Month: June 2006

Butterflies

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

The thing with butterflies is that they just can’t fly in a straight line. You think you’re avoiding them, or not in their path and all of a sudden they are at you.

For that reason, I don’t much like them. Well I like them, they’re lovely, it’s just that they scare me.

So this entry is in the “Funny” category so that you feel free to make fun of me. Naturally, it’s also in the “useless crap” category, for good measure.

Grazie Signore Poggi

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

Italy, Bologna, Hotel Holiday near via dell’Indipendenza. It’s well after midnight. I’m at the window. I light a cigarette and as I place the lighter back in the pack, both escape my clumsy hands –dumb me!– and fall noisily in the corner of the inner courtyard, a few stories below.

This is a roof, really. And it seems there are only windows around it; only one is lit. Alerted by the noise, somebody downstairs looks out their window; I see an arm pushing a shutter wide open.

I have more cigarettes in my backpack. But no spare lighter. I’d prefer to act now. I hope the people in the room downstairs will open their door when I knock. It’s almost 1 am.

“Buona sera, ” I announce when a man opens the door enough to show his face and let the TV sound flow out of the room. “Sono nella camera al terzo piano e le mie sigarette sono cadutte dalla finestra.”

I’m in the room on the third floor and I dropped my cigarettes through the window. He raises his eyebrows and remains quiet.

“E possibile che vado fuori dalla vostra finestra?” I ask while my hand is pointing at myself first and then in the general direction of beyond those walls.

Is it possible for me to go outside through your window? The man remains silent as he nods.

“Grazie!” I thank him as he opens the door to let me in. As I pass him I notice he’s wearing boxer shorts and that’s it.

The room is smaller than mine. There is a woman on the bed. I smile apologetically at her. She looks very perplexed as I cross the room. Below the waist she’s wearing panties, and above, she’s wearing… an open book…

I dash to the window that is already open, sit on the window sill, pivot outside, walk a few steps, pick up my pack of cigarettes and soon I pivot again inside the room. I make sure they see the cigarettes as I re-enter their room.

Not much has changed in the minute it took me. The man is now on the bed, lying next to the woman who hasn’t moved at all. The door is closed.

“Grazie milla, e scusa.” Thanks a lot, and sorry.

One last embarassed smile and I’m out of here.

As I was reliving the event in my own room, I thought of Mister Poggi. He was my Italian teacher at school some fifteen years ago. And I imagined writing him a letter to describe how his lessons had just been useful to me.

We are who we are. Good and bad.

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. but even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.

I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad.

The perks of being a wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

far away, so close

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

The other night I took a candle with me outside to sit in the garden. It flickered in the wind. It was tiny against the blackness of the night. And when I brought it back in my room, the light shone differently. It was comprised between walls that revealed its brightness. So I thought about the stars I had just been gazing upon. How they would shine so much more if there were walls around to bring their magnitude to view. And then I thought about love and how it’s a tiny bit like that.