vVvA log

one. my piano teacher told me today that i should be more serious about counting. i can not play just by ear. even if i could. i gotta count. not always work. lori even said that even if i played the wrong notes the rhythm was even more important for the piece. you could play the wrong notes but with the right counting and the piece would sound more closely to the original.

two. i did fifty pools. each pool is twentyfive meters. and i counted them. yes. in total i did 1250 meters. 1km and 250 meters. not bad. swimming has become one of my activities around here. i use to go 3 or 4 times per week to the Z center. some times i go to the alumni pool in the stata center but i do not like that pool very much. it is too little, and people does not seem to go that fast. in the Z center the pool is huge. at least 20 different lines to swim. and people going at very challenging speeds. very fast.

three. i am gonna try to count more and more. i will try to become an accountant. very important for the matters of fiction and writing indeed. jj was an accountant and also an insurance seller. borges was also a great counter as my friend edu was pointing out yesterday in a conversational dinner. he was attacking mr lovecraft because his lack of words at the time of describing the uncanny. edu said you cannot just say that you enter a space of non-euclidean geometry and do not describe the space. he claimed that those sort of spaces could be described. and if you are gonna do so, you gotta begin by counting.

four. i want to read these early sci fi stories that cyrano wrote : Voyage to the moon and The comical history of the states and empires of the moon and sun. VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1657) and L’HISTOIRE DES ÉTATS ET EMPIRES DU SOLEIL (1662). Very early fantasies. let see if i got time.

five. talking about time. perhaps now that i start to count everything i will be able to have more time.

after more than two years of being around the institute i have become more sensitive to the problem of time. actually, as i said to my friend gena yesterday, while we were talking, my experience here could be understood as a travel in time. un viaje hacia el futuro. time traveling has recently become one of my recurrent thoughts. my interest is not only aligned with the science fiction topic of going to different periods of time, but also it is related to more simple notions of time distortion and time alteration. for instance, the dejavu moments that one experience during the everyday life or the moments of time elongation when you get lost in conversations, landscapes, or places, where the normal flow of time gets totally altered. dejavu moments are quite simple, you experience something that you feel you have experienced before. time elongation, are simple as well, but could be more complex due to the different possibilities that this modification in time can take. first of all, although this time elongation seems to be something very subjective, very personal, sometimes it turns out to be a collective distortion of time. for instance, after being 6 hours on a highway in our way to rochester, ny, for evan and danielle’s wedding, we certainly experienced some sort of time-space distortion. we left boston early in the morning (8am) arrived to rochester in the afternoon (4pm) and around 8 pm, all of us who have traveled that day were feeling as it were 11pm or midnight. other distortion that just happened last week was the situation in the comic book store where tony wrapped us in conversation right at the moment we were about to pay and to leave, and suddenly we got stuck in the store for about 50 minutes. as the society and culture around here depends so much in time efficiency and management, one becomes more sensitive to the matters of time. el tiempo es oro. a motto that is not that new. actually, a very old slogan of the new brave world.

i have heard this story of the elephant somewhere else. i am sure about that. but it just happened to me this evening and it is worth telling it. a very disruptive quotation. There is an elephANT in the street. in the avenue. habia un elfante en la avenida. uncontrollable, irrepressible. all the people in the room went out. and walked through the infinite corridor. together. rolling down. The 77 Mass Ave. The main entrance, pretty big hall covered by a domo, a space of powerful echo and reverberation. Outside, the columns. In stone. Perhaps marvel. Something to find out. Doric columns? At the end of the infinite, sitting on the stairs, the students were waiting. Waiting for the elephant to come. A streetlight was blinking with the logo of the human pedestrian. The beep beep beep sound. Un elefante en la avenida masachusera, 77.

now that i am preparing application forms, the name of a country has called my attention again: the cocos republic. a country which is near to my country in the internet forms (alphabetical). i remember when this country appeared to me for the first time at the middle of the nineties. the name cocos is hilarious. what is more absurde is the fact that this country is right next in the in the alphabetical menus of the internet forms. another absurd situation added to the ones that my country survives. absurd situationism. sometimes not funny at all, very tragic.