God, I missed writing on this blog, but it has been a crazy crazy week, and I barely had the time to breath.

Anyway, best thing of the week is I’ve been to Paris with my friend M and that we had a super good time with our French friends. Anyway, guess our French trip deserves an ad-hoc post, so i’ll soon inaugurate a “J’adore Paris, part II” session.

For now, only thing I can say is that I feel extremely pissed since I put my beautiful boot-dressed foot on the Italian soil. Weather is crappy, I gotta be very careful to avoid the puking flu that is affecting the office, and I’m fricking overwhelmed with things to do. But all of this could just be a small cloud passing by the sunshine of my life, if it wasn’t for a creepy phenomenon ( even creepier than astracan grannies…can you believe that?) that is occurring in these days in Italy: San Remo Italian Song Festival.

Since my mother has always tried to make my sister and I grow as Sapiens Sapiens Women, we never had TV at home and we still don’t.

This of course caused me some problems at school, because I was the only one who didn’t know cartoons jingles ( so I soon had to learn how to playback).

Anyway, at least I grew up without knowing how San Remo Festival looked like.

First ( and last) good thing I learned about San Remo is that during San Remo Eve I can go to the cafeteria next to the office even at 9.30 and still find my favourite croissant. This happens because THE Italian festival organizers work in my office neighbourhood, and must all belong to the Sara’s Favourite Croissant Eaters Club, so I’m just glad that they got out of my way for couple of weeks.

Beside that, San Remo Festival is the biggest ( and most expensive) proof that life after death exists.

Avarage age of presentor, orchestra directors ( there are more than one, and they all look aweful), public and singers is 95, and now I see why the stage is always covered with flowers: they’re probably trying to get used to their next residence ( same flowers, only 6 feet below).

Songs sucked ( they all sounded like different kind of laments caused by different kind of stomach aches, and lyrics have the intensity of Sesame Street opening credits song), singers sucked ( some of them probably assumed Viagra or Cocaine, I even saw one who, while being interwied, started greeting people he recognised among the audience and told stories about Balkans that had no connections with the interview itself); the vice-presentor ( a 1m tall dwarf wearing enormous shoes with the colors of the Italian flag) touched between the legs and without any apparent reason the Director of the First Channel of Italian public television that was sitting among the audience; the idiocy of the two super models that usually jointly assist the presentor, this year ended up causing interferences with cameras, thus obliging the authors to alternate them.

My favourite performers so far are called “Frank Head” or somethig like that, they ARE che link between man and monkey, they cannot sing, they cannot dance, they don’t pretend to be human. Someone sincere, at last.

This post ain’t about Gf (Big Brother)8 trasgender participant (beautiful-lady-Bambi-eyes-super-smart-much-more-womanish-than-me-screw-her called Silvia). If you ended up on this post lookin for her, well, too bad for you. This post is in fact a serious meta-communication experiment. There is a nice tool called BlogStats, on WordPress, that mainly tells you how many clicks does your blog get every day, and which Tags ( which is the XXI millenium name for “keywords”) are the most frequently searched in the Net.  Checking out my BlogStats I found out that the second “top post” ever has been M’s one on the Italian Big Brother new ( and suprisingly smarter than usual) participants. Deepening the research, it came out that tags such as “GF” “Transgender” were often associated, in the websearch, to words such as “transgression”, “easy” and stuff like that.

So my little experiment will mainly consist in publishing this post, that says nothing at all about GF8 nor about transgenders, with the same tags M used for her post. After that I’ll just wait and check the BlogStats every two hours and let you know.

Now, you may think I’ve got nothing to do. From your point of view it could seem true.  I work for an association that gathers Radio and TV broadcasters from all over the Mediterranean and links them in the organisation of conferences, co-productions, festivals and so on. My job mainly consists in making sure that all of them are able to fly from their hometown to the place an  event is taking place (let’s say, Bucharest) and that they can enter the Country the event is settled in ( let’s say Romania) without being arrested for lack of Visa. After that I have to make sure they have a place to sleep in, one to eat at ( possibly not the same) and, sometimes, act a little like an idiot to make them laugh ( for example singing Adriano Celentano’s “Azzurro” in a restaurant in Alexandria, while wearing silly phones with a microphone as I was Britney Spears).  

In the last days I’ve been waiting to know if I gotta go to Romania and fight in person with Howard Jonhson’ General Manager for the bloody room release policy, after I’ve already spent last week doing that on the phone ( but in the end I guess that staring him in the eye and miming what i mean could help, since I’ve tried badly to let him understand me in english with no success and looks like Rumanian general managers have serious problem with the subject-verb-object concatenation).

Now, the thing is that my colleagues and I make every day huge efforts to make people understand the richness and the beauty of this Mediterranean enlarged world we live in. This blog as well is about that, and the idea that it has been visited mainly by jerks looking for sum hot stuff about Big Brother transgender, drives us nuts.

For this reason, this post is a very serious experiment about the avarage IQ of this blog’s visitors. I’m afraid to know the results. I’ll let you know.

A week ago we went to the movies to whatch a film M. had heard about. She’d kept telling me about that all the way from the office to the cinema, so as we bought the tikets I was dying to see that. It was while I was buying pop corn ( so what? It’s corn, it’s healthy, it’s like bloody corn flakes, it’s not like junk food. I don’t do junk food. Not very often, anyway) that we realized the film we intended to whatch was called “Cous Cous” while the film we were going to whatch was called “Caramel”, of the Lebanese Nadine Labaki. Well, guess what? It was beautiful. We spent our night in the cosy atmosphere of a beauty salon where the lives of  women cross and melt like the sugar they use to do the wax. 

The movie is settled in Beyrouth, but it’s not about Beyrouth. The women protagonists belong to the arab world, but there is no anger, nor politics, nor Coran it. It could be anywhere, because the relationship between those women are universal, as women relationships always are. So bravo, to this young ( and gorgeous) film maker whose levity has been already prized with a candidation for Oscars 2008, bravo cause she proved that Europeans ain’t the only one who are able to make a sweet, sensual movie about women.      

Italians are funny. This is the reason why we still are in the EU, it’s cause we make you all laugh. The latest joke is that our Justice Minister’s wife got arrested ( Ironic, hein? Alanise Morrisette would have wrote an entire album about us) and so our Government is now falling apart ( I’m astonished, things like that never happen here). 

Now, in these days I realized something that really upsat me. French people - who probably found very hard to accept to be defeated during Soccer World Champioships, ah ah ahahahahahahah - is now trying really hard to gain the supremacy in the “Funniest Country Ever World Competition”. Well, I must admit. There can be no competition. You win. If it wasn’t for the little blue-eyed dwarf and his romantic love story, I really wouldn’t know what to read when I’m at the toilet ( you know, even Italian politics ain’t that moving, involving and absolutely useless). Now I know how many times do the French Romeo and Juliet caugh in a day, I know that they went to Pyramids ( and so did I…so what?), I know that Carla is pregnant ( pyramids weren’t that interesting in the end, were they?) and, most of all, I know that the President’s former wife thinks that her ex-husband is, I quote: “A useless fucker”.

Well, this is really funny, I must admit. Anyway, since irony will be the only thing that will save us, our comedians are doing their best ( I can’t wait to hear next Berlusconi’s joke, I’m sure it’s coming…): there you are the amazing portait our beloved Fiorello made of our/their a little less beloved Carla.

Enjoy.

www.qiblalocator.com is a webpage that allows Muslims all around the world to know the exact position of La Mecca from the place they are. It’s very easy, you just scribble the address of the place you are, and a red line will show you the direction your prayers shoud take.

This is the coolest thing I’ve ever read about. I wish I had something to tell me exactly where to send my whishes, my hopes and my faith. I’ve always envied those little moments in a Muslim day during which, no matter who, they take their time to convey their faith towards someone ( or something) they can visualize wherever they are.

If our reference points are getting weaker and weaker as the time goes by, as the world shrinks, as the institutions fall apart, will a GPS save us?

Serj Tankian - Empty Walls video

It feels good to step on the bus in the morning, with your Vanity Fair under the armpit.

It feels good to find a seat on the bus when your supercute high heels boots hurt.

 It feels good to look up at the screens in the bus and see this beautiful AMREF campaign!

I wish you have something, in the morning, that makes you feel good.  

Besides….

this blog is about dialogue, about the hope that speaking, sharing, confronting our lives to the ones of others, who live just a step away, can change something…just a little…this is my Christmas wish