“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

You’re in total dark, and summoned by the voice you move forward, in line with few others. You keep one hand against the wall and with the other you waggle or drag the white cane nervously. You aim for the voice and try to follow it. Sometimes you’re cornered, or stumble, or you run into someone else’s limbs and must apologize. For the rest you fumble around. The space all around you at moment seems limitless although it is probably very narrow. You may have the impression of a very high or a very low ceiling above your head, but no doubt both the feelings are inaccurate because you have no way to tell. All you can see is total darkness, and some whitish blurry spots in your eyes that for a long while don’t seem to want to fade. All the steps you take are incredibly short tentative steps and yet you have the impression of having walked a large distance. You passed a garden, where the canned birds chirped and few odorous plants guided you through; had your slice of traffic experience and went across a dangling bridge, a passage on a boat, explored a room with bas-relief pictures hanging on the walls and chests with mysterious objects inside. Finally in a bar you realized it ain’t so hard to mix coffee and milk in total darkness, or to rip the sugar sachet, until you lost the plastic spoon, after which you were kind of lost yourself. You also realized that it ain’t so obvious to tell between one coin or the other, let alone drop them right in the hand of the girl at the counter and take your change back.
After one hour and fifteen minutes you get out of the dark to the bright hall and suddenly you wonder, what all this light is here for? What’s the use? You sort of was accustomed to the dark there. You were alert and your body and your senses were working at full throttle. It was amazing and challenging. Now you can’t help but feeling that there’s another bunch of experiences your other senses are craving to work equally hard for. Watching a movie. Playing a card game. Playing a instrument. Playing some sport. Writing. Climbing. Swimming. Hugging someone. Telling the facial features by touch. Groping your guiding voice who as soon as we’re all out to the light appears to be a strikingly beautiful visually impaired 25 year old foreign girl, who works part time at the Istituto dei ciechi (Institution for blind persons) in Milan, for the permanent exhibition Dialogo nel buio (Dialogue in the dark).
Which, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, is a must see.

… dietro si sentivano odori di cucina, dalle imposte penetravano i fumi e lei camminava senza affanno mentre dentro, lo stomaco si chiudeva ed apriva molto vicino ai polmoni, dandole calore, emozione, incertezza. Voleva una cosa, quella cosa: e dicesse pure Giuliano che lei non capiva la sua gente, dicessero le voci che era matta. Forse c’era l’amore seduto su di un piccolo trono in fondo alla strada.

— 3 phrases from my old novel

When I was 25 to 27¹ I kind of tried to write a novel. I had tried many times before, pieces of novels that never made it after the first twenty pages, but that one was to be my great effort. The novel was in italian of course, and here and there, what seemed to me a beautiful italian. Well, certainly the best I was able to come out with¹.
The novel had a good title, or at least what I thought it was a good one, and no serious idea behind it. I had few models in mind and a hazy idea of where I was going and I thought it was enough to make up a story as interesting as I imagined it to be.
It had a city, a island, it lacked irony and had few too many characters in it, I think two of them were especially both me and they had arguments for most of the novel and I think they really argued to decide where the novel was going.
In my mind I was writing for my enemies too, all those writers who were headed in the wrong direction and whom I wanted to wake up with a whip like Indiana Jones. This constantly caused the story to resonate with the books I had read, hated or loved, a resonance which had no reason to be –if not to display how smart and well read I was.

But something else that I wasn’t considering at all brought the novel to a strand and to its natural death after almost two hundred pages.
I lacked honesty. And I wasn’t brave enough. I mean, sometimes you feel all you’re reading are coward writers, or dishonest writers. I know because I’ve been one when I first had tried, when I hadn’t a clue. Today at least I know these treats are more than important, they are crucial, they are all that it is to it. Bravery to show yourself naked. Honesty in forging the impressions and the scenes. Etcetera.
I had no clue, all I could think of was that I was going to be a writer, not knowing that all I was trying to do was to make myself look good. Good in a smart way, sure, with carefully balanced stains and flaws and heroic mistakes but still, using the novel in an artificial manner.
In my defense, I had nobody to ask advices to. Well, I didn’t have the humility either, so I probably didn’t even look for it.

So finally the novel wearied me and disgusted me, as it had to, and I hated it– except maybe for few paragraphs here and there that probably still today I could forgive or use.
I shoved it into the proverbial drawer with other short stories and fragments i had tried to write before and during and right after the novel –and it was twice humiliating not having had the courage to just destroy it. Still today I am ashamed of not having had that courage. I think it was a perverted form of creative stinginess on my part.

Neither the novel nor the stories where ever read by anyone anyway. Except for Rulla who read some of the short stories behind my back during her raids in search for clues of my cheating on her, then throwing the pages in my face with rage during our fights.
“So you fucked her, uh?”
“That’s a story! Leave me alone!”
“It’s a ‘true’ story! You say it right here: ‘a true story’!”

Although I had had the dream since when I was fourteen, and probably even before that, after the novel had appeared to me as the gigantic error it was, I thought it was really over with writing ,and I was almost fine with it. A different chapter of my life had began, I was told I had a career, I was told that the world was accepting me and pulling me on — it was fine to let the writing go. I figured I was going to be like Svevo and get back to it in my old age, with more humor and understanding. Then the “carrier” proved itself phonier than all I had ever written — and when we (me and the career) parted ways, I ended up thinking about writing again. Later ended up blogging.
But I didn’t really think about writing another novel and going down that scary road again, at least not until recently. I didn’t feel the urge because at hand there were other more immediate ways to communicate. I guess that’s another thing to thank blogging for. One of the many, along with: the unpredictable readers, the exercise of humility, the mandatory discipline, the constant inspiration, the sharing of ideas, and, most importantly, the bits of courage and honesty sparkled almost everyday by the effort made to describe oneself.

_{1. In case you’re under the impression you’ve read this post already, it’s because I posted one very similar yesterday, and then I immediately removed it. The day after I noticed that some aggregator, like the Google Reader, in those few seconds that the post had stayed on line stupidly had grabbed it anyway. Well, who cares. This isn’t much of a better post either –only possibly not so aimless.}

2. English language came to me later on, after years of illiterate macaronic english. Just like it had happened with guitar chords, when after years of strumming and tone deafness all sorts of chords blossomed out of my fingers, and even bare musical ideas and a voice.

Could this, Mr. Tagomi wondered, be the answer? Mystery of body organism, its own knowledge. Time to quit. Or time partially to quit. A purpose, which I must acquiesce to. What had the oracle last said? To his query in the office as those two lay dying or dead. Sixty-one. Inner Truth. Pigsand fishes are least intelligent of all; hard to convince. It is I. The book means me. I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me?

— Philip Dick, The Man in the High castle

Early night over the city, wet and rained over, folks from the apartment below yelling in front of the TV for the Milan soccer team to score. Sometimes softly warbles through the floor the chant Milan Milan, and someone else, further away beyond the projects blows a canned horn. But everyone who feels like cheering cheers apart and the community exists only across the TV sets. The land all around is cooling and drying, quieting up. The world of the spectators watches the spectacles.
I went to see Jawa today, tried to talk. Things never go like you imagined them if you have imagined them too much or too hard, because your mind can warp reality and compromise it. I mean, we talked, even laughed over it, because the baby has her own same blood type so “this doesn’t help us, does it?”. But it seemed so far-fetched to her I just dropped it right away in our laughs. It would have been better to drop it anyway. I left soon, she smiled from the threshold and the little kid was crying his short sob in the commotion of the door opened and closed and the distractions going away. I went for shops looking for a new bag not too big, not too small, but in the bourgeois city all the luggage is sinister and well mannered and is a bunch of boxes on wheels. I looked at the travel books and they all seemed useless. I wanted to buy the I Ching since when I read The Man in the High Castle, I had a couple of questions in mind, but I couldn’t find the Adelphi copy I wanted. I met with Libi at home in the afternoon and we went to bed and after a while I managed to let my thoughts crawl away and let the sex work. We lay in bed for a while afterwards, the light from the gray sky gone dimmer and the room cold and under a blanket we stayed against the darkening orange wall. Whenever I looked down at her Libi smiled at me and then she said, you should never forget I’m the one who likes what you do to her. She came closer and against my chest and mentioned all the things she liked and we pictured them and I kept feeling inadequate but I didn’t tell her. Then Libi left for the sewing school and the door remained open and I could hear the buzz of the city, the fainted honking and the throb of motorbikes and the tires accelerating on the wet surfaces of the street. Nothing else. Birds were silent or unintelligible below the afternoon onslaught of the city noise.
But that was before the night came, and then late at night, when Libi was sleeping alone in the other room with her head resting on a slim pillow near the orange wall, and the soccer match had been over for a long while, and I was writing at the green table and posting on the blog this post and all around had a duration and it felt familiar and distant at the same time. But that wasn’t too original a feeling, and it stayed on the surface and I don’t know what to do with it.

platelet , noun | Physiology : a small colourless disc-shaped cell fragment without a nucleus, found in large numbers in blood and involved in clotting. (Oxford Dictionary)

Because of a nasty genetic disease affecting her blood, my sister produces too many platelets and the platelets cause her blood to thicken too much, this in the long run obviously leads to thrombosis, thus higher chance of stroke, ischemia, arteriosclerosis etcetera. She is 35 and they say the worse is not supposed to happen anytime soon, especially if she responds well to the containment drugs. Although right now her body doesn’t seem to tolerate very well the mini aspirin, which is the standard treatment in these cases.

I went at the polyclinic today to make a HLA typing test in the not desirable case my sister should go for a bone marrow transplant in the next future. HLA stays for Human Leukocitye Antigenes, aka the major indicator of genetic compatibility between individuals.
My sister is being cured in Rome, and since the HLA test is very expensive the hospital here in Milan had to wait for some papers from Rome to arrive to authorize the test, and although it’s not urgent, getting to the hospital I feel better that the papers arrived before I left for the U.S.

Later I am in the room where they take your blood for analysis. The doctor attends my arm phial after phial outlining for me the purpose and utility of the HLA typing test. She says that in case of bone marrow transplant the test must give 90% of compatibility, which is pretty hard to get. “There’s only so little probability for siblings to be that compatible, actually only 25% chance to get there, and almost zero chance for any two random individuals”, she says.
And the thing is risky too, I mumble.
“It is risky for the recipient”, she says, “whose blood cells have to be ‘destroyed’ before the operation”.
She makes a quick gesture outward with her hands turned down, flickering her fingers to picture the event of destruction. She doesn’t go into the details of such a destruction, or the risks involved with it. She’s so adapted to underplay the little annoyances of being a donor to persuade people to donate that she seems to be forgetting for a second there that she’s talking about my sister’s blood cells to possibly be “destroyed”.
But I am afraid to ask more. She has sweet oblique eyes, dark hair and large cheek bones like certain italians have, a motherly suffering air about her that makes her immediately sympathetic. She doesn’t want me to think at the details now, it’s too early, and she’s right I guess.
There is also a risk for the donor, right? I say then, feeling a bit coward and provocateur as I say it, and she replies, quick: absolutely not, no! Persuasive.
Behind us another doctor is going about the papers, curly blond hair and a larger body, also very gentle wider eyes. I feel weird and self-conscious as I sit there saying the names of my parents out loud for the family tree form she’s filling in. I wonder for a second when it was the last time I pronounced those names.
Finally they hand me all the leaflets about being a donor, and about the bone marrow transplant, give me my documents back and off I go, rolling down the sleeve.

Strangely enough, be it for logistical considerations, or possibly for reasons of persuasion, to get in and out of the room where they take your blood for analysis one has to pass across the hall where the regular blood donors lay down and give blood. So as I walk by, at least a dozen are laying down calmly looking up at the ceiling or sideways eying the doctors, nurses, patients and special occasional potential donors like me passing by for the analysis. A very pretty girl, all dressed in black, is laying down on one of the stretchers listening to her earpieces. For a second there I have the disturbing feeling she’s not even donating, she’s just laying there listening to music.

Outside is still another warm day. I go across the area of the polyclinic to via commenda to finally get me something to eat. A little later I am sitting in a bar eating focaccia and reading the leaflets about bone marrow transplant.
To my disappointment nowhere on the leaflet (which is not a leaflet at all, actually, but just some xeroed pages stapled together) is said anything about the risks for the recipient. The possibility of rejection is mentioned where it explains the HLA compatibility numbers, and that’s it. Nothing is said of the “destruction” of the cells the lady was referring to.
There are few laconic lines about the risks that the donor runs, though. A “very little but not null” chance of a “breaking of the spleen” is mentioned,”possibility of cerebrum-vascular accidents” and “myocardial ischemia”, following the “mobilization” and alteration of the blood that the donor must undergo in order to produce more stem cells before the transplant. Wow, just great.

Out of the bar. Is the sky turning gray? Is it a sunny day? Fuck who knows. It’s warm. I walk down the street wondering all the things it is stupid to wonder, like what if we she really will need the transplant? And what if we are not compatible?
Me and my sister never got along very much. Nobody really got along with anybody in our so called family. We never mentioned or proved our reciprocal feelings for each other in any way during the years and so, one wonders if the feelings are really there. Well, I wonder all the time and I never got a clear answer.
And if I ever have to do something so important for my sister… at least I want to do it right, to come out right. To be useful.

I curse science and doctors. I curse medicine. I walk by the Berchet high school, the second hour bell just ringing, a girl’s running in, the heavy knapsack slamming her back back. Maybe her second hour is science.
Fuck, science. There are the moments of truth when one sees clearly. I have one right there at the end of via commenda. I sort of always knew that science existed to overcome fear, and suddenly I see it so clearly. The reasons, the hope, the results, the hopeless too. So mixed up.

nothing is clear at all,
I’ve been out here since forever
clear is not love, age is not,
learned: nisba
only it’s too late to be innocent and make mistakes
only be evil when you’re weak
lie when you’re hurt, snitch if you care
and kill not for passion but out of fear
go to bed coi rimorsi stuffed in the pillow
awake the ghosts in the grinding of your teeth
consider the hydraulic erection in the morn
cazzo duro and you’re all set
enough longing for a mother’s arms, friends who likes you,
not in awe of you–
undress and be undressed
say out loud, my heart beats
glide down over
young cities of quasi innocent people
quasi unnatural, not always devouring
to a quasi window, a quasi view,
a quasi desk were to sit and write
in whatever language you like,
in the place that does not exists
where you hold and listen, no engines no drones
it’s them singing fighting making love, and singing again
and you quasi are one of them.

* nisba means nothing where I come from

Because I soon will have to fly, and the anticipation makes me quite nervous, it’s probably not a coincidence that a post about Alitalia attracted my attention today.
It is known how Alitalia, the italian national airline company, will probably be privatized, due to its irreparable losses in the millions, bad management, waste of public money and atrocious inefficiency. Not even going into organizing rendition flights to take supposed terrorists to be tortured around the world.
Many in Italy grumble against this probable destiny, and they seem to imply that it isn’t patriotic to get rid of our national airline company like that. They suggest, and many politicians among them, that the State should throw more money into the bottomless well to resuscitate the corpse (sorry for the double metaphor), because “Alitalia is a national treasure”, “property of the people”, etcetera.
Theoretically one could agree that it is never a good deal for the citizens to sell out public property, but the thing is the Italian State isn’t capable to manage Alitalia. So I don’t really know. It’s essentially a problem of political feuds and clientele, which makes it ineradicable. Therefore the question seems to be either you sell at one price now, or you sell at a much lower price later.
Well I don’t care much anyway, but I read a post today, and just in case you have any lingering doubts on what the right destiny for Alitalia should be, and like me you don’t fly much so you don’t know by your own experience, check out Alitalia as a ruler of my destiny, by Ms. Adventure in Italy.
I insist that nothing is more helpful to understand your own country than the impressions of the expat.

It’s a guy named Luigi (yes, Luigi) with an Alitalia lanyard around his neck, sitting in front of a display for Air Uzbekistan (no joke). (…) Luigi, our Alitalia representative, well, let’s just say that he is consistent with the level of Alitalia quality I’m used to. Which is, crap. He fuffs about looking for another flight before finally telling us we’ll be getting on the Virgin flight at 11.30. He takes a few moments to tell us about the amenities Virgin customers receive and a moment’s pause would have begged the question “Why is one airline’s customer service representative touting another airline?” but then again, this is Alitalia. (…)
10.30 Back in Terminal 2. “Luigi, we missed you.” Cretino, I feel like yelling. “How is it that no one made our reservation or even called them to tell them to hold the flight for us?”
“Oh.” Luigi picks up the phone to call his “supervisor” but he could be talking to a dial-tone for all we know. Pass the buck, m’amico.
Luigi glosses over the fact of what happened, and again recounts the luxuries that we missed by missing the Virgin flight. “What a shame that you missed it.” My fingers are itching, for his neck. “There’s a limo for first-class passengers, and if you’re really in a hurry, they use a motorcycle. It’s so cool!”

Details of rudeness and inefficiency in this story are comic and shameful. The smell of nepotism (incompetent people hired to badly do a job because they’re connected) is all over the place.
The overall picture, quite depressing: because at the slightest snag (the obvious strike), Alitalia rates probably as the worst company to ever fly with.

…there are still two weeks left, but, you know.

Libi I’m trying to write you this letter though I’m no good at it. I always worry that what I’m going to write in the letters will haunt me later on for some reason. Not that I have anything special to write you about. Anything you can’t imagine by yourself probably.
So I am leaving, as you know (do’h). Of course I’ll miss you Libi. I’ll miss your eyes so intense and sweet when we hold each other, your arms when we fall asleep together, your cheering voice as you enter the door, noises of you in the kitchen, in the bathroom, out on the yellow terrace talking to the neighbor’s cat. I’ll miss our clothes scattered all over the apartment, your round breast, the way you give me, I’ll miss you at night, when I’m awake and I hear your soft snoring coming from the other room, that always made me warm, our moments of bravery with the sex, our plans for dinner every night, the contorted and lengthy summaries of the movies you saw. I’ll miss not seeing our plants flourishing this spring or getting sick. Even that corny french music all in minor key you always want to listen to. I’ll miss hearing of your mother’s cat, whom you nicknamed with the same nickname you gave me. I’ll miss the countless ways you found to make me feel not guilty, of being alive, of being what I was, of not always doing the right thing. I always tried to protect you but if I succeeded at lengths it only was because you needed so little. Manifested so little. See, I know that.
I’ll leave and miss the warm love that my leaving triggered from somewhere inside ourselves, even if it was forced out somehow.
You know that I’ll be away for three months, although I am not so sure it will be three months, maybe it will be more, or less. I want you to be strong and go on with everything because I’ll be back anyway. I wish I was leaving you with someone else like a child or a pet. But our lives are still important to take care of if we part. And if I am not coming back, because I die or something, please know that the days were all true, all true. True like fear, like illness, like lust, like hunger, like all that I postponed waiting to find the courage to give more to you. True when I ran away from you, true when I came back, true when I said I was sorry. Sometimes I wondered whether it was true or not, but what is true? Is it a lie to think that it’s true all that we can’t rationalize? And if I really die or something keep my relatives away from my stuff if you can, except maybe the pictures, and destroy the blog please. The password is written under the drawer of the green table (…)

When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way

— Stevie Wonder

On the Italian police website, or maybe it was the U.S. embassy web site, they refer to it as the new “biometric” electronic passport. Well, whatever “biometric” was going to be I knew I was ready to be disgusted by it and that I had to show all my disgust to them. So I went to the police station stressed by the task and in a challenging bad mood.
But on the surface, in my country, having your new electronic passport done isn’t that painful after all. It doesn’t mean you are “biometrically scanned” or anything. I guess they infer some algorithmic data out of the pictures you give in when you apply for the passport, because the procedure is still the good old grumpy italian one.

You wait for your turn standing in a stark corridor with a group of other people, without a number or anything, just waiting for the calling bark from the other side of the door. You step in, reach the counter. Talk to the young distracted policeman who doesn’t seem to listen to you at all. Give in all the papers and watch him slowly cut the border of the pictures, fill in the forms, take your signature here, and here, and here, (grumpy mumbled thanks), and behind the picture, (another grumpy mumbled thanks). Have him acknowledge your payment of €44 to the PO, let him slowly cut the quittance and give your half back. Watch him as he attaches the €40 stamp you gave him, and the picture, and the quittance to the forms and as he stamps all over them; Let him slowly interpret the e-ticket you printed out of the email the agency sent you. Try in vain to suggest him to skip the printed headers on the top of the page and check the all capitals instructions at the bottom. Finally watch him highlight the correct departure day on the top of the papers, and attach the e-ticket to it all too; Finally watch him as he invalidates your old passport, stamping “annullato” on every page of it –and take it back.

Everything happens in the quiet Police Station near Corso XXII marzo. The offices are at the ground level, but there is no traffic in the narrow residential street outside. The naked walls welcome all the white light pouring in from the tall windows, and there’s a peaceful atmosphere around that maybe depends on the fact that there are no computers, no cameras, no office noises of any sort.
Next to me a couple of tobacconists are applying for a gun license for personal defense and another policeman is instructing them about the bureaucratic procedure. They endured a robbery already so they are qualified.
The police force seems so reasonable, carefree, unaggressive when seen from here.

I always thought that the residual charms of this falling nation were all in its underdeveloped, neglected parts. All the parts which have not been “upgraded” are what makes this country precious –at moments. Exactly the contrary of what most of our politicians usually assume.

I get out of the Police Station with a small piece of paper in hand, cut off a bigger one by the young policeman. There he wrote down to come and get the new passport two days before I leave.
Outside, the sun shines wildly and the bodies of the cars are reflecting the light with their limited range of colors. The avenue down the road is busy with traffic but from where I am standing, in the empty quite street, all that traffic seems so odd, and its frantic pace so distant.

“…an unsuccessful operation, managed by incompetents, a small tiny brand that perfectly reflects today’s Italy, presumptuous and without substance… The obsessive pursuit of consensus [which] generates mediocrity.”
— Oliviero Toscani

Like many, I commented the other day the design of the shameful cucumber-eggplant-zucchini new national italian logo.
Little I knew that the real shame was not much in that little logo — although that logo cost an awful €100,000 — as it is in the new national portal our falling nation seems now to have: italia.it.
This so called portal, inaugurated along with the mentioned logo and promoted by the same obscure agencies created by the late Berlusconi’s government for “national development”, has been payed by the italian taxpayers €45 millions.
Yes, you read it right, €45 millions for a website: and apparently almost €100 millions were originally meant to be invested on the project. Which is, I don’t know, probably the price of more than one big e-commerce or news website that produces lots of new content everyday. The figure is so incredible one can’t really see it.
How the money has been used? Well, not to create a decent, modern website, that’s for sure. So it’s anyone’s guess what they made of the millions.

A good work has been done by many italian blogs and websites to demolish italia.it piece by piece and to show to the world how badly designed and conceived it is. And how humiliating it is, particularly for the many young talents who really believe in the importance of design, especially for a country like Italy. So much that some of them decided to promote a collective project to create an alternative, better portal.

Among the hundreds of posts unceasingly drumming across the italian blogland on the issue: the observations and useful links of qix.it, the many posts at Diarium Neiminis, in english the comments on this page. But certainly the most complete effort on the case (as far as I know) has been done by ti.ailati.www, a blog expressly dedicated to the portal and its absurd existence. On ti.ailati.www, which also comes with a partial english version, all sorts of depressing detailed informations about the operation italia.it can be read. Details which should really have (and never will have) serious, penal consequences for those who promoted and followed that project.

For example: how the website came 15 months late without anyone paying a penalty for this; how because of the delay –unless more millions are put into it– on July 2007 all the editorial staff of the portal will be sent home after a regular service of only few months; how anyway the editorial staff has been hired with lousy temporary contracts; how €9 millions were allocated to develop a booking platform for the portal, that was never implemented (without even going into the absurd, useless, control-freak impossible idea of having a nation-wide booking service for tourists); how it took only half a day to a young talented web designer to pass –as a sort of challenge– from the concept design of italia.it as he saw it on the page to a actual, correct implementation of it, when it took months to the actual designers of the portal to do it wrong; how as a matter of fact the design of the portal is technically incredibly bogus, unfinished, and full of classic outdated web design errors, like using tables instead of styles etcetera.

Just like with the cucumber-logo, the portal italia.it speaks very clearly of what Italy is, in what shape it really is — but not for the reasons our politicians seem to believe.

— in picture, above: quando venire in Italia? scarica adesso tecnologia assistiva! from: italia.it

I haven’t followed the awards. I don’t have a TV set, I never go to the movies, I am so out of touch I don’t even know the name of most of the new Hollywood icons. And the old icons, all former alpha males with their hairplugs and gigantic white fake teeth, I am happy for them if they’re still alive and kicking but, I’m sorry, they just bore me to death with all their self-indulgent aura and all.
Shiny gold disturbs me. Fanfare makes me sad. And the italians at the Oscars? Forget about them! Judging from Salvatores, Benigni and Tornatore, they usually begin to destroy themselves and to cover their own country with shame shortly after the ceremony, so I’m not even going into that.
The only thing that can surprise you when you’re so out of touch with something, is to see other people interested in it. So many posts about the Oscars the day after. How anyone can be sucked up into that, you are left to wonder. But that’s also so subjective. Honestly I don’t really have a point “against the Oscars”. I am only completely out of touch and happy with it and I wanted to say it, since today my mood is doing much better and all.

–in picture: shiny gold, ugh.