Killing noise

My mom has a beautiful house that I love. I have always lived there until I left Italy to live and work abroad. It is still "home" for me, even if it is now about 11 years since I don't live there anymore.
I love it. It is cozy. It has a lot of light. It has a lot of space. It has a nice view on the hills. It has a lot of happy memories.

It is just impossible to sleep at night or during the day in my mom's house. Especially in the summer, when it is so hot that it would be nice to sleep with the windows open.
I am very sensitive to noise and since I started to live in a small village in Portugal, I am even more sensitive. I wake up at the minimum noise or I can't fall asleep if it is not very quite. Here, it is basically impossible to have anything close to something quite. The house is on a very transited road, so there are many cars passing by every single minute at every hour of night and day. And since we are in Italy, everything must be noisy, so people need to drive fast, speed up even on a town road and of course use the car honk any time they have a change. Plus, motorbikes and scooters are everywhere. And these can be even more noisy than the cars.

Basically, I got back from the Galapagos after two days of traveling. I spent two days completely jet-lagged in Portugal, during which I had so much work to catch up with that I couldn't really properly recover from the trip....I thought that, oh well, I will have plenty of time to sleep in Italy....and instead here it is so noisy that I am going around as a zombie all the time.....(I am not saying that people in Portugal do not shout or that they are quite....it is just very quite where I live most of the times...)

The thing is that I am really not used anymore to people speaking laud, laud noises, people shouting...I love living in a small, quite village in front of the Ocean right now. I love my mom's house, but I definitively miss the peace of my apartment, sitting in the kitchen and staring at the Ocean.

PS. I just read an article on the New Scientist today according to which women's brain may age faster than men's brain....the authors of the finding speculatively proposed that this could be correlated to the higher levels of stress observed in women.....  isn't that a lovely news??? I am sure that the lack of sleep and all this noise which I stand very badly will not help my brain's anti-aging process, unfortunately....

Forget or forgive

...or maybe I should title this post "sometimes they come back".....

I get hurt very easily by people I care about. I have a lot of problems to trust someone, but when I do and when I let this person become part of my life...well, I would like this person to stay there as a part of my life forever.

Things do not always work the way we wish they would. Sometimes people don't mean bad and they don't want to hurt anyone, but the end result may be different than what planned....So, sometimes it happened that either because I hurt someone or either because someone hurt me, people to whom I was very closed to and in one case I even deeply loved (and will always love in some ways) are not part of my life anymore.

Today I got an unexpected call on skype.

Completely unexpected.

I was busy, so I couldn't answer to it. But it was actually a good thing that I was busy because I wouldn't have known if I wanted to answer to it. The person who called me today is someone whom I considered a friend, to whom I grew attached to, someone I miss sharing things with, someone who also really hurt me very recently.

The thing is that even if I believe that this person didn't purposely want to hurt me, he showed me that I cannot trust him and that he did not care very much about me or our friendship, which to me instead meant something. I don't know if given a chance, he would behave in a different way this time. How can I know that this time he wouldn't hurt me again and keep me around as a friend according to his needs to throw me away when he didn't need me anymore?

I forgive very easily.

Or I should say. I used to forgive very very easily.

Lately instead, I decided that sometimes it is better to keep people at a distance, if they may hurt me.

Friends are precious to me.

But true friends are rare to find. I wouldn't want to lose the chance to have a true friend in my life. But how many times does it happen that people learn from their mistakes and actually would behave in a different way compared to the past given a chance?

So here the question that it is persecuting me over and over for many different reasons and situations, beside this specific one.


Is it better to live a calm, steady, simple life (well, in my case the terms "steady" and "simple" are already much more adventurous than what it is considered "steady" and "simple" by many people) or take some risks and see what happen but at least try to live as fully as possible?


Years ago, I wouldn't have had any doubt and I would have gone for the second option....right now, at least many times, having something steady, simple and well known is also incredibly appealing and desirable.....

Creepy men

I have a special talent. The one of often, way too often, attract creepy men.
I may smile too much.
I may be too friendly.
I may look too innocent.

I have no idea why this keeps happening to me, but no matter where I am, I almost always manage to find a creepy man.
I was just in the Galapapos for work. Walking on the beach on a very early morning. This 70-75 years old guy was also there with his brother in law. There were not too many people on the beach. They approached me and asked if I wanted them to take a picture of myself there. Why not?

One of them took the picture and started to tell me all about his life. That he is Ecuadorian, married to an Italian woman and they live in Canada. That he loves Ecuador and any time he can, he tries to go back to his country and especially visit the Galapagos....that his brother has a tv station....do I want to make a movie?

no?

a documentary maybe?

no?

his brother in law has also a radio station, the only one you can receive also in the Galapagos. Do I want an interview?

no?

while he was keeping tormenting me with questions, I was politely trying to walk away.....and he kept following....finally, considering the age difference, I was much faster than him and I managed to put some distance between us. He left the beach.

On the way back from the beach to the main road, I found him again. He started to talk to me again and he followed me to where I was staying. I told him that I had to work and I was very busy. He took a taxi and left. I thought that my encounter with him could be considered over after that.

Not really....he came back to where he left me and asked about me. A woman came to look for me and I asked her to please tell to the man that I was too busy with work to stop doing what I was doing. He left his card, demanding to this woman to please give the card to me and to remind me to contact him.

I got the card.

I went for lunch with some colleagues and he was there. As soon as we sat at the table, he appeared from nowhere......did I get his card?

yes, I did.

Am I going to write him?

uh?

please, remember to write me.....

Was the guy stalking me? how could have been there too?

I met him other two times after this day. Fortunately, I was never alone when I met him. Fortunately, one of these times I made him understanding that I wanted to be alone with one of the guys who was with me....which luckily, even if happily married, played along to help me to avoid this insistent man.

The thing is....why wherever I go I always meet creepy guys?
maybe there are too many of them out there....or maybe I have something special to attract them.... :-(

Dangers of being lost in translation

A small little misunderstood word can do some damages....some unexpected damage........

The fault is due to the fact that by speaking Italian and Spanish most of the times I think to also be able to understand Portuguese...and most of the times in fact I do....but some other times I don't.

I went for a bikini wax. It is summer season. I live right in front of the beach, so for me it is bikini time. And bikini time requires waxing. Up to here no problems. The problem started when for the first time since I am here and for the first time since I had other bikini wax here, the girl asked me a simple question, which was

"Tira"?

I don't know if in Spanish "tira" has any meaning, but in Italian has a meaning that would have perfectly fitted in the context....basically, I thought that since it was the first time I was taking a bikini wax there, the girl was asking me if I was feeling any uncomfortable....So, I replied with a "no"....which overall I think it was the right answer in any case, even if the meaning of the word "tira" in Portuguese was something else.

Anyway, she then said to me "no?" with a question mark at the end.....

I got that I gave her the wrong answer.....so, without having any clue of what actually she was asking me with "tira?", I replied "yes".

She said "yes?"

I mean, I felt that I couldn't give again the opposite answer....so, thinking that how much damage can you do by giving the wrong answer while doing a biking wax, I decided that "yes" sounded like a good answer.....

....she went for the yes.....

I am not going to write here what she really meant with that question....I just want to say that since she was not even happy with the first result of her work, she tried to improve it (she must have had a very artistic soul) and the end results was not only very painful, but also something totally unexpected and not what I had in mind when I entered the place...

oh, well....nothing to do about it now, except for waiting.


I just discovered a new music group now....The Traditionalist...I am listening to few songs now.....it doesn't seem bad...