Thursday, October 14, 2010

I love airplanes

I said I wrote many letters from the time I left home when I was seventeen and went to the barracks.

Yes, I went to the Brazilian Air Force.

I loved airplanes.

I still love airplanes.

I can not say exactly what happened to my life that led me away from them as a profession, since I left the Air Force in 1995. I do not know what led me to reconnect them, but I can not but admit that I love airplanes.

I also loved the wars. I did not understand, I could not understand, I was really too young, too naive, too raw to understand intellectually the wars as they really are, so loved militarism in general. I loved everything about studying World War II, about the Vietnam War and especially the Falklands War.

It's a long story.

I was twelve years old when the Falklands War broke out. It was this war that I had contacted all about militarism. Hence wanting to be military was a leap. I ended up being one of them, but something went wrong along the way and the dream faded quickly.

Today, I do not believe in war. I study them with great curiosity, but I do not see them as a deed of glory, but made of pain and suffering, and do not wish to be wars carried out or extended, or planned, nor romanticized. Wars are all bad, without exception.
 
But airplanes are a separate story. Whether civilian or military aircraft, are magnificent machines.

Interestingly, I have no desire to fly. Or like simulation games.

I do not know, but there is something interesting in my interest in stories of war and aviation technology. Indeed, at one time I loved astronautics, space race, rockets and satellites, spaceships and probes. I dreamed of being an astronaut, like all boys have dreamed one day.


But that dream has passed. As life goes on!

Now, I'm a bureaucrat, a government official, a accommodated, a cynical and skeptical. I am a sort of mulch stripped of illusions.

But the letters show that I has been different.

And the piles of magazines prove that loved aviation aircraft more intensively.

If only I had become a mechanical engineer, but no.

I ended up became a business administrator. A businessman who insists on bureaucracy, without faith, or heat, or hopes.

Why follow our life so strange directions?
 

About the things I wrote

I said in my first post in this blog I write a lot, every day.

It is not true.

I wish I could write all day, but I can not. I have much to do, although this 'to much' does not mean it's necessarily more important than writing. Much of what I do is trivial, but still, the banalities are important part of life.

Still, writing is not the most important thing I do in life, definitely.

Anyway, we should not now discuss why I do not write every day. It just convenient to make a summary of what I wrote. So, after this overview, I have a real idea of how much I write and how much I wrote.

In retrospect, it seems little. Looking from another angle, it seems like a lot.


I started writing when I was literate, at preschool. But nothing remains of that era. I have a few books in high school, and I confess that I did not even look at them in search of some writing or text that was my original authorship. Maybe there are some. It would be interesting to read them to see the young man I was, or what I thought a long time ago.

What's sure is that from July 1987 I started to write enough letters to my family, because this time I left home and went to the barracks, and then even use the phone was something forbidding. So, I used a lot of paper and pen to communicate with my family and some dear friends.


Well, I have kept dozens of these letters since that time.

I keep them as precious, and I want to scan them and save them in digital format for posterity. I think this a very cool thing to read about what we thought about old joys and old problems, now all resolved and forgotten. As life goes on!


I started writing hard in the barracks, in writing courses. The methods adopted were the most stringent possible, and interestingly, did awaken in me the creativity and dreams.

I then proceeded to write short stories, small annoyances, which served as entertainment for my brother as I finished my course in military training and went to work at an air base.


There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of absurd short stories.

In the end, I put it all together and created a book whose more appropriate name to be given was "Neurons in Fury!."

Never had the courage to show it to anyone, but my brother liked nonsense and showed few stories to my friends of youth.

Finally, I ended up passing the text from paper to computer and now Neurons in Fury! is available for the whole world, for free, in two very popular sites: Scribd and Bookess.

I have not stopped writing. But I wrote after deserves a post aside.

I think I have written a book of concatenated short stories as Neurons in Fury! even when I was 22 years old was a beautiful done.

Of course after that I gave a polishing in text, fix some things, and when I jointed stories together I had to use some amendments that did not exist in the original texts, but even so, the bottom line was built even when I was 21, 22 years .

But first we must remember the letters.

Ah! The letters!

Thursday, October 7, 2010

My MP3

A few years ago I posted here that liked to listen to Frank Zappa. Then I posted that I do not hear more rock.

Let the facts: I still hear music?

Yes, I still hear music, and quite. I live traveling and while enjoying for long hours my music on my MP-3.

So if someone came and asked me what I've been listening, I would say:

- Well, in my MP-3 you can find Pavarotti, the soundtrack of the movie Batman Begins by Hans Zimmer, the soundtrack of the movie Letters from Iwo Jimma, the soundtrack of the movie Star Wars Episode IV, by John Williams, more a collection of thirteen songs by John Williams composed for motion pictures and still Laura Pausini and Andrea Bocelli.


But it has also Renée Flaming and Brin Terfell with Under the Stars, and a compilation called Classicals 2009, with several famous musicians and performers such as Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo, Sarah Brightman, among others, playing a lot of known works. I love Chi Mai, by Morriconi.

It also has Emma Shapplin with Carmino Meo, very good to hear.

Finally, there is Backstreet Boys with his Backstreet Boys and Millenium.

Yeah, I heard Mussorgsky, Richard Strauss and Carmina Buranna of Orf.

Rock?

Well, there's Bon Jovi.

Viva Bon Jovi!

Consumers

Once day I thought writing a blog about consumption. Not that the idea was original.

No.

There in the United States, at least I've heard about it, there are magazines that specialize in testing products for popular consumption and then put expert opinion or simple consumer praising, criticizing, or simply giving opinions about what they consumed.

My idea was to post my impressions on the site about what I would consume, but, as always, the idea went no further.

I created the blog on UOL, posted two small, minimal text and lost a darn time fiddling with templates and other trifles, and he remained in the air from April to September 2008. He remained with only two posts and received only five external visits.

A failure.

One more failure.

But, to not say that there's nothing left of it, I post here, as a kind of obituary, the two small text files that existed for this brief period. They are:
 
Consumers, a blog for consumers

You like to consume?
This is your blog.
And:
Consuming since the uterus

We are born consumers and can not deny this fact. There are many people twisting the nose for consumerism, but still consuming things that are to be consumed in this world. There is simply no way for non-consumption. Even a hermit uses the gifts of nature.

We consume from the womb. We do not stop consuming even after death.

What are the things we consume?

What criteria do we use to consume what we consume?

Perhaps these questions are quite personal, but the exchange of experience is nonetheless an interesting thing.

So, go ahead.
But we ended up not going ahead.

Farewell then, Consumers, the blog that was to be for all consumers, but that turned out to be nothing at all.