Absurdia.net

Year: 2010

  • The return of the boy bands

    Yesterday night I could not sleep, so for some unknown reason, instead of counting sheep, I started enumerating boy bands of the 90’s. I didn’t want to get distracted, so I guess in my pre-sleep delirium I thought boy bands were something I would never be able to find attractive or interesting under any circumstance

    It was an epic fail, at least to my sleeping standards.

    It’s true I find boy bands boring to unreal extents, but what actually happened is at some point I thought about “Boyzone” and I absolutely could not remember who they were and what they looked like, let alone what songs made them famous. I had to get up and google their name to find out they were a totally forgettable incident in worldwide music history. It took me more than three hours to fall asleep after that.

  • Random things to abhor – Bank calendars

    Free calendars issued by banks represent the quintessence of human taedium. In the past though I remember banks were making an effort, using famous paintings to decorate the dull pages of their calendars. They managed to make any remarkable artwork very boring of course, but at least looking at your wall you could learn something. For example, thanks to the 1984 — or was it 1986? — calendar I could find all about Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. My grandmother, who collected everything, used to cut out those photos and frame them when the calendar wasn’t useful anymore.

    The quality of those calendars over the years has lowered, and I doubt these days anybody could learn anything significant looking at them — anything significant apart from acknowledging the unbearable tediousness of average graphic designers. Today I got my 2011 calendar and… guess what? It’s really really uninteresting. Terribly uninteresting. It’s so uninteresting that it made me want to buy immediately another calendar to make up for its overwhelming lack of interestingness. There are photos of rocks and water in it. And some of mossy soil. And more rocks, inside and outside water. There are also captions explaining why all those rocks and mossy soil should be considered so relevant to the point of justifying a whole calendar devoted to them, but the captions are even more boring than the pictures, so I couldn’t really focus and read any of them in its entirety. But yes, I actually looked at the calendar, first of all because it was free and secondly because I wasn’t really thinking, and since I am very lazy I doubt I will throw it away.

  • Don’t take me to a cruise

    We went earlier to see the AIDAwhatsitcalled harbored here in Reykjavík. Such an overgrown amass of metal and glass that was a truly impressive sight to behold. A lot of Icelanders were there too, to take photos and jawdrop in silent envy. But seriously, who would want to be on a ship like that for fifteen days, or more? It’s so much like a luxury concentration camp. From when you wake up to when you go retire to go to sleep, your daily routes and routines are traced by marketing experts, that know exactly what you will want to drink and eat and where you will want to sit and when and what kind of dresses you will have brought with you in your suitcases. You will bath surrounded by fake palms and bamboo groves and then listen to the country music act – very likely German despite the fancy cowboy attire – at one of the eleven available themed bars, while sipping your Mojito, battling with paper umbrella miniatures to get to the straw. And then you’ll dine in one of the seven restaurants, all covered in mirrors and other vomit-inducing materials in case of seasickness. I mean, seven restaurants and eleven bars? More than in the city of Reykjavík itself. But of course, I don’t like bars here, so that’s not a point in favor. And a casino and sport centers and at least a cinema screen – but I suspect there are more – and god knows what else. When and where can you be free just to be by yourself, instead of roaming the decks like a brainwashed monkey, eager to spend money on anything? When can you really enjoy the sea and its wild moods and the life in the middle of nowhere? I felt fed up even before being aboard. To think there are people with so little imagination as to save for years to be in a prison like that, with the well-offs that are even less imaginative than they are, ha.

  • Old but not aged

    I‘m losing track of the time. Time flows so easily. I look at the clock on the wall and it’s like looking into a crazy man’s inner space. I can’t follow. It’s light all day, without interruptions. Faces are not submerged by tidal shadows. I’m afraid I’ll get used to monotony of colors and shades. Wind blows now and then and I am cold all the time. The body still remembers the suffocating taste fo past summers, the scorching sun, the smell of dusky breeze. And I’m changing shape quickly enough to know that I’m no longer a girl. I’m a relic that’s waiting for dust and the beauty of age to gather on its recesses and edges. But no dust can gather. I clean and wash, and it’s ugly dirt only that gathers and needs to be washed away, no dust or beauty or oxide coating.
    Birds are confused. They sing all night. The see light and feel light and perceive light with all their senses. So they get younger and younger and sing to acknowledge their existence. I would like to sing as a proof I’m still alive, but I’m no bird.

  • Good day for goodbyes

    I got an email from my mother. She’s talking in it of little everyday struggles, like cats hiding under the bed and card playing with her friends. And I am here, reading what she writes, the few lines that sum up her life, not being able to adjust to what she says as I were just taking a trip. She is lonely and I can tell. Just a few words and caps strategically positioned. She is lonely and getting older day by day. But you know how it is, some families are not meant to be together. Faces disappear one by one till there’s nobody left that wants another portion of dessert. How to make your mother understand it’s a farewell, not a goodbye?

    Today the usual weather changes. From sunny to rainy and all over again. And the fog in the early morning. You get to know people, somebody you can learn to trust, and when you’re starting to think you’ll have a whole life together, it’s time to say goodbye. In the fog and in the rain. Or simply in a dull kind of weather that’s not as romantic as it should be. And you cannot really tell why, but everything takes another hue, and shades are other shades, and sunrays are cold and watered down, like they’ve been drowned in some kind of sticky substance. The voices of the neighborhood are deprived of the expectation of a familiar knock on the door; they’re just voices, distant, unknown. Children play in the streets because it’s too bright to tell them the Boogeyman is coming for them – what sort of Boogeyman would walk around like this, not looking scary at all, just clumsy and silly? And I cannot point out where or how, but I feel a little spot of uneasiness that’s been bothering me all day, when I sat on the table of the cafe and when I started making dinner and when I was simply trying to spot cats on the streets. But cats, bless them, are always a good cure for aching frenzies of any kind.

    I’m not sure why, but tomorrow is another day and there are still chances for me or for anybody. Things keep on getting soiled by life, people keep on aging though they won’t admit it, cats will eat furballs and then vomit them again and again. I don’t know if I’m feeling well. In fact I could be feeling very bad, because no place is really home. So much beauty around you that doesn’t let you get closer even after a lifetime. You’re a stranger all the time. So little time and so many things you don’t even have the time to notice. I’m not sure why, but things keep on going on.

  • Pu the Homeless

    That I’m going to be homeless seems to become more and more probable. I hadn’t experienced the notion of not having a place to stay for a long time, since university times. Back then it was different though. I had an actual place to stay, the parents’s house of course. Like it or not, that was a sort of back up plan. The days as a Bulgarian contorsionist’s neighbor had been fascinating, but I’m not sure I could endure that sort of situation right now. I’ve become old and soft, I need adventure in certain doses, not all the time.
    As petty as the desire can seem, the idea of having a house with a bath tub is out of the question. The idea of having a cat is a luxury – if my former cats knew, what would they think of it? The problem is having a house at all seems a mirage, an impossibility of absurd proportions. I see myself blinking with a plastered smile on the face when I go to see apartments and I know I’m not going to live in them. Every one of them has a terrible flaw of some sort, like being on the upper floor in some building hosting a terribly noisy bar. When they’re flawless the owner is clearly against the idea of renting to unknowns with a shady past – foreigners, that is. One apartment has a barbecue but no space for ambulation, another has a dishwasher but also a dishonest landlady. What one has to do to live in peace, or to live at all, for the matter?
    At home, people don’t get it. They’re used to Italian ways to go and get apartments. You always seem to have some kind of way out – way in would be more apt in this case – in Italy. Here you feel afraid even to ask to pay more because you don’t want them to think you’re bribing them.