My friend's beloved one, John, lives in Australia. My friend Jane lives in Canada. Some days ago Jane wanted to give John a surprise for Valentine's and phoned a bakery in the nearest town to his remote place. She wanted to order a pie and have flowers and the pie delivered to his dear John. The baker was excited about the idea but the bakery didn't take credit cards. Later, Jane will email the baker enquiring for possible alternatives. Because she didn't receive a reply, she let her beloved one know her previous intentions on the 13th. In this way at least John would know that she tried something. He, informed of her plans, phoned the bakery, just to find out that the baker had arranged, without expecting payment, to send the flowers to a post office and have a bus driver deliver them. This will be the beginning of an unexpected chain of reactions.
John decided that, instead of having the pie and the flowers for himself, he will redirect them to a friend of his whose daughter recently passed away. While at his local post office, he told the story of the pie and the flowers to others. Some of those others, who also know the man whose daughter passed away, joined him wanting to send flowers to the mourning man. John then took himself the pie, his flowers and other's flowers to his friend, spend some time with him, listening to what he had to say, joining him in his mourning.
Love sent from one place, to an unexpected recipient on the other side of the world.
Here is an interesting documentary and food for thought about the past, present and future of our families and society.
Hyper parent check list:
- Do you see your child's first birthday as an achievement?
- Do you consider yourself your children's best friend?
- Are you competing with other parents for the biggest number of activities/attention for your children?
- Are your children in college/university giving you their username/password so you can check their schedules/grades/email?
- Will you give them a wake-up call so they don't miss a class in university?
- Will you try to negotiate the salary with your children's employer in their new job?
There was a poet who was for me like the grandparents I never met. He had in his words, the advice needed to navigate those years of my youth, when the usual concerns about love, women and life could make the brightest day obscure.
No te quedes inmóvil al borde del camino no congeles el júbilo no quieras con desgana no te salves ahora ni nunca no te salves no te llenes de calma
no reserves del mundo sólo un rincón tranquilo no dejes caer los párpados pesados como juicios
no te quedes sin labios no te duermas sin sueño no te pienses sin sangre no te juzgues sin tiempo
pero si pese a todo no puedes evitarlo y congelas el júbilo y quieres con desgana
y te salvas ahora y te llenas de calma y reservas del mundo sólo un rincón tranquilo y dejas caer los párpados pesados como juicios y te secas sin labios y te duermes sin sueño y te piensas sin sangre y te juzgas sin tiempo y te quedas inmóvil al borde del camino y te salvas entonces no te quedes conmigo
Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920 – May 17, 2009)
As G.H. Lewmerwrites in his review of this very recommendable 57 minutes feature:
"Springer spent a year accessing live satellite feeds—raw feeds that are pumped directly to television networks and news channels before being packaged, processed, and regurgitated for your consumption—to create a funny and frightening look on how information is manipulated, suppressed and influenced by Big Media. ".... expressing that... "The footage is terrifying and telling because it presents all the off-camera comments, all the preening and maneuvering of the powers who are more concerned about protecting their interests than thorough reporting." Terrifying, without loosing the sense of humor and the good laugh that the discovering of how gullible one can be towards main stream media awakes.
Which makes me think, what is behind the words of those who I listen to...? =)
“Welcome to the human network”, the Cisco corporation’s tagline, should not come as a surprise in these times where the Web continues expanding and finding more applications. From a technical point of view, it is a slogan that makes sense coming from a networking and communications technology company. But, what do they mean with human? Do they only mean “English speaking humans”? Why the language barriers are impediments for a real human network? Find out more below… If at home or work you use a Linksys router to connect to internet you are using one of Cisco’s products to be part of a network, a communications network. But these are also the times of Web 2.0 and Cisco and others are also talking of how we use the technological products. As their ad says, these are times where “people subscribe to people, not magazines”. If you use internet for something more than checking your email perhaps you have had a taste of Web 2.0 (like the one I am having) and therefore an impression of what they mean with "the human network".
As a non-native English speaker, who has lived in English speaking countries, I know that watching their TV gives me an idea of what is their present culture and everyday life. Of course, I also know that this vision is biased by the filters that the broadcasters, the media and the governments apply to it. That's why the Web has come as a valuable space where individuals are writing, singing and speaking their thoughts. Their thoughts and lives are expressed in ways that we have the opportunity to see in sites as YouTube, Blogger, OpenDiary and Jamendo, to give a few examples.
I find the development of Web 2.0 fantastic but I also have noticed an important piece missing in the development of this human network: THE OVERCOMING OF THE LANGUAGE BARRIERS. My observation is based on my belief that you only can understand your neighbor if you understand their background. And it’s many times their language what shapes that complex thing which makes them be what they are and how they see you. For this network to be really human it needs to provide a way to overcome cultural and language limitations, of course, without annulling them.
More and more websites are taking one step to overcome the language barriers: the inclusion of their service in different languages. Take for example the popular social-networking site Facebook which now has been open to the Spanish language. Actions like this allow different groups of humans to have access to the same service. Nevertheless, the challenge of making these groups to interact and mix with each other remains.
Finally, let’s not forget that only a small percentage of the total population in the Earth has access to internet. The optimistic in me wants to believe that, as an inherent effect of the development of the human network, eventually more and more people could have access to it. We will see.
Happy birthday Leonard Cohen! Three years ago you turned 70 and the novelty of a new decade is fading away. But maybe it feels more like the revolution of being 23 than the slowing down of 33. One way or another we managed to celebrate it in Edmonton... one way or another.
The whole damn place goes crazy twice and it's once for the devil and once for Christ but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights we're busted in the blinding lights, busted in the blinding lights of CLOSING TIME
"Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this close-mouthed waltz..." wrote Federico García Lorca, and for your hero you wrote a waltz for his words, that you made yours, very yours. Not many birthdays I have been where the celebrated one gives the presents to the guests.
Perhaps that is the secret to have the guests back every year =)
Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked By the winds of change and the weeds of sex looks like freedom but it feels like death it's something in between, I guess it's CLOSING TIME
In this planet there is a land of consumerism, where plastic is a God and styrofoam containers the priests that everyday deliver to their followers lunch and coffee. A land where without a car you are nobody, the malls are churches where the faith is renovated and the energy power endless... or it seems to be...otherwise I don't explain why every night all the lights in the house are on... and appear on again in the morning despite turning them off. An electric stove can be left on without food on it and a SUV is the obvious choice when buying a car.
"And when you're out there Without care, Yeah, I was out of touch But it wasn't because I didn't know enough I just knew too much
Don't think you're anyone special or that you're better than us. The ten rules are:
1. Don't think that you are special. 2. Don't think that you are of the same standing as us. 3. Don't think that you are smarter than us. 4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than us. 5. Don't think that you know more than us. 6. Don't think that you are more important than us. 7. Don't think that you are good at anything. 8. Don't laugh at us. 9. Don't think that anyone cares about you. 10. Don't think that you can teach us anything.
In a bar in Helsinki, where you can dance Salsa, a drunk Finn approached me and with neutral tone and face said "Don't smile". Then he went back to his seat. =)
I love Scandinavians! (Specially Jenni, Sima and Chris... and you too Dulce ;-)
From my first Open Diary entry to this post I have been living the Web 2.0 explosion with increasing interest and participation. Some weeks ago I changed the look of this blog taking advantage of Blogger layouts and some Ajax applications from Google. I am not any expert so I was delighted to include the video, map, and search tools that you can see here. Even more, subscribing my blog to FeedBurner made me realise how much this blog could become more part of "the web" than what I originally intended. This therapeutic exercise of writing that started for the sake of doing it (and having some "practice" for the thesis that I had to write at the time) have become a point of contact with a virtual community. It is then time to recapitulate some of the steps that I have followed... After discovering that writing in the web can actually put you in contact with strangers I wanted to see the limits of this interaction and filled some profiles in dating sites. The frustration for not being able to actually contact other people in pay sites like Match took me to places like Plenty of fish, Person or OkCupid. This last one actually has surpassed my expectations from a dating site... which does not mean that it makes more easy to get a real life date! You still have to learn your lessons.
But the internet not only helps you to connect with others, it connects you with your life! Are you one who writes every reminder in a pace of paper that joins the bunch of others on your desk? Are you addicted to stickers? Is your agenda and address book cluttered with annotations? Do you have 567 bookmarks in your home computer (not to say the ones at work)? Do you always synchronize what you have in your computer at home with the one in your office?
Well, I could continue describing one or other aspect of my own life that has been impacted by internet. With pages like iGoogle (a kind of dashboard with all kind of useful widgets) I found that in one page and wherever there is access to internet I had my favourite RSS feeds, conversion tools, calendar, email, weather reports, etc. at hand. Then, one after the other I started using specific web tools.
I needed to keep notes of whatever I was finding while browsing internet for a particular subject. The old way of saving bookmarks was not useful. I always ended with a bunch of links, many without a clear context to tell me why I saved them in the first place when revisited later. With Google Notebook I found that I could save, organize and select the important information at the same time that I was finding it (enhanced by the add-on for the Firefox browser). Even more, if I still valued a website as to give it a bookmark I found that social bookmarking sites like Delicious could just make the trick. The trick of not only keeping bookmarks but also to organize them by labels (tags) and have them accessible from any computer connected to the web.
Word processor and Spreadsheet (former Writely now Google Documents), Photo album (Flickr for example), online Calendar and Feeds reader (e.g. Google again) are all web tools that, as I mentioned before, not only have made collaboration and exchange with others (either for work or for entertainment) a simple routine in my life but also have saved it to be drowned in this ocean of information... where of course I have decided to swim.
I use many other web tools (OK I am going to mention Remember the Milk which has cured my addiction to sticky notes), I do not know about many more and there are others in development... for sure. But let me say some final words about another "phenomena" that I also have joined: websites for social networking. They are for me a kind of synthesis of what I have loosely described above. They take the spirit of dating sites but with people that you already know, they allow you to collaborate, share or play with others not only with words and images but with whatever tools and widgets that someone develop. I am not going to explain those sites here, I think that you better find out what are those sites like Facebook, MySpace, hi5 and Bebo about by yourself. Like the slogan of the VoIP (voice over IP) provider Skype says... take a deep breath!... now dive.
Last 30th of March I went to Downtown Edmonton considering that the artist Elvira Santarmaria welcomes the participation of the public. It is called action-art and in her own words it means... "a larger term than performance. It's the art of creating experiencies, meaning through feeling. Not objects, although in the process objects can appear or create an experience. Action art is actions as art." Some minutes after my arrival I took my jacket and my shoes off and gently I made myself at home in her temporal space at Latitude 53. Thoughts started to cross my mind while I was observing her in her actions. For some moments she was reading words from a universal history book while standing in front of a big spiral made of salt scattered on the floor. In fact, in different places of the room there were other patterns made of salt that she made during her hours of activity. In some other moments she laid on the floor, gradually blowing some of the spiral, traveling from the outside towards the centre of it. This combined action of blowing and reading gave me the impression that she was erasing the words because this spiral had for me the form of the glyph that Aztec paintings used to represent someone speaking. I thought that she was also remembering the past as her selected words from the history book were flowing. Was she contemplating the past? There were certainly people contemplating her work and taking pictures of her display while she was making her way through the spiral. Was she making the way or erasing the way that history has followed? A history of creation and destruction.
At the same time that I was observing her, submerged in my thoughts, one of her salt patterns was inviting me to let the impression of my hand on it. Of course I had a debate in my mind. Should I do it or not? I believed that her work invites the audience to participate, to act. However, I felt that putting my hand on her work, out of the blue, was somehow too childish. A child does these things without thinking, not an adult. The solution to my dilemma came when I realized that being an adult does not necessarily mean that I should not do some things but it means that the how I do things is different to that of a child. Obvious as it sounds, to put this in practice requires more than thinking. I can be watching Elvira, expecting a signal that allows me to participate, the "permission from the authority", while holding my wishes to act. I can hold myself only reflecting, like others seem to be doing.
"I am not proposing people interact with me. The way to people is through my actions, how I use the space, how people can be there or feel free to leave. That's the way I invite them" she clarifies.
I sat besides the salt pattern that was inviting me to put my hand on it. It was there, it was not mine and I was not sure that it was completely hers. I decided to let myself be part of the actions, not suddenly interrupting but spending some time watching what was the dynamics of the actions taking place in the room in order to act myself. Gently, I left an impression of my hand on the salt and it really didn't look well there. Being part of something brings responsibilities. I understood that one of the beauties of her apparent simple and futile pattern was due to the time that she spent doing it. As she pointed out in her lecture days before in the University, the stress is not in what to do but how to do it, completely present, with dedication and giving the appropriate time. I would like to eat my meals in the same way that she works.
My intervention in her space made me part of it, only in terms of how I wanted to be there. With the best of my intuition I inserted myself in the dynamics of the room starting to modified my hand print to better suit her pattern.
She and I speak Spanish and nevertheless, there we were, in an English speaking environment. Perhaps in her blows of the spiral she was erasing a language of words in favour of a language of responsible communitarian actions.
I have watched with fascination my friend's machimina, which has the interesting name Defragged. Of course those of you familiar with video games might not be surprised at all by such a name. After all, what else a grenade can do? If you are a computer versed creature you also know what the term means. Now, what my friend's work does is, in my opinion, to "defrag" what her main character sees as reality.
Let me give you my own personal experience from watching the video. The beginning is a close reminder of a Quake game. Then, at a critical point I really had the feeling of a malfunction of the game that my friend intended to give us... but, is it a malfunction of the game? Recalling that the character was chasing Hossman before the malfunction a thought comes to my mind. Why the character didn't shoot merciless Hossman as it has been doing with others? It was not because of lack of ammo... maybe the failure is not in the program.
The character is now alone and in an introspective search that reminds me a David Lynch's movies situation, specially in the "mirror" scene of Lost Highway. The character here should know that the other is not his specular image in a mirror because of the side on which one of them are carrying their guns.
The clones are part of that introspective search that tests the boundaries of the character's perception. At the end, the single shot that kills the character is like a return to the real time, real space and the action of a snipper. However, when I realized that the score was -1 I just could think that the character somehow shoot himself.
For me, Defragged is a metaphore. Someone who kills merciless ends up alienating themselves and kills something inside them.
I am back for a short time in Bristol realizing that I feel here very much at home. This is not surprising after living here for four years. The ex-housemates are lovely and nothing seems to have changed a lot so far. Somehow I liked it this way. I came back quickly and with a very limited amount of time to sort out some things from the past. Probably you have noticed that I have been thinking of my karma lately ;-)
Precisely and talking about karma I have an anecdote from my arrival to Heathrow. I found myself in the corresponding tube station queuing along a crowd of people. At some point I got distracted and when I payed attention again a tall guy was standing in front-besides me (it was the turn of the queue). I made him notice that I was standing (at least) in front of him before as I didn't remember seeing him when I started queuing. He said "yes, you were in front of me" but he didn't move a bit! =)
The corresponding tension was kept all the way until he helped the people in front of me (us) with the automatized ticket machine. From his heights he had a clear view of the situation. I thought that he could be not as an assh... as I suspected as he kindly gave help.
Eventually I got in front of him to the ticket machine, same machine that didn't take my card and left me with the decision of queuing again or ask for... for help to the tall guy. I had a fiver (five pounds note) and the resting 1.70 was somewhere in my luggage. He didn't want to lend me 1.70 pounds that I promised to give back as soon as we have got out of the queue.
Instead, he paid with his card the whole amount of my day travel card and didn't accept my money, saying goodbye with a "have a nice day". If I am learning well, the best thing at the end of our life is to have paid all our karma. I am very thankful with him for showing me another face of life in a crowded big London area.
?Que cual es mi interpretacion de la cancion "La 69.G" de Sabina?
Pues bien Juan, asumiendo que la connotacion sexual de 69 y punto G no te son ajenas dejame preguntarte, ?cual es tu estacion de radio favorita? En Mexico, durante muchos anyos me desperte escuchando Monitor, cuando estaba en Radio Red FM 88.1. O recuerdo a la estacion Alfa 91.3...
Asi para mi, La 69.G de Sabina es esa "estacion de radio", pero aun mas, ese lugar, esa frecuencia, esos cuates, esos compas, ese momento para relajarse y pasarsela bien.
Sabina es un buenazo para las metaforas y para describir la vida cotidiana. ?Alguna vez has buscado refugio en la almohada y esta te ha dado la espalda? ?Donde buscas refugio cuando te cansas de crecer, cuando los problemas y retos de la vida cotidiana te acosan, cuando los suenyos tardan en venir?
En Mexico ha sucedido que una cantina, un bar toma el nombre de "La oficina". Uno tiene que recordar esto cuando las estadisticas nos dicen que la gente pasa mas tiempo en su trabajo que en la casa :)
Por eso Juan, y por Sabina, escogi ese nombre para este lugar. Asi que bienvenido, pasale, ponte a gusto y gracias por haber firmado el libro de visitas.
