I'm listening to Gustavo Dudamel and eating one of the best sandwiches I've ever prepared: slow cooked ham, aged cheddar, mango chutney and spinach. Today is one of the few nights I'm able to stay home as my travel schedule is crazy; Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Canada, St. Lucia, Alabama and California between February and March. Last week Sean, Javier and I returned from Bogota and Anolaima, where we conducted creative and scriptwriting sessions with community members and visited a family coffee farm. I'm still impressed on the process that takes to prepare a single cup of coffee. Every step needs to be perfect, from growing the plant in the right environment and light, to the drying, fermentation, toasting and grinding. All that is needed to steal some of its scent as we pour hot water through it. (And then mix it with milk and sugar).

I rearranged my bedroom so now I can actually sit at my desk and write. The wall I'm facing has a collage of unrelated pictures and papers, including a business card from EL FENIX, my aunt Pilar's jewelry store in Florence. After almost thirty years she is closing it as sales dropped sharply in the last couple of years. My grandfather's store, which provided for most of my family's resources, had that same name. By EL FENIX card I placed a postcard from a Gustave Caillebotte painting of three shirtless men scraping a parquet floor of a Parisian apartment; they have a bottle of wine and a glass on the floor.

Last night we went to see RED at the Golden Theater in Broadway. A new production staring Alfred Molina portrays a certain time in the life of Mark Rothko, when he was working on a series of paintings to be displayed at the recently opened Four Seasons in Midtown Manhattan. The script is depth in meaning and irony, showing the complexity of being human and the circumstances that shape us. For me it felt like a wake up call: bring meaning to all you do, acknowledge what was built and created before you and understand the responsibility you inherit within, the many shades a color has and how any canvas represents only ten percent of the art piece, with everything that was left out becoming the substance that support what you see. The Rothko on scene talked about Jackson Pollock, about Pollock's intensity when maturing as an artist and the lack of meaning he must have found when he finally got fame. Rothko decided not to sell his paintings to the Four Seasons. We don't need to be artists to loose sense of what is important. For me it's too easy to get carried away by materialism, new technology and the vast amount and speed of information making it impossible to prioritize. I guess part of our complexity is that we both feel the need for lightness and depth. After Abstract Expressionism came Pop Art.

The worst post ever.

One more day without writing and this blog would be considered officially closed. This is why I'm writing today, to keep it alive and breathing, at least on a comatose state. As I always say (you must be tired of this) it's hard to capture everything that happened in the past month into one post or a single paragraph. That's why here is a short list of (ir)relevant things and thoughts to share:

1. I think Astoria is becoming gay, or so it seems as lots and lots of cute white clean-cut guys are riding the subway every evening. Good for sightseeing but not very promising for all the single looking-for-a-steady-boyfriend girls that populate Astoria – which are quite a lot. (Not me!)

2. I was in Guadalajara for a few days, dividing my time between work meetings, renewing the tremendous H1B visa, sharing with friends, going to art openings, discovering the new crop of artists, making Patrick Charpenel feel awkward, cooking with my Mom and kissing my boyfriend for the last time in months.

3. I didn’t got food poisoning in Guatemala even when I ate a full stack of Mayan tamales.

4. I got a Geisha wig to wear tonight at Oscar’s 39th Birthday Party.

5. I’m glad to see that lots of people in Guadalajara are opening their own business. Everything keeps moving

6. I discovered that even with all my travel from the past three years, I still don’t have enough miles to get into the VIP rooms between flights. (sucks!)

7. Victor stayed in Mexico, meaning that our history of long-distance relationship reopens, which means that it’s not enough that I produce soap operas for work, I insist in living one.

8. I think this post sucks, but what the hell. I hope that at least being honest about it saves my reputation.