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Author Archives: Alice Salles

You See, My Mom Is Special

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Alice Salles in Family & Friends

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

mother's day

There’s no easy way to talk about our mothers on Mother’s Day. So let me start by saying that my mom is special.

mom

Mom and me, 1986 or 1987.

You see, my mother is different from most other mothers out there because she raised two free children. Her approach was something that came naturally, but now, she would be called a ‘free-range’ parent. We were always encouraged to do things on our own, come up with our own games, and go to the store unattended either on behalf of our mother or grandmother.

Mom and dad, 1983.

Mom and Dad, 1983.

While hers wasn’t an easy childhood, mine was the easiest of all. She never pretended to know everything and often urged us to get the answers we were seeking on our own. Through some of the most complicated phases of our lives when she barely had any time to sit with us for dinner, mom managed to stay sane. Raising two children with little money while taking care of a sick husband is not an easy task, but my mom made it happen and guess what? She never complained.

Mom never complains.

Mom & me, 1989.

Mom & me, 1989.

She’s the happiest of all women even when she’s not, and when we talk over the phone or see each other, she cries. And as I kiss her cheeks she reassures me that all that salty taste is a product of happiness. She’s so happy that my brother and I are free. And because of her, I’ve always known freedom.

It’s because of my mother that I love dancing, singing, and Paul Newman, but it’s also because of her that I love freedom.

Mom & me, 2014.

Mom & me, 2014.

You see, my mom is special, and she’s all mine. ~

Jeannette Rankin: The First U.S. Congresswoman Was Also Antiwar – Updated

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Alice Salles in True story?

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Tags

congress, heroic, war

The first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress was Montana’s Jeannette Rankin. Her most noteworthy feat was her opposition to war. Then, very much like now, being against the war was seen as a treason.

Jeannette Rankin

The first U.S. congresswoman Jeannette Rankin.

In an essay she wrote in 1958, she explained her votes against World War I in 1917 and against World War II after the country had been attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

While she did have some support the first time, she stood alone before congress the second time around.

According to her own account, she would not be able to face her remaining days in office if she had not voted against the war. In her remarks after a long investigation into data available then, Rankin claimed the war was nothing but an attempt to blame the Japanese for the aggression the United States had started by imposing economic sanctions against them.

The very first U.S. congresswoman, a Republican, was vehemently against war and dedicated to bringing details the administration would rather keep under wraps to light no matter what. Her decision to stay true to her role as a representative of her people was all she needed to act honorably.

In 1958 she said:

And how much do the people and even the members of Congress know about the moves now being made by our government or other governments which may lead to another war? Our being kept in ignorance arouses my apprehensions today as it did more than forty years ago when World War I burst upon my world.

It breaks my heart this is still true today. ~


Quote taken from: We Who Dared to Say No to War – American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now, Edited by Murray Polner & Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

About taking yourself seriously

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Alice Salles in Family & Friends, Living

≈ 1 Comment

My sweet mom trying to decide on what dessert to go for.

 

“Lost in the valley without my horses / No one can tell me what my remorse is” – the great ~ ~ THINKER ~ ~ Anthony Kiedis (yeah, dude from the Red Hot Chili Peppers)

My mother is a fervent catholic.

She maintains a tradition of dedicating a mass to dead loved ones at the anniversary of their deaths. Every year. No matter how long it’s been since they have passed away.

She does that for her father, mother, aunts and brother. She does that for my brother, my father and cousins. She does that for her grandparents.

While I’m not religious and have never seen a major point in carrying on with this tradition, I’ve recently begun wondering what I would do if my mother could no longer maintain her promise to herself. If she is no longer able to celebrate the memory of her loved ones, her own way, would I have any reason to carry on with her tradition, even if she never even implied I should at all?

Personal promises are powerful, but only if you take yourself seriously enough. Oftentimes, however, taking oneself seriously is the least-likely thing you are encouraged to do.

Taking existence lightly makes things easier, when you fail. Learning where caring ends and where taking things lightly begins is something we have mastery over after we set our own standards.

There’s nothing pre-made. No perfect formula to follow.

Just like I can’t tell you what should motivate you, you are the only one who knows what’s important to you and so it goes with what kind of traditions you like to embrace and carry on. Could I choose to care about a promise my mother has silently kept for so long or would I weaken its significance by not quite getting why she does it over time?

I still don’t know. ~

I should just doubt myself more often

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Alice Salles in Living

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rose

I have had the opportunity to fall madly in love and believe I would be in love forever three times.

The three men I gave myself blindly to taught me I was actually wrong. Not all along, but just for a brief moment. They thought me to doubt me and as I doubted myself, I learned something else entirely new:

I was right.

Romance is not the type of struggle you would imagine. It’s not a struggle, at all. I always knew how to feel it, it comes naturally, and at last, I find no shame in facing it.

As I struggle for other things in life I know this: love is not a struggle, it’s the eye of the storm where you are just as safe and just as absolutely vulnerable as you possibly can and yet, you don’t need shelter, you don’t need to find a way out. You accept it gladly. Both of you.

It’s a clichê because we all have it in us, some of us take longer to grasp, some don’t.

I never lost it and I as much as I would like to teach those men what I’ve learned, I know I can’t. I’m sure they will figure this out too once they doubt themselves first.

After all, every quest for meaning starts with a question.

About not shrugging

27 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Living, True story?

≈ 2 Comments

sitting

An uncle of mine whose life was cut short due to that beast we are all well acquainted with, cancer, taught me a couple of things about living life. Not because we spent that much time together, but because we were probably the only two introverts in a whole family of musicians, highly intelligent doctors, men of law, teachers and somewhat well-connected politicians.

He was a surgeon, freemason and sweet father of two children who… didn’t turn out much like him. He used to sit for hours in silence, staring at nothing, paying attention to nothing and everything. Once he learned he had the same type of cancer his father had had, he didn’t rush to do all the things he wanted to do or asked his loved ones to cry him a river, he carried on with life like nothing had happened. He chose not to get treatment. He chose to live as if he had no idea he had cancer at all.

He chose to shrug.

When he visited us in São Paulo, I gave him a little bronze medal with the “Ôm” symbol. When he touched the medal, he smiled and paused for some time. He then looked up and said “listen to me little Alice, you must remember to never do something the same way you’ve done it before for the second, third time or even fourth time in a row.”

I was a bit confused. “What do you mean, uncle?”

“Well, when walking home from school, take a different path; when catching the bus to the theater, take a different line; when saying good morning to your neighbor, say it with different words.”

“Why is that?”

“Do what I didn’t do. I’m a man of habit. Let your brain create new connections, let your routine allow your brain to discover new ways of seeing things.”

He smiled. Sweetly, the way he always did. He was lovely and lovable and he never asked for attention. He lived at a slow pace and left early but didn’t forget to ask me to do just the opposite, as if he was meant to show me that not all that runs smooth on the outside is also running just as smooth on the inside.

Against sobriety

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Living

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

analysis, sobriety

CYMERA_20131120_190630

I have been writing sober pieces for too long now to be able to write about the kind of heavy existence I have been experimenting with.

I feel that, to use the letter “I” with some responsibility, one must first understand its presence. Its mass. One must also wrap one’s mind around the fact that one plus one makes two and that a mass of ones will never speak louder than the one that speaks privately to one’s self. Once this realization has been confirmed, one must ask: am I confident about my oneness?

Whenever I hope to go beyond the critical thinking that my sober writing demands of me, I feel dry and wonder if I ever had anything remotely poetic to share. Have I ever gone beyond the realm of immediate life and if not, is it even a terrible thing? Is being “beyond” cold analyses anything close to being full of blood? Or is it a sin to be so passionate about the quest, but not passionate enough about the undreamed of?

To penetrate pig-thick skin

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Uncategorized

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rant

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Why is it that having a hobby is healthy and being mildly obsessed with a band, a movie star or a literature character harmful?

Humans have a funny way to categorize everything and make sure that, whatever it is that is placed above or beneath previously traced lines, is crushed back to exist within limits or expelled forcefully through the use of real-world politics.
Yes, I used the word politics.
Because politics is exactly what one may find meticulously defined in the contents of a dictionary: power struggle, machinations, maneuvering and finally opportunism. Part of the reason why I hate politics so much is how aware I am of its influence and how incredibly sensible I am about its effect on people.
Politics push everybody to think like everybody and I have no patience regarding those individuals who won’t let me be an individual. To constantly feel pressure to make a good impression because, believe it or not, I might offend Joe and Jack over there when they finally find out my radical and poetic visions regarding my own self and my own preferences when it comes to whatever do not match theirs.
‘Whatever’ is too much of an issue to deal with because taboo is a much easier thing to fight over than, I don’t know, anything that is truly important. Because the idea of fighting, after all, is overrated and blown out of proportions, which leaves nothing to the imagination and everything to the shallow. To fight over something is a luxury item that is truly available for all.
The one thing we have in common: the capacity to argue over nothing.
When one argues my “opinion” (note how I placed opinion between quotation marks) offends them or outrages them or makes me less of the human I obviously am, I puke a little inside my mouth but before feeling sick, I feel fine.
I, in the end, know better while the pig that spits on my face knows only how to be… a pig. That’s true politics, to point the finger at somebody for having some ludicrous idea and mock him or her for expressing thoughts in a very inoffensive manner. To create the idea in others that a harmless someone is not worth any attention and to do so forcefully, through the use of a detrimental and abusive approach… now that is politics.
Wow. A post that started as a rebellious way of telling the world I do not like to hide what I feel that finished with a rant about real-world politics… We haven’t changed much since Columbus ‘came across’ the Americas and I guess evolution is nothing but a faint notion of idealized humanity that mankind is simply not able to wrap its collective mind around… and never will.

A sad story

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Living

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The latest occurrences have reminded us all that vigilance is the only price we should really pay for freedom.

Vigilance, thus, could be easily called the enemy of fear for those who are comfortable in their own skin, but it could also be called the slippery slope of paranoia, for those with little confidence in their own means.

I heard a story today that made all other stories fade away. I sat down to work and for a couple of hours I would occasionally focus my thoughts on that story, as if I were trying to put myself in one of the main character’s shoes.

This lady I know lost her husband fourteen years ago. I’ve known her for about a year and a half and I never asked her about her husband. Everybody told me it was a “complicated” story. I never bothered asking anything else. Today, her sister told me everything.

Her husband, she said, was a little “off”… “you know, war does that to you”.

And what happened? I asked.

“Well, he hanged himself one day, even though he had a fourteen-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife waiting for him at home”.

As she told me that story, I flipped through old photographs of the two of them. I saw the young lady, so slim, so gorgeous. A true Latin diva: the perfectly shaped and warm-hearted mermaid of any man’s most daring of dreams.

He hanged himself. He took his life, his right, and his pain with him, but not without leaving a heavy weight behind for the girls to carry on their own.

I don’t judge him and I don’t blame him. The reality of those who serve “their country” in uniform is harsh and each one of them deals with their own experiences the best way they can, but I feel for her.

Not because I think she wasted her years with the man she loved only for him to take his life in the end, but because I know it’s hard to give in. To let go of somebody that means everything to you in the name of letting them exercise what’s most precious to man: freedom.

2013-04-20-18-35-55

Violence Generates Peace, Oh Wait [Catholic Edition]

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Living

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

catholic school, peace

I used to study in a Catholic school. My brother and I had scholarships because of my father’s work with another Catholic educational institution. Note that, my father was agnostic, in spite of the fact he was a law professor in a private Catholic University throughout the 1970s. Nobody ever questioned his capabilities because he stood proud of his lack of faith. They respected him. Anyway,

The schools in Brazil are mostly modeled after European educational institutions, which usually follow a system in which the students are grouped together in fixed classrooms. Kids are usually required to wear uniforms, which was what happened to me. I have plenty of memories of my days as a Catholic school-girl but one in particular stands out and makes me think of what brought me here today.

Every day, I would walk down the hallway from the main stairway toward the classroom in my navy blue and white uniform. I stepped carefully and attempted to draw as little attention to myself as I possibly could; given the fact I was often treated as the odd bird of odd birds, the nerd without a cause in a school of abnormally healthy and gorgeous little jerks.

As soon as I stepped into the main hallway, which was about 40 meters long, my eyes immediately landed on a poster hanging between the 4th A group and the B group classrooms. There was an awfully cheesy picture of a flower in the very center of it and at the bottom of the poster, the words “violence generates violence, peace generates peace”.

I kept my eyes focused on that image and quote for as long as I could. I would even get to the point of looking over my shoulder as I forced myself to stare at it until the point I couldn’t hold my head in that position any longer. I never really knew why I was so obsessed with that thing but as I sit here and remember the little girl walking slowly down the hallway, all I can think of is that poster: the cheesy flower in its center, the faded colors and crappy font.

All I can think of is that it was always so obvious to me. That quote did not have to be on a poster to make me understand the meaning behind it.

I guess all that I’m struggling to understand is: isn’t it always obvious? ~

Stating the obvious

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by Alice Salles in Uncategorized

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individual, obvious

Fiction

There’s no meaningful existence without exchange.

This sentence has been ringing over and over in my head for the last couple of weeks and I just can’t let it go.

What I usually do when things like that happen is to sit and write but I chose not to yield to my obvious coping tactics this time around. I slept on it. I mumbled it to myself and asked myself if, under any other circumstance, such thought would have crept into my head the way this one did. I asked myself if I wasn’t being simply led to believe that the human, like any other living thing sharing this Earth, is not capable of evolving, creating and developing anything on his own.

When I say “on his own” I really mean “for nobody, with no realization of how relationships are the links between the individual and his or her achievements”.  I asked myself a very simple question that, in my humble opinion, people should ask themselves more often: would I be one third of who I am if I didn’t live to exchange thoughts on what I love, think, question with others while serving as I possible can, be it with the excuse of building a family, a career or whatever in the presence and FOR others as much as I think I do it solely for myself?

Wow. What a complicated question. Let’s rephrase it: would I be me if others were not around?

The simple answer is: no.

Would I be less of whom I am, someone intrinsically complicated and unique just like every human is, if I did not relate to others and had spent my whole existence away from any human contact or exchange? Yes.

What I am saying is that while in pursuit of who you are, you bump into what others are. While looking for a way to bring everyone to the same level, you fail to realize how important it is to be unique, different and special: because everyone is just as special, in different ways. After all, the word special simply means something “unusual, uncommon, particular”.

The realm of the self is just as exclusive and complex as the realm of the universe, and just as seemingly insignificant as the existence of one dying star millions of light years away among millions of others. When one tells me we need a system to keep us in check because we are a hazard to our peers, I walk outside and start a conversation with a random stranger.

Humans have this amazing quality about them: they want to believe they are unruly, strange and dangerous when in reality, as one, they are what’s more beautiful, more virtuous about living, they are abundant when it comes to possibilities. When not under pressure to participate in conflict, man excels; as one, in order to serve others and be one, not a group.

Threats don’t provide fertile soil for full ecosystems to evolve: peaceful existence of individual components does. ~

 

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