A hurting country

How can it be that a person feels a lot of pain for a country? What is it exactly what makes you cry when you see something like this about your country:

Because every time I see this I cry, and I feel a short of breath and I feel like the world crumbles around me, I feel how my soul breaks in a thousand pieces and the most terrible sadness sits on my shoulders.

What is it exactly that makes a person feel his country so much? Is it the people, the landscape, the memories you have of your life there? If I think about my life , if I remember my life there I don’t cry, so it’s not only the memories. When I think about the beaches, the cuban mountains, the beautiful of Cuba’s nature, I don’t cry, tough I miss it and I would like to see it again.When I think about the cuban people, well, I don’t miss them so much, Cuba has become a country of very rude people, that’s what misery and poverty makes off people.

So what is it that makes you feel that much your country?

It might be that after spending your life in some place it just become part of you? Just like a son, like a mother, like your very love of your life?

Then when you lose your country you lose your loved one?

What is it?

I am falling apart.

Lets put it this way: I am one of the ugliest persons I know.

Getting older has taking a high toll on me. I have hairs where there shouldn’t be any and lack of hair where there are supposed to be. I have lost 2 of the front bottom tooth, so when I talk I guess you can see the tongue too. I have gained a lot of weight so carrying myself around is a lot harder than it used to be.

When I were younger I suffered a lot of different physical pains, but somehow I knew that they will be gone someday. Now, when I feel a pain I  know that its gonna probably stay with me for the rest of my life. Like 2 months ago I started feeling this pain in the right shoulder and upper arm, well, now it’s getting to the point that I can’t stretch the arm anymore, much less if it is to reach something high. I am becoming ambidextrous.

My ankles hurt, like constantly, sometimes I have also this pain in my right index finger that it feels like its broken, I am even afraid of pointing anything, just in case, it could just fall.

I used to be 5.4 now I am 5.2.

I used to like walking on the hills and forest of every country I have been in. I can barely walk to the car now. My back is the reservoir of all the pains in the world.

This morning I woke up limping, because my left knee decided to start hurting more than usual.

Well, I could live with all of that, I have been doing it for a long time, but this morning I got a first.

This morning , while I was drinking my coffee, somehow it ended on my nose, followed by an explosion of coffee coming from my nose that covered the whole computer in coffee.

Also the printer, my registration card to vote, my glasses, the cigarettes, the notes I was taking, the wall, the curtains and now, the calendar with old cars that I have on my wall looks like suffering a severe case of chicken pot. And November just started, so I will be looking at it for the whole month, reminding me of the coffee explosion trough my nose.

There are days that you just want to erase.

Its really expensive to be poor.

You would think, like richer people like to think, that poor people is poor because they are lazy, they dont work hard or they are just plain too stupid to be anything else.

But I am the living proof that intelligence has nothing to do with that. Because I know, I know, after a while, of course, how things are supposed to be done, its just that I cant do them that way.

Lets talk about insurances. Everybody knows that is much better to have insurance than not. But what if the little money you have is to feed you, pay rent, buy gas for the shitty cars you have, pay the furniture and washer and dryer that you bought ( because your furniture was so old that you are pretty sure 3 generations slept on your old bed and you spent 20 dollars every weekend on washing your clothes on some dirty machines in the apartments, when they worked)  pay for the internet (because you will have a dead brain if you dont have it) and drink some beers on weekends while you watch some movies from Redbox.

What if?

Then you wont have money enough to pay for car insurance or any other kind of insurance.

And if you dont have car insurance, the police will stop you for sure, at some point in your life and find out that you dont.

And then you will get a ticket, a big ticket if you have a commercial driver license. No matter that you where driving your car, not the vehicule that need the CDL.

And, not only that, then you will have to pay for 3 years and amount of money over 250 dollars every year.Its called surcharges.  You know, to punish you for not having the insurance, in the first place. They will suspend your license if you dont pay.

They punish you for not having the insurance, they punish you for not being able to pay it on a regular basis, they punish you for being poor. But in order for them to feel good, they think they are punishing you for not being responsible.

Its really expensive to be poor, honestly.

We are american.

Like two weeks ago, in an interview with Oprah, actress Raven Symonè declared that she didnt like to be labeled as african american and that she prefered to be called just american.

At last.

At last someone says what i have been thinking since I emigrated to this country 7 years ago.

To start Africa is not a country, its a continent , all kind of people of different races lives there. There are several negroid races, if you prefer to call it like that and also berbers,moors and even white people. Its a continent,so how in heaven can you be defined for a continent that has so many different people,races, religions and countries?

In Cuba we have all kind of different people, different races,different religions too, as every country in North and South America have, since both continents and the islands were populated for all kind of inmigrations that added a lot of mixture to the original native races that lived here, but we call ourselves cuban,it dont matter if you are white or black or chinese.

I refuse to be called hispanic too,there is no such a country called Hispania, i think that a person should be defined in the first place,by his country, not his race or anything else.You are american if you were born here, I am cuban-american, a person who was born in Nigeria and came to live is the states is a nigerian-american, same with a mexican, that will be a mexican-american. But if you were born here you are an american, and thats it, not an african american.

What is wrong with the word black? I know that it took a long time and many lives and suffering since the slavery to these days to obtain the rights that were theirs in the first place, I think the slavery and after that the discrimination is one of the most terrible things done for any human being. I say it because nowdays i suffer discrimination too, and not only from white people but also,and most of the time, for black people.What I am saying is that slavery is gone and if you really want to be considerated as equal, why dont you start for behaving like you are ,instead of sepparating yourself from the rest with a label that refers to another place and continent?

We are all proud americans, black, whites,natives,mulatoes,asian and all in between.

Thats what we are. God bless America.

 

Reason why.

Ok, first of all, read this, its written byJonh-Henry Perera, Houston Chronicle:

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Report-America-s-wealthy-giving-less-to-charity-5807095.php

Now, lets think about it. The range of people earning 25 k a year is the one that is more generaous with their own money and more likely to give it to charities.

Is it because people earning that litle money, like me, face the poverty every day and have to confront it every day?

Is it because once you get to earn 250 k a year you get greedy and dont want to give a damn to anyone?

Is it because once you get to earn that much money you start to despise the poorest people and start thinking why dont they get a job?

Or is it all the way arounf and poor people are poor because they are more giving persons?

 

There is hope

I hope that James Harden will be able to defend better this year or should I say : to defend at all and we , Houston and the Rockets, can get a chance to advance more in the playoffs. There is hope, it seems that during the world championship he did it.

I hope that the heat will be gone for a while soon. There is hope, this weekend it seems we will have colder temperatures, at last.

I hope that my car will resist and keep working till I can afford another one, yesterday he almost died for a dry radiator that I didn’t check, so his dead will be on my head and I don’t want that. There is hope, after finally pouring some water on the radiator, the guy responded well and started breathing again.

I hope that the minimum salaries will be raised next year and people like me, who anyway have to pay for everything with anguish, can have a little extra money to use it in something that bring us joy, not just to pay a rent. There is hope, the politicians are talking about it.

I hope that Cuba will finally be free next year, after 55 years of dictatorship. There is hope, even if the Castros want to, they cant live forever.

There is hope.

Houston suburbs

I was reading the Houston Chronicle online today, when I found this very interesting article from Darla Guillen:

http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/woodlands/article/How-Houston-s-suburbs-compare-to-major-cities-5780717.php

Then I started felling really proud of Texas and Houston, like many other times you read something like this, until I remembered the days when I didn’t have a car, not even the shitty car I have today and I had to travel to my job using the public transportation….. you should ask: which public transportation? That’s the point, we don’t have one, you just cant consider the buses and trains by Metro like a public transportation for a city of this size. I remember I have got a job doing a part time in Highway 6 and I couldn’t take it because the buses only went to Synott and back. If you look in a map the area covered by the public transportation in this city and suburbs the word that comes to your mind is “pathetic”.

So maybe it can be much better to live in some of those other places, smaller than ours, but more poor people friendly, than here.

Because , you know, its so easy to look at the big big Houston’s map and forget about the less fortunate people that live here…

 

Emma Watson UN speech

I know that some of you, men, will take your time to comment about how stupid she is, what a whore she is, what the heck is she thinking, how spoiled this white rich lady is, about how women need men to lift heavy things and rule the world, about how can she possibly aspire  to male rights( human rights) is she is not a f…ing male and so on and so on and so on… boring, really, whatever you may say about this speech and the content, wont make it any less the truth, so, be it, and if you listen carefully, you may even learn a couple of things about us, women. Yeah, you know, the same ones that you know.

Sunrise on Bellaire

This morning, at 7 AM, the street lights on Bellaire went off and there it was, for all to see, the most spectacular sunrise I have seen in a long time, cut against the cityscape of dark poles, wires and buildings. The light of the rising sun made the clouds look red and pink and the shape was like stripes of the darkness that was about to disappear.

This is the kind of things that make you feel fortunate and it doesn’t cost a penny.

By 7:20 was all gone.

Like so many good experiences, don’t last too long but the joy can stay with you for almost a day and that, my friend, is not bad at all.

The Corner of the Pigeons.

The corner of Beechnut and Boone in Southwest Houston, Texas, is the corner of the pigeons, which are in clear minority in the rest of the city when compared with the population of crows.  In the first of the electrical cables are posing, one next to another, adult pigeons, nearly all looking in the same direction, posed in  the second cable are the youngest pigeons, who can not yet compete with the highest  cable best aerial view and the third wire landed a few other birds, crows , mostly.  Pigeons, like humans, associate themselves with their peers and have claimed this as his corner, the corner of the pigeons, maybe the only one in the city.

In Houston there are apartment complexes where the vast majority are Hispanic or Chinese or Vietnamese or Indian or black. And when you find yourself living in a place where the majority belongs to another group, we look around with disgust, rejecting each other for nothing more than our race.  After some time, we end up moving to another complex, to a place where  most of the people look like us, making, by doing this, the voluntary segregation deeper.

As the pigeons.

But when the wealthy people are choosing a place to live no matter the race of their neighbors, only if they are equal in social status. Wealth makes humans truly equal, and there you will find, getting along so well between each other, the Arab princess, the rapper of the moment , the  Hispanic singer, the Japanese investor, or the white guy, owner of a blonde American bank . They are all parents of kids that go to the same type of school, they can share experiences about how was the weather in Barcelona this summer, they can complain about the government taxes together and they feel like they belong to the same human group.

The are all equal: the rich. Race, skin color, citizenship, all gone, money make them equal.

Like pigeons in a city of crows.