you will get ahead of it sometime. It doesn't matter either because I've a great boss, not some moron with a dysfunctional pea-brain, like the one I used to have (who now torments some of my friends, all hiked up on the fact that they are naive fresh meat, right from the private market grinder, and would do his obnoxious bidding in the same overly exploited slave-driving fashion Chinese slave work force does). So this is when I pop out of those magical chill pill, take it and let the world grow groovie. My chill pill is my coke and a nice vid to slow down the rush. What's your chill pill?

Rain and Me

It's raining. I wouldn't mind that fact much - I would actually love it - except that it started REALLY raining when I was out doing office errands. Now my trousers are wet from the knee down, and the sleeves of my shirt are wet also, and to say that it's driving me mad, would be an understatement. I wish right now for nothing else but to take my clothes off and wait for them to dry. Hate the feeling of wet clothes!

After getting to the office, peeling back by bright aqua-green raincoat and putting my things down, I went to the bathroom, where I stood with my scarf tied as a skirt around my hips for I don't know how long trying to dry my shoes, socks and trousers, all the while cursing for not taking my rubber boots for the trip. Should have. That way at least my shoes and socks would have been saved. Oh well. Now I have to wait for my normally steaming-hot office to do the magic and dry my clothes. (Oddly, either I am losing sensitivity on my legs or I feel my pants... dry.)

This thing, by the way, is a curse I have. You see, no matter what, but during the rainy season at least once I get SOAKED while wearing pants. Have gotten soaked in dresses (actually remember getting soaked wet in a Benetton dress, which I was able to fully dry under the hand drier!), but always-always get soaked at least once while wearing pants. Then again, it could have been worse, it could have been jeans. Now that would have been really unfortunate.

In moments like this I also mind not having a desk top, as CPU's are awesome drying devices. Oh well, the UPS will have to do it.

I'd love to be home right now, wearing dry, comfy clothes, drinking coke and watching TV, or answering letters from my friends (which reminds me that I'm stuck with another letter again! But this time ain't because I've no idea how to answer it, but rather because I've like so much to answer to it! It's turning into a Coppernican Letter!), and stuff like that. The other day I wanted, but like really wanted to read a manga I haven't read in ages, called "Only the Ring Finger Knows"... or something like that. I checked where I keep my mangas (which is now  everywhere I used to keep my books, since basically all my books have been shipped to Hungary, and I don't want my folks to see my room empty and feel that I will leave anytime now, even if that could be the case), and it wasn't there. Checked up and down and all the way around and nothing. So I came to the conclusion that we packed it and it's now in Hungary. I've been re-reading again all my yaoi mangas and pretty much read them all... again, so I was looking for something I haven't read recently. Anything. Okay, anything but Ororon (good art, stupid plot), Paradise Kiss (interesting plot, but that doesn't make it good), Mars (good art, corny plot), Angel Sanctuary (awesome art, good plot until it nukes the fride, or like I say 'brings back the Winchester'), Candidate for Goddess (I really gara get rid of that), Petshop of Horrors (I went on a speckof hope that never came through. Gara get rid of that), King of Hell... Chuck! I have a lot of mangas to get rid of!

Anyways, it happens that today in the morning, I spotted it! Yep, there it was, the manga, in yet another shelve. Right now I'd love to go home and read it. Well, truth is that I just wanna feel comfortable and be a bit lazy. Rain, whether on me or not, always invites me to be lazy. What does it do to you?

[boing, boing, boing, boing...]

Today my head feels a bit... heavy. Nah, it ain't the worry or the tiredness of the trip kicking in, it's the sudden heat washing over the country after days and days of cold fronts turning our nails naturally blue and hanging icicles of our eyelashes. nToday I dressed up like every day, with layer over layer of clothes and a nice, thick wool poncho-like ... thing over a red knitted sweater over a rosewood, long sleeved shirt... and now it's so freaking hot my hair is melting. Damned, how I hate heat.

Work trickles down slowly, and this generalized heaviness weighing over one's forehead and eyes, where the pressure seems to kiss the poor vibe into you, makes you escape from even the simplest and most basic of tasks. You simply want to roll over and sleep next to a beer bottle under a palmtree lulled by the ocean. The amount of fluids I'm drinking is quite admirable, specially because it includes a liter of water. Me. Water. Yeah, that should give you an idea of the situation. It is Friday and that should put us all in a rather festive mood, but hell if this Friday isn't one of the longest ones in the history of mankind! Each minute seems to take at least a quarter of hour to pass. In a few minutes... or not so few, I'll be free. Free, free, free... to join the traffic jam that will only improve my building headache, that will make my trip home all the more straining.

It is even probable that I won't be able to see NCIS tonight, for I can't asure anyone that I'll be able to keep myself awake all the way to 7 pm. Yeah, talk about that.

The Internet has been on and off all day, making it hard to do anything with it, making you wonder what on Earth people did at the office when there was no Internet? Must have been so terribly boring... or "productive" in a seriously "tayloristic" way. If "the man who works with brute iron shall be as brute as the iron", then the "man who works at an office  shall be as dumb as it's access to the Internet". I left my book at home today, and I would have really, really enjoyed to grace my day a little with the notes of Maria Festetics about life in the court of Empress Sissi. I kind of love her writing, and her subjectivism is quite enjoyable.

In her entries you do feel the fact that she writes the journal to be later on read by many, to be published, and at some places it makes you wonder what would be her real feelings and thoughts. There's some self-glorifying, but what journal doesn't have those? The love and devotion to the Empress borders into unholly love that not one lesbian-lover would embrace passionately to the bosom. Comtess Maria is, without any trace of doubt, a complex and fascinating creature you can't stop reading. Well, you can, when you leave your book on the nightstand. Phew...

I'm addicted to books. I'm addicted to my journal, that's clear and undeniable, but I'm also painfully addicted to books, though I expect not to join no "retreat" to get me "clean". Yes, I love to read, and thick books with extensive chapters do not threaten me. Hell, I read Ann Radcliffe! That's not something you see often nowadays, when celebrities "write" books about themselves (all of them with the colaboration of a professional writer because, really, do you expect them to write? You know, when you are famous and rich, you can afford to write a book without actually writing it, because you can pay someone to write it for you, and it will be a best seller.), and everything that comes from the polished shelves and counters of the media-friendly bookstores filled with CDs and DVDs is conveniently chaptered up into no-more-than-two-page segments and chapters so short anyone with serious ADD can run through it in one sitting.

People don't read. They think they do, but they don't.

I know someone from a book club, who has labeled me like "you, who like the big books". Yep, that's me. "Over 150 page book" Bunny.

So, here I was, with a flickering Internet, no book, a boyfriend struggling to talk to me through Google Talk and a question in my head: how the hell can I send something via sea to Hungary?

boing, boing, boing goes my head. Hectic? To say the least. I just want to get out of here.

This is how desperation-by-heat "reads" like.