Thursday, June 26, 2008

Chile

This is my fourth day in Chile. I'm here on vacations and I've enjoyed every moment. The first day I ate fish and shellfish, and I ate so much that my dad asked me if I was in prison and I was recently released or if I was eating normally in Norway. I explained to him that in Norway you don't eat that much, there is no real variety in foods and that we chileans do not know how lucky we are of having all this food available, in this quantities and so tasty .... :-) This is truly the land of plenty.
Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised with my country, it has been more than two years and my country has advanced quite a lot, however there are still some things to be improved. It really looks like a developed country up to the point when you have to cross to one of the "shanty towns". There are not many of those and you can tell that the goverment is making great efforts for improving the life of that people. If you look around, you see mainly new cars, everybody looks well fed and wearing nice clothes, there are only a few that are not having a good life. I hope this goverment and the next one can finally make that final jump and eradicate this last signs of poverty and suffering.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Sometimes

The brain is a funny thing, it goes around looking for explanations until it finds a way to explain what it does not understand. This can be verified by reading a text with some orthographic errors and some misspellings, the brain will match each misspelling with something that makes sense to each particular phrase. This can be really helpful if everything goes well and the matches are correct, but if the matches are wrong then the thing gets way more interesting. Why all this? Well, because our brains also do the same thing regarding our feelings, since those cannot be understood it tries to match them to something it can handle and logical explanations appear where they do not belong.
Because there are situations when we are confronted with things we do not expect, or we do not know how to handle, this explaining mechanism in our brains triggers and starts finding explanations for things that should not be explained. Sometimes we have the answer right in front of us but we deny it and let our brain elaborate very complicated theories about things happenning around us. My brain has been trying to explain an event that happened to me yesterday evening in a bar, for which the answer is very simple yet my brain has refused to accept and in the meanwhile it has come with the most incredible answers. The good thing is that it is finally accepting the answer, so probably next week it will stop spinning and move forward.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Bar stories

Tonight I had a really nice evening, and part of it was spent in a very nice bar. While being there I remembered a song from a singer named Ricardo Arjona, the song title is "Historias de bar" which in english is "Bar stories" and it made me realize that bars are probably one of the most complicated environments that you can find.
To start with, you don't know what's happening on the table next to you, maybe there is a love declaration, maybe somebody is breaking with somebody or even there could be a huge deal going on. It is such a public yet private space, anything could happen and you probably won't even notice it!
I wonder what happened around me, was there a break up? was there an engagement? did somebody close a deal? I only what happened on my table, and maybe that's all I need to know... why do I want to know what happened around me? how useful is that information to me?
Well, maybe it's just because I'm about to go back to my country for three weeks... maybe I just want to sit down and relax, maybe it is too late in the evening to write this post.... Maybe I should go to sleep.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Living on my own

Today I was listening to some Queen music and I happened to listen to that song. Despite being very simple, it is a very deep song. After that I listened to "Don't stop me now" and again, another very simple song with a lot of content. How can anybody write songs like those?
Well, the reason why I'm listening to music and paying attention to it is because I decided that it was time to start playing guitar again, so last saturday I went to a recommended music store and I bought myself a new electric guitar. Since I haven't played guitar in almost 13 years, my fingers are literally bleeding, but I'm having the time of my life. I'm a little bit rusty, but what the heck, it has been a long time since I played electric guitar.