This modern love

A winter cold in November cannot last in Barcelona and as from yesterday we are back to normal with the wind slowing down leaving the mist hanging in the air, Gaudi's lizards stretching in the sun once more. In the midst of all that we start another week with the same old problems and brand new hopes. Last weekend was great, having seen a very beloved one after an annoyingly long time and it must have been exactly for this -and perhaps the lack of Sunday night football- that made the transition much more difficult than usual.

Monday proved to be -deservingly- frustrating as I passed most of it trying to change some of my best -best meaning most scientifically deceiving- plots and diagrams from any possible format to another. I came home destroyed and tensed, wishing ALL scientific journals perished into oblivion, so the only thing I could do was to lay back with a glass of tsipoyro and get back to my reading while listening to Stan Getz and "Stella by Starlight". But as music, words, image formats and electronic submissions of scientific articles were twirling inside my mind a weird obsession started to take me over. I had just read about amazon's latest device, the "kindle", a sort of "iPod for readers" allowing you to store and read thousands of e-books, newspaper articles and entire blogs on a tiny, portable screen with wireless connection, which you can keep in the inner pocket of your jacket. on the other hand, the thought of getting me one of this cool 160G iPods that could actually carry all the music I have owned or listened to in my 30-year life was already harassing me over the last weeks. So there I was fantasizing about two small devices that could carry the only two things I allow myself to be fetishist about: my books and my CDs. A kindle carrying all my books, an iPod with all my music, enough power to serve them for life and I am set!

I stopped and pondered. Not long ago I was criticizing cell-phone nations from this same blog and there I was thinking about all these gadgets that become obsolete before you even get to owe one of them. Then I just realized that during this daydreaming I had completely forgotten about "Stella by Starlight" and that my eyes were simply mechanically scanning lines in my real-paper book (actually it is Giuseppe's but still) in a process that was far from qualifying as constructive reading.

I woke up today and got out of bed with extreme difficulty. In fact there is a good chance I 'd still be there if it had not been for Bloc Party (on my faithful old and crappy mp3 player) and "This Modern love" that kept me up and going while riding the bike to work, thinking about all this modern gadgets that do so well in feeding our obsessions but very often tend to obstruct us from the real thing.