Arturo

His name, Arturo at the outset, stretched on for several more syllables and across the map of Asiatic, Catholic European - chaotic and decidedly Latino.

Round faced, a cherubic smile and smart, dark intelligent eyes. Easily mistaken for a filled out Japanese, as my friend Trea discovered.  He had an easy smile and round, full lips that teased my own thin ones as they glided back into a grin.

We said goodbye near the Consolation end of Paulista, catatonic both. It was the last bus ride I would take back from the centro, winding quickly back to Butantã in the early morning.

I awoke to the fare collectors tap. End of the line, he said. I stared blankly out the window at unfamiliar streets.  It was the last time I'd be lost in Brazil.

We exchanged messages a few times, via some social networking chat connection. Enough to say some unforgivable thing about his corner of SP metroplex. The conversation fizzled, but persisting into a hollow buzz of awkward static misconnection.

Home

Is cozy

Observação

[obs: Smiles and happiness are not necessarily correlated]

IRL

Standing staring at a painting sometimes, I'll be overcome with a bit of frustration.  Eyes scanning the painting laconically, but with a frenzied energy.  I'm looking, waiting, almost, for some bit of sense or meaning or greater story to appear from the swirls of paint splotches or color blocks or mazes of lines on paper.  I want there to be a greater meaning to the work, to see it with my own eyes, to have it pop out livid from the canvas/paper/slate rock/polyester.

The last time I was at the MOMA, I caught myself doing this.  Skimming above the paintings and sculptures, looking for ones that had an easy story to tell or some political message that could be divulged from just staring at the thing, or reading the title.  These are easy to find at momas.  But what of the ones that frustrated me?

For some paintings, there's more to it than political message, simple statements.  Rather not more to it, but less.  Things can be exactly what they are, without appealing to some higher need of purpose or message.  Sometimes swirls of color are nothing more than that.  They necessitate no response, there is no call to action, there is no greater purpose than just to be a splotch of color on canvas.

As of late, relationships frustrate in the same way that abstract paintings do.