Touch and go

Off to V**** until Wednesday then back home for a few days, and off to S**** until Feb rolls in. Lots of things going on; some good, most bad.

There was this song in the soundtrack to The Revenge of Shin*bi from S*ga Genesis- you know how it goes, late '80s-videog*me music, all midi-like synthesizers and stuff- it was called "Long Distance". It started out with a slow, mellow introduction which burst into a crescendo through the chorus and…

More disturbing things to tell other people

Today I shook hands with some homeless guy (not a metaphor).

On time management. Also whether Amilcare is a guy's name or not.

On time management. Also whether Amilcare is a guy's name or not.

Okay, this one begins with Amilcare Ponchielli’s The Dance of the Hours bit from his La Gioconda opera blasting at full-speed, I’m thinking throw in maybe some uptempo drum and bass arrangements to jazz up the rhythm… well anything short of Disney’s hippos in tutus.
Such is the substance of this moment.

This is me running like hell to survive the migration of the telephone number and e-mail structures for our offices (on which I dearly promise to write some decent stuff in the future), then there’s always the bit about the MS-Excel course which I was forced to give in due to shady possibilities regarding tomorrow (Mon-Fri 06:30-10:30pm, whew!), and I’m aslo pretty much flying solo now that P*** is rehearsing his Exeunt piece. And I still got TWO trips to take for the office still this month.
Oh. Yes. It goes without mentioning this Jane Austen book I’ve locked myself into and just can’t seem to break free. Three weeks and I still haven’t broken through the middle pages. Bo-o-oring…

The days are just packed, granted, to which I just assume my mother must be grateful: It is the only thing keeping me from getting that second tattoo I’ve been thinking about…

So, this is pretty much a no-post; just dropping a note, that’s all.
Topics for next posts include:
1. Superman’s girlfriends;
2. On Writing ’07, pt.II;
3. Advantages of a unified e-mail/telephone system for Customer Service.
4. The new tattoo, providing I do get it…


Will let you know.
I mean, someday, gee…



(and I still haven't said anything about whether Almicare's a guy's anme or what, from the title, but given time constraints I'll end this one with, Sounds like a girl to me!)

Excerpt from a song

I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
Dress in white one said, with quotations
From someones wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When youre young you find inspiration
In anyone whos ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: we were never feeling bored
(...)

When I went I left from the station
With a haversack and some trepidation
Someone said: if youre not careful
Youll have nothing left and nothing to care for
In the nineteen-seventies
But I sat back and looking forward
My shoes were high and I had scored
Id bolted through a closing door
I would never find myself feeling bored

cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: make amends
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
Youd be sitting somewhere here with me
(...)


from, Being Bored
Pet Shop Boys

ET... phone home...

Okay, this is day one in which we switch 100% of the telephone & e-mail system for the (local) office: a unified e-mail, one only telephone number with a menu structure for all customer service reps.

Unless it fails, it's just gotta work...

On writing ‘07, pt.I

I don’t usually do how-to manuals but some of them get really interesting at least to provide me with some new insight when the dinosaur of my creativity is stuck knee-deep in tar waiting for Darwinism to check in.
Case in point, I was thinking back of this writing how-to book I read a few years ago. I think it’s called Writing Without Teachers and despite being more oriented for a group setting instead of a single person-enterprise it offers the reader some good advice, fresh ideas and downright practical tryouts, etc. But this is not a plug nor product placement.

Point is, I think it’s this book that mentions a very important point about writing which is pretty much, Just do it. It stresses out that it’s not about quality when you’re learning, but more like pure quantity. Because let’s face it, I am not getting any Shakespeare out of a daily blog, alright?
Since what I’m doing here is sheer training and not the final product per se- regardless of whatever this “final product” might be- this is no more than practice.
I mean, sure there’s the whole personal aspect to it regarding the content and the works but I’m looking at this at a purely technical POV today.

The output then must outweigh any sort of self-criticism to the very point we’re trying to develop a habit here: Even though I’ve come to a point where I’m pretty comfortable filling up a page of text at any time I still find it a little difficult to break it past this limitation. There are days, of course, when I can punch through say five or six full pages or more without stopping to catching my (creative) breath but all in all I’d say my limit’s still a page or two on a regular morning and it simply doesn’t cut it.

I’ve been thinking also of every amateur writer’s answer to Ben Kenobi, Mr. Jack Kerouac. Now Jack, good ol’Jack, would preach day and night about his “spontaneous prose” method and he’d say, you don’t really have to edit your texts, just write for writing’s sake and mend things as you go. Let the text flow out of you, avoid the excessive use of commas and stuff.
Thinking of it Jack really was a genius by suggesting the use of dashes in lieu of commas- you gotta keep some rhythm to whatever it is you’re writing else it stops cold and you lose the motivation and the point. As Keroauc once put it himself, “The gig is shot”.


And what do you know, I’ve just broken page one again ya babes…

1989: A tale of times past (The one about the tail-end of the Cold War, Stephen King’s son and my own grandmother)

If you believe the legends this one has that Stephen King’s son, a boy then, came up with the idea for this specific GI Joe action figure called Crystal Ball back in ‘87. Now do get to read CB’s cardback and it’s all there: deeply rooted in gypsy origin, only weapon is a shield-like appendage that hypnotizes people, has distinct evil-looking goatee and the works.
Not only that- and this is way for real- the civilian ID for the Sneak Peak action figure released around that time is indeed the boy’s own name. At least that one bit’s been verified and it’s henceforth true enough.

I wasn’t really aware of my father’s income when I was nine years old but in hindsight, especially considering he never really worked on a fixed wage, he had his bad months and his good months, thus the month or at least this one particular Friday evening in 1989 described in the ensuing lines must have been a great one.
When I was a small boy I’d sleep over at grandma’s every Friday night so my parents would go out. Depending (again, in hindsight) of that week’s financial result, my father would buy me either a comic book or toys. On this specific Friday, sometime during school period back in 1989 my father took me to the mall and bought me a sh*tload of GI Joe stuff. If I remember correctly my report card had arrived and it was pretty much all golden, top of my class (It would take me a couple of years to go on and become a lousy student, but that’s a story for another day).
Here’s a complete list of what I got that evening before going over to grandma’s: 01x Crystal Ball action figure (orig. rel. 1987), 01x Snake Eyes action figure (ver.II, orig. rel. 1985), the cool one with the wolf, and 01x Asp ground-to-air artillery (the Python Patrol variant, orig. rel. 1984).

A rhetorical question if there’s ever been one: Was it just me or were the Cobras really Soviet agents in secret? I mean, every damn time I’d lay my hands on my GI Joes it was always about Gorbachev sending out orders for Cobra Commander so that he’d blow up a nuclear power plant, steal precious military secrets for some brand-new invisible spacecraft, kill the US President and so on. Once again, blame it on the Kali Yuga and the color TV.
So this time around, this night around the Russians ordered for the Cobras to establish a hidden artillery base underneath the aerial corridor the Joes used to transport cargos in C-130s. Thus, Crystal Ball was stationed atop the centerpiece marble table in the living room at my grandmother’s, manning the Asp vehicle to shoot down the (fictional) passing aircraft and since the Asp was indeed mobile the Joes had a hard time finding it.
…Snake Eyes to the rescue… etc.


Now 1989 was the same year Sonny Crockett headed down that Miami Beach street after regaining his memory in the last season of Miami Vice and there was still a USSR on the map in our classroom.
Some dumb kid in class with his ears like Dumbo’s would ask the teacher whether that spot on Gorbachev’s forehead was indeed shaped like the map of Russia (it isn’t), and this guy D**** would swear to me that his dad really was a KGB agent (he wasn’t) and he got to ride the Soviet space shuttle out of Baikonur during Christmas break and would invite me to tag along next year (he never did).

Totaling the metaphor

Ever heard of the term “beer belly”?
As it turns out, not a metaphor…


As usual with any big city it all comes down to “providing it doesn’t really rain this evening” and the sneakers are safely tucked in the backpack already & the works.
Have since moved the working out hours off the graveyard shift by the way, into the evenings; waking up at 05:30 am was just not cutting it.

So, back to the sneakers and the rain: Providing it doesn’t rain today I’m back to joggi-- ahh, almost jogging. I’m in no shape for jogging, if I may be completely honest with you. My knees are busted, I have a gut the size of the Death Star and the breath of a 70 year old man.
So I’m back to walking home from work today: up the long slope on Rebouças then making a right turn and straight through Paulista, then on towards home… walking, walking, walking at least up until the golden hour when I’m finally feeling like my own age again & able to withstand jogging for a couple of blocks and not dying.
Once I get home I’ll work out for like, half an hour or forty minutes tops, something like that.

I did it last year and got pretty good results out of it, till I had to quit because of a bad ingrown toenail…

2007, day one

Okay here we go...