The Sound of Silence

It's been a long month since I haven't even thought of my blog. I somehow felt I used all the words in the world and have nothing more to say. I wanted to leave Germany peacefully and silently, like I lived there. And every day bringing me closer to the end of my staying there made me realize that I don't want to go back to my home country. I knew the German stage has ended and it's about the time to start looking for a new place, but no way I felt like going back to where I grew up.

There were times in my emigrant experience when I missed speaking my native tongue or meeting my old friends from back home. I felt many times alone and isolated and that's when the idea of going back home sounded a bit appealing to me. I kept thinking I could call people and talk for as long as I wanted, not being limited by the minutes spent on international phone conversations... or I could (even better) go out with them, just to hang out and have a drink or watch a movie or chat... in this line of thinking, the country I left because I felt as being too much limiting my choices became the country in which I was free to be a social creature. And I was missing this more than many other things in those times, so the decision to go back home came naturally, in a way.

I bought a car, rented a place back home and headed for my trip of independence. With my personal life going through some unclear times, I considered it wise to be back home and think things over in a more clear manner. Change is never a bad thing. Driving two thousand km's with three dogs in the car sounded like a bit of adventure, and I never refused things of this sort. When my car engine exploded on the Autobahn, the adventure started to look a bit unpleasant but ... it's all well when it ends up well. So we kept moving, after a short interval spent in a small Bavarian village, where I had the opportunity to contemplate living in the country and to turn off any fantasy of this kind for good.

At Szeged, civilization ended. The four lanes highway going around the cities, like on a normal trans-European road, became a two lanes country road, where you had to cross small towns and cities, driving behind a long line of trucks. It all became worse after crossing the Romanian border, so any sort of home sickness that must have brought me back here, started to vanish. To make a long story short... I am home. Sweet home, Alabama.

Oddly enough, I feel more dislocated than ever. Times which were promising to be fun and alive and entertaining are actually boring and lonely. I look around and I fail to understand people anymore. I spend long hours to solve simple problems and this makes my heart shiver, reminding me of my Italian times. I feel insulated on a grey deserted island, where I understand the language but nothing else from the surrounding world. I do not hate, I just feel paralyzed - I wake up and I do not know what to do and where to go. I have no desire to call or to meet people and I have no places I know of where I can take a peaceful walk. I stay for hours in front of the TV screen, watching the pixels hit my eye and not getting one layer deeper and I feel deadly bored.

I must be feeling like a prisoner after release, but I was released in a place where I do not want to stay. In the world where I had no limit, I felt trapped by the vasteness of my horizons - anywhere equals nowehere. Strangely, I feel the same nowhere here; the surrounding universe is neither hostile nor friendly, just looks and feels more deserted than the place where I knew nobody else. There, loneliness seemed natural - here, being alone is weird, since I am alone by choice, at least apparently. However, this is how I feel - I do not refuse the contacts, I just don't feel that I want them.

As you get older, it is probably harder and harder to get to know and to accept new people. I look at new faces and at old places and I feel ... silent. Even writing this post made me feel somehow clumsy. I do not know what to say, words have left me and I'm caught in a limbo of silence. No hostility in me, no revolt - just a paralysis of senses and of mind, in which days flow one after another and I live in an expanding, pointless, today.

Blühe, deutsches Vaterland

After three long and painful years in Italy, here I went to Germany. With a car loaded with clothes, books and my three dogs, I left the sunny (and lethal) Florence for a nice quiet village on the German-French border. One night of travel, and we arrived to a nice house with an ugly yard, which I was expecting to cradle in another nightmare - I didn't know if much worse than the Italian one but definitely was not expecting it to be much better either.

The German landlady took 10 min of her time to explain me how to sort the garbage and showed me the calendar with the schedule of the garbage collectors. I felt a wave of amazement and a strange happiness warming up my heart. These people can actually plan something in two weeks from now on... while in Italy you can't basically look further than tomorrow and if, God forbids, something unexpected happens today you only have a horizon of uncertain dates and possibilities of when that thing can or actually will be solved.

Being used to hate as your only mean of defense, I started to hate Germany as I was hating Italy. "Those Germans" replaced "those Italians" in a well pre-made discourse. But hell, "those Germans" were giving little to no reason to comment upon or get angry with. The Internet connection broke down, and I had a sudden panic attack - if this happened in Italy, it would have taken anything, from 3 days to 3 months to get it fixed, and a lot of friendly conversations with nice Italians who couldn't solve it for various reasons: it has been solved (nope, try again), somebody is there working on it (where, do you use ghost workers, I see nobody), the technical infrastructure has an unknown problem (it's a damn wire popping out there, come glue it back), it's a holiday (you advertise as continuous and uninterrupted client service, why the hell are you on a break), it's a strike (to hell with your labour union), it's due to the storm (I didn't know my Internet subscripition was made to "God inc.") and whatever other reason that Mediterranean creativity could come up with. Well, in Germany it took like one hour of talking to the client service and voila, my net was back and working (and it took one hour because it was a very complicated problem, which I managed to solve only by being a non-German and lying shamelessly to the client service operator).

As days were passing by, my wall of hate was being reduced to nothingness. How can you hate a clock-wise mechanism in which your problems are getting solved without you having to sweat on them? How can you hate a small village in which you go walk your dogs in a huge nice field, where the lawn is mowed regularly to define the access path? How can you hate NOT hearing your neighbours (I still have the traumas of the Italian lady with an amazing pair of lungs and an unstoppable need to yell at everything that moved around her, from husband to kids and from pigeons to the pans and pots in her kitchen)? How can you hate the restaurants in which you pay exactly as much as you calculated and have no surprise taxes, fees or whatever else the waiter could think of when writing down your bill?

I still have hate reserves, but I save them for Italy - and yes, I still have reasons. My Italian card, purposedly required for as being "internationally valid" which doesn't work in Germany because they gave you some unknown V-Pay circuit instead of some boring Visa or MasterCard (and yes, it's your fault you haven't checked); trying to take the car out of Italian license plates which lasts "approximately a week" (I sometimes wonder whether they don't use some sort of computers with a very high random operating factor - today they are on strike, tomorrow they wake up late and so on); my Italian university, where my superviser barely remembers my name and, if asked for advice, he sends me a short letter of moral support but no academic idea whatsoever; and I could go on for a long while but hell... it's all behind now.

It's the first time in my life when I feel well in a place. So far, I was finding reasons not to, but here... oh well, I feel happy here. It's the first time in my life when I don't want to leave a place and, ironically, I'm supposed to be leaving in less than one month. Where? I have no idea yet... I might go home for a few months, although the simple thought of it starts to give me creeps... I might move to a different German city, and the idea is more and more present in my head... For a long while I've been disconnected from places - I could go anywhere and, oddly enough, this anywhere actually means nowhere. All places are equal, but none says anything to you. There are different degrees of comfort, but basically it is all the same - I ended up as a globalized mut without any home. When you feel the world is yours, and you can go any place, there is a complementary, but rarely mentioned, feeling of being a nomad, free but way too alone.

I've always been fascinated with nomads and always tried to become one. I've been afrain of ties, roots and responsibilities. I loved the feeling of being able to leave any place in any moment. And I do not know whether I am getting old and aiming to become just a pilgrim (always having a home to return to) or it's just a temporary feeling of belonging which would suffocate me in a few months or so.... but I don't want to leave this place. I walk on the fields every day and I watch ever step; I create memories of a place which will stay in my heart as the home of my soul, in which the feeling of home is not given by the past connections and ties, but by the present happiness and the dream of a possible future. A home by choice, this is what the little German village became for me. I do not know if I will ever return, but I know I'll be missing for a long while the corn crops, the football field and the jasmine from my neighbour's yard.

Pictures from an exhibition - Poets of the Fall

In the last couple of days I've been in the "movie mode" - I felt like watching a movie or two. A couple of days ago I spent one hour and a half watching "Grimm love/Rohtenburg" (after a real case) and like three days after thinking about it. The movie is pretty well made, although a bit Hollywood style, but my main question was, after watching - "why on Earth would somebody want to have his penis bitten off and then served as exquisite dinner dish?". OK, I can pretend to understand the desire to be eaten, but I fail to understand the quest for horrible pain and mutilation just to have a very particular steak on the table that night. Since the answer to this was not really at hand, I had to leave the questions open and tried to watch something else, to somehow wash away the feeling of being awe stricken and tongue-tied by the hideousness of the dark corners of our mind and soul.

The natural choice was a horror, of course. Like a horror in which nothing is real, because this is why we like horrors - how can you fear a Freddy Krueger, actually? So I went for the last production signed Lars von Triers - "Antichrist" - advertised as an "art drama/horror". Oh well... I have to confess I've never felt sorry for spending my boyfriend's money, but this time I was overwhelmed with remorse. I can't think of anything that would have made a worse purchase than that movie ticket.

It starts well... like a story of losing and coping with grief. So far so good, you are even ready to believe that taking your patient/wife to the forrests for a curative trip is actually a current therapy practice. The first sign of doubt appears when a a blood-covered fox, which is disemboweling itself, turns to the main character of the movie and says something like "chaos reigns". One can assume it's because of the little bell hanging on the fox's neck and, given that you actually came there open heartedly and paid ten euros for the ticket, you don't rush out of the hall. WRONG, you should have when you saw the first sign, because from there on everything turns into a gory involuntary comedy.

Shortly put, there is some sort of feminist cry for the women murdered all along the history for the simple crime of being women, mixed with a wierd desire of the director to have close shots of (very unshaved) genitals. And I can only blame it on my luck that the leading female character has an urge to section her clitoris with a pair of scissors - in the end, it's been just a few days since I watched another movie with self-removed genitals.

After these last two experiences, I think it's about time to face the bitter truth - I have the soul of an engineer and I do not understand art. I also don't understand humans, but this is minor and irrelevant, who the hell cares about humans? ;). So, I made up my mind ... from now on, I shall only go to movies which are about either Godzillas or some invasion of the killing tomatoes. I am just as sick and tired of art for the sake of art as I am of living for the sake of not dying. If beauty is the destination of all these trips, then... for fuck's sake, let's not forget the journey till there. The risk of slipping into absurd and grotesque is way too high and, instead of bringing the beauty in the eye of the beholder, you poke the eye out to roll it in your "art".

Das alte Leid

"Once upon a time, a blade fell in love. It was a thin sharp blade, a bit naive and a bit adventurous. She liked impossible challenges, so she fell for a bulldozer - the others around her were so shapeless...She was looking for another blade, but there was none left - or maybe she was not that lucky to meet another. She just kept running into shapeless or too-simple-shaped beings. Some were beautiful but empty, some were too complicated, some were too afraid to be near a sharp-edged blade. For a while she tried to live without adventure, without a thrill... but that was not a life, was merely an existence and the blade kept dreaming of waking up to life. And one day, she met the bulldozer.

Dancing around him with her shiny blade and showing off the beautiful precious stones of her hilt she made him fell for her also. In all the movies they watched, fate was near the daring ones, so they hoped fate would be helping them as well. The love was so big and the task was so impossible that the blade decided to put all her efforts into achieving it. Not that the task was too clear, but the blade thought she finally found what she wanted. So she came after him, in the world where the bulldozer decided to have a tuning and become bigger, stronger, better.

Time was passing and the blade was happy. She felt safe, because she didn't have to cut her own way through. She felt strong, because she was no longer bearing the heaviness of hitting and being hit. She felt beautiful, because she was in love and she was being loved. And time started to fly.... As months were just passing, the blade noticed some rusty spots on herself. She wanted to dance, to clean her shiny metal and be again shiny and happy - but looking around she noticed she was locked in her case. The space around was pressing her and that's when she realized she was hanging on a wall as decoration. She thought an accident happened, so she cried and asked for the bulldozer to come and take her down from the wall - but when he came, he told her that this is her place. A bit surprised, a bit not knowing what is going on, the blade got back to hanging on the wall thinking this might be an accident or who knows...

Time was flying like a hurricane but for the blade it was slow as a snail. Little by little she started to forget who she was. Her surface was covered with a thick layer of dust and all spotted from the passage of days and months. Her hilt was not glittering anymore - the precious stones were now light-tight and she looked at them, and at herself and she suddenly thought: "this is such an ugly piece of metal". In her heart, the dances and the light and the fire were not forgotten. And so she asked the bulldozer "let me go, let me be what I used to be... I will come back to you and I will charm you with my flares". But the bulldozer said this is not what she should be... this is not what bulldozers find appropriate - she has to learn to be blunt and she has to stop complaining. It is not dignifying and completely unreasonable... in the end, she was having what most of the she-bulldozers would ever want.

Her soul was falling like on a descending convolution. She didn't want to see the dust on herself, but she couldn't take her eyes away from it. She wanted to get back to what she had, at least to what she had when she met the bulldozer. Tearing herself apart, she hoped she would be happy again. But every time she looked at the bulldozer, a new feeling was growing inside her - hate. She hated him and herself for what she turned into and she was hating him more and more, as he was reproaching her what she turned into. Sometimes she was crying and whispering - but isn't it what you wanted me to be? Yes, the bulldozer was answering, but you also have to be happy; why are you sad, I am turning you into a decent creature. You should appreciate my effort... in the end, I could have taken a she-bulldozer and not have to go through all these troubles.

All the blade wanted now was a strong fire - she wanted to be melt and remoulded. She didn't care into what, just to stop seeing that ugly piece of metal that was, long ago, a thin shiny blade. She just wanted her freedom back - and if, while ago, she would have just taken her freedom back in a simple act now she couldn't anymore. Her sharp edges were now chippy and worn out, her steel was now opaque and dirty as any cheap metal and her hilt was now shapeless. All she had in her heart was hate and doubt - she couldn't understand what went wrong. She couldn't believe somebody would just bend her till she becomes beyond recognition for the sake of some abstract ideas. She was angry with herself for not seeing that the bulldozer was merciless - she just thought he meant well. And maybe he did, but ... who cared about it anymore? And although she felt like in the middle of hell, when looking carefully it was actually the mid-afternoon of a very regular day of her life. And that's when she decided it is time to go dance alone...."

I do not know how the story ends. I sometimes see the blade in a dream and she is getting stronger and stronger. I even saw her smiling a few times. And when she will visit me again, I will tell you her story from there on - for now, all I know is that she promised she will turn back into a blade. An older one and maybe less shiny and more cutting... but a blade, again.

Time to say good bye

How do you know when it's time to walk out of something, be it a work place, a relation, a country or whatever else? When is that moment when you give up all hopes and withdraw your investment? Moreover, once you "kinda" understood what is the solution, when do you start putting it into practice? I assume there are no easy answers to this and no universal solutions - everything is very personal and very much depending on the circumstances. Short term relationships function on a different principle, and this is a very relative statement. Let's not forget that, in the end, no long term relation is as such from the beginning - they all start as short term ones.

Little by little, you get entangled into a relation till you end up forming a "couple". With time, you become so much a member of the couple that "we" becomes the first word that comes to mind when you want to say "I". Whatever you desire, plan, want to do, decide to change - it affects the other as well and you start acting "responsible" (jeez, I hate this word). In return, you are supposed to receive the answer to your other needs. In very cold terms, each relationship becomes a business - you invest something and you expect a return for your investment (to specify: business is here used to define a relationship of mutual exchange, in all the possible terms - emotional, sexual, social etc). You, each of you being in a couple, gives up a certain share of personal freedom in exchange for the other doing the same, for commonly agreed decision and, in the end, for mutual profit.

This is, I believe, the biggest trick. You expect a profit (again, it can be an emotional profit - you feel happy, a sexual one - you feel satisfied, a social one - you feel accomplished etc) but you miss the point that it's very hard for both to maximize this profit. Maybe it is one of Murphy's Laws, I do not know, but it might be that there is a constant maximal value that this profit can take. Once you reached this conclusion, the next step comes easy - if you want to maximize your profit, you can only do it by lowering the investment and, if possible, maximizing the return.

In simple terms, the cooperation for mutual profit becomes a competition for who makes the most out of it. One is winner, the other one becomes by default the loser. He/she starts feeling that what is invested into this relationship is not bringing back much; sometimes it becomes exactly the opposite and it brings back a double-edged frustration - you are frustrated by how much you give and you are also frustrated by how little you receive. I assume this is the first step to the end... when you start telling yourself "it's not worth it".

From there on, strategies vary. Some I assume are winning strategies and you manage to make the business work and reach a mutually satisfying balance of what you give vs what you receive. These would be those things called long lasting marriages... and I have seen in my entire life only one which worked (my grandparents). The fact that it was built on mutually accepted frustration is less relevant in the end - they were content with how things were and they built a family, a house, raised a grandchild and so on. Not fairy tale, but a nice real story, ending with the death of my grandfather after 52 years of marriage (so, we can't blame this for his death;)).

However, this is one story and it started long time ago. Times have changed and people also. We start wanting more and being less able/willing to accept frustration. The array of choices is wider and the social pressures have considerably diminished. Being unhappy is not a state of mind one is any more willing to take for the sake of a relationship, whichever one it is. And what happens from here on... I will discuss in a later post, because now I'd better go get some rest. I've said goodbye to one country and I am planning to say goodbye to a man. Yes, I am tired:)

Happy Easter! Can I crucify you tonight?

And now, time to rehearse the Easter scene, kids! Hurry up, take your positions. You got the honour to be Jesus for tonight - let us try the Golgotha first. Bear the burden and keep walking, this sounds like some good intense fun. OK, action. Walk and smile, bitch, we have a show to run here. Sweet pain, I wanna do it again... walk three steps back and let's re-shoot this scene. I think you are bleeding too little, we've got to try harder.

Yes, this is the solution - keep talking while you whip. Blame, hurt, swear - we need no special effects, just push those thorns a bit more and let's watch how it bleeds. Get up from your knees bitch and stop begging for mercy - who do you think you are? Oh please, stop these disgusting tears... stand and let's whip you again. We are not done yet, the best part is yet to come. And what is most important - you know it and you walk towards it on your feet. How dare you say you can't anymore, you can't take me anymore? I am God and I do it out of love for you.

Just bring those fucking nails and let's get it over with. Who needs a Resurrection?

Call you up in the middle of the night
Like a firefly without a light
You were there like a slow torch burning
I was a key that could use a little turning

So tired that I couldn't even sleep
So many secrets I couldn't keep
Promised myself I wouldn't weep
One more promise I couldn't keep

It seems no one can help me now
I'm in too deep
There's no way out
This time I have really led myself astray

Runaway train never going back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here no there

Can you help me remember how to smile
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded
Life's mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just drownin' in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

Everything is cut and dry
Day and night, earth and sky
Somehow I just don't believe it
Bought a ticket for a runaway train
Like a madman laughin' at the rain
Little out of touch, little insane
Just easier than dealing with the pain

Runaway train never comin' back
Runaway train tearin' up the track
Runaway train burnin' in my veins
Runaway but it always seems the same

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psP1bKKEtHg

Wollt ihr das Bett in Flammen sehen?

While digging in the blog-world, I ran into a really funny one (by funny meaning here a bitter, cynical manner of dealing with the "shock and awe" moments) . Seen from the perspective of a man, the blog tells us about various sexual and not-so-sexual ads posted by various ... should I call them men? ... on various dating sites - http://whywomenhatemen.blogspot.com/

Somewhere on the border between surreal and disgusting, with a touch of "how the statistically average man looks like and what is going on in his two braincells", the blog is a discrete invitation to both laughter and frigidity. Why? Because you DO run into all sorts of... people(?) and, during a life time, you hear some weird stories and you have to drink the glass of imbecility to the bottom sometimes. There are no guarantees you are 100% idiot-proofed, regardless what safety measures you take.

Moreover, outside the virtual reality you end up hearing real stories of real relationships. I'd be damned if I manage to understand how and why (and where have the good old strong relations of our grandparents gone), but I somehow ended up with the conclusion that, basically, each and every relation is just a story of misery and who fucked up who in a better way. And no, I do not mean anything like "sex" (which seems to be the biggest fuck-up in basically all the relations I've come to know of); I mean who screwed who, in what circumstances and so on and so forth.

In the same pathetic-to-hysterically-funny manner, the sexual life of both singles and non-singles seems to be more of a wanna-be than of a reality. Singles keep complaining they have nobody to have sex with, while those in a relationship have a wider array of complaints. If you are single, you have to date and hence, to find a suited candidate, invite him/her out, do the bla-bla dance and get laid. Of course there is the simpler way, namely just to get laid with whoever stands in front of you and seems slightly available, but hey... we want romance. Does it get any easier if you are not single? HELL, NO! On the contrary - having a stable sexual partner seems to be the best way to make you non-sexual (with variations on the theme - I am bored, too much routine, I can't date somebody because I would be cheating, nobody would date me because I would be cheating and so on).

I kept wondering, while listening to beautiful, smart and young females, what the hell is wrong with the world. Relations in which your beloved guy is too suffocated to have sex more often than once every now and then (no, I do not know the actual frequency but I somehow doubt it can be called frequency and not better 'random acts of mercy'); relations in which your beloved guy has gone for some time, in search of his personal freedom or whatever, and you end up having some random sex with some random persons; relations in which you stay like a nun for a year, because his PhD and your PhD are in different places, and it is too expensive for him to come pay a visit; relations in which you sleep in the same house, room or even bed with your better half, but you have sex sometimes between once per trimester and never; relations in which trying to buy sex toys proves to be a sex-killer, since the cost of the toys is too expensive for one of the two (generally, the not-so-interested one); relations in which you watch a porn and mourn, while your partner is writing a very important article.... should I continue?

Does this make us less sexual beings? I wouldn't bet on this - all the hormones relaxing somwhere in a remote mountain spa, very very far from you, are beemed back to you the second you see/meet somebody desirable. If you are single, you might think you are lucky (well, actually wait till you get to the first date and ... write on that blog after;) ); if you are not single, it becomes even funnier - you want to have sex, but doing it with the regular partner would be too much (not like you should change the routine; plus, it raises questions); doing it with the desired partner is barely possible; doing it on your own seems to be a working version, till you run up into a solution for all your problems (and I mean all, who the hell thinks that you can have sex without solving all the other existential questions?)

What should you do, if you actually plan to have a sex-life ... stay single or not? Adam, choose yourself a wife. Oh... let me try to make Eve first ... you might have a wider array of choices ;)

Stairway to Heaven

When a woman starts by saying "I am not feeling too well", you should know something bad is coming. Whether she is severely and innocently fucking up your plans or it's just her PMS... you cannot know from the start. But do not expect anything good to follow the unfortunate sentence...

This is what happened to my plans to visit a nearby city today - the girl who was supposed to come up for the trip together with her boyfriend, called me in the morning and started with "Hi, I am not feeling too well". Since I am myself very familiar with this strategy, I started to look for alternatives in the back of my mind while in the background the second, third and next sentences were smoothly flowing. I said "get better soon" while thinking "bite me", hung up and lit a cig. I had no intention whatsoever to rot in the house today, having a car with a full tank at hand and a sunny spring day ahead. I called a friend (boring as death, but less boring than driving a couple of hundreds kilometers alone) and we went to the closest point of attraction the map showed us.

The road was a beautiful drive on the sun-lit Tuscany hills and through the forest, but nothing was announcing the small miracle called San Gimignano. I do not fancy too much medieval cities - the too narrow roads and the walls almost merging from two sides over the streets give me a feeling of suffocation. I get bored after the second building from I don't know what century and even before the first museum (which I graciously skip visiting). So I was glancing through the shop windows and taking a picture now and then.

My ear got caught in some sort of a whispered music and I suddenly had to walk that direction. I see the world, but I understand it way better through smells and sounds. San Gimignano smelled like incence, wet stone, laundry and trees and sounded like a corner of heaven. Behind a church there was this small piazza, a square surrounded by walls and with a beautiful acoustics. This guy was playing some Bach at the harp in one corner of the square and the sound of it... just broke the time and made it freeze into one sunny second.



I sat and smoked on the edge of the well near him, and dreamt. Life was unbearably light (like Kundera was saying) and the light was unbearably alive. The harp was talking with the voice of the forest, of the hills, of the clouds. The background tourist humming was not able to cover the sound of a fairy-tale, but it was maintaining that thin red thread connecting my mind to this world and allowing me to be there, but everywhere else as well. And when the music stopped, I got up and left without looking behind. I thought the day gave me more than enough already, I didn't want to bother the memory I just grasped.

The city was more generous to me than I imagined and the path led me to the inner yard of a former small castle. The smell was changed now - it smelled like grass and olive leaves, and a bit like still waters. Another old covered well and more music - this time a guitar, playing some Spanish strain... a bit more pushy and daring, more vivid and wild like a hot wind of spices, the music spoke of a different Heaven. A Heaven of touch, of skin and lips and arms, a place of togetherness. The harp invited me to solitude, the guitar reminded me of people from afar. Two moments, two sounds and two places made San Gimignano look like a universe in miniature, like a medieval lithography of the entire world.





Eeeee.... e basta per stasera.

And if I go insane, please don't put a wire in my brain

Having lunch in a grad school cafeteria can be a traumatizing experience. I was hungry today so I decided to take my chance and eat in the "mensa" of a very famous Italian graduate school. Well ... that... hurt.

I've never liked the prison/church/sanatorium atmosphere that I encountered there every time I had to pay a visit. The Institute is situated on one of those beautiful hills surrounding Florence, but it is quite well insulated from the outside world. It has all the facilities one needs to study and nothing even remotely resembling living. Surviving for the noble purpose of producing a research - for sure. But living... not really. What strikes me the most is that I've never heard anybody laughing out loudly. There is this constant background humming, of moderately low voices, but not even accidentally somebody raises the tone to say something. No, no... I DO NOT mean yelling. I mean just somebody bursting into laughter, or saying something to somebody a bit farther. Or some uncontrolled giggle in the library. Just the civilized voice, a bit louder than whispering but not too much, only for the neighbours to hear.

At 2 o'clock they serve lunch and the disciples of science come to eat in the "mensa". They gather in small groups, based on two criteria - ethnicity and research interest. People are rarely quiet or alone - they need to make their networks, so they interact as much as possible. Still, they do not stare at the others. Of course they would notice their supervisor passing by, and then the ass-kissing job will take over, but otherwise... they are all ears and eyes to their group. If you start listening to some conversations, you find out that most of the conversations are either political debates or discussions about a thesis. Even when there are those gorgeous spring days, when the view is breath-taking, nobody simply stares at the scenery - at most, they start taking pictures of each other with the mobile phone, under the blooming magnolia tree.

The girls are almost all trying to be pretty. Dressed more or less casual, they try to prove that you can be both sexy and smart (I would like to point out that shaving those armpits might increase your chances .... and yes, this is for the girl who ate at the table in front of me today. Please, pretty please, do not EVER, under any circumstances, mix again a spaghetti dress with ... those things. However, thanks for keeping me slim and fit). I didn't manage to figure out why exactly, since most of the guys start looking interesting after at least one month of "robinson-crusoe-ing", but let's say it's just a matter of taste.

I tried once to go to the Friday evening bar, suggestively named "Fiasco". I do not know if it was purposedly called like this or it's just a weird concidence, but that bar is the best proof that there is life after death. Thanks God, they have alcohol and a table football. Oh yes, and a pool table as well, but after a lot of alcohol football does come easier. An evening spent with a bunch of highschool cheerleaders might be more rewarding. I can probably write a short novel about how each beer added improves the general perception, but I'll stop here. It's simply too boring to even yawn.

Today, while eating those sad spaghetti and staring at the people, I remembered Slawomir's skeptic eyes whenever we were talking about academia. I was at that time pissed that he is not more interested and active in my academic growth and development. He was my supervisor, he was bound to do this. Well... now I start getting an idea why he was so slow with this. He always helped me when I asked for help, but kept the incredulous look on his face. I noticed the same expression on my own face, while reflecting about my academic future. I know that having these ideas one year before getting my PhD is like wondering whether you actually want to be a parent in the 8th month of pregnancy, but they say it's better later than never.

I do not have any closing thoughts, I have not reached any conclusion. I'm barely starting to ask myself the questions... but who knows, maybe they are right when they say that half of the answer comes when formulating the right question...