Ravnica: Uprising [Part 2]

So, anyway, I started blasting.

Found a website called playgroundai.com that let me create up to one thousand images per day, all for free. I went head on to create the first card on my list. Quickly, I realized something that I have been repeating to friends and family for months "It's easy to create great things, but impossible to create what you want." Which kind of sumps up my whole history with creative endeavor. Coherence and style, which I thought at first were going to be the main obstacles, were quite easy to figure out. But to create intent, that was hard. To solve this, I doodled things with another AI, stable diffusion, and use the product of that to serve as baseline for the another AI the create pretty, awe-stroking images. Awe is something I encountered a lot. Sometimes AI creates something that leaves you almost paralyzed. You look close and the image it's shit, it has inconsistencies, defects, visual garbage. But you look at the whole and it just works. It gets it, even when you didn't even knew before starting with that particular image what "it" was. Then, you work from that.

All and all, I spend about twenty minutes with each image. Creating variations, changing ideas. More and more, I started to get new ideas and modifying cards. I got better at creating them. I switched baseline models, using an improved version of stable diffusion in the same webpage. I created collections of keyboards that gave each guild a feel and motif. I created an architecture for each one of them, defined in a few words. I scouted dozens of artists I had never heard about to expand the range of styles and ideas to use. Better and better stuff was coming out, and a lingering feeling that I had to step up the overall design of the cards started to emerge. Specially when creating for the Dimir, that guild blue and black that portrayed the more obscure part of the oppressive state, in which secrets and contradiction were foundational ideas. Contradiction was at the hearth of it all. When I started, I made some cards about ministries and slogans directly taken from the 1984 book, almost as a joke. I was looking back at those more and more, and started thinking. Bad sign. Because creating images was kind of interesting but grueling repetitive work, my attention started to drift. I was already months deep into this hole, and I needed a distraction, so I went out the house. It turns out it was a national holiday, and the main street of my town was flooded with roses and books. I approached the one that sells second hand ones for one euro (the only one I go to year after tear, honestly) and found a damaged copy of, guess what, 1984. Neat, I though. I mean, I like doing versions, working or talking about things I only remember loosely, but if there was a moment to reread the best book I have never reread, it was that one. So I started right away.

Holy shit.

Every chapter I read gave me ideas for a dozen cards. But that was the least of my troubles. The book evidenced the lack of depth of my work, the lack of subtlety and bluntness. Never compare yourself to classics, they are classics for a reason, after all. I had to redo the cards. I had to. I had to expand the edition and be more ambitious. In my impulse to get the job done and actually do something, I had fallen into doing exactly what I didn't want to do, bunch of cards that did nothing but convince you they are magic cards. Every one of those was a missed opportunity to explore vital aspects of the conflict, of the contradiction, of the world. And I didn't stop reading there. I read about the Spanish civil war (which I had never done, despite being born, raised and living in Spain) and spent lots of hours in wikipedia and arguing with ChatGPT. So, when I had already finished the images for half of the cards, I opened the first guild I started with and started, once again.

There's a certain order in my creative chaos that I think many people can resonate with. I have no trouble with ideas, never feared a white page. First a have a foundational one that interests me, I feel I have something to say about or I am familiar with. When, I expand on that idea for it to fill the shape of the container or art form I'm trying to make. Then, I have a finished product that's explicative of my worldview. Then I decide it's shallow, pedantic and only scratches the surface of everything I realized or started to suspect while doing it. So I rewrite it for the ground up. A couple of things start to click and I have an explosion of ideas that need to be introduced into the thing all at once. Now, instead of filling the shape, they get constrained by it. So, against the best of my efforts I surrender my initial vision and expand the project in order to fit all the awesome shit. Eventually, if ever, I have everything again. Then I realize it's overworked, has lost it's identity and shape, it's huge but not powerful. It's a mess. I think about it during sleepless nights, procrastinate in order to avoid working on it at any cost. A couple of existential crisis later, I surrender again. This time in the other direction. The project will never be what it should be. I drift from expansionist exposition to evocative background. Well, evocative it's more a desire than a fact. But one has to have faith. Then, still not wanting to work in what in my eyes is a dignified failure, I scrape the rests and put them together with duct tape, praying to God that a sensible, smart or unwilling costumer will indirectly perceive the depth of the ideas through the paper (cartboard, in this case) and be as awe struck as I am to the complexity of creation of how we can only scratch it's surface though art.

So, that's what happened. I expanded the project and decided to finish only half of it (but finish that half). I sit now at five completed guilds of about fifty cards each, all with "original" images attached to them (we can talk about authorship of AI created art another day). I showed them to former magic players and, they confirmed that indeed, they are magic cards. Well, that's a first step. I guess. But do they accomplish the task of communicating though the limitations and mechanics of a casual game the conflicts and complexities of the world? Dude, I don't know, leave me alone. Ok? Give me a break.

I will name this The Minotaur Problem. Think about a minotaur card. It's there. It's a magic card. For some reason, you are convinced you need to make a creature that belongs to a certain guild. Maybe you want to cover more creature types, maybe you accidentally created a cool image. It doesn't matter. In your mind, that creature has a clear position within the guild and a position within the conflict. It makes sense that our minotaur is against the government and part of the uprising. Maybe because he is a beast, and feral. It makes thematic sense that can hate civilization. He is angry. That's self-evident to you. But why? What problem does he actually have? Why is his reaction this and not another? What characteristics does he have or what part of society conveys, being an angry minotaur? How do you expand on that idea without making it a character in itself, without personalizing it too much? Without those things, the card already makes sense, but explains nothing, explores nothing. There's no conflict. It's just a magic card.

On the other side, imagine you have an idea. It can be anything. A nuance about the conflict of good versus evil. A reinterpretation of moral values as necessary lies. About social behavior being driven by convenience instead of ideology. It doesn't matter.

Now make that a card about a Minotaur.

Well, that's every design problem ever.

How to portray contradiction? What are the internal psychological mechanisms that keep an status quo stable and how are they subverted? Are these subversions maybe part of a deeper game? How do factions keep balance but still present inner conflict? I started to make much more literal references to the book, and watching documentaries about revolutions and alternative history channels. How do you explain in a handful of words a minotaur to an artificial inteligence that for some reason knows what "Luciano Pavarotti singing to a capybara" means but doesn't know about minotaurs? I got lost, inside my mind, in what I call the abyss. Not a single card remained in it's original form since I started changing one of them.

Better that keep talking about abstract stuff, I decided to better show you a piece of the though process that goes behind creating a card. Which is one of my favorites of the set, I confess, but the process itself is not so different from any other one. Let's start.

Orzhov. White and black guild.

In the official lore and past editions, they are supposed to be about corruption, religion and wealth; which translates well into what we are trying to do. They make sense as a part of the coalition that conforms the Azorian state. They are contiguous to them in the color wheel, share the color white and would have reasons to want to stay in power. No doubt there in their position. I decided that they benefited from the uprising at first, thinking it wasn't a big deal and just using it as an opportunity to enrich themselves, but then got cold feet, realized it was snowballing and when they tried to back down the damage was already done. In a sense, their inner conflict is about how much greed they would have, and about how much they should be accountable for the consequences of their own actions, even if they didn't rebel themselves. That's just a bit of exposition.

The leader of the guild is a council of ghosts, everything likes to religiosity and spirituality. Their Ministry is the one of Virtue, or Loyalty; which they transform into a thing about money. Somehow communicating the process of commodification of virtue in modern societies. They are powerful but scared, rich but corrupt, with lots of resources but without exactly the means or will to actually use them if society doesn't function in a certain specific way. The problem is: religious institutions are not that important in modern societies. The mixture of them and wealth and corruption is great, but not enough. What mechanisms, emotions, figures, represent this kind of behavior or takes that role of indirect spiritual control in our world? What part of religious societies have been taken in modern urban conflict by what? Spiritual and moral decadence couldn't be the manufactured product of an evil organization, but the byproduct of the infinite amount of interactions and ambitions of every single citizen in a system that has drifted it's original curse.

I did some thinking. Religion, specially religious institutions are not only about faith. They are about idolatry. In the novel, as well as in totalitarian regimes, that is redirected to figures of the state, but it didn't really fit for me that a guild started to worship the leader of another guild. I maybe could make a card about the cult of personality, but not much more. The solution was other. I had to create an object of worship that encapsulated the same idea of idolatry and idols and belonged to the Orzhov themselves. I was going to create a modern idol. A celebrity, with legions of fanatic followers, that represented modernity and... vanity. That was the word I was looking for.

First, I though about creating an Avatar. A card just named Vanity that loosely represented the concept or emotion in an ethereal way. The same way I created avatars for the Golgari (Hunger) or the Gruul (Pride) but the problem was that I already had an avatar for the Orzhov, named Avarice, that I really liked. So I had to search for another solution. But I really wanted to use the word Vanity, because it was perfect for it. One way could be for it to be a "title" for the creature, spelled in it's name. For example something like "Cavalier, Vanity Champion" and for it to be a knight surrounded by mirrors of something like that. That would be a good solution, but I kept thinking. About celebrities, influencers, rock stars. Eventually, it came to me. What if Vanity was a stage name? What name could I give it to make it obvious that's a stage name and not just a flowery name I came up with? It has to feel like he or she gave it himself. It has to contain elements of Orzhov identity but it has to be a name you could plaster on a screen, or a ticket, or a stage. After some iterations I came up with Vanity Nethervoid. I gave it a mana cost and color identity of two white mana and one black, came up with an ability, and rewrote the flavor text about a hundred times until I was satisfied. It was something about how the council of ghosts were old fools and how she was the new thing and how thing would be from there on now. Should it be an angel? A demonic angel? A vampiric angel? All those have implications in lore and meaning. But maybe over defining it could be bad. It has to have an air of simplicity. Black space has as much meaning (sometimes more) than text. Whatever, let's decide it later.

Now, I only needed the image.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't remember exactly how I created this image and don't have the exact prompt. I'm just using it to walk you though the process. It went something like that:

Close-Up Portrait of Vanity Nethervoid. Portrait of a beautiful female idol, abstract painting. Ravnica City, Orzhov. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork. Revivalist Gothic Architecture. _____ style.

dynamic lighting, splash art, trending on Artstation, soft natural volumetric lighting.

orwellian, wealth, corruption, spiritual decadence, oppression, loneliness, monumental architecture, black and gold palette. shadows, duality.

Let me explain.

The first part is the more intuitive one. A description of what you want. But the way you use language there matters, a lot. I can't explain it. Just trust me. Then, I repeat always the part about "Ravnica City" followed by whatever guild we are talking about. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork is mandatory, and found it though trial and error. I think I used it in every single card. Then, the architecture I designated for that guild. When I start a guild, that is the first thing I do. Sometimes you use real stuff you find on wikipedia and look at hundreds of images of fucking buildings on google, sometimes you make up something and the AI does cool stuff. Either way, let's continue. The part about the style is for when (if) you want to use the style of a particular artist for the card. Not all artists are recognized by the AI so you have to experiment first. You can also combine. The possibilities are pretty much endless. The stuff about lighting and all that is something that essentially tells it "make it cool". Not much no analyze here. Then, I use the keywords of the edition and mix them with the keywords of the guild. They are not direct descriptions of anything in particular but are meant to portray the overall "vibe", in an effort to maintain a certain thematic consistency across the art of the edition and inside every guild.

Then, there's a bunch of negative prompting, things you don't want in the image. Sometimes you don't want specific things, sometimes when generating a particular thing you notice that for some reason the AI is trying to create, I don't know, teddy bears. So you drop the hammer and say, dude, don't create teddy bears. Also useful for colors. Another world to explore. Colors have meaning inside the machine, with free associations to concepts and ideas, they aren't only a functional thing.

After all that, I probably generated about thirty or more images with or without slight variations in the prompt, select a few ones and start to make variations of them, with more or less faithfulness to the variation I am using as a base for the next one.

About twenty to thirty minutes after, I am moderately happy with one, and I ship it. Here's the result. 

That's it. So much talk, so much thinking. So much conceptual nonsense. It's this. Only this.

I could have learned how to bake a cake. Go to the beach with some friends. Exercise. Look for a job. Be a captain. Finish the physics career I left ten years ago. Marry my girlfriend of that time. But instead, I chose to do this. I don't know why. I don't know when.

And that's with EVERY SINGLE ONE.

I'm tired and done and don't want to do it anymore. But here they are. Half of the guilds completed. about two hundred images and cards. I have no idea of that to do with it. I should share it in magic communities, show it to friends, send it to rito, post it in social media. I don't know. I don't want to know. I create things, I overcreate things, and they stay in a folder, created. What I would like to do is find a project, with people, where all this work of abstraction is shared to create something big. Cards, films, games, books. I don't care. Things that have depth, things that need of interaction and esoteric discussions about the nature of idolatry in modern societies. Maybe I don't communicate them properly, maybe I overthink them and this is just supposed to be a card game and not that much though is meant to be put into it. What can I say. You can keep the cardboard, I prefer the Magic.

Ravnica: Uprising

Five years ago I started making Magic the Gathering cards. It all started as a sort of agreement between a friend of mine that wanted to delve into game design and me being bored as hell and wanting to do stuff, whatever stuff. We both had a background playing magic together as kids so the choice seemed quite obvious. The project kinda went nowhere, but tinkering with the cards made me realize there was more to it that what it seemed; in the format of the cards and mechanics I found a language, not only to make a game, but to be used to communicate ideas. I finished it on my own, scraping the internet for images and completing the world I created to sort of fill the gaps of gameplay with lore. I guess that's the usual procedure, or at least the one one expects.

Fast forward to a six months ago.

I had finished writing my book, which in a sense is also a language (narrative language) to also communicate ideas and conflicts. But a book is very different, at least how I wrote it. If you want to communicate or explain something, you just do. You hit a white page and go to town, in whatever extension or form you want. Yes, you still create characters and maybe give them the expository charge, but its still a very limitation-free format. But of course, that has it's drawbacks. I remembered the quote from Mark Rosewater (I think that's the name) from a speech he gave about creating Magic cards. "Limitations breed creativity." That quote was very surprising to me, a kid that refused to learn, analyse or compose metric poetry in high-school on the basis of "conscientious objection". In my mind, art and creativity should be, by principle, as free from constraints and rules as possible. And that's still not far-fetched to me, but it comes with nuance. Now, I wanted to do the opposite. Instead of riding free on a line of text without barriers or frontiers, I wanted to squeeze meaning into little boxes, and embrace the constraints of a language as my tools to communicate it.

That's great and all, but what is "Magic" language? It's just a game you play and the lore comes in second place, we certainty didn't pay attention to it when we were kids and were trying to just min-max the game to beat each other. We didn't read Magic lore, read the flavor text or even pay much attention to the images.

Well, first of all that's a lie. There was a time, indeed where all that meant jack shit to us. But the sole reason we became mystified with the game was because the images looked pretty. Not only pretty, evocative. I remember reading over and over and watching over and over my own cards, when we didn't event knew you could play with those. There was a perceived hidden deepness in them, an evocative force. A magic card was a fascinating object on itself. And second of all, even when we forgot about all that and just wanted to play, the narrative force of the cards is not located only in their "designated" flavorful parts. Flavor in magic is ingrained on the mechanics, cost, colors, rarity, function, everything in the card. It's a unitary entity, in which you can't separate one from the other and whose function is not only to "beautify" the card but to make holistic sense, to explain an entity, in which in the best of cases their game mechanics are self-explanatory and so obviously linked to it's identity they don't require to read entire books about past events to not only "figure out" or "understand" but to "feel".

Yes, I wanted to used magic cards as a narrative device. Which is not very far from creating cards just because and then enriching them with a backstory and lore in it's result if both are done very well, but requires a totally different approach and mentality. It's very easy for me (and I assume for anybody) to create magics cards whose sole purpose is to convince you that the card you created is, indeed, a Magic card. It's also relatively easy to make them good, pretty, or interesting; like the members of communities of magic cards creators often do, as the cards created this way serve only themselves. I could create hundreds of Spiders and Ogres and brave warriors if I wanted to, pack them together and go "yep, that's a magic card edition that could perfectly be a magic card edition". But as you can expect, that's not my jam. Amidst the storm of AI generative tools I was trapped in early winter, I almost jokingly started to prompt ChatGPT with ideas for a set, and it came up with kernel ideas for cards. Then, I opened Midjourney and told it to make some art that crossed my mind. I am ashamed to admit than I needed a couple of weeks to think the obvious "hey, I could use this to actually create original magic art".

So, I had the means. And the time. I just needed a reason. Something I wanted to communicate or explore it's complexity with. I though about making cards about the world of Berserk, but that seemed like another case of just doing it because I can. Then, binging videos on youtube I found that channel named Rysthic Studies, an incredible channel that focused on art and flavor and not much gameplay. I devoured it in a week, and finally came to the video about a new plane (planes are like worlds, or universes in Magic) I didn't knew about. Well, I didn't knew about most of them, because I've been out of the Magic world for almost a decade now. What was different about it was that it was based on American mythology. Not about native american mythology in form of spirits and the usual stuff. Modern, urban mythology. Modern societies and cultures have myths and legends, not necessarily meaning lies, but foundational ideas so entangled with it's media and cultural output one doesn't usually reefers to it as mythology. But it's there. The plane was based on a fictional city, with lots of stuff related to social issues like class, social mobility, legacy. The American Dream could be felt though a veil of fiction. It basically deconstructed a modern culture into it's bare bones and reinterpred it using a canvas of fantasy. That was my shit. I love classic fantasy. Conquests, kingdoms and beasts. But I don't have any motivation to create it. The conflicts that emanate and are fictionalized from what I name "pastoral societies" are done and ever-done. I wanted to translate to a world of fiction conflicts coming from the modern age, not related necessarily to technology, but born from the core of urban society.

So I typed in google "urban myths". That didn't help. I wasn't behind what I though were gimmicks, but after endemic conflicts that could be "mythologized". Then it struck me. My favorite work of modern fiction. I could adapt that (more than adapt, use the core conflict within it, at least at first). That would be perfect to create a light-hearten card game for children to play around. 

Ah yes, perfect.

So now, the easy part. How do I create a world in which to communicate the oppressive nature of power and the risks of idealism turning totalitarianism? The conflict resultant from it was obvious, an uprising threatening to appear. But what could be the scenario? Do I really have the force to introduce so many ideas and nuanced stuff while at the same time creating a new world for it? No, but my memory was there to rescue me. There was already an urban world in Magic. Used for alien invasions and superpowered beings. What a waste. I could just use that, create the minimum necessary to link it's past history to the state I wanted for it (that was quite fact) and use it's own characters, rules and mechanics.

Ravnica is a world that mirrors a multicultural European mega-city. While in the world of Magic for example minotaurs are beasts that spell wildlife and evil, here are part of a society, maintaining part of their identity but also transformed into a part of urban life. To create a minotaur in Ravnica you can either take the original and imagine how would it fare off in the modern city or you can do it in reverse, imagine a modern city and guess what would be the representations of different organizations, people or civil functions in fantasy. And maybe some of them can be a minotaur.

In order to understand what I mean when I reefer when I talk about the "language" of Magic or that world, I have to explain a couple of things. We come with preloaded expectations about the world when we come into a game. Some of them are from general culture, like the fact that maybe a minotaur should be wild and aggressive. Some of those come from the medium we are currently using. In magic, you would expect the minotaur to be red, and probably to be a creature with around two to three power and two to three resistance. These things mean nothing to the non player, but the game itself create expectations and a language you have to commit with in order to tell what you need to tell. Magic is full of micro expectations, and to navigate them is more art than science, but the main one, the one that's genius is the color wheel.

I could talk for hours about it, but here is what you need to know. There are five colors in magic, each card is from a combination of them and you can only play it if you pay mana of that color. The colors are not only a differentiating function, but each has an identity on itself. A cosmology of ideas is related with. In Ravnica, the city, there are ten guilds that control the city. Each one is of two colors (all the different possible combinations of two colors if we have five). The identity of each guild in this fictional world is not independent from the colors it belongs to, but a reinterpretation of that precise combinations and attributes of those colors in the setting. Colors are also related between them, some having identity relations to each other, common or antagonistic, and all that needs to be represented somehow in the cards, guilds, mechanics themselves. It's a giant, colossal, work of abstraction. Luckly, I have half the work done already, that world is already created. Each of those guilds have a position in the city, an identity, relations, protagonists, etc. What I need to do now is develop a function for each one in this totalitarian world that makes sense thematically, along with inner conflicts regarding the potential uprising and represent the whole spectrum of political and ideological opinions and factions that could exist in a real world in a language of soldiers, dragons and cards that say things like "destroy a land". All without creating a good and bad side, respecting the color wheel and making a functional game. Kill me.

One thing I have to point out is that, all these things are not stated anywhere. Are kind of assumed, or inadvertently learned, almost though osmosis, while playing the game. In order to create magic cards, you have to reverse engineer them. There's not a guide. That imagine is not official in any way shaper or form and has no actual direct implications in gameplay. But it has to contain it. Somehow.

The prime candidates to be the conduits of such totalitarian state were the Azorious. Blue and white, being white probably the color more like to "goodness" in the Magic universe. It would had been maybe obvious to create an evil totalitarian state of color black and have heroes of the good colors righteously fight against it. But we don't do easy here. The whole point was to don't do this kind of thing. It was far, far more interesting have that state be the result of an ideology or dream from the good guys turn inherently oppressive when applied to the real world that having a run-of-the-mill evil empire that needed purging. From that point, it was easier to fill the gaps and imagine what the consequences of that rule would be, and reactions and alliances from each of the other guilds, based on imagination, common sense but, mainly from their relative position in the color wheel (his roundness be praised). I decided that such state would be mainly them and four other guilds, with two other in open uprising and three undecided ones. That resulted to be a good balance. I created a timeline of events, a draft of the current state, motivations and representatives of each of the guilds. I created some mechanics, re-utilized old ones, and spend like a month making prototypes of the three hundred cards I needed to make. I just needed to create the images and I would be done, and maybe remake some of the cards so they would be more interesting. Maybe add some more deepness and detail in order to give it more nuance and I would be successful in mythologizing modern rebellion in the form of little pieces of cardboard. The concept and card creation took me about a month total, I give myself another one to finish this and I will move on to make something with my life.

Oh boy was I wrong. Oh boy was I not done.

It's infuriating how I get baited by myself into "little projects" again and again, when I know for certain they always become impossible monsters.

he venido a hablar de mi libro

Hace ya casi cosa de un año autopubliqué casi quinientas páginas de bajanades en forma de un libro y creo que es tiempo suficiente para explicar un par de cosas sobre él. Sobre de qué cojones va, por ejemplo. Así que me he puesto delante de una cámara y eso he hecho, sin mas.

Nos vemos pronto.

No soc ningú

No sóc ningú, i ja m'està bé.

En ocasions he pensat que m'havia d'esforçar molt per arribar a ser algú, i a força de treballar i de ser megaproductiva arribaria un moment que ho aconseguiria, i seria rica així que podria jeure i relaxar-me a l'ombra d'un arbre i menjar sushi.

Doncs aquest "algú" resulta que ja existeix, i resulta que soc jo. L'únic que vull fer és gaudir el que se m'ha donat. Treballar lo just i necessari, i al meu temps lliure dedicar-me a no fer res. Descansar, pensar una mica però tampoc gaire. Llegir una mica potser, o potser no. Amarar-me de temps. Perdre el temps, malgastar-lo, desprofitar-lo al màxim. No cardar res. Posats a no fer res tampoc no vull ni gaudir. Si m'ho passo bé, doncs millor, i si no, doncs què hi farem. Veig molta pressió per fer coses súper guais i aesthetics i viure el moment. Doncs que el moment em visqui a mi.

Me la suda el temps. El temps em pot menjar el sashimi.

El juliol passat vaig venir a Holanda i em vaig posar a treballar de la primera mandanga que vaig trobar a un centre de Logística. Fins el dia d'avui, la meva feina consisteix a classificar paquets, escanejar paquets, posar paquets sobre una cinta o arrossegar carros. I és la millor feina que he tingut mai. 

Quan arribo abraço la Carla, la meva amiga, amb tot l'amor que el meu cos em permet donar. Les dues som espanyoles, però ens hem conegut aquí. Sovint sortim de festa, gràcies a la Carla he descobert que m'agrada molt ballar. Si hagués de descriure la Carla amb una sola paraula, seria: celebració. Aquesta noia és la màxima definició de hippie sense saber-ho i sense aparentar-ho, en el millor sentit de tots, com una papallona que no sap que és una papallona. 

A la feina he conegut molta gent. Gent jove i gent vella, que em saluden i es passegen com jo pel magatzem. Gent que estudia, gent que té fills, gent que ha d'anar a la presó. Alguns venen, treballen durant una setmana i se'n van. Alguns s'hi queden un parell de mesos fins que troben una feina més ben pagada. Alguns els conec des del primer dia i m'esperen per tornar cap a casa en bici. Holandesos, polonesos, romanesos. Camioners, tècnics, Team Leaders que porten una samarreta vermella per diferenciar-se de la resta. I enmig d'aquest purgatori de nacionalitats, ens mirem als ulls i ens diem bon dia. 

És un espai enorme, he de caminar bastant així que estic en forma, no hi ha pressa i ningú m'estressa (normalment). Sé on va cada cosa i com funciona tot, i la feina és tan senzilla que la puc fer amb els ulls tancats. Som un grup gran, així que tot s'acaba enllestint, i jo sé que al cap de quatre horetes soc fora i tinc tot el dia per mi. Estic vivint el pitjor escenari del meu futur laboral i m'ha sorprès descobrir que s'hi està de tranquis. No sé si a catalunyeta això seria possible, però el que importa és que he carregat la meva pròpia ambició com una pedra enorme durant molt de temps i ara, per fi, l'he deixada anar. I darrere la pedra, trobo l'alegria. 

https://youtu.be/eXvBjCO19QY

P.D.: Esclar que seguiré estudiant però això és un altre tema vale? Així que keep scrolling, aquí no hi ha res a veure.

Spoiler: Fa un any i pico que vaig escriure això, ho vaig posar a borradors i no ho vaig arribar a penjar. Han canviat moltes coses. No vaig seguir estudiant, vaig fer una parada tècnica a Espanya i ara visc a Bangkok, treballo de professora i torno a tenir molta ambició i a voler fer coses molt guais, amb l'ansietat que tot això comporta. Trobo a faltar la Jordina que no volia ser ningú: era alliberador i fàcil. Recordo la meva habitació gairebé buida excepte per un matalàs a terra, i la sensació de fred quan sortia al carrer, que convidava a descansar i a rendir-se dolçament. Només necessitava anar fins on em portés la meva bicicleta. Potser llavors era hivern, i ara potser tinc la sang alterada per la calor d'aquest país tropical ple de gratacels. I totes aquestes coses han passat en un any. Em pregunto què vindrà després. 

Immortal

 1. Love

I have tried many times to figure out what day I was born, but I still have no idea, because things were very different back then. But I like to think that I was born on the first day of the calendar. This way, people are expecting my birthday weeks in advance, and when the time comes, they dress up, gather in bars, on the streets or at home, and they count down the seconds left to celebrate the beginning of a brand new year of my existence. I like to think that, on the first seconds of my birthday, everyone is touching each other, hugging or kissing each other. This is the one thing that hasn’t changed much. For me, it’s still the most exciting thing in life: love.

 

You would think that after all these years, I would be looking for extravagant ways of filling my time and kill my boredom. But in fact, I have become a very simple woman. I like having some good ten hours of sleep plus a nap, eating nice food, being around fun friends and, once in a while, enjoying mind blowing tantric cosmical interdimensional sex.

 

Every now and then, I meet someone who reminds me of a special person from older days. The angles of their face, the way they talk, the way they move. Even the way they smell. And they also go, and some years later I see them again in a new shape, in a new voice, a new name. But yet they are the same as they were hundreds of years ago. In some strange way, they are all connected.