End of November Entry. Sorta.

I'm way to cold and numb to blog, but here I go anywhere.

Time calls for some catch up, or so it seems to me. November has been a cool month. I spent the first days in the anticipation of my birthday, and went it came it was pretty much what I had in mind: lots of party and good times in London - refer to my album on facebook. Diana surely helped me greatly to keep my joyful mood for a while.

Then complications came. I'm really unhappy with my project. I don't feel like I'm learning anything, and the people I work with are plain horrible. After some arguments and tension at my workplace, I decided to talk to ICYE - off record, and they opened the possibility of allocating me somewhere else. Then I saw all the faces of the people I like in London and thought: "wait, do I really want to leave?." It took me some days and then I decided that I am going to finish my time in here regardless. Anyway, January is coming and a week in Spain with Synove and Fran might lift my spirits a bit. Then, it will be one month before I'm off to the rest of Europe and visit all those wonderful people who live in Germany. I can stand the pressure.

Now I find funny that I feel so cold inside. Less than 24 hours ago, I was in the company of one of my favorite people in the world. It did not snow, neither could I escape work as much, but the time I spent with Vlad made up for all the things that did not go as expected. the challenge now is putting up work, the spirit of Christmas, and all the things I dont fully enjoy. This is what we call "fucking London" while we look around Brixton, freezing and laughing on the irony of our lives and how expensive everything is. One thing is for sure, if you feel slightly miserable, cold increases the discomfort.

I apologize if I didnt make much sense in this blog. The season and the loneliness are getting the best of me.

The Stalker Chronicles

Is it only me or London’s suburbs are rather stalker-inviting places?

I’ve been talking about this with the people I know for a while, but nobody else seems to share my fascination for people’s lives, so I tend to drop the topic. What does a writer do when he’s not being heard? Easy: he writes. And be it to satisfy my own need of telling the story or to explain until which extent my stalking practices go, I decided to blog about it.

(Parenthesis: As I wrote this last sentence, one neighbor shut the curtains.)

My room has a nice balcony that leads to an open space that nobody in the building uses (a.k.a. forsaken backyard,)and this space is poorly separated from the neighbors’ respective backyards by a fence covered in vines of leaves and ivy. Every time I go to my balcony for a cigarette or just open the window, a whole set of four-story buildings with windows leading to different houses appear. The family that has parties like every other day, the Indian/Pakistani guys who cook by the window sill all the time, the couple of entrepreneurs who run their own business from their houses, the people that come and go: all that is there for me to watch!

This has got to be a common problem among writers, I’d like to think; being nosy, I mean. Often the passion for discovering stories is as strong as the zeal for creating them. I wouldn’t dare to separate them, actually. We produce narrative but not after having devoured a great deal of anecdotes, biographies, and events. In my fantasy novel also, I write about a door that opens the path to a different world, and when I read this recurrent theme in other novels, my heart jumps with excitements; I might be a little bit of a Peter Pan and get the same feeling from windows and the real people behind them.

(Second parenthesis: One of my neighbor’s desk is next to the window that is in the second floor right in front of me. It is so funny that we’re both typing now, face to face, and nobody dares to be the one closing the curtains.)

It is not that different in my work place. The person I provide care for lives in the eight floor of a twenty two-story tower that faces a huge residential building. From his window, I see no less than fifty balconies, all with people shaving, watching T.V., drinking, talking, hiding. It is hard to keep a record of what people like to do, but I have the image of this punk girls singing and rocking, the families on the couch watching T.V. on Sundays, and the stamp of the stud who comes shirtless and wearing his white fabric pajamas, stretches, and spits over the rail of the balcony (that’s probably the image that is going to stay in your mind after having finished reading). The view often overwhelms me; it reminds me of the Matrix. It’s like having lots of mini screens with programs to watch. As I realize what I’m writing, I’m starting to think that there’s something wrong with me, but it is too late for that now.

(Third parenthesis: I just spotted a kid similar to a black cherub watching shyly from the third window to my left, in the third floor. He hid when he met my gaze and I couldn’t help laughing.)

It might be that never before I have been so abruptly exposed to a place this cramped in which your life could collide any moment with somebody else’s and work magic! Produce a story! But I seem to be so into it right now. As part as an experiment, I’ve kept my windows open for two days. The reactions go from awkward brief gaze encounters to friendly smiles but no further contact. Just two nights ago, my young male neighbor and I kept this game of not closing the curtains, but he won cuz I felt asleep very early. It’s like paradise for hunting stories and human contact… if it weren’t for the neighbors’ reluctance to share their lives and the Western paranoia over privacy.

(BTW, the neighbor whose computer is in front of me didn’t close the curtains. She left the room and turned off the lights instead.)