The · Evening · Mood

Been dieting. Finally. Seriously. Painfully. For a while I actually tried to walk the path of fat acceptance, but maybe I'm not ready yet. Or fat enough. I eventually resolved to diet when a suspicion arose that the extra fat might be a pejorative factor in the insomnia debacle. I certainly used to like my body a lot more a few years ago and of course, there are other things, work revolution and crises and governments falling and Benazir Bhutto being killed and me wanting a pregnancy and yet not being sure I like the world that much and my books and music and love no longer able to shield me and my unconceived child from such a world and somehow I need to be in control of something and my weight may be that something.

I've lost about eight pounds so far and there have been smaller icebergs tips. And I'm swimmimg! That doesn't help the insomnia though, I seem to get back from the pool exhausted and excited at the same time (I'm good at it) and then I stick my chlorine-irritated nose into Atlas Shrugged which is severely messing with my head: the woman riducules my life philosophy, she's kind of a nazi and her characters are so flat and predictable and she overuses the adjective "angular" and yet I'm loving it. That's the extent of my silliness, liking the russian nazi woman, being competitive at swimming class, dieting when I should be campaigning against unfair and unhealthy standards and the objectification of women and thinking myself insomniac.
I do need a vacation.

Current Mood:	confused
Current Music:	Gretchen Am Spinnrad - Schubert (and Elly)

But I have been doing my planning a little better: all freaking presents are in exquisite good order under my pretty red-and-silvery tree, and the cleaning lady is coming to lend a hand with the momentous tidying-dusting-washing up trifecta. The food shopping is done and I have a whole weekend ahead of me for the rest and more. I just wish I could spend it sleeping. Yawn... Actually, I am a little excited if I think of the extremely adorable (and expensive. And fragrant. And useful) leather accessory the precious hubby will be giving yours truly come Monday. That actually makes it all even more pathetic, doesn't it. We really need children around here.  

Current Mood:	sleepy
Current Music:	Maria Callas - La Divina

About fifteen seconds after I have met somebody new, I am always asked how old I am. Always. Can't remember an occasion it didn't happen in a couple of years (which is about all of my memory range, I have severe insomnia-related neural damage) On the other hand, I can't remember a single time I did ask someone their age. And it's not that I am curious about it but abstain from asking 'cause I think it's tacky (although I do think it's tacky), I just don't care. It really makes no difference to me if a person is twenty-five or thirty, forty-three or forty-eight, a person is not a number, and if I really have to select an age-appropriated behavior, I can rely on looks quite safely. I mean, if I offer a seat to someone on a bus, odds are they'll be about seventy if they look about seventy. If they're poorly aged sixty-year-olds, well, they still should accept my seat.  But people are always curious about my age, and I flatter myself thinking I'm sort of age mysterious, with the self-possession and articulateness of a thirty-something and the looks of a twenty-something (I suspect the second one is true). They do tell me I look young to be married, and seem relieved when I say my age and they realize I'm spinster age, but with a husband.

But it's not just me. The same happens to my baby, only people are surprised by his age because he looks older, very manly and experienced and he only just turned thirty. They look puzzled, and when he asks back (which I never do, tacky, remember?) they suddenly look depressed. At least my age is better news. 
All around, all the time, people asking each other their age. What's that for? Do they calculate the salary/age ratio? Do they evaluate their own medical condition by comparison? Seriously, what the funk is in an age?    

Current Mood:

quixotic

The little scarlet gate. The driveway where I learned to skate and fumbled with a skateboeard a few years later - I never mastered the silly thing (it must be there still, half buried somewhere in the garden alongside my uncle's wind surf board). The steps where I would sit in the late afternoon combing and drying my whimsical long hair in the sun. The pine tree that was planted the year I was born. Sometimes, the pinecones. The verandah and the ivy. The door we locked so carefully at night in the handful of summers after my father's death, when it was us girls and a small child in the house - the cutest child ever, my brother, and now he's as annoying as any man. The mirror in the room and the table where my mum kept the keys. The main bedroom, where grandma liked sleeping and where my mother and my siblings would sleep most times. I liked the smaller room better, especially when it was just us at the beach house and I could have it for myself. I drew fairies and horses, aliens and trees in that room, and I read a million books, and I daydreamed about bloodthirsty axe-wielding madmen and pretty boys, and I learned about myself and the fact that I just couldn't get bored. The room we called a parlour, but really was just a TV room. Two other big and needly trees (hey, I'm no botanist) made it shady and sustained the hammock you could even watch the TV from and I used as a swing. We would watch the Olympic Games on that TV set. So many medals were handed to people who are now otherwise employed (some might be even selling the family beach house right now). The bathroom were I endlessly showered off the beach taste and washed my bathing suits and marveled at my body changing, and the small kitchen where we breakfasted when mornings on the verandah were chilly, and where another uncle taught me all about making spaghetti al dente.
It breaks my heart, it breaks my heart away. 
I feel like I never really had a home. My father's parents house wasn't home and my mum's mother's house is not home although I call it that sometimes. School definitely never felt like home, and every house I moved in as a grown-up was always new, unconquered, ominous. This will be home someday, when we have kids perhaps, who can be happy here, and when I have had time to get to know it. So far, I love it, but it isn't me.
Unlike the house with the scarlet gate, the ivy, the hammock, my dumb unicorns and freedom.
It will always be me, it will always be home, for someone else as well now. Because home is the place where a happy child lives.

Current Mood:	sad
Current Music:	Dvorak - New World Symphony (Bernstein)

There are. And I'm playing with the thought of them to make the sad business of the summer ending a little less painful. But no, I won't be doing the same for summer come March. The end of winter is never that tragic, and there are way too many things I like about summer. Still, I sorta kinda miss:
- A cup of tea after work.
- The empty beaches.
- No bugs (well, apart from mosquitoes).
- Holiday Season days off (if any).
- My long, hot baths in the evening.
- The glare of the sun on a chilly January morning.
- Reading Goethe's early poetry.
- Reduced need of shaving.
- Little or no need to tend the garden.
- Oversize, cuddly warm clothes.
- Pepitas Pernigotti.
- The hairdryer.
- The combination of: an idle afternoon, heavy rain, a blanket, hot chocolate and Bach's Cello Suites. 
(The rest, I loathe.) 

Current Mood:	complacent
Current Music:	Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream

When your cell phone's memory is almost full, you can pop up the messages menu and erase a few. I used to do that: I would browse through my incoming and outgoing, have a laugh, remember happy times, trips abroad, work problem solving, but I would soon get bored or busy, and give up after erasing a dozen. And a week later the memory would be almost full again. So, when it happens now, I just erase the whole of them.  I do not get attached, and I don't look back. Overall, I need a functional phone.

When someonelse's memory is almost full, the sleek lad decides, for once, to look back instead, and grace us with the results. The man is rich, still hot with the ladies, has grandkids who unfortunately weren't named Vera, Chuck and Dave, and he was always mostly aloof, dispassionated and discreet - never giving much of himself away. Well, this time something seems to be different. Because he grieves for the time that flew by in a flash and ponders on the things that he did as a kid. He can't take the fact that images and sounds, pictures and voices, songs and letters are all that makes a life in the end. He asks us to sing and tell stories of old on the day that he dies. And he tells stories himself, stories of past events that bring to life characters such as poor Mr. Bellamy or the guy who was abandoned by his runaway mother. The past is us. And yet it feels like a dream. Were we there? Was it real?
Still, he and I are of the same stock, that of the people who always think the best is yet to come. That's what makes my baby unstoppable. The past is yet unsung and the future yet unseen, and the day I will tell stories of old is very, very far in time.

Current Mood:	contemplative
Current Music:	Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full

Man, I love the people. It's way cooler to say that you hate mankind, the pathetic, egoistic, destructive breed, but I can't help it, I love it. I've been in Rome for the week end and there were so many people - I normally spend my days in the office, away from the crowd - and all of them looked beautiful to me for some reason. Some of them had intelligent eyes, some others had gorgeous hair, others sported nice smiles. Handsome Japanese teenagers talking about the Champions league final match and middle-aged Italian  janitors talking about bacteria - and with astounding linguistic propriety (the Italians, can't say about the Japanese youngsters, I didn't get further than "Milan" and "Liverpool" with them). Then this morning I was coming home, got to the Termini tube station, turned a corner and found myself right here:

I was listening to Schubert's string quartet nr. 14, Death and the Maiden, but I didn't cry for Vanessa's death. I cried for her mother's love and pain, for her boyfriend's goodbye, for her murderer who has eyes as young and beautiful as hers, and for the people who walked by and gave her a thought, a flower, a kiss, and asked me about her because they wanted to hear her story.
The people who care about the people, and I am one of them, and the time will come when you see we're all one, and life flows on within and without you.
 

Current Mood:	hopeful
Current Music:	Schubert - Death and the Maiden

I figli degli uomini è ansia e inquietudine, vibrante speranza e struggente malinconia. Il grigio del nostro futuro è il grigio di un cielo metropolitano inglese, e ha lo stesso sapore, dolce e fumoso e denso e livido eppure familiare, come Ruby Tuesday non è la migliore canzone degli Stones ma è quella a cui ritorna il cuore. La vecchia Inghilterra è un coacervo di ricordi dolorosi e bellissimi e i ricordi sono qualcosa di reale e tangibile, non abbiamo veramente niente altro, eppure accanto a questo tesoro c'è un disperato anelito verso qualcosa che forse non esiste. Il futuro. Quanto senso ha pensare al futuro che potrebbe essere un proiettile, una bomba, o, se ci va bene, un cancro? Eppure gli andiamo incontro: incontro al proiettile, incontro alla sopravvivenza, incontro alla speranza.  E il ritratto   dell'insensatezza e dell'eroismo di questa ricerca, grazie alle magie di Cuarón e Lubezki, è realistico, vivido, straziante come una goccia di sangue sull'obiettivo.
Il miglior film del 2006 per me, e di gran lunga. 

Current Mood:	calm
Current Music:	Janet Baker/Gerald Moore - Schubert Lieder

Damn Elly Ameling. I was innocently and well-meaningly investigating Schubert's Lieder when I came across her performance of Der Hirt auf Dem Felsen, and was completely knocked out. The song itself is enormous - incredibly lively and soulful and hauntingly beautiful; her voice, the purest and most tasteful soprano, maybe too light and fragile in places in comparison to other great Lieder interpreters' pipes, but simply the best match for Der Hirt. The problem is, I just have to sing it now. I guess Schubert's ghost, his descendants, my husband and my whole neighbourhood will be thrilled.

But I miss singing so much. I do have a decent but very underappreciated soprano coloratura voice and I used to love singing despite the fact that no one around me bothered to hide their displeasure. According to my mom and my grandmother, who love classical music and Opera, you better shut your hole unless you are Renata Tebaldi. And everyone else just hates old reliable traditional singing style ("It's annoying, it's boring, it sounds unnatural, it scares me, stop it").
Wel, bugger them all, I will sing for myself, but I will sing, and it'll be Der Hirt auf Dem Felsen.

Wenn auf dem höchsten Fels ich steh',
In's tiefe Tal hernieder seh',
Und singe.
Fern aus dem tiefen dunkeln Tal
Schwingt sich empor der Widerhall
Der Klüfte.

Je weiter meine Stimme dringt,
Je heller sie mir wieder klingt
Von unten.

Mein Liebchen wohnt so weit von mir,
Drum sehn' ich mich so heiß nach ihr
Hinüber.

In tiefem Gram verzehr ich mich,
Mir ist die Freude hin,
Auf Erden mir die Hoffnung wich,
Ich hier so einsam bin.
So sehnend klang im Wald das Lied,
So sehnend klang es durch die Nacht,
Die Herzen es zum Himmel zieht
Mit wunderbarer Macht.

Der Frühling will kommen,
Der Frühling, meine Freud',
Nun mach' ich mich fertig
Zum Wandern bereit.

Current Mood:	artistic
Current Music:	Elly Ameling - Schubert Lieder

Darn cute.

And I was never a fan of the whole Jack & Rose thing. I think Titanic is fun and I cried buckets, there's no denying that, but both were better elsewhere. Look at them, ten years later, during the Golden Globes immensely boring show. Even more beautiful (Kate is thinner, Leo more manly), affectionate, talented, smart. I feel eerily proud and close to them, because we are the same age and I feel like we grew up together.  They will both receive an Oscar nomination on Tuesday. Neither will win, but who cares. Screw you AMPAS, and screw you Clint.

Current Mood:	content
Current Music:	Haydn - String Quartets Op. 9