I dance through the rush hour traffic. I try using the inner city road but the traffic’s so jammed I immediately choose another route and when I find it is also jammed I try another one and like this I go around town, you know, just checking that every building is still there. I recently made a CD out of some of my favourite songs of all times and am now listening to my favourite of the moment, The Reason, Hoobastank . Such a perfect song you almost wish you’d had the honour of witting it yourself, at least I do! In fact, I press ‘repeat’ on that song so many times I think I could have completed a CD with that single song and would listen to it from beginning till end. So, I guess I obsess about stuff once in a while. Meanwhile my thoughts are unclear, I try not to think at all. What a mess I got myself into. I stop the car and sight. It’s just going to be another day, just like any other day at work I remind myself. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure. As I said, I’m refraining from thought as much as I can. Despite the fact that I recently read in this book that ‘denial is so last century’, right now, I’ve become pretty good on the denial thing. So you do learn from experience after all. Just you don’t learn never to do it again, you learn to block it out the next time.

Another sigh as I enter the place. (I’ve been doing so much sighing these last couple of weeks you’d think I would have drained all the air my lungs could get me by now.) The place I work. It is how I earned my way through these last years of college. And now it is high time for me to find something new. I just can’t stand this place anymore. The place, the people, the work. I want to do something I love, and work with interesting people. This gym, as far as people are concerned, you just meet dumbasses, a few exceptions aside I must say, to their credit. I don’t mean to say these people are shallow. Oh, no, certainly not. They’re full … of rubbish. And they do have useful information to pass on … if you wanna be talked into freaking anorexia nervosa!

So it’s a quiet day and I have my book ready to fill the void between getting a coffee and making a sandwich. I start to read and this person comes to me, takes a look at the book, decides it’s not the one I was reading last week and shouts ‘Are you reading ANOTHER book? Do you read like three books a month?’ She actually made it sound like I was on drugs or something. That’s the thing about my country, if you’re smoking pot and drinking anything but water every other night, you’re a rebel, a COOL rebel; if you read a lot, you’re a freak. And I don’t even read a lot, it’s just a frenzy I’m going through at the moment. And I just found out that the more I read, the more I wan to write. So, if I keep this pace, I should well be on my way to becoming a novelist. I just need to fix up a story to tell. Anyway, as much as I love the person, I took offence on the commentary. But that’s how people are, I guess you cannot expect a gym instructor to sympathise with the ‘reading kind’. She’s becoming a mother in a few months. Now THAT’S a kind I don’t understand. Just the day before one of the many brilliant people at the gym said (kept saying) that she would bring her four-year-old daughter the next day because she had no one to look after her. I immediately got the feeling that what she really meant was something like ‘Tomorrow be ready and have many many tricks up your sleeve to entertain my baby. Please, also have some nice comments on how beautiful and cute and well-behaved she is.’ So, when I smile at her ‘warning’ I just think ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ I’m not playing the babysitter and I’m not playing with your daughter. I always find parents who drool over their children’s perfectness so pathetic, especially when they expect everybody else to agree with them. When I have kids, and I’m sure they’ll be too beautiful what with my wide green eyes and perfect taste on men, I’ll never boast about their virtues. And I won’t treat them like children, I’ll definitely treat them like little adults. I don’t usually relate to children, my whole life I can only remember two little girls I just loved and wished mine would be just like them. But that’s it! Parents out there, don’t expect everybody to envy your kids, cause they don’t.

That’s just what I think but it’s not really what I say. I mean, has anyone ever told you that it was good to speak one’s mind? Well, these people are either mad or they just never thought of what that meant. If I said everything that I think it would be … bad, for lack of a word that expresses how despicable that would turn out to be. But then again, if people expressed everything that comes to their minds World War Three would be on its way. That’s why we have compromised to do a ‘little’ bit of editing in every thought, or else, society has made us do it.

Oh, and here it is, The Reason, Hoobastank

Depois de muita relutância lá decidi experimentar fazer compras online. E que melhor maneira de começar senão com livros? Fui então à amazon.co.uk e fiz a bela da compra, Ted Hughes, Selected Poems. Serviço ultra-rápido (como pedido) e ultra-profissional (como esperado). E só depois de uma viagem à livraria Britânica fiquei a saber que o serviço também tinha sido ultra-barato. O mesmo livro estava à venda por mais do dobro do preço que paguei na amazon (e não vamos esquecer que pedi entrega-express). Este mês encomendei Anna Maxted, a minha musa da chick lit, e, claro, não resisti ao Twilight … eu tinha que ter um só meu.

Já agora, aqui ficam algumas das minhas preciosidades.

Anna Maxted, “Being Committed”

Hannah thinks you have to be absolutely nuts to want to get married. She’s quite content with her life thank you very much – her job as a private investigator (albeit not a very successful one) for Hound Dog investigations, Jason (her boyfriend of five years standing), and her relationship with her wonderful dad (pity her mum is such a disaster). Besides which, she’s tried it once but she and Jack ended up divorced before she was 21: well really, it’s a bit much to ask a girl to stay faithful when she’s scarcely out of her teens and the world is full of such wonderful men- So when the long-suffering Jason proposes Hannah doesn’t think twice about turning him down. But would she have said no quite so quickly had she known that only a month later he’d have gotten engaged to another person? Is she really the emotional retard that Jason thinks she is? Hannah’s family is acting like she blew the one fluky chance she had of hooking a permanent man , and maybe – just maybe – there’s something in Jason’s theory that being committed means first coming to terms with your past.

um pequeno excerto… (depilação à lá Brazilian)

“She ended the call and grinned at me. I grinned back. Brazil, St Tropez, these were nice places… I was actually looking forward to this.

   …

   “Lovely, now can you pull your cheeks apart for me?”

   I can’t speak for the rest of society but it’s not often I find myself pantless on all fours on a table, spreading my buttocks so that a glamorous blond can rip out the hairs obscuring my anus. Maybe other, harder women get used to this. But me personally, call me a wuss, I couldn’t get over the unusual fact that my anus was in her face. She was staring right at it -O, there it was, my bottom hole inches from her ski-jump nose. I couldn’t believe people voluntarily did this. And I’m not talking about sexual sadists. Normal women. I mean, it isn’t right.

   I blushed right the way through the back of my head. At the least, I blushed on all four cheeks. When she was tearing the hair off my legs, I’d managed to bluster through my embarassment. But this? Nothing! No words could cover this!.

   I shut up. The Brazilian silenced me as effectively as a bullet. I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d wanted to. This was a social situation that gunned down etiquette and left it bleeding. There was no form of words on earth, no correct behaviour available to the human race that would normalise this and make it comfortable. Monstrous mortification dwarfed the pain which, experienced in isolation – an Iraqi prison, say – would have been excruciating.

   I supposed if there was a God and He was looking down on me (I hope not) He’d have said I was being punished for my sins.”