II, Morocco

So, I have been here for a bit over two weeks. I wanted to write before, but for some strange reason, I didn´t.

Okay, no… I am going to level with you, that is a lie. I perfectly know why I did not write until now. I found it extremely difficult and delicate to frame experiences, ergo, I usually just preclude myself from doing it. As my close friends and family know very well, although I love to talk, I very rarely share things for the sake of just sharing. I don´t write unless I have a reason to.

With that out the way. I have acclimated pretty well to this place, I like living simply. It is, redundantly enough, very easy.

I have found my favorite café, “Complex el Kasbah”, just a short 15 minutes of walking distance from my apartment. I had a chat with the manager a few days ago, and he gave me the number of a photography club from here. We are expected to go to the mountains to take pictures someday in the following week.

I am used to reading a couple of books simultaneously. Since I left Mexico about six months ago, I have been reading a lot, if I may say so myself. And, one curious effect of this is that there comes a time where I finish more than one book in a span of maybe 12-24 hours. I always have this odd feeling when I finish a book. It is like time stops for a second as I read the last word, and I momentaneously feel that I just draw my eyes through each line of the book and I didn´t take in anything that I read. I am glad to say that it usually lasts for a few seconds, up to maybe a minute. Then, I am flooded with this avalanche of thoughts and words like if I downloaded the entire book in 1.2 seconds. It is twice as odd when it happens more than once within the same day or two.

A few days ago I read “The old man and the sea” again, in one afternoon and the next morning. That evening I finished reading “Sapiens”. The following days I have had to take it easy to avoid collapsing from within my mind.

I am thinking of writing a few reviews of the last books I have read, so I won´t describe my thoughts on them here. I will say that I am so looking forward to reading “Homo Deus” (Sequel of Sapiens). “Deus” is part of the reading plan of February. What follows on the January list is re-reading my favorite 30 essays of “Death by Black Hole”, and also “Reality is not what it seems”. If I finish early, perhaps I´ll pick up “The Social Animal” again, God is such a damn good book.

Please recommend me books if you can, either through here in the “contact” section, my twitter, or if you have my number, but please do.

A couple more notes:

I had a pretty interesting conversation with my two roommates, something from Climate Change to the core problem of the Human Being.

I am not interested in pointing fingers or attacking some of their views directly. But something I really am eager to say is that it is stupidly easy to convince you to blind yourself. Also, it is just as easy to have your views perfectly clear, but not including in them any solutions. It is dangerously easy to just blame something else, someone else, or even yourself (as part of the problem), but not helping the conversation. I think that doing the easy thing of hiding behind vague statements, reasons, and solutions will not help anyone. If we as a species do not ground our solutions and make them plausible, I do not think we are going to be able to change. And that is that. I have no further comments on this topic for now.

Now two interesting anecdotes of my classes of the past two weeks:

- A girl, 17, asked me out of nowhere if I could recommend her novels. I gave her a short story by Hemingway that I had printed out for the other group. And I also send her the PDF of Paper Towns and told her to let me know which one she likes the most. In the case that she likes Hemingway better, I am thinking of lending her my copy of “The old man and the sea” while I am here. When I gave her the titles and the printed copies, the other girls asked me to gave them stories as well, so I gave them the ones that I had to spare. Two sets of “Soldier´s home” and one of “After twenty years”.

- After one class of the other group, one of the girls said: “Can I ask you something?”—so polite that she asks. After I said “yes”, she asked me how did I get to have such a “cool” English. Needless to say that I was flattered, I told her that maybe with practice and listening to people talk for hundreds of hours, but that I did not have the best English, not even the best one from the people I know. So we made a wager. I have until the next class to show them another non-native speaker who´s accent is better than mine, if I fail to do so, I will owe them one chocolate bar to each one of them.