Monday, January 28, 2013

My heart is crying today

My heart is crying today. I don't know what to say. I have no words. As I watched the news - the parents who lost their children, the husbands who lost their wives, the children left orphan, best friends lost forever - all I could do was cry with and for those who were all a little like me.




Death is never so evil when it comes as a tragedy - harvesting so many in so little time. 

I found this poem on facebook. I wanted to share here. Here are the words I couldn't find:






THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF OUR LIVES

Fabricio Carpinejar

I died in Santa Maria today. Who didn't? I died at 1925 dos Andradas Street. In a choppy slope of smoke.

The smoke was never so black in Rio Grande do Sul. Never a cloud was so ominous.

Not even the most morbid and electrical storms desire your company. You you follow alone, spare, like a page torn from a map.

The smoke blotched the sky forever. Blue turned gray, night came on January 27, 2013.

The flames calmed down at 5:30 am, but death will never be controlled.

I died because I have a teenage daughter who comes home late.


I died because I went into a nightclub thinking I could leave in case of fire.


I died because I prefer to be near the stage to hear the band better.

I died because I've already confused a bathroom door with an emergency exit.

I died because the fire never apologizes when passing.

I died because I was somehow those who died.

I died suffocated by excessive death. How can I wake up again?

The building had not landed in the morning, like a plane on the runway runaway.

There was only one exit and fear came on all sides.

Teenagers will not sleep in till lunchtime. They will not remember anything. Or understand how suddenly they've distanced themselves from the future.

More than two hundred and forty youngsters without the final kiss of mother, father, siblings.

The phones still ring in the chest of the victims in the Municipal Gymnasium.

Families still looking for their children. Kids in college are eternally silent.

Nobody has the courage to meet and tell what happened.

The words have lost their meaning.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Dreaming of Paul ...


My first book - I wrote to 14 years in Portuguese - is to be released very soon here in the U.S. - in English. The book in Portuguese is called Thank you, girl - a Beatles song. In English is The Little Girl From Yesterday (Yesteray being another Beatles song) This book is a product of my Beatlemania. At that time I was crazy mad in love with Paul McCartney ... well, still am. But Paul is nothing more than 38 years older than me. So I wrote a story in which the main character takes a time machine and goes to 1964 ... okay that was still a good age difference - 13 to 21 .... but who said Vicka would wait until age 21 to go meet her beloved Beatles?

I stand here remembering all the times I dreamed of Paul McCartney. I still dream. Sometimes more often than others, but almost every week ... I'll never forget a dream I had in eighth grade. I do not remember how, but I met Paul, I asked him to give me his phone number, bc then we could stay in touch ... I remember he had written it on a piece of paper - a little crumpled, torn and folded over... just like those pieces of paper that we used to send phone numbers or test answers in the classroom.
I remember seeing the numbers and getting all happy. Then I woke up. I was so frustrated and so angry because it was just a dream, but I thought if I could only see the number ... if I could only remember the number, I'd call. After all once dreamed of Cassiano Gabus Mendes (an actor) and I did not even know his name and called him by his name. ... And I was not even a fan of Cassiano, I was just watching a soap opera with him. So those dreams had to have some kind of special energy - the kind that takes information from every corner of the world and brings to your subconscious ... I dunno.
But unfortunately I never got to see the number that piece of paper. Oh, sadness!

Sunday, January 06, 2013

You don't floss enough

So Every time I go to the dentist, I am assigned a butcher who will spend a few minutes drilling blood out of my gums with those metal sticks (sorry, in my layman ignorance, I don't know what they are called), then proceed to bury a floss line in between my teeth as if she was flossing her mother-in-law's *** (my apologies to the nice mother-in-laws out there, including my own - I am just perpetuating the age-old idea that m-i-ls are evil entities per se).
Anyway, after bleeding me to the point in which I might have to go for a blood transfusion, the butcher announces from the height of her hygienist  degree that the reason why I bled so much is that I didn't floss enough.
And I obviously felt guilt and shame, because I knew better than not to floss.
Six months ago though, I had it with the butchering of my gums. I decided I would floss every single day and, I would like to see the hygienist tell me again that I bleed bc I don't floss, even though she was the one poking me with an iron toothpick and and strangulating me with a white line.
That's what I did. I might have skipped 5 out of 180 days. Those 5 days were due to arriving home at 2 am after a New Years party, or spending the night in an airplane/airport/shuttle mess - in other words, situations in which the whole regular body hygiene gets overlooked by obvious reasons of complete exhaustion.
So I get to the dentist after flossing religiously every single day (with the exceptions above mentioned), and she decides it's time to do the poking thing - that in which they poke you and then call out numbers at random for another person to write. I had a couple of 4's and 5's, which she said very categorically were due to lack of flossing.
Then I charged with the line I had been waiting six months to use: "But I floss every day."
Quick silence.
"Well, those where in the back teeth, it's normal that it happens in the back teeth."
Then she proceeded to to do that which they call cleaning - and which I call "bleeding me into oblivion with an iron toothpick"
I bled like there was no tomorrow. She then buried that floss inside my gums - nothing out of the ordinary. And I left the dentist feeling pretty banged up, wondering whether I had been hit my a Mack truck or by a 747.
My conclusion - I could have spent those 6 months without flossing and I would have heard the same crap and suffered the same amount of pain - just that I would not have gone through the daily suffering and the of flossing.