I wasn't thinking, I just thought I was thinking...

I learn a new language like babies learn to talk. I went to a school in which English teachers were coming and going, and the English class was a “dead time”, cause there was nobody there to teach us something, so I never had a proper English training. that’s why all I have learn come from an early exposition to cable TV, that’s why I say that I have learn English like babies learn to talk by listening to others, I have also read books in English, and by those standars I would have to say that I’m in a “six years old girl” level of English, that’s how I mesure my progress. That’s why I really scary by the idea of having to come to this English course, cause even though I reach the four level in the English test I’m pretty sure that if the method were other I wouldn’t even have reached the first level.

 Now that I’m finishing the course, and I think I have done pretty well, I have to wonder why, was this luck? No, It can’t be that, I have never been a lucky person, with me is always the same, if something might go wrong it’ll turn out to be horrible, so no, it’s not luck. Is it that I’m  really smart? Mmm don’t think so, cause if that were the case I would do good in all my subjects, and I’m very much aware that I have to burn my eyes studying  and I have other classmates that read the texts one time, party all weekend and get the same results as I do in all the works. So, is neither luck nor intelligence. What is it then? I’m about to say that is balls, but that would be too rude for an essay, I’ll say guts, yes I think I have guts. I must be like that cause the way I’ve learn to speak English is the most unconventional way, and that is something that I do, or try to do with all the language.

 I listen to someone speaking in another language and something is activated in my brain and, like a cryptologist, I begin to decifrate the code, by context or things like that, and I’m sure that everybody is able to do the same thing, but no one dare, most people say “Oh you speak another language, I don’t understand it, I’m too lazy to do something about it… We are in a spanish speaking country, for god sake!! Speak to me in christian or at least bring a translator!!” and this is the same kind of people that think that the only way of learning a language is by taking a course. And this is the same kind of people that spend greats loath of money in English course and by end of it they know the very least of it. Why? Well because an English course gives you the tools to learn English, I mean, they teach you the structure of the sentence the syntaxis and gramatic, the kind of things you learn in the “castellano” subject on the school, and I think you would agree with me that if on one side that teach you to speak and write well in a “cult and formal” register  it does not teach you to speak it if you don’t know nothing about it, I mean we can’t put a baby in a school “castellano” class for him to learn to speak. So, what I’m trying to say is that the process of learning a language is very much a self taught task, you can not expect that someone force you to start thinking in English.

As I say I learn English by myself at home, with the TV on and with the help of some short story books of the greatest English writers, like Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. By I haven’t learned the structure of English, everything I have to figure out things by context. I never learn by memory all the irregular verbs, if someone asked me for them I would be blank, by if have to use it in a sentence I would know easily how, on the other hand I know many people that know all the irregular verbs by memory but don’t know how to use them.

Maybe I should had taken the English courses from the level one, to know the mechanic of the English language, but all I need is to speak and write English I won’t ever teach someone English so I don’t need that, though it would be interesting.

Open letter to the everyday day guy and to the everyday gal

I’m being a rebel today (a tiny one). I’m not going to do what I have to do cause what I must do is to write about a Chilean person whom I consider to be the greatest one. And to be honest there is no one I can call like that, and I don’t need to have someone with that title. I don’t really understand this obsession with the image of a hero. Why do we need to have them? I think that is because to know that someone is willing to do what we do not dare to do make us, somehow, to feel a little more secure and awake in us a feel of admiration.

Therefore, as the title of today’s post suggest, this is an open letter to those Chileans who do the right thing and love what they do, and I’m not gonna call them heroes because they are just living their life, luckily the way they wanted to.

So, who are they? Well they are just the everyday person that you may see them on the street or in the bus, you might even share with them everyday and you don’t know it. What do they do? Well they stand up for themselves and for what they believe, and they are just good and caring.  If I ever meet someone like that I would like to ask them how do they manage to be strong enough to wake up everyday believing on themselves, especially in a country that is culturally know for having a traditional way of letting people down?  

Jesus! I just got too corny to even bear it, didn’t I? But I do believe what I just said (that’s the worst part). I’m sorry for not choosing an individual character, but  it wasn’t just because it was hard, is because there is really no one I consider to be the beholder of that kind of title, not a Chilean person at least. And is not a snob thing, because I’m not the kind of person who believes that there are countries that are better than others, I just think that a great person is a great person everywhere and that has nothing to do with the place where that person was born. I think that is all in the life experience they had.

So that’s it, good bye.

Burning light

Today I would like to talk about a film called “I hire a contract killer” of the Finland director Aki Kaurismäki. This film is set in England and tells the story of a French man that after spending fifteen years working as an accountant he get sack because the company needs to save money and, as he is French, the company decide to dismiss him. Because he had spend his youth working in a that horrible place, and he didn’t had anything else in life, he decide to commit suicide, but he fail at every attempt he made, or he get cold feet and resign from it at the last minute. So, because of that he decided to hire a contract killer.  And because of that, he doesn’t have the tinniest idea of who the hell is the killer or when he will be murder.

The film is from 1989 and is a little low budget so is not very good, is not that I think that a film needs to have a lot of money invested for to be good, is just that this film is a bit lost. but it has a plus (actually two great things) one the protagonist is the French actor Jean Pierre Leaud, and I like him a lot, he was the protagonist of the five films about Antoine Doinel of Truffaut. And two in one scene of the film the protagonist is running away from the guy he think it might be the killer and hide inside a bar and in the bar there is a singer on stage and that singer is no one else but JOE STRUMMER himself. If the film had turned out to be bad I would have mind just because of that scene, I love when things like that happen in a film.

The film in general is pretty weird, I don’t know what genre is it, but I quite like it. The actors play their parts weirdly, a bit like over acting or under-acting… I don’t know, but is weird. I think that is because is definitely a comedy but everyone acts as if it were the most tragic drama of the world, everyone is really serious, even the film is filmed in a dramatic way. At times I think the film get a little boring, but maybe is because when I watched I expected a lot more action, because of the exiting plot, but nothing like that happen in the film. And after all I think that the film is like life itself, everyone lives the most exiting drama on their own heads, but everything is a lot more simple that that, even if you hire a contract killer.

However,  this isn’t a great film but I couldn’t think in any other film to write about right now, maybe is because I was listening to The Clash this morning, I don’t know.

PS. Now that I’m finishing I come to realize that this post is really lame. But what the hell my job is done! is not like if my other post were good.

I was looking for a job and then a find a job… And heaven knows I’m miserable now.

We all must work in order to survive, that’s a fact and we all agree with it. For many people the thing is simple: Job= money= goods. Is a no mistaken equation, right? We seek in this goods the satisfaction and the return of our invest time- the time we spend working is compensated by this brand new I-pod (that I don’t really need) -that’s what we said. Well, of course that we also work because we need to pay for things we do need (like a house, food and later on our own coffin). But not everything must come down to that. The time we spend working is our life and if we waist our time doing something we hate, but day dreaming about getting that I-pod, we are going to be miserable. If we hate our job we do it wrong and we make it hard for the people that work with us and that may like the job. So I think that we all should look for jobs that we like (at least a little bit).
I know that not everybody can afford to have a vocational job, that sometimes we like a job but the pay is not enough, etc. But I think that every job is an opportunity of learning something about ourself. For example, when I was a little girl I use to think that working in a library was a great job, ‘till I do it, so I learn that librarian was a bad job for me.
However, the job subject is very much related to the character subject, I mean everything depends on what kind of person we are. I once read a study of the anthropologist Helen Fisher and she describe 4 types of personalities: explorer, builders, directors and negotiator. Each one were related to the level of some kind of hormone in our brain (I don’t remember the names in English)*. But, for example explorer were the kind of people that were always looking for challenges and new sensations, they were open mind people, but on the down side they were risk taker and with an inclination to have drug addictions, this kind of people should get jobs as parachute instructors, or something like that; the builders on the other hand were serious, correct and traditional people, and very much reliable, a job as a judge in the supreme court would be fine for them; then the directors are the brainy ones, the ones that spend too much time examining things and that likes to make the decisions, then, as a fault, they may be stubborn; and last but not least the negotiator, which are the kind of sensitive people that are always seeking for answers, they are very empathic with other people and have a hard time making decisions. We all have a little bit of all of these four personalities but one or two domains above the others, and this should be a way of knowing what type of job we should seek.
For me, for my personality, as I say it in an early post, should be a job that makes me travel and that occupied all my life, I would say that I would like to be a writer, but I don’t know if I have what it takes to do such thing, anyway I will try (but secretly). I think that I would like to be a weekly columnist in some newspaper, spend my time traveling and writing about interesting things, that would be ideal, because is not a job that requires to work with a lot of people, which would be hard for me -but most of all for my co-workers- because I like to take my own decisions, I’m very independent. So, I would like to be an anthropologist/writer/globetrotter.

Well that’s it for this week.

* Now I do: Explorer have more dopamine on their brains, builders have more serotonin, deirectors have more testosterone and negotiators have more estrogen.

Frank McCourt

Hi, today I must write about one historical character that I would like to meet, and as always is hard to choose just one. But, what I’m gonna do is to write about a person that maybe it didn’t do so much for the historic development of the world and is not well known, but I think that the history is not build around big events and historic characters but for process that were move for the simple people.

In the first place I must say that I love writers I admired them very much, especially literature writers. I really like the interaction between an author and the reader. When you read a book you are not only knowing a story you are also knowing the writer and most of the time yourself, I mean you are what you read, right?, especially when you are a child, I think that then those books you read became part of you. That’s why the person I would like to meet is a writer.

I haven’t decided yet, but I think that my favorite book is “Angela’s ashes” written by Frank McCourt , this is an autobiography and in this book the author tell us the story of his hard childhood in the Irish city of Limerick. I don’t know if is the best book ever written, I’m not the one to judge that, but what I know is that it is a wonderful book. The author tell us about his childhood narrating from his past child voice, and he put you in a hard world from the child innocent perspective and what you find there is shocking, hilarious and many times to rough to even bear it.  

I would like to meet this author because 1) His books are great and I am so happy everytime I read one of his books, beside I think that he is like me, he likes words, in one part of Angela’s Ashes he said that he loves Shakespeare's work because is like having jewelry in your mouth, and I feel the same, I really enjoy language (as strange as this might sound). But the second reason of my inclination toward this person is because he was a resilient person, I mean he had a difficult childhood but the way he speak of it and the memories that he kept are the memories of a person that loves life and believe in goodness. In many parts of Angela's Ashes he speak of the little moments of joy that he had as a child and speak of those moments with great passion, like if his whole life where reduced to those single moments, and I feel ashamed of myself because I’m always forgetting the good stuff but I’m always remembering the bad moments.

I would like to continue speaking of this author because I find him fascinating, but I can’t. all I want to say is that I would like to have met him, but he died last year. I don’t know what question would had made, but spend sometime with him listening to some of his stories would had being great.

blur

      I find extremely hard to talk about my current favorite song because there isn’t just one. Plus, to talk about how my favorite song make me feel and why it is special to me doesn’t make it any easier. But I’ll try anyway.
     Well, even though I like to look for new songs, I’m constantly turning back to old classics, I mean there is no one like Morrissey (for example) to express how I feel. 
       And my favorite song, right now, is “she’s so high” from the British band “blur”. It’s been so many years since I hear it for the first time that I don’t remember when was it. But the song didn’t use to be one of my favorite. Its distorted sound and the repetitive lyrics (that when I was a little girl didn’t understand) made it a good song, but not great. But I’m a music lover and my theory about music is that what I DON'T like is 1) what  I don’t know; 2) what I don’t understand and 3) reggaeton.
     A while ago I listened this song again and I pay it real attention to the lyrics, and to my surprise I found myself loving it and, at the same time, I felt a bit uncomfortable about the lyrics, like if they were rubbing those lyrics in my face, like if Damon Albarn (the vocalist) were making fun of me, by guessing what's was going through my mind. i'm sure they just got wrong the pronoun. Now I understand that its distorted sound, the repetitive lyrics, etc. are part of the meaning of the song, it’s what completes the whole idea, and the obsessive tempo goes really well with the lyrics.
     Some people find Blur a bit shallow, but I think that it's because they haven’t pay real attention to their songs; I mean they can be sarcastic and sometimes brutally direct (like in this song). It’s a really good band; Damon Albarn is a great musician and Graham Coxon (the lead guitarist) one of the most gifted guitarist. Even if someone doesn’t like blur they got to admit that their music was innovator and impeccable.
    They are not my favorite band, though. But once in a while I listen some of their song in the radio and then I spend the rest of the day with that song stuck in my head.

London Calling!

Hi! Today’s topics it’s a great one, I’ll be talking about which country I want to visit.

I must say that travelling it’s the only way I can see myself in the future. I would like to travel to so many places that I would probably need to live twice to do that (and a lot of money as well). As every young person I don’t want to end up with an office job, but (and this is the weird part) I want to have a job that requires my entire dedication, I mean for example I don’t want to work eight hours a day and then go home and have my personal life set apart from my work, NO I want a work on which I can dedicate my life (the whole of it). Cause I really believe that I’m the sort of person that can spend a year studying the architecture of a cathedral, as long as I can be in a place like Rumania, and then move to Madagascar (for example).

But before, I want to go to England, the United Kingdom in general or even Ireland. I know this may sound a little snobbish but I’ve  spend so many years listening bands from places like Manchester and reading books and novels from British authors that I really wanna go there, specially for the comedy, I love to watch British’s sitcoms. I think comedy it’s best way of knowing people, I mean if you know the type of sense humor that someone has then you’ll know pretty much everything about his/her personality; and judging by their sense of humor, I think that British people must be really nice (I know how subjective that is but anyway…) . I think that it is a great country. I like Latin-American culture as well, but anyway I want to go to England, mainly because it’s one of the fewest countries that have real job opportunities for people with an art history degree. I would like to go there and take a graduate degree in archeology, or something related to social and cultural studies, and work (of course this is day dreaming only), live there for a couple of year and then see what’s next.

Another place that I would like to visit is Israel, because I want to study Jewish culture, actually next year I want to take a diploma course in religious studies with focus on Jewish religion. I’ve always been interesting in that culture, etnia and religion (because Judaism is those three things at once). I don’t know what to expect from that country because last semester I took a course in Judaism (a CFG, which it’s not much) and what I’ve learn from that it’s that it so wide the expectrum of Judaism that it’s very difficult to understand it fully.

Well that’s it, If I’m lucky and smart (If I’m lucky enough to be smart, actually) I’ll move to London , because for what I know (and have read)it’s the city with the largest mixture of cultures in the world, that sounds to me like it’s the capital of the world.