SOMETHING YOU FEEL PASSIONATE ABOUT (free post)

“Kell wore a very peculiar coat”.

That first quote was the one that introduced me to a place some knows as heaven and others as hell. For how I see it, it has a little of both. A place where forming bonds with anyone is a dangerous thing, because they’ll probably end up dead. A place where the rules we know are bent and even broken, so anything is possible. Here, you’ll laugh, you’ll hate, you’ll ugly cry, you’ll want to kill and hug everyone at the same time.

This place is called High Fantasy.

Now, this term can be applied when you’re referring to movies, TV shows, graphic novels, books, etc. I’ll just focus in the last one.

In case you don’t know, High Fantasy is a subgenre of Fantasy. Its main characteristic is that, in difference with Urban Fantasy or Low Fantasy, the entire setting of the story is an imaginary world that has nothing to do with our reality. A clear example of this would be The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I now, it sounds amazing. And most of the time, it is.

This type of stories have a really special place in my heart. They give you the opportunity of unplugged from routine. You can dive into this new world where, again, everything is possible. You can be a pirate, or a dragon master, or a royal member. You get to fight the bad guys, go on adventures to distant lands, meet the stories about kingdoms, about wars, about magic. Even now, just writing about this is sending chills up to my arms. Because, come on. Who doesn’t want to be a wizard? Or control elemental magic? Or fly in the back of a dragon?

And even if you’re not interested in any of that, there’s so much more High Fantasy can offer you. Like politic organization, which is always an interesting aspect a book can offer you. Or the social problems within a kingdom. Or how the renegades act against it. After all, even when is a new world built from scratch it will have problems to deal with. Problems that sometimes we can see reflected in our reality.

And because not everything can be sweets and rainbows, there’s a risk in this. As I said before, going into this genre is a dangerous thing to do. It might sound dramatic, but trust me, I know. Because High Fantasy’s authors like to write about this amazing characters you most definitely will fall in love with just so they can crush your hopes and heart at the end of the story. For some reason, they love to kill their own characters and make us feel miserable. I’ve been through a lot of griefs, and they are not fun. So beware.

Going back to the line I started this blog with, it is the first quote of A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. The book that introduced me to this new genre and made me fall in love with it. 

FIESTAS PATRIAS

My Fiestas Patrias were pretty much… uneventful.

My family and I have never been a big fan of Fondas. We used to go sometimes when I was a kid, but it was merely for me to learn more about my own culture. The time passed, and it didn’t matter how many different places we’d go, every single one would look the same for me. The Chilean music con the background, tons and tons of food, and traditional games impossible to win. So eventually it became something we were just doing because we’d been doing it for the last years. But there wasn’t enjoyment to it anymore.

On Fiestas Patrias of 2014 we were getting prepared to go to a Fonda, when our car died right outside of our house. Apparently my mom forgot the lights on, and the battery suffered the consequences of it. Our fist though was “Well, nothing to do about it”. That day we spent it eating a barbeque my dad prepared with fries and ensalada chilena. There wasn’t Chilean music, or cuecas, but still was a lot of fun. It was nice to have some family time inside doors.

This year was different though. My mom was out of the house because she is studying right now and she had classes, and my dad had to go to the doctor because he was feeling a really bad pain in his back. So, it was a day for myself, which at the same time wasn’t all bad. I watched a lot of Netflix, slept a lot, read. The 19^th both of my parents were at home, and we had lunch in the terrace, listen to some music, and other things.

In the end, it was a common day.

SOMETHING YOU DID LAST WEEKEND.

Because we didn’t have classes this past week, I took it as a really long weekend (which honestly, I think we all needed). With so much time in my hands, I had to spend it in the best way possible before college started. I needed to get organized and prioritize, so I made a list.

Of course, number one was to get some sleeping done. Between theoretical classes and making models, most of my previous nights had been directed to me being awake with a lot of coffee in my organism. Not healthy at all, but it’s the only thing that works for me. So, based on that, the extra hours came right on time. I know the majority of people (if not all) agrees with me that waking up when you want to wake up and not because an alarm is ringing in your ears is one of the big pleasures of life.

Number two was for reading. I consider myself to be a bookworm, and because of that I’m supposed to read a lot (not because I’m trying to prove anything, but because it puts me in a good place, and it just feels right). But, again, college has no mercy when it comes to give you time for yourself. Yes, I try to read in the mornings either on the train or bus and also when I go back home, but I always end up needing more. So this “long weekend” I decided to lock myself in my room, torn off the Wi-Fi, and just read. I managed to finish two books, which I’m really happy with.

Lastly, in the previous two days before classes started, I resolved to catch up with all the series I had abandoned. I watched so much Naruto Shippuden… and terrible things happened along with wonderful things, and tears were dropped and… it was amazing. I also watched some movies with my parents. Just then I realized how little time we had spent together as a family doing something else than commenting our routines of the day at dinner. We needed it.

So basically, my weekend was a time for myself, to recharged batteries and start in the best way possible on Monday… Except that in all the days I was doing the things I wanted to do, I was also ignoring the things I had to do. So Sunday was me working, working, working, and being awake until early morning and… Sunday took pretty much all my energy away… but the coffee is still good.

AN EXHIBITION OR CONCERT YOU ENJOYED

When I think of the concert I’m going to talk to you about, there are three things that come to my mind.

1. Girls screaming all around me.

2. Someone spilling their drink on my T-shirt.

3. A lot of crying happening.

Now, you might think, based on what I just told you, “What a terrible night”. Well, it wasn’t. Yes, by the end of the night I ended up being half deaf, smelling like Pepsi, and with red eyes and wet cheeks. But all of that was part of the fun. 

To put some context to this story, you need to know what a big fan I was of Justin Bieber. I knew every song there was to know, and half of his life (although my sources were teen magazines and what I could find on the internet, so I don’t know how true was all the information a read back in the day). 

He’d come to Chile once before —2011 I think— and presented at the National Stadium, but since I was only twelve years old in that moment and the money my parents gave me could only buy me one candy per week at the local supermarket, my options of paying a ticket for the concert were none.

I remember crying in front of the TV every time the news mentioned anything from the concert. The tears were half from heart and half to manipulate my parents so they would buy me a ticket. They never gave in, and I didn’t go.

Two years passed, and a lot of things changed in that period of time. I was more aware of how to spend my money, and I had discovered the best way to talk my mom into something I wanted and not being rejected on the first try.

The news was, once more, this big concert that would have Justin Bieber as the protagonist. It took some time and a lot of home chores, I’ll admit, but I finally convinced my mom who convinced my dad to buy me a ticket.

The plan was getting a good seat. Maybe not in the first row, but something reasonable. Sadly, by the time my parents decided to give me the money, all the best seats had sold out. I ended up getting the cheaper seat, with the worst view to the stage, but I didn’t let that embitter my mood. I was going to meet Justin Bieber after all (with a distance of countless meters in between), so it was all worth it.

Sharing that moment with so many people that were as passionate as I was for his songs was the best part of the night. Hearing thousands of voices coming together, singing their lungs out. It felt right. 

Even though I don’t like him anymore, I still recognize the value of that concert. It made me feel excited and happy, and nervous and shocked all at the same time. It also showed me I could be part of something, that I could connect with people and people could connect with me, and that it shouldn’t be complicated.

That night will stick with me for years.

THE PERKS OF BEING BORED (free post)

When I was little, my family and I used to live in this small community where most of our neighbors were old people. It was nice the calm that you could find in that place, but at the same time, there wasn’t much to do. With no kids around, it was common for me to stay indoors playing at my room, watching TV, or annoying my parents. And being honest, the fun used to last for the first three hours. After that, everything came down to being bored. Of course, the five-year-old version of me didn’t appreciate it at the time. But now that I’ve grown up (hardly), I can see how important was for me as a person all those moments that I spent in the house doing nothing. Because now I can see how important is for everyone to get bored.

This might sound strange, but it’s the truth.

Every single time my mom would find me doing nothing, she would get mad at me because I was “wasting my time”. And because she is a mom, she would send me to do home chores. “If you have time to sit there and look at the wall, then you have time to clean the dishes”. I have tried to correct her over the years, to tell her that what she’s teaching me is wrong. But you know… Moms. They always find a way to be right (even when they’re not) and make you seem like you are wrong (even when you are not).

So back to the “doing nothing/wasting time” topic. As for how I see it, we never waste our time. We spend it. We watch movies, we hang out with friends, we have dinner at home with family, we read, etc. And between all that, we also do nothing. Yes, is a different way of investing time, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Actually, is the complete opposite of it.

Picture this. The year was 1990. A really young J. K. Rowling was traveling by train from Manchester to London. The convoy had a delay of four hours and she hadn’t brought anything to read. So for four long hours, all she could do was look through the window while hearing annoyed passengers all around her. Of course, there was no fun in that. So, with no more source of entertainment that her mind, she worked with what she had. And do you know what happened next? It came to her. A story of a little kid who receives an invitation letter from a magic school called Howards.  Obviously, she didn’t though on the entire plot of Harry Potter in that moment, but it was when the first spark of the story appeared. And all because she found herself bored inside that train.

It comes with human nature the necessity of move, of doing something that will keep us active. And when we don’t have phones around us, or music, or Netflix, we can only rely on our minds and imagination to do the job. Creativity is a value that is getting lost in our times, not because we don’t acknowledge the importance it has, but because we can’t find a way of fitting it in our routine. There’s always something in our minds. The paper we have to write for the next week, or the model we have to finish for tomorrow. And in the small lapses we have, while we are on the subway or waiting for the bus, we take our phones out of our pockets so we can chat with the people we just said “goodbye” to. Because, after a long and exhausting day, we don’t want to think anymore. We want to relax for a few minutes before the routine starts all over again the next morning. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s not right either.

If we keep losing our capability of thinking, of creating, we’ll lose what separates us from being animals. We’ll be lost from ourselves.

So, the next time you are at the bus stop, or on the subway, unplug yourself from your phone or your homework. You won’t come up with the story of your life in that time… Or maybe you will! You never know. All we can take for sure is that being bored is one of the best things that can happen to us. One of the things we must let happen to us.

WRITING

One of the things I enjoy the most is writing. For how long? I remember it started back when I was twelve. There was this singer that I used to love, and I would not shut up about him. Some friends saw this and recommended to me a page full of fan fiction about him. Before that, I wasn’t the kind of person who would read, unless it was because of school. Actually. I used to think it was boring (big mistake).

Anyhow, my love for this singer was so big that I decided to try it out, and that’s how hell began. I got addicted to this stories, no matter how cringe they were, or how unrealistic, I loved them. But just reading them wasn’t enough. So… I started writing my own fan fictions and posting them on the internet. Of course, I have already deleted them all, but back then the feeling of creating something out of my own imagination was enough to give me confidence, to make me feel like a real author –an author who didn’t know a thing about synonyms or character building, but an author in the end.

With the time, I expanded my reading to other genres. I started reading real books. So the more I got into fantasy, or sci-fi, or contemporary the more my mind worked, and the more I wanted to create my own stories. To build my own world with its laws and characters. And, even now that the years have passed by, that feeling of excitement that pops in me whenever a get a new idea and decide to write it down hasn’t left. I hope it never does.

In this whole time, the few people that know I write have always asked me what I like so much about it. But then again, is there another answer besides everything? I mean, what’s better than give life to something that until now has only existed in your mind? And because it’s your story, you have full control on it. Not to be cocky or anything, but it’s like if you were God. And, when you live a life where you can’t control much, writing it’s a great escape. When you are having a bad day, it’s a great escape. When you have so much inside you and you don’t know what to do with it, it’s a great escape.