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I’m surprised that the volcano-ash-cloud situation didn’t occur while I was travelling. Knowing myself and my travel experiences, this is just the kind of thing that would have happened to me. I’m sure as hell never complaining again about missed connections and lost bags. I do feel for all these people stuck in various airports around the world, away from home and with the anxiety of not being able to do all the things they were supposed to do and for which they were travelling for in the first place. One of these people is my dad; he just made it to Rome on Friday, although I really am worried about how he’ll get back home (Mexico) when his business trip is over.

      What I found truly surprising, as well, is that there’s never been a movie made about a distaster like this. I think of the millions of pounds/dollars/Euros that are burning away  because of the air travel block; really, is the word millions sufficient to describe it, even? People desperate to get back home, but who’ve been camping out at airports for days. It seems like the scenario for a bad sci-fi movie. Yet what is really scary, I find, is how little we really know about this whole deal; we accept and assent.

      All I can think of in relation to this is the swine flu. I lived in the epicentre of the crisis (Mexico City), my finals were even postponed because of the outburst, but the media never told us: who got it, where they got it, how they got it. In a city of over 20 million people, things like these are indicative of how such a disease might spread. I never knew anyone who got it, and to be honest, the economic losses that occurred during those unforgettable 2 weeks still amaze me. Restaurants, businesses, shops, offices closed down; people where forced to stay at home, we were encouraged to call supermarkets and tell them to bring groceries over, to avoid exposure. It was one of those crazy economics-textbook scenarios: if there is a sudden outburst of an epidemic, what will happen to the supply and prices of surgical masks and clorox wipes? I’m sure you can guess the answer.

      It’s the same these days. I would dread getting on a train this week. Being in St. Andrews does cut one off from the outside world, and I wonder if there’s more traffic on the highways, if road accidents have been more frequent, and if a train ticket might cost a fortune already. Bottom line is that we are always slightly left in the dark, and the less we know, the more we panic. It does get one wondering how many things going on around, above and below us we don’t find out about.

      The swine-flu crisis was hushed away slowly with propaganda on washing your hands and being less physical when greeting people. I don’t know if the air travel problem will be as easily resolved, or how reassured those first few passengers will be when they get on planes again. It does seem, however, that when the world wants mass hysteria, it is getting more and more inventive. 
 
Sexy Monsters 04/24/2010
 
EN1004 is the module that keeps me the busiest; as I approached the end of “Frankenstein”, already I was relishing in the idea of reading a silly paperback during spring break, rather than some deeply intense novel, like I’ve been doing for the last five months. As I was skim-reading the last few pages of Mary Shelley’s gothic nightmare, my mind wandered towards what I would read under the balmy shadows of Mexican palm trees. I had already bought “Eat, Pray, Love” the previous week, and surely I would take that in my beach bag. But the trashier side of me was tempted to buy the third “Twilight” book...and judge me all you want, but I know I am not alone in feeling guilty for reading that crap and, let’s face it: we are only human and easily tempted.

This is when an extremely comical idea came to me. “Twilight” is, after all, nothing but a pastiche of the great “Dracula”. “Twilight” fans are in fact swooning for a (bad) copy of one of the most dreaded villains of literary history. I then wondered if a teenage series starring a hot version of Frankenstein’s monster would be equally successful. Just imagine it; girl meets a benevolent and fatally attractive guy made out of spare morgue limbs, they fall in love and next thing you know the heroine wants to be killed, sown up with some other dead person’s parts and live the dream with the love of her life, the corpse boy. For all I know, necrophilia would become fashionable (don’t get me started on the twisted logic that goes behind wanting to sleep with a vampire―he’s dead after all isn’t he?!). It sounds incredibly stupid, but if the vampire thing worked, why not this?

I then wondered about this poor creature, so disfigured and despised. I could already see the first problem with my idea; Frankenstein’s monster has no glamorous background (Brad Pitt never played its part, as far as I know).  He’s a bit like the loser of monsters, depicted as too slow and too brutish, regardless of the fact that the being in Shelley’s story was so well-read that a geek like me would have easily fallen in love with him. I can’t deny I haven’t asked myself, looking at all possible reasons, why “Twilight” has had so much success, and I kept asking myself this same question as I thought of all this. In a world where we all know that sex sells, a badly written book on platonic love, with a badly acted film version full of good-looking protagonists, is all we need to fulfil our hormonal anxieties.

I finally gave up on my fantasy of a best-selling series starring an idiotic, needy girl in search for the unconditional love of a non-human (sorry Stephanie Meyer, your story is just so catchy I had to try imagining a similar one myself!). I’m proud to say that in the end I was faithful to my purchase of “Eat, Pray, Love” (not the greatest of alternatives, you might think, but at least gives some food for thought) and was half dreading, half anticipating, reading “Northanger Abbey” for EN1004. As for the third “Twilight” book...I think I realized that after all, and, at least for me, what is dead isn’t that sexy after all.

 
 
 
I often think that, as time goes on, actresses have become less naturally beautiful and unique; what with plastic surgery and style makeovers, we sometimes even confuse female stars with one another. Two days ago, on one of the "endless hours days", I stumbled across "Let's Make Love", an old movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I could go on holding this opinion… 

At first, I couldn't really tell if it was her at all; the movie was in full colour, so her hair seemed to be too blonde, white even, to be as sensuous and lovely as Marilyn's. She had yellow teeth, undoubtedly an unwanted effect smoking sexy cigarettes, and...I don't know, I guess I had never looked at her so closely. The real shock came after, when she appeared in a scene dressed in a dance costume that was truly a huge mistake; Marilyn Monroe was chubby! She really was. I was looking at her, and all of a sudden it became obvious to me how much times have changed. I mean, nowadays all the gossip magazines would have pictures of Marilyn Monroe wearing that dress and tabloid would read “Monroe needs tummy tuck”, or some similar brainless statement.

But you see, back then every woman wanted to be her. And I can't help but wonder if it was as hard to become her as it is to become a contemporary cover-girl. Having role models such as Marilyn Monroe must have been much more reasonable; for one, it is a relief to see that sex symbols can have a normal figure, an attainable figure. The thing I thought was most surprising was that all these flaws made her truly beautiful; even if her hair looked a bit like a Barbie's from being so dyed, even if she wore a layer of make-up that could be distinguished from the actual epidermis, and even if she had the faintest beginning of a double chin, when she broke into singing intervals, I could not help but notice how truly beautiful she was as a whole. 

I think what I am trying to get at is that what made her so desirable and gorgeous was what she represented, and what she did, because she did it best. I can tell you I have enjoyed an old movie this much on few occasions, and all because of the passion Marilyn Monroe showed when playing her character. These days I think we all try to be beautiful, period. Beautiful constantly, no matter what we are doing. But maybe we don’t realize that we are most attractive when we do certain things, and not all the time, like Marilyn Monroe when she sang. I know that realizing that the concept of beauty changes through time is no last minute discovery, but maybe realizing that we can be more beautiful when we do what we like is. And maybe this is even harder than becoming a size zero model, because you can diet and work out until your body disappears, but doing these particular things that bring out our beautiful sides often involve a bigger amount of sacrifice. Don't they?