Sunday 23 September 2012

Short Considerations on Weather, Detectives and Style


It's been a long time since I published something, I'm sorry for that, there's been a lot going on right now and it's hard to find not only time but also a proper theme for an article. You know what they say, you talk about the weather when you don't have anything better to talk about. I never agreed with this statement for I always loved talking about it as much as anything else. You know, the world keeps developing, nanotechnology is built, skyscrapers cut the clouds in Dubai but the weather is still here to change our daily moods as easy as a click — I wonder how people can keep inventing such things when their feet are cold or when they're sweating like hell. Downtown houses in Porto are very badly isolated, this can make you feel the four seasons down your skin quite easily, just like the weather pavilion at expo'98, from which you got out with a cold — but here,  instead of staying 5 minutes in each room, you'd stay three months. Which makes you feel like 'oh my god, the next room is three months away, I'm gonna die in this freezer or in this oven or in this windy drying machine or in this pollen power disperser', but then you don't, you always survive and forget how bad it was and then two months later you're wishing you were in the previous season — just like you had a fish's memory or a traumatic experience from which you don't remember anything or how bad it was.

And you know what, fall just arrived, my favorite season!
There's something dramatic about fall I like a lot, I think of lonely walks in the park, the yellow and orange leaves falling in spirals, I think of tea, coziness, squirrels and hedgehogs snoring between hazelnuts, baking carrot cakes (even if I never made one) and the best of all: detectives and murders! (basically my sense of fall is everything but portuguese). I can't help myself not thinking of style when talking about detectives, that's part of my attraction, I admit it. I love their big brown coats, their hats covering their faces and the smoke from their cigarettes vanishing in the fog — although I don't smoke (I'm very allergic to tobacco smoke, for my lungs sake) I always found it to be very sexy, mysterious and stylish, the perfect attributes for a detective. But the point where I'm trying to get is: a detective story has always to be set either in fall or winter, a detective in floral shorts and flip flops would need to have lots of 'carisma' to pull these of. When I was a kid I loved to watch The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, a Canadian TV series from the nineties shown on portuguese television in the kids channel Panda. Shirley was the great grand-niece of Sherlock Holmes and followed her ancestor's legacy of solving crimes after finding his letter and his detective tools in a box in the attic. Shirley was not the high school princess kind of girl, she was cool, I mean, detective cool. She had those hermetic bags, tweezers, brushes and a magnifying glass in her backpack and wore some nice hats with her school uniform in a very low profile kind of way — oh, she was my kind of girl.

And this leads me to another thing I can't separate from the beginning of fall — school! Buying books, new supplies, sometimes a new backpack, a coat and boots, meeting your friends that became different after the summer, fall always made me feel a bit more grown up, not just because of the starting of a new year at school but also because my birthday is in november. After the silly season of summer, fall is the time for seriousness, for drama, for philosophy, for the wind and tears on your face. Last year, fall started after the person I was with for about two years broke up with me, this year fall starts with a different bitter feeling that I never experienced before in my life — there's no school… anymore. Actually the school feeling is still here, and I will always associate this time of the year with school but, as I just graduated from university, it won't be a reality anymore. This fact highlights the karma that fall has to be dramatic, it's not only the time for you to realize you've grown older and take life decisions (even my astral map says that I should make important choices after october), it's also the time to be alone. I like to think that the wind, the rain and the fact that everything is falling apart are here to help me realize that — just like hints from a detective story. And if I was a smoker, I'd be much more stylish in this season.

3 comments:

  1. I used to watch Filmore, on Disney channel.
    He was a detective in the safety patrol. and really cool.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxWCc_eLLXI

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  2. I share this fall love with you with an extra. my birthday, on the 20th of september, is most times the real first day of fall - the one with a rainy morning and bright white light. It always gives me this-is-the-first-day-of-my-life feeling.

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  3. That's nice, I think this year I felt your first day of life just like that!
    Oh, and I forgot to tell you something. Last time Jakob was here, we went to the Botanical Garden. There was a tree which skin had that weird texture that gives us chills, I could't stand it, if I had that in my garden I would always cover my eyes when passing by it… or leave without my glasses on

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