Hello World!
Yes, writing Hello World is the tackiest/geekiest thing I could ever do to start a personal blog — or whatever this is.
The thing is, I have a lot of ideas on my mind and I'm trying to discover better ways of putting them out.
This blog will be a joint project with my weird podcast!
I do not feel totally comfortable writing in English, I'm Brazilian, therefore native Portuguese speaker. If my Macbook's autocorrect function could speak, I'm sure it would not be very complimentary on my skills. Still, I might complain about English, but I muss confess that I also love foreign languages. It's such a pleasure to discover how some words and expressions simply make more sense in another language! Such pleasure! Furthermore, writing in Portuguese would just not be enough. I'm based in NYC and I rather be able to communicate with friends scattered around the world than just to Brazilians. Well, Brazilians are quite numerous, 200 million people so far, so it is also important to address them. I hope to do so, at a certain point. But my country if often very self-centered, we're this enormous nation, far away from any international border in most of our big cities. A lot like the US in this sense. And China. But a more provincial version of these two.
My country is going through a very hard moment and often we speak about it as if it were only our fault. Or as if it were the fault of a foreign power who had complete control over all own madness. We're destroying the Amazon, we barely understand our own history, we burn our historical documentation, we massacre indigenous groups, we kill our black people as we get deeper and deeper into international drug trade, and everyone else also feels like one could get a gunshot at any minute. We're exploding. So I look at it in awe and try to do my best. Rationality, understanding history through a world wide perspective, elaborating strategies, connecting people.
I've been trying to be a bridge between the different groups I manage to have contact with. I know something about translation. Not only language translation, but as a nomad and the irredeemable outcast that I've always been, a person who doesn't quite fit into any group (am I a street artist? not quite. visual artist? not quite. Historian? not quite. Activist? not quite. Middle class bourgeoisie? not quite), I believe at least I have the skill of walking through different groups and still managing to keep some kind of dialogue. I'll let people guess the groups I walk through once they read my texts. I might not even be able to acknowledge them all myself.
My believe system is based on philosophy. Therefore it's based on doubt, observation, attempts to elaborate methods and the openness to elaborate it all again once I step into trouble. That's the best I've been able to do so far. Suggestions are welcomed, as long as they come with interesting arguments. Arguments are great! No time for hate though. There's too much to do already.
Let's see if I manage to keep this going this time.
I've always failed miserably in trying to make my thoughts public. Academic papers seem too laborious to write and too specific, social media is too short, so a blog with its multiple links possibilities looks like the best option so far.
Special thanks to my friends Gene Kogan and Mariah Valerie for inspiring me to start this, even if they had no intention of doing so.
By the way, I've also started a podcast of raw unedited thoughts
I think this is the link: https://soundcloud.com/vanessa-rosa-234406550
That's it
