I kept looking for free software that could help me do my home budgets, and finally I found GnuCash for windows. Yes, you heard me: for WINDOWS. I have been using windows again because many of the softwares I’m used to aren’t compatible to Linux.  Anyway, this is the third day I’ve been using it, and so far I’ve reached the conclusion that this is a powerful – but possibly cumbersome – tool. It is not really heavy on your computer; it’s your mind I’m talking about.

First of all, I couldn’t really do ANYTHING with it before I read a few pages of it’s documents. And now, three days since my first contact, I stand in awe of how amazing GnuCash is – although there’s a long way for it to go in my opinion. So, if you’re looking for a quick review of this software by someone who is a real beginner in the whole accounting thing, here is what I like and dislike about it:

The Good Side

The best thing about this software must be it’s capacity for detailed money tracking, which really fascinated my neurotic obsession for precision. You can be as detailed as you want – right now I can even track the cents in my wallet! Of course, you don’t have to go that deep and you might just use it to keep track of your bank account… but I really want to get detailed info about my expenses this month, because my clumsiness towards money has led me to a point where I feel like my money is disappearing from my pockets. The double-entry system surely is handy for keeping such precise records, as it forces you to always know where this money came from (your wallet, your paycheck, your checking account, etc…) and where it is going to (groceries, entertainment, etc…).

The Bad Side

The worse aspect of GnuCash must be it’s flattened learning curve. As I mentioned, you can’t really do anything unless you already have some notions of bookkeeping or read a few pages of the manual. Myself, I already managed to put most of my finances in order on the system, but I have two company loans – yes, I’m tracking my company there too! – that I haven’t been able to insert in the system, because I still haven’t a clear notion of how to register my debt and the monthly interest rates in there – apparently, GnuCash won’t just calculate it for me. In MS Money I would just insert my current debt – the amount I have yet to pay – and keep track of my montlhy payments. Yet, that wouldn’t give me such a clear picture of my balance, so I prefer to dive a little longer into the documents.

In sum, GnuCash is a wonderful application to keep your money in check. It doesn’t have the automated features of it’s web competitors and, although it may be considered user-friendly, it is not a software for the lazy as it does takes some effort to be properly learned. If you’re migrating from MS Money, don’t expect to tame GnuCash instantly, but do not give up and you may enjoy the benefits of detailed and precise bookkeeping.

By the way, if you’re a windows user -such as myself – and have no idea how to compile the software by yourself as the GnuCash website tells you to do, don’t panic! There are executable installation files around the web in download sites – I found mine at www.superdownloads.com.br .

When I first began to work through the oDesk system I was quite impressed. Finally I had a way to offer my skills world-wide and work under a flexible time schedule – an important thing when you’re trying to conciliate work and studies. I thought I’d take a couple of jobs for a low income, just to try the system out. After a while, though, better opportunities came my way in the real world – you know, the one that exists whenever we get a chance to look away from the screen -, so I decided to step away from the web market for a while. Now, I come back to oDesk to find a myriad of almost disrespectfull payments for jobs due to the competition against countries even poorer than my own. A result of economic crisis? Maybe… or maybe it’s a sign of the end of days. Filipinos, Indians and others, clutching themselves for the priviledge of working for three dollars an hour! I saw people accepting to work for as low as two dollars an hour in the website. My cleaning lady got payed more than that, and she doesn’t even know how to use a mouse! If things keep going this way, I might be looking for cleaning jobs around real soon.

The Wachowski brothers have been very cryptic about the metaphors in the movie, and, as far as I know, have never explained exactly their intentions for what the meanings in the Matrix are. Many thinkers saw the richness that lies under the main story and used it as a didactic reference to discuss a wide variety of relevant matters, mostly in the field of philosophy of the mind. I was startled when I first checked this site, which contains articles from real monsters of contemporary philosophy such as Hubert Dreyfus, who, for example, wrote the 1972′s book “What computers can’t do”, besides several other works of great academic importance – very few of which I have read during the NIEC project, but which strucked me very clearly. It is, of course, a highly recommended reading for all those who were fascinated by this masterpiece, but I really believe that they too have missed the greatest and most precious alternative readings in the matrix, which lies in the sociological exploration of it`s universe. I have not yet found another article or book which holds this view of the matrix, but I assume something of this sort must exist because the social metaphors really seem obvious to me.

The film, as I see it, talks about macro an micropolitics, the society of control in which we live, the oppression under which we live our lives, completely clueless about the violence of which we are, at the same time, victims and accomplices. Exploring such an analogy between the universe of Matrix and our own society would probably suffice for a very large book, but let us try to scratch the surface of it here, in this humble tiny blog post.

In the Matrix, the machines have dominated mankind, put them “to sleep” while sharing a kind of “dream” in which they live like citizens of the 1999′s western capitalist society. They are busy with their little silly worries, working, studying in the formal system and trying to achieve a successful life under the terms of capitalism. Stuck in this rat race, the great majority of humans never even question the reality in which they live. This allows the machine to grant it`s control over what is, essentially, it’s main source of energy – generated by the human brain’s activity.

Let us be reasonable: we’re talking about an absolutely genius masterpiece of cinema, so, if the author was just trying to write another history about computers taking over the world, why the hell would the machines use us as source of energy? They’d have a much more efficient source of energy just by using nuclear power! In the Matrix, an important relation we must observe is that the machines cannot exist without the humans. Thus, the machines from the film are a metaphor for THE machine – the social machine (you know, the one in the “rage against the machine” band`s name). It exists in the macropolitical level, it drives our lives in patterns we are unlikely to perceive, and, at the same time, it is driven by us. It exists only as an abstract representation of the result of our collective actions in the micropolitical level. Hard to understand this macro/micro thingy? Skip the next paragraph if you already understand it; if you don`t, cope with me for a small detour in our analysis of the movie and let me create a small analogy of my own to clear things up.

Macropolitics and micropolitics are two ways of seeing the same phenomenon. Think about a hive full of bees- and be ready to bare with me on an biologically inaccurate analogy. Now, a certain unaware dog comes around too close to the hive and the swarm of bees, in order to protect it, attacks the dog which runs away with several injuries. The attack of the swarm is, to our purpose, an analysis of the event from the macropolitical level. It sounds as if the entire hive had felt the threat of the dog almost at the same time and acted on it; on the other hand, if we look closer to this scene, we’d see that it was not the whole swarm that started the attack simultaneously, but one individual bee happened to be crawling in the base of the three where the hive hangs. The dog, a silly puppy, decided to take a good sniff at that curious little winged object, and that one particular bee was alarmed, releasing a signs of pheromones inciting her fellow bees to attack. In this second version of the same story, we can see the event in greater detail and understand how it really took shape, and, from one individual’s action, unchained the attack of other individual bees. This would represent a short micropolitical analysis of the attack. Thus, it may be apropriate to state that the macropolitics are the resultant of all it’s micropolitic agencies, just as a swarm’s behavior is to the individual bee.

In this way, the Matrix itself can be taken as a macropolitical view of the entire system, while the agents clearly represent the micropolitical level of it. Take the wise words of Morpheus:

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it”.

Yes, beyond the innocence of our futile activities in the daily life, we are also the agents of the system. We are the ones who keep it “alive” and fight to avoid it’s decay; we do it so naturally and so frequently that we don`t even realize. Sometimes, we even do it with the best of intentions: we denounce bandits to the police, we take our crazy people to the mental hospital, our drug addicts to the rehab centers, our children to the schools, our homeless to the shelters… in sum, we make sure that everything is where it is supposed to be in the system.

Let`s make it very clear here: I am not saying that we shouldn’t take kids to school or bad-guys to the law. I am just trying to show you that, even when we do the right things, we are still “feeding the machine”, playing our roles in the maintenance of a system which we know has many flaws and is frequently brutal (sometimes horrible – I will write on it in the future). Yet, we need this system to maintain our “reality”, or, to get out of the analogy, our way of life. So, how do we change this invisible prison for our minds into the utopic society of our real dreams? The answer to that question is probably the thing I love the most about this film, and it is showed in the end, when Neo fights the three agents after being shot in the chest several times.

We’ve seen Neo fight agent Smith before in the subway. In that occasion, Neo could already match the agent in strength and speed, managing to kill Smith in the railway. The problem is, once the agent`s body was dead, it quickly assumed another body and came right back to hunt for our hero once again. If everyone is an agent in the system, direct confrontation against such agents is useless. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, or which big agent you managed to “kill” – killing an agent here here can be understood as, for example, overthrowing a certain government, bankrupting a major company, etc. The system is more stable than that, it adapts itself and it always has substitutes. So, it really doesn’t matter how many anti-Microsoft banners you put in your blog… even if you could ruin many “Microsofts”, impeach ten presidents in a roll and provide amnesty for all political prisoners around the world, the system would survive. Other leaders (presidents, kings, dictators, etc) and other “Microsoft”s would rise and we would still have homeless people, famine in poor countries, wars, etc.

Neo understands that once he becomes able to see the system as it is, represent on the screen by those weird green codes he sees all around. The problem is not beating agent Smith. The problem is to change the codes! But you don’t change the system codes with brute force from the outside. Instead, Neo learns how to use the system in his favor; Neo becomes able to fight with much more efficiency and even stop bullets in mid air! But, eventually, he realizes that there`s only one way to beat the agent once and for all: change it from the inside! That must be the most beautiful  metaphor in the whole movie. It can be applied to a variety of contexts, but I find it most charming when applied to the context of the education: Yes, we are prisioners of the system, and the system needs qualified work-force – thus, we’re sent to the educational system. There we have the opportunity to develop an understanding of how the system works, and then we’re finally able to use it in the benefit of our causes.

The system has places designed for us to take once we’re advanced on our educational process – places that always convey a certain amount of power, usually depending of how useful we are to the system. If you fight against it, it is most probable that you will end up on a place of little power (say, inside a prison for the most extreme cases… the less extreme cases are pretty much harmless to it anyway). But if you play the game, if you embody the agent instead of facing it head-on, chances are that you will find yourself in a position where you can help with changing it.”Humanize” the world in any way you can, and, it is never enough to repeat that EVERY place you can possibly be conveys some power, for as little as that power may be, and it is also important to stress the fact that big social changes always begin in some small level. No matter who you are or where you are placed in the system, there’s ALWAYS something you can do to make it better, even if the improvements you begin now will only reach a macrostructural level in a generation or two. We are the ones who build the machine with everything we do amongst ourselves, and no action is too small to change the world – like the wings of the famous quotation’s butterfly that can generate ciclones. I beg you, make your actions worthy of the world you want to build.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

…

Homeless man kicked out of a bar by the manager (in white shirt by the door)

Although the notion of world’s misery has always been boiling in the back of my mind, these past few years it stuck in it to the point that I can no longer understand what is it that makes us able to even sleep at night knowing of the circumstances under which the majority of mankind lives.

Like every Brazilian middle-class citizen, I’ve been skipping “bums” all my life. There they are, on the street, always looking down towards the ground in search of any scraps they can sell (soda cans, paper, etc), or sleeping in the sidewalk or (depending on where you’re walking and at what time) using cheap drugs such as marijuana or even glue with ink solvent. Not a day goes by without that scene repeating itself right before my eyes. Yet, when you grow up seeing this all the time, it sort of becomes natural to watch your step when you’re walking in the metropolitan area so that you don’t step on the guy sleeping in your way to the bus stop. Of course, you always understand that this situation is brutal, but it only affects you in a distanced manner. It’s sort of like when you think about your own death: if you ever had a near-death experience (as I did), you know how incredibly scary it is to know that you are going to die, but, when you survive it, death goes back to the end of your priorities. You get used to know that you will die someday, and it worries you a little bit, but that thought does not strike with such horror again until your life is threatened once more. It is that feeling, that little weak worry, that walks with you once you are aware that many people live and die in such degrading situations of famine and diseases that science has been able to cure for over a century. Of course, when that happens in mass proportions in your own country (as in my case), it affects you even more, usually contributing to harden your heart – given that the alternative would (and, really, should) be gruesome despair.

Mostly, people dare not to try and break that distance apart. They walk around dodging “bums” as one dodges a stray dog on the streets. The difference between the way those homeless people live and the way we, “upstanding” citizens live is so huge that one cannot really put oneself in their shoes without a great amount of willed effort. But it wasn’t really by will that I first got that awareness. Let me share an experience here:

In the World Social Forum of 2003, which was held in my city, something pretty curious happened. I was 18 years old by then, and was sitting on the grass with some great people I had just met – a group of “hippies” (I think the term describes them roughly, but well enough for the present purpose), including a few Canadian people. A south-African reporter was interested in taking pictures on the local trenchtowns, but, since you have very little chances of getting out of a trenchtown alive with a camera unless you have someone trusted by the drug-dealers to vouch for you, he called for the help of my friend Marcus, who acted on NGOs inside some trenchtowns and thus was able to take him there. So Marcus and the reporter also joined us.

Suddenly, a homeless man, appearing interested in what was going on in such a meeting of odds speaking in these strange languages, came around us to hear and watch. Marcus invited him to sit with us, and so he did… in a few minutes, that generic homeless guy had a name and a voice that, for my surprise, was not begging for money or anything. As a matter of fact, he took a bit of marijuana out of his pocket and rolled it into a cigarette, then began to smoke it and tell us about his life. He was clearly mentally challenged, and I wondered how brutal it is that a man in such conditions was left to wander the streets in search for whatever he needed to survive. He even offered us to share with his cigar, which some of the “hippies” in the group accepted and, although I didn’t take the offer, I found myself in a pretty new position: a homeless guy was offering something to me!

And, please, let us not judge the act out of pretense politically correctness and say “damn, he offered you drugs!”. He was not a dealer, and never tried to charge anything from those who shared it with him. Marijuana is no taboo for him – and certainly not for most middle-class kids. I had already met homeless people and even talked to them. I had worked on charity before, so it was not particularly shocking that I shared a conversation with this guy, shook his hands and shared anecdotes (as I believe that the notion of spending an afternoon with a homeless person may sound shocking enough for the European or even to the regular alienated middle-class people in my own country), but what makes this experience particularly memorable to me is that, for the first time, I was put in a very different position in this relation with the miserable: I was being offered something! That mentally challenged man, who could not even buy a set of clothes or sleep on a bed, was offering me something that, for him, must have been extremely expensive! Then I considered that, with just the money I had on me in that very moment, he could probably feed himself for the whole week! And yet, I did not give him a single cent – I certainly would if he had asked, but the fact that he didn’t is part of what kept him apart from those other people I dodge everyday in my memory. The fact that I never offered anything except for the sandwich (which, by the way, I got for free) I had on my backpack is also part of the glue that made this experience stick with me. That guy, that day, was not a homeless guy, he was one of the friends I met there and, to be honest, one of the people I never saw again after the social forum was over.

After that, whenever someone posts on a blog that 40% of the people in the world live in misery, this is no long such a distanced number or such generic people. These are people just like me and you. They shiver in the winter cold and their body ache after a night sleeping on the ground. Seems to me that we shouldn’t have the right to sleep before we change such brutal, abysmal, horrific reality – and yet, here I am, going to sleep in my warm bed and soft pillow, and wondering how it is that I can actually do it knowing the things I know.

…

PS: Just something for you to think: Brazil, although considered a poor nation, is not really such a cheap place to live. Given my experience, I am convinced that even the homeless guy I mention above can’t survive here with less than four dollars a day in the current currency conversion rates. That said, he must make about twice more money than 40% of the world’s people, and the proof of that is that he is (or was) alive. Given the absurdity of his condition as it is, I must say I cannot even imagine the situation of a person in an even poorer country that has to live with the two dollars a day reported by WHO. And to think that almost half of the population lives in circumstances that I cannot even imagine… well… sleep on that thought if you can.

In first place, I must say to my defense that my time has become quite precious to myself these last few months… let’s see, I’ve got a shop of my own, a little project as a translator for an entertainment website and a little hand on a sales representation for a brand of tropical beverages. Besides that, I remain a psychology student, but, as any student knows, that also means a myriad of collateral projects that have taken their toll on my personal time. What can I say, I love doing all this stuff!!! But lack of time is not really the cause for my absence from this blog – or from any other writing activity. The fact is, every time I thought of this blog, I just couldn’t find a subject on which I truly wanted to write, and I really did not begin a blog to be pulling subjects out of my ass. I read many interesting things in the meanwhile, but they’re all related either to work or classes, but nothing I particularly felt passioned about. But how come that I study for a profession I absolutely love and still can’t find a subject to write about?

One of the reasons for that must be the fact that my university, although very renowned, is actually very weak in the subjects I care about. I cannot believe, for example, the amount of time I have to spend on texts about psychoanalysis! There are some very good professors working with cognitive-behavioral therapy and neurosciences there, but the curriculum of the course puts them to the margins and “kindly” allows them to offer a few optional classes and develop research projects; apparently, if I intend to study the specific theories I actually will use as a professional, I have to give up a large amount of my time to insert myself in these optional classes and projects. So, the contents I am studying right now are not worthy of a post in this blog!

On top of that, we have the formal model of the classes in Brazil. Small classes – about 40 sudents in the room – listening for three hours of daily lectures, from monday to friday. Don’t take me wrong, I love lectures, and I can even stand them when they’re about a subject I don’t like or, as in the case of psychoanalysis, strongly disbelieve. The problem is that we’re treated like kids from high-school, who need to be lectured every single day! Dammit! Give me the books to read and meet me weekly for a discussion, but do not keep me in a room for three hours staring at a projector or, even worse, a blackboard! ask me for a paper each month, put me through exams! Do anything, but please, no more of this scheduled encarceration.

So, there you have it: i dislike the contents of most classes I’m attending to this semester, I really hate the model for those classes, and I am very frustrated because of the time I have to waste on subjects that I don’t intend to use even for a blog entry! Every second I waste in there could have been used in one of the optional classes I’d love to attend, or on one of my jobs, or a research. I don’t have the time to read a good, inspiring book, to wander on the Internet and find some new things and, thus, I have no subject that feels deserving of a place in this blog – only the routine subjects I am forced to study in order to keep a nice grade. The professors do their best to overcome the inherent boredom and frustration that this educational model causes, and, in truth, they too are subjected to it and I know they feel the same effects as I do. Some of them care enough about us students to go on and deliver the best class they can under this model; others seem to have given up and give their classes while clearly wishing they were at their labs doing something more interesting. They can’t skip as many classes as I do, but I am sure they would if they weren’t paid to be there.

In his old age, Professor Lattes – a renowned physicist – declared that the formal education was a trap to the creative mind. I have to say I do feel my creativity has been numbed down since the classes began this year – and the void in this blog proves it -, but the elderly scientist was already pretty damaged when he said that. In fact, during the same interview he used a bible to answer how the universe came into existence – something he would never do in the days when he participated in the researches that made his name -, so I will try to keep some faith in the system for now… but I´ll keep some aluminum foil under my hat.

In the dawn of the 21th century, what do we know about thought? According to Millar, all we can say of it is that it’s something that humans do. He wrote on the 90s, if I’m not mistaken, but there aren’t any evidence that we have a better idea on the subject so far. fMRIs and all other developments of neuroscience have served us well into solving many mysteries, but the definition of thought still lure us very much. I mean, besides saying “it’s something that humans do”, can we say anything about the thought? Does a Chimp thinks? How about a computer?

In his article, Millar gives us a very humorous alegory for this problem. Imagine two men who lived they’re whole life in an Island, where the only thing they’ve ever seen flying were seagulls. Now say they want to define what “flying” is. Here we have our situation brilhantly represented. All they know about flight is that “it’s something the seagulls do”! One could then thrown a rock upwards and ask himself: is this rock flying?

The rock can stay away from the soil for a while, so that may be a criteria for saying that something flies. On the “thought” side of this analogy, a computer can play chess as well as a master nowadays. It clearly fulfills one of the criterias for thought (after all, one of the things humans can do due to their thinking is to play chess). But is that enough for us to say “It’s aliiiiiive, it’s aliiive!!!”? Also, can we say that the computer is not thinking at all while it does it, or should we rather declare it’s thinking, but only on a different or fragmentary level than humans do. Ok, Mr. Searle posed his great arguments against the possibility of machines (as we know them now) thinking, saying that, although we don’t really know what thought is, it is something that probably requires a human-like biostructure. Ok then, let’s forget the chess playing machines… what about sign-language speaking monkeys?

A few years ago I read an article (very famous, must be easy to find on google) about the researches with monkey’s and they’re learning of the human sign language. One thing that struck me as amazing was that it mentioned that the monkeys (pretty sure they were chimps) where able to connect verbs to create their own substantives. When the care-takers pointed a refrigerator, one of the chimps chose to call it the “open/eat/drink” instead of the substantive for “refrigerator”. At some level, this animal “knows” what a refrigerator is… but is that a thought?

Myself, I believe that thoughts and feelings have been used lately as a “second soul” argument. It’s very fashionable nowadays to keep oneself from saying “the dog can be jealous” or “it is sad”. Those are treated as anthropomorphisms that should be banned from the language of scientists because they refer to something that is an attribute of humans. Well, a hundred years ago we were different from all other animals because we had a soul. Now that the soul has been taken away from us, we need a new barrier to separate us from the “things” we eat and keep tied by the neck in our yards (just like the “soul” barrier did on the days when slaves had no soul).

Particularly, I’m tired of this dumb and childish rebellion of our species against the belief that we are animals mostly like all the others. I’m of the opinion that thought shouldn’t be just “that thing that humans do”, but that thing that all mammalians (and many others) do to some extent. Yes, that stake you ate at dinner had a thought of it’s own once! Feel guilty now? Well, I ate a stake too, and I’m not feeling anything. Questioning the morality of eating meat is just another pretentious way to try to set ourselves apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, as if we were those creatures that a god placed on earth to take care of everything else. What the hell, if that’s what you think you are… ok! Myself, I’m just an animal playing my part in the food chain.

Anyway, I digress enough. The thing is, I jst finished reading Guy de Maupassant’s “Bel Ami”, and it occurred to me that the best place one could fit in the statistical line that ranges from the smart to the pretty, would definitely be on the pretty extreme. Even the beautiful-and-smart aberrations are not as fortunate as those who have only the looks. Good loooks come almost completely by chance. They have no great costs, no great responsibilities. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and such bliss can be better enhanced when it inhabits a beautiful body.

Bel Ami, the main characther of the story, is a handsome man who builds all his fortune based on the lovers he acquire. Quickly, he overcomes those around he who can only count on wits to strive, and the story gives me this sense of reality that intellectuality makes up for a decent blog, but not as easily to a successfull carrer.

In any case, I had a lot more to write on this matter, but I am out of time right now (one of the great things about a personal self-centered blog is that you can tell people you just couldn’t write everything in time for the post). Also, as said Bon Jovi, “there’s a bottle of vodka still lodged in my head”. When it comes out, I’ll come back to this theme and better develop my thoughts on this matter. For conclusion, I just want to add that the point of the whole thing is that I would prefer a thousand times to be born stupid and beautiul (as Bel-Ami seems to me) than a hardworking intellectual (and not even that I am!).

Good carnival everybody!

Although I like very much to brag about my intellectuality and my usual pompous and serious posture, I simply cannot deny the spirit of the time. So, ladies and gentlemen, this post announces my vacations from this blog until the end of carnival, not only because I don’t intend to write during it, but also because I will probably not have conditions to write anything at all. Carnival is, after all, an official patriotic date for us, when we get to celebrate the fact that there are no sins below the equator. Who am I to stay aside from such a noble and solemn celebration?
Updates will go back to regularity on February 11th, but only if I can find my home until then (there are no computers on the gutter).

Although they’re noticeable for sadder songs, and also for political lyrics, this one makes me think of a mature composer thinking maybe about his kids, or about a school girlfriend. Well, who cares about what I think? Enjoy the lyrics (I hope my translation doesn’t completely ruined it) and make up your own mind.

Let’s make a movie

(Legião Urbana)

I found a small portrait of you

And could not believe

It was from so long ago.

A nice example of goodness and respect

That a true love is capable of.

“At my school there are no characters,

my school has real live people”!

Somebody talked about the end of the world

But the end has come and gone;

Let´s begin it all again:

One for all and all for one.

The system is evil, but my friends are alright

Living sucks, dieing is hard

To see you is a must,

Let’s go and shoot a movie.

And nowadays, what’s the way to say “I love you”?

No way for this “I’m lonely” stuff!

We’re so much more than that;

We’re penguins, we’re dolphins,

Men, mermaids and humming-birds,

Lion, lioness and seal.

I need, I want to have tenderness, freedom and respect,

Enough with oppression!

I want to live my life in peace.

I want a million friends,

I want a million brothers.

It must be silly of me,

But the only way I still can

Imagine my own life

Is to look at it like a musical from the 30’s

And in the middle of a depression,

See you and have peace and fantasy.

And nowadays, what’s the way to say “I love you”?

And nowadays, what’s the way to say “I love you”?

And nowadays, let’s shoot our own movie.

I love you;

I love you;

I love you…

As for myself, I’m going for a hot bath after this, and hopefully have a silly dream about sunshine and butterflies.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Many years ago I made a new friend. I was barely a teen, he was already on his thirties (on the way to forties), but was such a vivid person, so full of youth, that anyone who would have met us both on the phone would think I was the older one. By that time he was a bus driver, and he took me and my family for a tour to a city nearby. We had barely met and I was already being the idiot I usually am, and, I remember this vividly now, I called his attention to the fact that he had a breath problem.

A couple of years went by and finally, in 2002, I began to work at an university where he drove students; He had to wait long hours between the times when students went into classes and the time he had to drive them home, so he started showing up at the copy-shop (where I worked) for taking coffee and talk the time away. As he was such a nice guy and an unquiet soul, he couldn’t just stand there talking while we worked, so he would jump the desk and come in the shop to help us with whatever we were doing.

By that time we were all making very little money, and having dinner at the university’s canteen was very expensive, so, instead, he’d go there and buy us all a couple of small packs of crackers and some soda. That was our dinner for most of that year.

When I left the copy-shop, I did what I do in most cases about my friendship: I took it for granted. I am the kind of friend that you can spend years without seeing and still feel at home when you finally come to my house. That’s just how I am as a friend; there’s no need for effort to keep my friendship. No need for weekly visits, nor phone calls or invitations to parties. If you have managed to gain my trust, it will be there forever (or until you break it). I will be the first one in your doorstep when I hear you’re in trouble or just needing a friend, but I will probably just ignore the invitations for parties and I won’t call, I won’t visit, I won’t say how much your friendship means to me. If you have to guess from my actions, you’d say I don’t care if you live or die.

That is probably the guess that this friend of mine had about me almost one year ago, when he passed out. He never knew I cared, and, to be honest, I didn’t really know that till tonight. Only about two or three months ago the news about his death came to my knowledge, but then I just acknowledged the information and went straight back to my little life. I knew he died, but it didn’t feel like it was so. Deep down I had not felt that, in truth, I’d never see him again, nor would I ever say good bye. Even his funeral I missed. Maybe not saying goodbye is what held this numbness for so long. Every time I thought about his death, I was thinking with brains, never with guts.

A few hours ago I was watching TV, just relaxing a bit, when this crackers commercial showed. The memory of the crackers went straight through my defenses and fell on me like a punch to the stomach! For the first time I thought of him as the friend he was instead of as a name someone told me had deceased. Now I’m here, understanding that we’ll never share a freaking cracker again, and that hurts more than knowing he died without even knowing he was still an important friend; without knowing I still cared.

He was exactly the opposite kind of friend than I am. He was that guy who was always around when he could! He was the guy who made parties, who invited, who called and cared all the time. I envied his sympathy, the way he cultivated friendships and, above all, I envied the way he made beautiful new girlfriends on a daily basis. We used to joke about the way he looked, saying he was convincing the girls that he was gonna turn into a prince after sex, because he looked so much like a frog (sorry, man!) and was always dating these beautiful women.

One of the main problems of being a skeptic is that there’s no scape from the wrongs we’ve done in the past. There are no ghosts out there to hear my late good-byes, no afterlife where we can meet again. As I face the future, wishing I won’t make that mistake again – wishing I’ll keep the ones I care close -, I see I’m up for a good fight against myself. I’m aware that I can never be a perfect friend, but Maninho, if I ever become half the man you were, I’ll consider myself a great guy!

PS: No need to remind me that he is not reading this! It just seemed a nice ending for such an emotional post

PSII: If he was reading this he would joke about it as it is, indeed, a very girly text.