Don't Think Again

I'm starting a move to my own domain http://furetosan.com so be sure to check it out. This blog will be replaced by a WordPress powered blog over on http://furetosan.com/blog . People who follow me on http://furetosan.tumblr.com should see no problem, because I can just import the RSS feed into tumblr. Since Blogger has no such feature, I guess I'll import this blog into WordPress and leave this one last post so that people can find their way there. See you on the other side!

I ain't no anthropologist, but o see some roaring differences here. In brazil we seem to have a lot of mixed attitudes towards success. We have learned far too well how to be helpless. My little third-world country heritage speaks up sometimes. When I tell random canadians that I'm writing a book, they'll tell to not sweat about the pirated copies. The Brazilian crew will try to convince me I'm wasting my time. Now, the question is: would the little voice inside your head believe your success or try to warn you (with the best of intentions, of course) against failure? Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetosan

I think I was always very conscious of this on some level. I always knew you can't control people, just like stones fall downwards and Americans will do crazy stuff. It's a statement of fact. (Just kidding about the Americans. Not.) Thing is it used to make me feel afraid of people and/or totally threatened by knowing I could never know what they would do. Think of how this affected my relationships. No wonder my first girlfriend was huge on demonstration approval and giving me reassurance. That's what she had to do, and when she did everything was roses. Now the tables have turned, after an impossibly unexpected series of events. Things weren't supposed to have happened this way, but they did. Things that were supposed to have happened a long time ago will apparently never come to pass. This all sounds so bad, and yet I'm still here. Now this impossible reality is what I call home. I'm at ease with the shifting sands of life. I don't plot against and fe...

First off, not everyone is gonna like you. Actually, having haters is an indicator that you have achieved some notoriety. Don't expect everyone to like you, and if everyone does, maybe that's not a good sign at all. About making it, know the haters don't make any difference. Thing is you have to know what is it that "making it" means.What do you expect to accomplish? And maybe more importantly: you need to define ways that will let you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have indeed made it. Then find new stuff to work on.

Equilibrium, whether it's chemical, physical or even psychological can be defined as a state that tends to get back to itself when afflicted by regular events. Your stomach has a pH level that is pretty much stable, until you drink a Coke and it gets acid. To solve that, your body has innumerable little mechanisms working to bring that pH level back to par. Takes years of stress, tons of coke and beer and all other sorts of abuses to actually get gastritis. I'm borrowing the term from other disciplines here, so don't take me for an authority. In short, whatever change you try to make will be met by resistance. It's always around, it's not going anywhere, it's the first obstacle you have to bring down. Shake up that homeostasis. Fortunately enough, it will work against you and then for you. That same thing which was preventing you from taking the first step will get used to being on the move. Like posting daily on a blog, you get used to it. And then, if ...

I'm not a capitalist, but I loved Ayn Rand's novels, namely Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As much as people want me to like Atlas Shrugged more, Fountainhead will always be my favorite. So I was considering buying some apparel from these guys . Thing is, they have nothing but quotes from Fountainhead, even though there are three thousand cooler Atlas Shrugged T-shirts. Do you understand my doubts? Anyway, I'm not a capitalist in any way. Not a communist either. Picking any of those two choices would just mean I'm stupid. I don't wanna be in favor of people blocking Facebook, like they do in China. But I'm also not gonna vote for those guys who want to put a price tag in everything, even water and air, like some guys from the documentary The Corporation. I must be a walking paradox.

I've been pumping out words like a mofo' lately. People who say they ain't got no time to write are basically full of it. No offense. Anyways, on the YouTube front I've finally made the decision to take the time to put up subtitles for every single one of my videos.This takes work, but the outcome has proven to be more than worth it. Got some good material waiting to be produced, and definitely feel like I'm coming into my own in this production process. My first book is more than halfway done, and these last few weeks have been highly productive. It's a short self-help book about picking up girls, written in Portuguese. I'm self-publishing, so you'll be able to get it from big ebook stores like Amazon and the iBookstore or you can get a printed copy through a print-on-demand service. I'm gonna do a book launch in Brazil in early 2011, after a series of releases in miscellaneous news media. After the initial launch I'm gonna dedicate more t...

Today I'm going with Florence + The Machine - Dog Days Are Over . I'm going with the comments of Tuesday, November 9, 2010. You might wanna check for more recent comments. Anyway, fire up the song and keep on reading for my take on the comments. A lot of the comments are talking about movies: slumdog millionaire, eat pray love, covert affairs (tv series). So this tells me they relate this song to entertainment who moved them somehow. I checked and wikipedia says they're not on slumdog millionaire, but that they're featured in a commercial in eat pray love. Couldn't figure out if they're on covert affairs or not. I really thing good stuff is very hard to come across. Finding really good music is almost like meeting your future spouse. Relatively good music are like short affairs or random club makeouts: enjoy them for a bit then move on. The video has but 1 dislike, and most of the comments are about how awesome the song is, how awesome it makes them f...

This movie was called 恋人までの距離 in Japanese, and it is pretty awesome. I'm using it as inspiration for my book, and then writing about how everyone should watch this movie and pay enough attention to the important stuff in the movie. I have been told several times that watching the same movie more than once is a waste of time. People who study cinema and films would disagree, I bet. Nevertheless, I have my own reasons for watching movies several times, namely the fact that I write about them, and must keep my facts straight. Of course, I get to actually learn better wars to read  the movies, including subtleties such as the actors' body language, small twists in the plot and imperceptible dialogues.

I'm reading yet another outrageously good book called The Fold, by Gilles Deleuze. This guy is a famous philosopher, and I find that reading his books always gets me peeved at first. He just doesn't make any sense. He writes vaguely about concepts and then plows on to the next interesting subject. He is deliberately vague, and builds concepts' borders by tracing relationships between these and other concepts. Strangely, that works even for me, whose knowledge of philosophy is inexistent or anecdotal. Just because I don't know what I'm reading about, it doesn't mean I don't get it.

It started with a simple idea, that I then decided to make into a reality . This entailed three months trying to figure out how to approach people who care and get them to get involved and donate. It took me more than a couple of weeks to actually figure out how to donate, because of the whole location settings problem. In hindsight, this couldn't have been a richer experience: I set the goal at 5000 bucks, because I didn't feel there would be any harm in aiming too high. It couldn't hurt. The results are 170 bucks in donations, which makes water for 8.5 for 20 years. I'll say that again; TWENTY YEARS... by the way, I am actually looking in the computer screen and gesturing the words with my lips and making buggy eyes. I'm not making any sounds, because that would be weird. Within the next year and a half, everyone who donated will receive an account of where their money has been spent. I'm definitely doing this again next year, but I'll do it harder...

No, that's not my major. Not even loosely related to it. Thus I can revel in reading whatever books by whichever thinkers. This makes me who I am. It's an inseparable part of me. It makes for a lot of conversation, for cerebral vlogs and for blog posts such as these. I think of myself as a thinker constantly yielding unto life. Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetosan

I've just finished writing a chapter on homossexuality in a book about picking up girls. It's in Portuguese. Sorry. Am I being a fool in stating openly that I've had experiences with men? Am I silly for bringing material against prejudice to an audience whose purpose is to "pickup girls"? I don't think so. My rationale is simple: you have to be in the trenches. Being an academic well-protected in an ivory tower is fine, but you're only talking to people who'll listen. Crossing over the trenches is the only way to get stuff done. Let the hate and misunderstadings come flooding in, as long as a few words get through. Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetosan

Think of sleazy used cars salesmen. Now think of the best purchase you've ever performed. Think of the people who conduced you to it. Then compare the two. What I'm gettig at here is that sales is not inherently sleazy, but we have been accostumed to think it is. That has been vey damaging, as I've distanced myself from such "horrid" behavior as selling as much as I could. My loss. Selling without sleaziness requires no less than brutal honesty. This thing i'm selling might be for you, then again it might not be. Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetosan

So, this very productive conversation started with a video by gimmeabreakman . And just recently FantasticBabblings has added a lot to the discussion with this video. So I'll take this opportunity to bring my own 2 cents to the discussion. First off, I want to clearly assert that I am totally in favor of gay rights, just in case some passerby who doesn't know me long enough misunderstand me. I wanna bring Frank Zappa into the conversation, and the two points I want to bring to this particular conversation are: (1) this is about words, and (2) America is moving towards a fascist theocracy. This guy is just so awesome beyond description. I stand with davisfleetwood on this one, when he says most of us in the left defend freedom of speech for me but not for thee. I don't think criticism is censorship. I think words like "nigga", "faggot" and so many others should be thought of as just that, words. South Park is great at doing this and ...

I'm not referring to the so-called war on terror waged by the US. My point here is something I taught many of my ex-students how to consistently do. I'm talking about kids fresh out of high school and whose sole life objective was to get into college. They were all terrified of not making it, like I once was. I used my own story as an example, to show them I was once also paralyzed by fear. The prospect of failing almost kept me from doing what I knew I had to. The story comes in to show that I'm no boy genius wonder, and that I made it regardless. Now I'm fighting different battles, but I still get a kick out of using my own fear as leverage. Fear is like a huge Internet banner making an annoying sound over some page I can't wait to read. I will read that page. Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetosan

Yes, Dilma Rouseff is the first female President in Brazil. This is awesome, and I really think she will do a great job, regardless of all the opposition and tough problems she'll have to deal with. Now, I've become increasingly interested in reading Lula's biography. I'll get myself a copy next chance I get.

This moment is terribly final and a forever unfinished beginning. Everything in your past has brought you to wherever you are now, reading this blog post and there's no arguing with the finality of reality. You get no second chances here, bro. Then again, all of your future starts and springs forth from this one single reality. There's a continuity between this terribly and tragically final reality linked directly to a miriad of possible futures. You don't know what's gonna happen. Nobody does. So we live in this eternal in-between. This resonates with Deleuze's devenir and with Nietzsche's eternal return. We live in an imperceptible gap between the terribly final past and the forever unfinished beginning. Can it be that we're forever bound to be stuck in an existential lack devoid of final meaning? A quote from the monkey character in Waking Life: "(...) and a new world is just as likely as an old one." Check me out on YouTube: youtube.com/furetos...