vVvA log

some weeks ago i visited the state of cordoba and fell in love with the deep caribbean region of colombia. today i just came back from a week in cartagena de indias, and have fallen in love with the caribbean coast again. i miss so much the sea roar. nothing is as pleasant as sleeping with a sea lullaby. perhaps the best song for sleeping. the rain is also good. this was the third time i visited la tortuga, a beach house located in front of the sea, at the crespo neighborhood of cartagena. however, this was the first time i became aware of the flow of sound, of the constant roaring of the sea. i am not sure why this happened until now. it could be possible that is the sea who is becoming noisier nowadays. perhaps is a matter of a season. there were certainly more birds at the shore. amazing. pelicans, seagulls, maria mulatas, and many other kinds of birds that i couldnt recognize. very inspiring to swim in the warm waters of the caribbean sea. it is very rewarding to float on the top of the waves and see the flights of the flocks and single birds. surprising to run into pelicans that are just floating near you. delightful to imagine and dream the story of the pelican man. coming soon. i love the caribbean time elongation. love the sea and the sound of the sea. all the waves crashing in constant motion. love to be inside the sea and to feel his enormous volumes.

yesterday, while having a dinner around a dinning table in the Mary Chung restaurant of central square i came up with a very nice ad-libbing explanation of the emaitinian distortion of time/space. i tried to explain to my friends that one of the reasons mit people does not go far away the institute buildings and tunnels is because there is a sort of hole time/space deformation. the fact that emaitinians have so many things to do around on campus and in computers and in labs totally makes any move across the river, or across mass ave a huge transatlantic displacement. the gravity of the institute is massive. and you cannot scape. if you do, you feel like an astronaut coming back. it happen to me when i came back after long trips to colombia during the awful newenglander winters. it happen to me in the summer when i went to revere beach riding my bike.

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.