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Swimming Like a Fish

La cancion de esta noche

Why don't we just stop and help each other?

Sometimes I walk passing central station, both in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and I can't help noticing how everyone walks in their own imaginary bubble, avoiding all reality around them.

Some are too late to get to somewhere, so they rush through places having no time to notice their environment, some others are too busy, they have their phones on and the whole world around them is switched off, some are just too scared to notice, so they walk quickly, with a concern face on them, always looking at the ground, and a lot of them just don't care, so they walk with their headphones on avoiding eye contact and any other human distraction.

I stop and the whole movie seems to roll around me. I see people who have to go to the airport and struggle incredibly to get their big bags up the stairs while the rest pass by them pushing them, going over, avoiding them, skipping their bags for a centimeter, getting inpatient, moving their heads in disapproval, but no one helping. I see the starving man who looks with his watery sad eyes inside the garbage can, and the guy who comes and throws half of his hamburger in the trash bin, rather than giving it to the man in his hands... I'm afraid he didn't even noticed the man. I see the musicians endlessly playing their melodies in the harsh winter while everyone walks by trying not to see or listening to their own tunes. I wonder if they ever thought about the man standing always in that sharp cold.

And then I wonder, why can't we just give a hand to someone else, given that all humans have such an amazing capacity for compassion. How can we see the faces of pain, hunger, anger and fear scattered through that world of strangers around us, and fail to notice it? We are all prepared to help, why don't we then?

Why do we rather absolve into ourselves to not notice others? Have everyone forgotten the strange complacency that one feels when helping others? We are indeed naturally altruistic and prepared to enjoy altruistic actions. Is that we have lost our compassion or is that we are just so overwhelmed with everything else that we can't pay attention to life and to the world anymore? I wonder if we will ever start noticing, if we will ever stop focusing on ourselves and start seeing others, if we will ever again pay full attention to the world, if we will ever gain back our emotional empathy and take the opportunity to help others... if we will ever just have time for it.

Life and Dead

Por primera vez experimento en carne propia la alegre y casi satirica capricho de dios y el mundo, siempre engendrando y siempre matando. Un buen amigo muere y con el parte de mi corazon, pero sin darme aun el tiempo para el luto, dos gemelos entran en el mundo chillando y alegrando la vida de mis amigos y regalandome un pedazo nuevo de corazon.

Interminable el encuentro del universo con todos sus atomos e indescriptible la resistencia del corazon que pareciendo fragil siempre se vale del tiempo y de contradicciones para seguir viviendo

New Manolismos in Spanish v_2007

Eres una uva floja esperando en el agua tibia

Is there really a "world of men"?

Reading a blog post from Susan Mernit, "Women and Tech: Earn vs. Have" where she comments over another post from Shana Albert entitled Social Media and Gender issues come back to haunt me in which this last one says "The issue is my past insecurities of being a young female professional in a man’s world. I earned my spot then and I will keep trying to earn my spot in the Social Media world now as well".v To which And Mernit replies in disappointment: "While I respect her point of view, the big bing that went off was this: Why do women continually feel they have to earn a place in the world? Why don't more women recognize that they have a place, and the challenge is just to keep it, or to expand what you have?". I can't avoid wondering how "a world of men" might feel like... I never felt I lived in a world of men, and definitely never felt that I had to "earn a place" in between a space "ruled ?!?" by men.

In any case, when I think about my working experience and life in general, trying to recall the problems that I have had when working on projects, at school and generally at work, those have mostly involved women. Women who (as I perceived it) have fallen in a strange trap in which they think they need to prove they have got the ruling scepter and need to bang it against the floor for others to acknowledge they have got "power", and then (maybe unconsciously) became some sort of powerful witches who travel around surveillant, in their power brooms. Women who think they live in a men's world, definitely do... they create it themselves and suffer from it, fighting until exhaustion against their own monster, and dragging other women to it, along the way.

I can only think that as women feed machismo, inculcating it themselves in their own male children, they also feed "the men's world" by (instead of living in a men & women's world) trying to fit into their perception of a world which is men's.