A hot shower to warm the cold shivers later, I’m sitting in my couch, ready to curl up under a blanket and watch Game of Thrones… and prepare for another day of trading and partying ahead.

And hopefully summer.

PS: Our ICFF 2013 booth…

I can honestly tell you is not a very accurate one tonight. I took my shoes off with an ‘aaah’ that lasted for about 5 minutes. I’ve been on my feet since 10am, and almost 14 hours later, I’m about to crawl to my bed that I know will host me in the best nap ever.

ICCF day 1 and a lot of parties later… And we’re doing it all over again tomorrow.

By now, you also should know that means my Friday didn’t smoothly flow into a weekend, but I’ll be working non-stop until the next.

This year’s ICFF is even crazier than last year’s, where I just went home at night and to bed early… this year, my calendar looks like this:

And I had to literally PLAN how I’ll run from event to party – and what shoe’s I’ll wear doing that.

The absolute countdown to next weekend has begun. One I’ll be spending in Poconos… I hear there’s nature over there… I may not survive that either. The closest I came to nature recently, looked like this:

And now I struggle. I struggle so hard, I start sweating even thinking about the assignments and tasks I have to put myself through. Especially since I can  read the material my classmates post in our virtual classroom, and they – clearly – have much, much more experience in the field. Or are at least native Americans. I can tell, because they use words I need to look up in a dictionary.

I tried using my Word thesaurus on half of my efforts to sound more or less professional, but then I remembered that one Friends episode where Joey did pretty much the same thing, and although my life sometimes feels like a season of Friends, I just can’t.

It’s interesting though to meet yourself at a point where you feel like you actually might not be capable of doing something. When that happens to me, it makes me even more eager to at least try – although I do feel like I should start off my assignment with a disclaimer that reads ‘please don’t judge me!’

Of course, my striving little heart has now an eagerness to learn a complete dictionary, and I had to tame it just a bit. Which is why you can now find my at night, on my couch, with a notebook and the list of words that I gathered from the countless books I’ve read in the past couple of months, studying them as I did when I was in highs school. I’m learning 10 to 15 new words a day…

Desultory is not a word in my dictionary.

PS: But don’t expect me to write about Darfour any time soon.

I was planning to steal my hotel rooms ‘recuperating’- doorknob sign, but given the fact that I’m already half to sleep, there’s not a knock on my door that’ll be able to wake me tonight. I just know you were hoping for some crazy tales of my time in Las Vegas… but you know what they say: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Or as I like to call it: the perfect excuse for a short post on a day where I traveled and just want to go to bed already’.

But ‘sssshhhtt!’, nevertheless.

Bye now.

PS: see ya’ll back in NYC.

I’m not particularly a big fan of traveling. I count the minutes till the plane hits the ground again, while wondering why I didn’t bring some Sudoku puzzles, earplugs or a complete entertainment center.

Today, however, I started reading Caitlin Moran’s book “how to be a woman”. It’s quite amusing to read a book that has “I’M A FEMINIST” in capitals in it, especially when seated in between two 50something guys and you feel them glaring at the pages as you read along about what the most appropriate name for our boobs should be. Yeah, that was fun.

I have a couple of pages that will lead into posts one day, but what I don’t want you to miss, are the questions that popped up in my mind…

Titled “questions on a plane”

-       who cleans this interior?

-       Does it ever get cleaned?

-       It looks like it doesn’t…

-       What’s that smell?

-       Is that me??

-       Oh. No. it’s the bathroom. No more row 26 for me, please.

-       How many people are on this plane anyway?

-       One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,… wait? Did I just say twelve? Shit. One, two, three…

-       Oh. Wait. 26 rows times 6 people. Ok.

-       That’s an ok amount of people if this thing crashes.

-       Are we there yet?

And then we finally were. Or were we!?

But yes, we most definitely were.

On a totally different note, I went to see The Great Gatsby. I read the book ages ago, and I can’t remember when exactly… but I was seventeen and I had a huge crush on my English teacher, so I read it about every time he brought it up, which was four times to be precise.

The release of the movie has been postponed so severely, I was afraid it would be awful, but it was actually quite good, and if you liked Romeo+Juliette and Moulin Roughe, this one will be right up your alley as well. If I may remark just one futile thing, though: what the heck happened to 90 minute movies? It’s one thing to capture a book on screen, but it’s another to make a movie that lasts as long as it takes to actually read the book… before you know it, movies will last 10 days and we’ll be calling them TV-shows.

On another unrelated note, today was Mother’s Day, and unless you were being held hostage in a movie theater, it was hard to forget, as Facebook and Twitter were trending on the topic. I posted my wishes on my mom’s wall shortly after midnight…

Moms are the best!

PS: you know who else are the best? Aunts. I call for an ‘Aunt’s Day’ – any given Tuesday will do, and we should get the day off, just because we’re so freakin’ awesome.

On a very related note, this is what my skype session today looked like…

… and being an aunt is pretty swell too.

And enough for now.

That second class was about blogging. Given I’ve been doing this for two years, you’d think I’d consider myself an expert. But no. Nah-ah, dude. I realized I’m only an expert in A) being severely committed and B) rambling about myself.

And the latter caused me to be honest at the meeting, and proclaim to my fellow-bloggers the most feared words any blogger – or writer for that matter – will ever come across: I’m stuck.

I guess if you’re writing about yourself without giving the whole thing a little bit of direction, that’s bound to happen. It’s like I’ve been driving a car zig-zagging through the countryside, and now I got caught in some muddy pile of who knows what substance, but let’s stick with mud.

The original apple project made sense. I had a goal: I  wanted to prove – mostly to myself – that I had it in me to dedicate myself to a project, to vow a commitment and to stick to it. I have no idea why I needed to prove to myself – again – that I can commit for a second year. I assume it’s a control thing. And also, this is the second longest relationship I ever had.

So today, I’ve been browsing blogs, and articles and basically the depths of the internets, searching for a new topic, an idea, some inspiration for what’s to come. I’ve been scribbling notes on every piece of writable material I came across today. Which means I may have accidentally blew my nose in one. I wandered the streets of the Upper East Side this afternoon, seeking guidance and new shoes. But then a thunderstorm came rumbling and I found neither. I went to yoga and hoped to meditate and stretch and sweat myself towards an epiphany, but now I’m just sore.

And that’s what happens when I attend a class. I get out of control.

I don’t even know how to begin to give that up.

I’ve come a long way.

I still have those moments where I get so angry I have to leave a room, because I know I’ll start crying when I open my mouth. I still have those flashes of rage where I wish I could kick something to damnation. But overall… I’ve become a pretty balanced person.

I know that for a fact, because today someone send me something that I know was intended to be hurtful… but all I could do was look at it, and smile at the amounts of fucks I didn’t give.

The fact that I was able to do that, and feel not even the smallest crisp of anger, disappointment or – worse – regret… actually made me believe that there’s hope for my controlfreakin’ mind.

PS: Today I also let go of my spasm to rush through the city from meeting to visit, back to the office without standing still, and acknowledge the fact that this city is absolutely beautiful.