Trying the blog with my dad and sister

I'm showing how to publish with this.

All my love in vain

So I'm leving for the weekend. I'm gonna take the train, and just remember these verses by Robert Johnson and his "all my love in vain" blues:
"I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand
And I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand
Well it's hard to tell it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain
All my love's in vain
When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eye
When the train rolled up to the station, and I looked her in the eye
Well I was lonesome I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry
All my love's in vain
When the train it left the station, 't was two lights on behind
When the train it left the station, 't was two lights on behind
Well the blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind
All my love's in vain"

Mythology, childhood, gayness, and other ramblings of my mind on a thursday night (II/II)

So I started reading about chinese mythology, and inevitably came across a tale about the origins of human race, and how humans started reproducing. Then, I found myself trying to understand why reproduction is associated with the highest pleasure, and whether primitive people also felt that pleasure and asked themselves these questions. And then, don't know why, almost instantly, I suddenly found myself thinking about gay people, and how they might feel about having a daughter or a son. And then, I thought that society might have done a big step, because now reproduction needn't be associated with pleasure anymore. You can have reproduction without pleasure, which is even more amazing than pleasure without reproduction. And maybe this is linked to the fact that you don't need a man and a woman anymore to conceive a person. You see, my mind rambles so fast, at night, when I can't sleep. Hope you can't get something out of it.

Mythology, childhood, gayness, and other ramblings of my mind on a thursday night (I/II)

I turned off the light, I was very tired. After half an hour, I was still awake. So I turned on the light, and decided to read for a while. I looked at my shelves full of books and finally I saw this collection of books that attracted me. It's a collection of diferent mythologies from different civilizations that I made as a child. They are big books, with lots of beautiful drawings, but also lots of text (though I found out that last thing just yesterday) Somehow, I really liked them as a child, and so my family always got me these kind of books for my birthday: Greek, Roman, Chinese, Japanese.... The thing is that yesterday night I picked the Chinese Mythology one, and started reading it by the start. I don't quite remember who got me that book, but I do know now that certainly I couldn't have read a page of it as a child, since I couldn't remember a thing.

CHOCHE

My good old friend Choche wanted to appear in this page. So it's done, Choche. In a short time, a google search of "Choche loves Pere" will lead people to this page. Life is a bitch, I know.

Geeks

Overheard at the office, while having a cigarette:
GEEK A: "With Spectrum, you couldn't change the keyboard for a wireless one, cause the keyboard was the computer"
GEEK B: "Yeah, that was the golden era of Spanish software games industry. We produced for the whole world. Remember Don Quijote in French? Man, that really rocked!"

Favour returned, II

The review is here, Jojo.

Cleaning and listening

I was just cleaning the kitchen and listening to a Norah Jones' CD. Man, this woman is really good. It was a long time, I thought, since I didn't just stay home listening to music and doing random stuff. What a big mistake! Silence is the invention of the bored. Norah really turned me on.

35 euro dinner

Tonight I'm gonna have a 35 euro dinner at a restaurant where a friend of mine (his name is Nile, I have always thought it a really cool name) is the cook. Man, my stomach roared when I heard about the price. Not of hunger, but of philosophical despair, whatever it means. It made me think of the times when you could still have a very good meal for 2000 pelas (12 euro). Times have changed in Spain: we are now european.
[And I should also add that I will meet 8 of my primary school classmates at this 35 euro dinner, and this always makes the air in my lungs boil with excitement ... ]

First rating

My good friend Joaquinsito (well, maybe it was Jojo, but that's something that only him can tell) has been the first person to write about this blog on the net. Read it there or read it here: "Wonderfully slow and unaggressive way of looking at life. This Fruitman records his chronicles and always makes me think!!!"
I felt wonderfully and unagressively happy about it when I randomly found this comment, and of course (according to some unspoken laws of latin fraternity) I returned him the favour, though it hasn't been registered yet.

Old women in the tube

I just came back from work. In the tube, I was sitting before this really old woman: one of these women that you can hardly see in Barcelona lately. She was there, sitting in front of me, with this scared face that really old women seem to have by default. Her face was all wrinkles, but wrinkles with an order, all of them pointing to the woman's nose, like the lines of a magnetic field with the poles in the ears.
She was really old, and acted like a really old woman. She stood up from her seat when the train stopped at the station before her station. I remember my grandma did the same when we came back from school, when I was still not supposed to come back on my own. "We just stand up now, so we are prepared to get off on time and avoid the unstability of the train" (she didn't use the word unstability, of course, but I can't think of the right word now)
If you salt with a bit of philosophy all these words, you could say that they really want to get off the train as soon as possible, and that it's not surprising. These women do not belong to this world anymore. Everything they can remember is dead. Friends, love, the village where they were born, the first house they lived at in Barcelona. Everything's gone. What are they doing in the tube, at seven thirty at night? Where are they going? Why are they going? I would also be scared if everything around me, while crossing a strange city through underground tunnels, belonged to a time that is just my ending.

Overheard

I will just do like this great website In Passing, and transcript a conversation I overheard today at my office. I was waiting for three girls to get their coffee from the coffee machine. One of them (who is actually quite hot) started this very interesting conversation:

HOT GIRL: You know, my boyfriend's so dirty. The other day, in Crónicas Marcianas (a spanish late tv show) they had this game where the public had to guess who some women were by just seeing their tits. Well, Manolo (the boyfriend, I guess) got them all right. The dirty asshole. He can know every tv women just by looking at their tits.
ANOTHER GIRL: Maybe it's a gift
HOT GIRL: Maybe, but I don't like this kind of gift. It's ok with car brands, but not with tits. Shit, how can he know women by their tits?

They all have their coffees now, and I am ready to get mine. Tits, tits, tits. Why do we like them so much?

Get the candy

A japanese friend of mine went to watch the parade of the "three kings", you know, the guys that give presents to children the 6th of January. In the parade, the three kings and their employees throw sweets and candies to the children from these big trucks dressed like magic carriages. My friend said she was quite shocked, because adult people were so violent trying to get the candies.

My friend Ray talked to me last night, in bed

I'm reading a book of short stories by Ray Bradbury. A story about a man that is sent to a psychiatric centre just cause he's walking in the streets of somewhere in the mid 21st century. A story of a man that decides to ruin every picture that some "posh" photographers with their top models try to take of the old buildings of his village. Every time they try to shoot a picture, he crosses the frame naked. A story of a woman that cries and shouts all night cause his husband went to war, and nobody can sleep until they decide that "something must be done"...
You see, just stories, short stories.

Greed

The Fruitman Chronicles

F Sleepy

At work. Terribly sleepy. Nothing to do.

The Internet, a place for the exchange of knowledge

Some time ago, I told you about my little sociological experiment: in the meta tags of this webpage, I included the words "Letizia", "Ortiz", "desnuda" ("naked", in Spanish) and "top less". Letizia Ortiz is the woman that is going to marry the prince of Spain next summer: the future queen of Spain, in other words.
Well, the thing is that (as I suspected) half of the "visitors" of this website find it by typing "Letizia Ortiz desnuda" and "Letizia Ortiz topless" in the Google and the Terra search engines (see, for example, this search).
Now I am thinking that maybe what I did is illegal, and the courts of Spain will knock on my door's house to put me in jail. Sad ending for a fruitman. This posting is to certify that it was only a sociological experiment, and a very meaningful one, I believe.

Mystic River and Mystic Trains

I have to write about Mystic River and about my thoughts this morning at the Diagonal train station. Now I have to work, unfortunately.

My friend Alyosha reports

"SLOVAKIA, SLOVENIA IDENTIFY IDENTITY AS SOLE BILATERAL PROBLEM.
Visiting Slovenian Prime Minister Anton Rop and Slovakian Prime Minister
Mikulas Dzurinda agreed on 6 February that their only bilateral problem is
that people often confuse their respective countries, dpa reported. Dpa
reported that, during his successful U.S. presidential campaign in 2000,
George W. Bush inadvertently greeted the then-Slovenian prime minister as
the leader of Slovakia. Some 5,000 letters destined for Slovenia were
delivered instead to Slovakia in 2003, the news agency reported. Rop and
Dzurinda expressed confidence that such confusion will disappear once they
join the European Union and gain more international attention."

Sunday

So today I was waken up at 12pm by the phone. It was her, waking me up as usual. I asked her to call back later, so I could have a shower and eat some breakfast. Then we talked for nearly an hour, and then I was too tired to prepare some lunch. So I surfed the net for a while, listened two times to a Van Morrison CD that I got last week for 3 euros, and talked some more time in the phone with a friend that wants to go to New York in three months. We've been planning his trip since a month ago. And when I say planning I mean really planning: what airline is better, is it better to get a direct flight even though it's a bit more expensive but then you also save some hours that you can invest in visiting nyc. And then once the airline is decided, you need to tell me what seats in the plane are best, you know, the aisle is good for your legs but maybe you can't watch TV very comfortably, and then there's the seat with a window view, it would be nice to see nyc from the sky, but then these seats are also colder...
Anyway, I was saying, this friend of mine called me, we are now at the stage of deciding what place is better for a hotel in nyc. I am telling him the Village is the place to go, but it turns out there's only one hotel there, the Washington Square Hotel. It sounds good, but I told my friend I find it fishy that they don't have pictures of the rooms at their website. And the room is 170 bucks, man.
And now, well, what I did next was start writing this post. Then (sorry for so many "thens") I will go to the train station to get some stamps to send some letters to my globalised circle of friends. Today it's letters to Granada, Berkeley and Hong Kong. Nice combination, um?
And I should get a sandwich, cause, you know, haven't eaten anything today, but don't really feel like cooking (it's kind of starting to worry me that lately I never feel like cooking, and you know, you can ask my friends and they'll tell you I am known to be an excellent cook)
And then, and, after, after then, then after I'll go watch a soccer game with my i-want-to-go-to-nyc-friend (we are actually gonna meet 30 mins before the game starts, in order to continue planning his trip, this time with a map before us) And well, after, yeah, finally, there's this movie we'll watch, Mystic River. I have many expectations put into this movie, so it'd better be good.
That was and will be my Sunday, told really linearly and with no willingness to sound literary. Just like it was, wasn't it?

Pere the tracker

As always, I copied Joaquin's ideas once more, and installed this visits tracker so I can know how many times a week Bernardo, Joaquin, Grace or José visit me.

Grandma's stories

Lately, I've been visiting my grandma at hospital, where she is recovering from an operation. One of these days, she told me this story of that man that once cut the power of the entire little village where my grandma was born and passed the first 16 years of her life. It turns out that this man (I didn't really get how he did it) deviated the water of the river that fed the power plant of the region. With the village completely in darkness, the man was able to kidnapp his young sweetheart, the daughter of the richest man in town.
My grandma then tells me that the man and the young lady were found the following day sleeping by a tree. "But it was too late", she says with a witty face. The seed of life was already inside the daughter of the richest man in town.

Belo Horizonte

Two days ago, this Brazlinian workmate invited me in the restaurant to sit and eat with her an her friend. Their table was too small for the three of us, so they offered to move to a bigger table (Brazilian hospitality, you know)
As we ate and talked, I couldn't help telling her that I once lived a year with a Brazilian, my beloved and now far away Bernardo. She asked where Bernardo was from in Brazil, and when I replied "Belo Horizonte", she sighed "oh, Belo Horizonte". I don't really know what that "oh, Belo Horizonte" was supposed to mean, but I tell you it really fitted the conversation. I think it fitted more than any careful description of the beautiful sights in the city.
Now this Bernardo doesn't read my blog anymore. He prefers gay literature. I hate him. I hate him so very very much.
Isn't this blog gay enough for you, Bernardo ????!!!!????

Train blog

If I had time and the right skills, I would start a blog where everyday I would write about a person that got my attention in the train, on my way to work. "In" the train, "on" my way. Funny language English is, I must say. (E)specially when it's not your mother tongue.

New design

Well, I'm trying out a new design. I just wanted to play a little bit with stylesheets. Also, and to be honest, niopo provided the template on which the new design is based.

Tubes and faces and places and seats

Everyday, monday to friday, I spend two hours in the tube/train/subway/whatever. 50 mins to go forth, and 70 to go back (don't know why, but it always takes longer to get back)
Once a professor told me that watching people in the tube is one of the greatest spectacles in london. At the beggining, I took it as a big revelation: he opened my bored eyes to tube life, and closed them to the tabloids that hang around for anybody to take them in the train seats in London. Suddenly, I learnt to admire people's slightest details, gestures, like in a nineteenth century novel.
After some time, I went back to Barcelona, where I live and work and play pool now. Little by little, I abandoned this english tradition (because I practiced it in England) of staring at people in the train. It was little by little, because during the first month I went to work, I would carefully look at these south american women in the train, all these unexpressive faces of women that get off the train at Sarria, a posh neighborhood in Barcelona. These women, I imagine, are making their way to clean the houses and the toilets of the houses of rich citizens.
Now I don't really look at them anymore, but I try to stand by them if they have a seat. It's a safe bet: I know they'll get off at Sarria, and so if I stand by one of them I'll be able to get her seat first, and read my newspaper comfortably until my turn comes to get off. Then, a young and sleepy (perhaps even beautiful) student will take my seat. I wonder if they also look at me, or they just stand by me to take the seat.

Light

I suppose everybody would agree that light is a very weird thing. Ask several physicists what light is, and none will give the same answer.
But I don't blame them. We just don't know what the hell light is. We pretend we do, but we don't. It's the big paradox, if you think about it. All of our knowledge of the world comes through our eyes, through light, and yet we don't know what light is. But then, how can we know that our knowledge has something to do with the real world? We can't, until we unveil light.