The Day I Saw The Dog

I got off the subway as usual. Twilight had covered the Beijing streets in a blue whispery blanket. People and buildings seemed distant and muted. I walked towards the big street, and then I noticed it.

There was a dog next to me. I could see its back, pale yellow, its fur falling on two sides, the skin between light and warm.

I could feel its heat. Each step it took made its back curve – left, right, left right. It looked like a golden retriever.

I knew the dog was mine. It had waited for me outside and was walking me home now.

And 5 seconds later it was not there.

I turned around, mildly concerned with its sudden disappearance, as well as with my sanity, as there were neither dogs nor people around, just the busy street in the short distance.

That night I went home feeling strange. There was a gentle tug in me, a tug in a direction I was not sure I could tell.

I missed the dog.

Now I think I know what must have happened.

All the choices we make every day push us to places we did not know before. And all the choices we could have made, reside in other worlds. Nearby realities, where we took other chances. Just a twilight away.

On that evening, another Silvia and I, got off the subway together. Her dog came to take her and walk her home. For a few short moments, we were one. I felt happy and warm with the dog’s company.

I wonder how she has felt.

Български

Слязох от метрото както обикновено. Беше привечер, синият пекински здрач покрил хора и сгради. Светът изглеждаше мек и заглушен.

Тръгнах по пътечката към моята улица, и тогава го забелязах. До мен вървеше куче. Виждах само гърба му, светло жълтеникав. Козината беше гъста и мека и падаше разделена на две. Кожата в средата бе светла и топла. На всяка стъпка тялото му се извиваше наляво, надясно, наляво, надясно. Приличаше на голдън ритривър.

Усещах топлината която се излъчваше от тялото му.

То ме е посрещнало на спирката и ще върви с мен докато се приберем.

Кучето беше мое. Нямаше и съмнение за това. Знаех го...някак си.

И след 5 секунди то изчезна.

Огледах се се наоколо, малко обезпокоена, дали за кучето, дали за здравия си разум... Но го нямаше. Наоколо се виждаше само синята вечерна трева и малко по напред шумната улица с осветени коли и забързани минувачи. И никакви животни.

Тогава се прибрах вкъщи с едно неизказуемо чувство, едно подръпване дълбоко в мен, в посока която не разбирах.

Кучето ми липсваше.

Сега вече мисля че знам какво е станало.

Човек прави избори всеки ден, и всеки избор те отпраща в някаква посока. И преди да се усетиш си стигнал на място, което не си и очаквал. А всичките тези избори които не си направил, живеят в някой друг свят. Може би съвсем наблизо, на един здрач разстояние.

В онази вечер, друга Силвия и аз, слязохме заедно от метрото. Нейното куче дойде да я посрещне и да върви с нея до вкъщи. И за момент, ние двете станахме едно. Аз се зарадвах на компанията, макар и за няколко секунди.

Интересно ми е какво ли другата Силвия е усетила.

What would you tell your 20-something self if you could talk to her now?

I just read something very beautiful.

Please, read it.

Dear Sugar,

I read your column religiously. I’m 22. From what I can tell by your writing, you’re in your early 40s. My question is short and sweet: what would you tell your 20-something self if you could talk to her now?

Love,
Seeking Wisdom

Dear Seeking Wisdom,

Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.

In the middle of the night in the middle of your twenties when your best woman friend crawls naked into your bed, straddles you, and says, You should run away from me before I devour you, believe her.

You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.

When that really sweet but fucked up gay couple invites you over to their cool apartment to do ecstasy with them, say no.

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

One evening you will be rolling around on the wooden floor of your apartment with a man who will tell you he doesn’t have a condom. You will smile in this spunky way that you think is hot and tell him to fuck you anyway. This will be a mistake for which you alone will pay.

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

Yours,
Sugar

via I’m Truett Ogden.

Hutong Life

It's been five days since I am in vacation. These things should be more often.

So five days of real hutong life. I wake up to birds. And hawking Chinese, but that's irrelevant.

Dogs bark... actually they mostly yap, because all the dogs around are tiny. And vicious.

There are trees all around.

Today it rained, and I listened to the rhythm of the falling rain... (cue soundtrack).

I am so happy that I have nothing to do for three weeks, that I don't even know what to write now.

I'll have to post again.

A picture - this is what I see when I open the door to the roof terrace.

Book Nightmares

In very recent future IP laws are very powerful.

People are forbidden to share books. What pirating was before -sharing an electronic version of a book or a sound file you had bought online has evolved into a ban on sharing all authored printed materials.

People have to catalogue their home libraries and register the books with PIPPA ( Printed Intellectual Property Protection Authority). People's online conversation are monitored and if they mention reading a book that is not registered on their name they are investigated.

This leads to new ways of sharing - reading aloud. There are parties where a certain book in possesion of the host never leaves the hosts hands but he reads it aloud and the guests listen on. Viewed as the right of people to free speach this activity cannot be criminalized. People under investigation explain they overheard someone reading the book. PIPPA passes a ban on reading books aloud in public spaces but cannot touch the reading home parties.

Libraries receive huge security budgets and all electronics are taken from readers when they go in. They are patted down airport style and allowed to browse the books while monitored with cameras. Borrowing books to read at home is not allowed anymore.

Book markets are very popular and well advertised, but in order to buy a book people have to provide valid identification. Some businesses use books as end-of-year bonuses.

Schools have pretty much stopped teaching books from great writers due to their unavailability.Literature lessons now teach the IP laws and how to protect our books from theft.

Every person who starts writing a book of their own must first obtain a permit to do so. The permit is easily issued, but the authors are registered and often monitored to make sure they haven't given the book to someone to read it (usually to family and for an opinion) because this constitutes facilitating a theft. If the author does not bring charges against its family, the state has the right to brings up charges on their behalf, and they can even sue the person writing the book on behalf of their virtual identity which is being hurt by the physical person sharing the book.

Copying the books by hand is considered plagiarism and falls under the restrictions imposed by PIPPA. It can be done and is allowed as long as the hand-copied book does not leave the home where the printed version is registered. Copy machines are licensed only to businesses and not to homes, and every year their hard disks are changed and searched for illegal copies of books.

An underground movement forms which uses a loophole in the regulations. All books must be registered by language. This movement translates random parts of the books in a different language, usually the beginning of every sentence, or every second word. This way the advanced software that the PIPPA ( Printed Intellectual Property Protection Authority) uses cannot correctly identify the books and they fall in the cathegory of unregistered sribblings and therefore are not protected by the law. These semi- translated books are easily decipherable by anyone with knowledge of the languages in question and there are many groups for Scribblings Disposal that have a good business on the side.

Registered books in home libraries are not allowed to be taken out of the home without the proper permits, and are forbidden to be taken out of the state or the country. In the past there were drug mules, now there are book junkies. These are people willing to trafic books. The best and most expensive ones spend months to years in preparation and effectively learn the trafficked book by heart. Then they travel to their destination, successfully passing through all security controls, and once arrived in a safe place, they recite the book exercising their right of free speech.

Now that's a nightmare.

Back To Fuji (F810)

It’s been some time since I posted here. My excuse is work, work, and unfortunately no time to take pictures. No time to take good pictures, I mean, because I work in a kindergarten now, and we HAVE to take pictures every day, loads of them, to send them to the parents. And once the work is over I am so tired, that the world is simply not beautiful enough to tempt me to take a picture. Sigh.

Then the Chinese New Year holiday came, and things changed.

I dusted off my cameras, (nikon D40 and Fuji), charged my beloved fuji F810 and found out that the flash problem didn’t go away on its own as I has secretly expected. The camera somehow thinks that flash is always on, and tries to take pictures with it, closed or not. The result is underexposed images with the flash closed and a battery that runs out in the matter of hours. The only work around is in landscape mode.

So I opened the Chinese shopping sites, and on Taobao found another second-hand F810, and promptly bought it.

I doesn’t have a flash problem so far, or any other problem, and little by little the world regained its beauty.

Why I keep coming back to this discontinued camera? After all it came out in 2004, that is six

years ago.

Because it delivers amazing pictures for its size.

Before, cameras used to write images on light-sensitive emulsion, placed on film. Now cameras use sensors, a lot smaller than a film negative. There are advantages to this, as cameras get to be lighter and smaller and thinner. The disadvantages are loss of picture quality. A problem with most digital cameras is enlarging the pictures. When you do that you’ll see smudged corners, blurred details. The bigger cameras, DSLR , professional or not, use bigger sensors.

There are many things that make up a good picture. I’ll keep it short and simple. Each digital

sensor has a lot of pixels. They are millions of pixels, and 1 000 000 pixels amount to one 1megapixel, or 1 MP.

When you put a lot of pixels on a small sensor, the pixels have to be smaller too. Smaller pixels catch less light. Light is very important when you take a picture...You realize this when you shoot indoors or in the evening. Even when your eyes tell you that the light is enough, your

camera often doesn’t think so. That’s why we have the flash, but you can’t always take pictures with a flash.

The bigger cameras, DSLR have larger pixels on a larger sensor. The pixel density with them is something like 2-5 million pixels per square centimeter. While the lighter and cuter digital cameras have between 30-45 million pixels per square centimeter. It affects the picture quality, and it’s best seen in low light conditions. The cute digital cameras have higher ISO, light sensitivity, but it brings another problem - digital noise. These are dots of color on your photographs, that simply do not belong - blue, green, purple. To deal with noise, cameras employ noise-reduction techniques, which ultimately hide these colorful dots, but smudge the

fine details in your pictures.

Now back to Fuji F810.

It’s sensor size is 1/1.7, or 0.43 square centimeters. That’s is not bad at all for a camera this

size. The pixel density is 14 million pixels per square centimeter. It has only 6 megapixels. It makes quite good pictures. Another thing that drew me to it, is its ability to save images in RAW. Most point-and-shoot cameras deal only with JPG pictures. They are fine, but what the camera does is to take all the control from you, process the sensor data, adjust levels, colors and white balance, and compress the image to a ready to use JPG file.

If you want to keep that creative control, you need to take pictures in RAW format, and then process them with Photoshop or another program that deals with them. Many people don’t bother and are perfectly happy with the JPG output. I, however, want to experiment with my pictures. I want to see if I can bring up a picture shot in the evening, if I can brighten up a portrait taken at home, not close to a lamp or a window.

Of course, i can do all this with my Nikon D40, that’s why I got it. It has a larger sensor and pixel density of 1.6 million pixels per square centimeter. But my Nikon is larger, heavier,

impossible to carry in a pocket, to hang from my wrist, and definitely attracts attention

whenever I point it at somebody. While candid pictures, or street pictures are not even noticed if I am brandishing a little silver camera taken out of my pocket.

Because in the case of Fuji F810 appearances deceive. It can save images in RAW format, and later, in the comfort of my own home and Photoshop I can make them appear the way I saw them.

Our eyes and brain are the best camera. They adjust quickly to light, and compile an unforgettable image in our memories.

How many times you have you taken a picture of an amazing scenery, only to arrive home and find out that the image is not what you saw? The greens don’t shine the way you remember

them, the colors of the sunset are washed out, and the sun reflection on our friends hair is just a white blotch? If I save the pictures in RAW I try to process them to get the image I saw. The

image that inspired me to press the shutter.

So there it is, my reason to hunt down and get another second-hand Fuji F810. Because they

just don’t make them like this anymore. Its tiny silver metallic body hides the fact that this camera has a low pixel density on a relatively large sensor, it produces low noise pictures, it is able to save them in RAW format, it has very sharp and clear lens. It has full manual controls, which means that I can adjust the speed, the aperture (opening), the light sensitivity (ISO). And it fits comfortably in my pocket.

Here are four images taken with it, to illustrate what I mean by good pictures.

Posted on www.silviamyworld.blogspot.com

Things we say to strangers

There comes a time when all the people we meet are strangers. On the streets, at work, in the cafes, on the planes.

Everyone is a stranger, and we tell them things.

It doesn’t matter what we say, because they don’t care. Or we won’t see them anymore.

It’s such a fascinating opportunity to make a new person of ourselves. We don’t have to lie. We just have to not say certain things. We omit mistakes, family members, years spent doing things that are not important anymore.

And it makes me wonder, of all the people I meet and talk with, how many are doing the same thing as I am? How many are showing just a side, a polished shiny side of them. They are like icebergs; they look different if you move a step away, different if you take a step closer. Different under the sunlight, and different in the fog.

Iceberg is a cold word. I used to think that people are like diamonds, multifaceted, and beautiful. Impossible to see them all.

Impossible to know them all.

There is a certain relief in the fact that no one will know me as well. I even don’t know myself.

I had a fair recollection of my teenage years. I thought I remember well what has happened and how I have felt.

That was until the moment I went home, after the passing of my father, and started reading through my diaries.

They were written in a time without global technologies, when I couldn’t always speak to people when I needed it. There were evenings I had come home, in my room, bursting with thoughts and feelings, and my diaries were my best friends.

I sat down by my old desk, my sister’s former desk, and took out my diaries from deep inside it, behind old textbooks and forgotten books. I started flipping through pages, full of writings and suddenly realized something.

I realized that I have been a very different person then. I was seeing myself through the rose-tinted glasses we all put on when we look back. The diaries forced me to take them off.

My diaries played like movie to me, and the scenes were subtly different. I had the director’s cut, and it was rough.

I have a been a sweet girl, full of questions and dreams. I found the notebook with my poems and started comparing the dates. Somewhere around the age of 16 I have somehow grown fangs. Rash, and impulsive, quick to take offense and shout, black and white about the world.… If I could go back, I would have probably spent hours with myself, trying to tell of what could happen, what will happen… I tore away pages, filled with scribbles that needed to be thrown away. Words that screamed with rage, words written with the sole purpose to hurt. If I could meet myself then, I would have been a stranger. A diamond with way too many sharp ends, still fragile and rough.

I saw my friends then with new eyes. There were details, recorded on the pages, that I have missed to notice really. Things my friends have said, or did, things to which I would have reacted in another way now.

It made me think. It’s scary how we change. We become our own strangers one day.

Pierre is leaving China

Pierre, the gentle giant... my friend, my cousin Pierre is leaving in July.

He has helped me so much in his stay in China... I simply cannot imagine life without him in this country. 

I met him first in 2004, when he arrived in China and didn’t know anything about this strange country. 

Throughout his stay here he always stayed calm, wise and nice to everyone.

He was even nice to my ex-boyfriend, who definitely was not a nice person.

Every time we would fight with my ex, Pierre would be the person I call.. to talk about what happened, to cry, to complain, to be consoled. 

He had all the reasons, he refused to believe in anything bad, he always refuted all the evil ideas and mean words said and found a way for things to work out. 

He was my anchor in the stormy seas, a window to a happy place.

I have never seen him angry... well, maybe once, when we were in the zoo, and the 100-th Chinese turned to stare at him, he was annoyed and shouted - do not stare at me, there are much more interesting animals here.

Pierre, who always had time to talk and listen.

Pierre, who was always there for me when I had to move house, carrying heavy things without as much as a sigh from corner to corner in my new apartments until I was satisfied. 

Pierre, who always supported all my decisions, be it to buy the n-tieth mobile phone, change a job or a hairstyle or even break up with my boyfriend. 

For the last he stayed and listened to me talk about my reasons for 6 straight hours...without ever appearing bored or tired. Then he came with me to the airport to get my earrings, which I had forgotten in the hotel room of a guy last night. That hotel room, and the time I spent there made me realize that I had to break off the poisonous relationship that still weighed on me. Weighed with dead weight, because there was no love, no trust, nothing... Pierre listened for 6 hours, and agreed with me - You need something better than that, Sue.

Pierre, who I call my cousin, because sometimes families are not based on blood, he couldn’t be real family, but  to me is more than that, even if I call him simply cousin.

Pierre, who always has an advice for a difficult moment.

Pierre, who laughs with all his heart when he is happy and you can see that in his eyes.

Pierre, who loves pizza and good music.

Pierre, who is friends with everyone. 

Pierre, who is always late for everything but you cannot get angry at him when he appears and smiles and says Ah, Sue!

Pierre is leaving China. 

I’ll stop writing because I am going to cry.

Cooks Gathering Lunch?

Now now, I know that the tennis center where our kindergarten is situated suffers from  money problems, but the sight this morning caught me off-guard. All the cooks, in full kitchen attire, plus hats, are on the camp grounds picking unidentified green things. Together with them is the canteen boss, two cleaning ladies, and god knows why, the accountant. 

All squatting down and inspecting intently the grass. 

I really hope we won't be eating the result of their work at lunch.