Nothing

Well I haven't been doing this. Just letting this poor little fish swim around eternally. It embodies all my frustration and acts it out - and I keep hoping there'll be none left for my own everyday life.

(It obviously doesn't work. There's still quite some left for me. Am off trying to deal with it.)

how?

I don't get it... how is it possible that he DIED? that he is DEAD? what an absurd word... it feels so impossibly weird to pronounce it, in any language... this word has no meaning. I mean, really. It doesn't.

optimism

OK well I'm definitely not getting obsessed with it, which is good, I guess... and probably also means that the experiment will have lived a very short life, less than a laboratory white mouse.

Anyway, I'm still here to say (whom? why?) that my optimism still survives despite all the failed attempts to secure a job which makes me feel like I'm where I should be.. or at least getting there. At the moment I'm getting farther and farther from it, but coming up with alternative plans. Which might obviously all be bullshit, but they make me feel OK until I get that confirmed. So better than anything. The important thing is to have a plan (or more.. but then that risks confusion/loss of focus), and to have something to look forward to and to work towards. Next step, next award... I should soon get a conference ticked on my CV, see how it goes... then a bit more work.. then stop work.. and go to Rome, back to the Città Eterna for a little week to celebrate our first year (and beside that, just for the sake of it :) )

Fascinating isn't it? Like the modest Chevillard said, "Hier encore, un de ses biographes est mort d'ennui." (More or less... but my life feels so full... maybe that's why my blog is so empty... enough for now...)

the question

The main thing here is that I'd like to know how this thing works - for YOU, in the first place... and then, for myself... guess everyone their version; I'm a beginner, and what I feel is a tickling little thrill, might be that of the beginner, the newcomer, the unexperienced explorer who gets excited setting foot on the Mount Everest - never mind its a daily walk for the sherpas...

So, the question is:

Is it possible not to get obsessed with your blog, once you started and et a taste for it? Don't you start walking around in the world thinking of what would be a good thing to put down on here, or how to put something so it renders some of what you think or feel or discover? 

Doesn't it produce the Japanese tourist effect, which travels with its camera and harldy sees first-hand reality any more, more interested in taking the compulsory snapshot of it - with him/herself, in group or alone, in front of the thing... with the difference perhaps that the Japanese tourist follows a guide and goes to see the predefined must in each place (from Big Ben to the Eiffel Tower), while a blogger (hopefully) has an eye for uncanonical places, moments, and things, to which s/he is the only one - or at least the first - to attribute interest...

My question is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, folks of the Blogoshpere, tell me how you live it! I'm really interested!

the moon

That poor little fishy up there... I was wondering it it keeps swimming around even when I'm not on here and no-one else is looking either... 

Il n'y a pas de lune. C'est le bout du tunnel. (Chevillard)

(the moon on the pic in the prev posting shows my shrinking chances to get to the end of the tunnel before it definitely closes on me... or is there a new full moon coming? how was it again about hope?)

and now... what?

horror vacui
let's give is a smooth start... with a decrescendo moon seen from Gozo (I will often use the three dots I think... points de suspension... as if anyone expected anything - cos what suspense without expectations?)

Found this clever thought in an online paper (???) on weblogs (yes, that's where I'm coming from), quoted from Vaclav Havel: 
 "Hope is the ability to work for something just because it is right, whether it stands a chance of succeeding or not." 
Does it make sense? I can't see hope as an ability... isn't it rather some sort of stubborn energy often feeding on nothing from nowhere, just because one has no best choice than hoping.. cos otherwise one would do nothing, just gaze at the TV maybe, or sit down and die (I mean, wait for death... if it was so easy, just sit down and die...)


(Don't ask me what's the link, who said there's one? there are too many...)
(I go finish that paper now... online...or not... [more suspense])