Mi Voglio

I was going through some old shoeboxes at home, flipping through old notebooks, organizers, and magazines, in a haze of electrified curiosity and minutely balletic dust. It's just the "blog bug" catching up on me and I'm just extra-perceptive for whatever "find," worth writing about, I may somehow providentially come across with.

Then a fat frog's face smiled at me in green rubbery relief from a little mauve notebook. I smiled in return and tweaked its cheek. I opened the notebook and found only white blue-lined empty pages, somewhat as deadstill as the disappointment it spawned in me. Truly, you are a cheerful little fellow, my dear Freddy, but I would have liked it better if you had something more subtantial to offer. His smile seemed to pale and tighten a little, as if he's realized he's in for a dive back into the pile. I admit it was a little too brusque of me, specially to a frog (even if he was all rubber), and especially when the inside backpage revealed a couple of index cards with dark broad permanent scrawls on them. Geessh, Freddy, if this isn't my twenty year-old self bringing on the drama full-blast on five 2x3 index cards on May 4th, 2006! They read:

A guy at twenty could only want so much. But how about when he's twenty-two (and feeling thirty?)

Well, I feel things haven't really changed much in this regard. And whether or not two years is relatively too short, or too long, to be talking weltanschauung twists isn't really much of an issue for me. This is what it is: I still want pretty much those same things. I'm still me. And I want me.

*Photos by Ana Alegada, who couldn't trust me with a digital camera, but is wise and prudent enough not to let it show so much.