Westerbork, May 3rd 2006

Finally, summer is truly upon us: the heat lingers now after the sun is gone, especially in my room with its huge windows facing south, the heat stifling but still so new that it doesn't bother me much: it makes my skin sticky and salty, and I've rarely felt more bloated, but I can't be made to mind. The nice thing about sunny weather is that whatever your doing it feels like it's the break: in between writing this, browsing the facebook - the University of Utrecht was recently added, which means I finally stopped pretending that I'm still at UCLA - and listening to the new music I downloaded in order to find my summer sound (so far, "Stadium Arcadium" seems a worthy candidate, but I also recently discovered a scottish band called "My Latest Novel", a Scottish band which could offer some serious competition), I am in fact working on the physics paper on neutrino oscillations that's due tomorrow, but without any sense of urgency: this warmth slows everything down, even time, it seems. Doesn't it affect quality, slow down the brain as well? It probably does: the creative writing portfolio I handed in earlier today wasn't one of my proudest achievements, especially not the short story that was supposed to be its crowning piece, but as I said before, things like that stop feeling like they matter. It's over now, it's done, and I'm free to revert to my tendency to write overlong sentences filled with asides and comments between brackets.

This was never a personal blog, and despite what the above might suggest, I don't really mean to make it one. I still don't think my life is very interesting to anyone who doesn't know me, I often think it's not even interesting to those who do. The reason my blog sorta, well, died was that I stopped thinking my opinions were very interesting to anyone either. That, and taking five courses -four of them science, three of those on the highest level- left little time for watching movies and discovering new music. I failed to keep my "movies seen in 2006" list up to date, but I wouldn't have had many to add, a dozen at most. A short list of those I remember right now:

• Walk the Line: Nice performances, nice music, but ultimately too long and not very interesting
• Capote: Riveting, fantastic, mind-blowing. I expected to find this a good movie, but I didn't expect I would be so involved by it
• Mar Adentro: Beautiful and much less manipulative that I had expected. Still, not a movie I'll probably watch again, I'm not sure there will be much to find in a second viewing and I never look forward to watching a movie that I know will make me cry.
• The Squid and the Whale: Funny, sharp. Ultimately not entirely satisfying.
• The Opposite of Sex: Glad I finally saw it, and I definitely laughed. It feels very dated already though.

Two lines for every movie, and I already bore myself. I suppose it's always a back and forth, especially for me: I have periods in which the arts fascinate me and in which I can blab on for ages about every single aspect and every tiny detail of movies, books, songs, but currently I can't find anything interesting to say, while I could - if my friends let me, which they usually don't- talk on and on about things like, well, neutrino oscillations (the paper is already over 5000 words, and there are a dozen more things I want to say, not to mention all the things I still want to understand better). Don't worry, I won't start about them here, but I suppose I felt like I needed to offer some explanation for why I've neglected this blog so badly. And the poor Boomerang, of course. Last semester my ambitions took flight, but now I realize I'm definitely not fit to be a journalist: I need to be able to write consistently, and not give up anytime I cannot find an interesting angle.

That's exactly why this post exists, despite the lack of a purpose you might have detected. Any purpose aside from light procrastination, that is. I'm going to write here again, try, at least, and hope that inspiration will follow. Waiting for it to come to take the lead certainly didn't work. I hope this will.

H.

WARNING: blog re-animation attempt starting soon