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.

On Forgetting

It was cold today and I felt sick, so I worked from home and cooked chicken and vegetable paella. Victor and I booked our airplane tickets to Mexico, a step that I've been trying to avoid as most likely he'll stay and I'll be back in New York in two weeks by myself.  To be honest I can't even start thinking about it; I'm sure I'll be writing about it soon.  

My Mom sent me an email with a quote that read "Nunca la ausencia causa el olvido" which roughly translates to absence never causes forgetfulness. When I moved to New York she was 49, now she is 57; I was 24, now I'm 31.

It's been a while since the last time I wrote, I know; I realized it as I lay on the massage bed at the physical therapy facility listening The Girl from Ipanema. After the trip to Italy, I started getting back pain, so I go every two days to get spine massage. The place is usually busy with elders, or young people who suffered an accident, making me feel guilty to appear so healthy.

The hardest part about writing after a long time is trying to select the stories to tell. Should I write about the man who got killed by a trailer in the corner of my house? About Cristina opening a new Mexican restaurant in the Upper West Side? Should I describe the new developments in my relationship with Victor? Things in my life keep moving in the usual chaotic order; the New York way.

Two weeks ago we had dinner with Victor’s cousin. She lives with her husband at their Upper East Side apartment. Everything seemed perfect: magazine-inspired décor, good and steady jobs, arts management masters, happy couple, waiting for their first child, and above all, no apparent doubts about the decisions taken. Somehow most of my friends, and me, have recurrent crisis questioning the paths we’ve chosen. My friend Arloinne, who moved to Barcelona recently with her husband (who is on his second Masters), confessed the uneasy feeling about starting from scratch in a new country at age 32. Spain is not the best place to look for a job right now, so as an Anthropologist she is applying to work at local coffee shops. “It feels strange that I might be working with people in their 20’s who are just defining themselves,” she continued, “I’m supposed to be building a career or something.” Just like with Victor and I, things are yet to be defined.

Morality at 3:00 am

Victor, Alex and Oscar are discussing morality using the Tiger Woods case as an example. They seem to be in disagreement, but they accord that his main failure was lying about his true nature. "He tried to keep the image of Mr. Perfect for too long,' said Alex, 'he sold the idea of a family guy". I'm more in favor of Victor's opinion, we both acknowledge that maybe he was forced to sell an image he was not even so sure to represent. For me, we all fuck up one way or another, making most moral standards a fallacy. We expect our idols to represent what we can't achieve, or to stand for it on our behalf. Victor, Alex and Oscar keep discussing; they shifted their conversation to compare Tiger with Elliot Spritzer, and how receiving tax money adds to the moral equation. I'm too tired to mention that I advocate for prostitution legalization. In the meantime, Maria sleeps in the couch. The champagne took its toll already.

Post script: Alex wonders when Tiger Woods comeback will happen; he already assumes he will. Oscar thinks the idea is irrelevant; public memory is too short for it to matter.

Sunlight in the sky and and on the pavement

It was snowing as I walked on 43rd Street this morning.

Frozen Honey

I have a bear-shaped honey jar on top of my desk. Since the honey crystallized I had to put the jar upside down, but still a quarter of it is too solid and definitely not coming down. If this bear-shaped honey jar was as an hourglass, the countdown would have stopped on Monday, freezing a precise moment in time. It might also mean that the honey is slowly dripping, extending my perception of time (at least during office hours). I read a good explanation on why every new year feels shorter than the previous one. When you are six years old, a year is actually a sixth of your entire life. A sixth of my life now is represented by 5 years, so one year is just a tiny fraction that promises to get smaller as years go by. I suddenly remember my 3th grade Math teacher saying “You can eternally divide fractions into smaller fractions.”

I haven't decided on my 2010 resolutions. I guess I'll just wait until the Chinese New Year's celebration to come with a thoughtful list of resolutions and the roadmap on how to achieve them. I used to be too faithful that things will be completed just by naming them. Now, as experience starts to settle, I know magic is not enough. Of course it doesn't mean that I lost my appetite to wish for wonderful and unrealistic things to happen (like Victor finding a great job in New York).

I´m at home by myself waiting for the clay facemask to dry. Today is the first day of a new decade which feels as yesterday, with the difference that I´m trying really hard to make-believe that indeed a new era is staring just now, as the clay is sucking all impurity from my skin. An indecisive new year´s eve marked the celebration, just the precise reflection of the last years. This was the first year we had no plans, so we just decided to go with the flow. We started the evening having a late lunch/early dinner with friends from my childhood at a Thai place, later making a stop at Veneiros for a taste of their famous cheesecake, and we ended at Café Frida playing DJ with my iPhone and talking to Margarita Pracatan, an underground celebrity and personal friend of Boy George. After a long night, an unexpected call from my cousins in Mexico and realizing that Victor is my family made the new beginning worth.