changes

One moment you are living in Madrid, writing your Master’s Thesis, lead vocalist for a punk rock band, highly responsible IT manager at a large tech company, hard partying socialite, meeting new and exciting people every day, and the next moment you are going to lie on your bed with a book at 7:30pm on a Friday night. It’s not always about becoming old and boring, it is also about the things that you love to do. These things change over time. I miss the creative aspect of being in a band, but I don’t miss the hard work of rehearsals, concerts, tours, etc. We had to carry all of our equipment around, we had to rehearse in dingy, tiny rooms, and my vocal cords were often strained to the extreme. In terms of the social side, aside from the band, we’d formed a community that gathered every Thursday night and also hosted huge parties every couple of months. Thursday nights themselves were so extreme that Friday at work was a complete write off. And this meant that Monday to Thursday was even more stressful than it should have been… and the stress we were under during ordinary circumstances was beyond belief. And Monday to Thursdays were also rarely free of social commitments.  I had a Spanish-Bulgarian girlfriend with whom I would sit up deep into the night, talking. She’d smoke cigarettes and drink wine, looking like the archetype of a beautiful French intellectual directly out of a literary work or an artistic film. She would speak philosophically and explore the absurdity of life. Then she’d go home the in the daylight to play piano. Towards the end of my time in Spain I had a Galician girlfriend from La Coruña. We’d spend many afternoons and nights exploring the city, bar hopping, walking, talking. Then we’d go home to her place where we would sit on the balcony and drink wine until we were exhausted and went to bed in the early morning hours. If she came to my apartment, we’d listen to music and talk all night. In the morning she always rose relatively early, went to some nearby bakery and bought pastries and coffee. Around noon she would head off to band practice or to rehearse her parts on the keyboard. I would often head to band practise, too, or I would exchange music and vocals back and forth, digitally, with Pablo, who wrote most of our band’s music. 

                  These days I live across the Atlantic Ocean in the USA. My social life is quiet, although I do still meet up with friends in the neighbourhood for drinks… and these gatherings can occasionally get messy. I travel quite regularly to Europe, and to different parts of the US, usually based around some form of rock concert or another, occasionally for work. I wake up early most Saturday and Sunday mornings because I want to watch English soccer and, with a six-hour time difference, the first game usually starts at 06:30am. 6am if I want to watch the women’s professional soccer. I choose to be single, but I also don’t have the lovers that I had in the past. It was Valentine’s Day few days ago and I spent a large portion of my day in hospital getting a mole surgically removed from my back. I used to spend a lot of my time pining for people who didn’t really care about seeing me or who just simply didn’t want to see me. These days, that seems to be reversed. People ask me to go out with them and I tend to find excuses and tell them that I really hope they are able to find a boyfriend. It’s not because I am cruel, it is more a form of self-preservation, I just want my life to be as simple as possible. 

                  Last night I took the train downtown and had dinner in a taproom/bar that I love, Dot’s Hop House, before walking over to a concert. I didn’t stay too long at the concert because I had not slept the night before and was unable to nap at all before going to the concert due to an overactive mind. But I loved the evening. The train ride, the long walk, the discovery of new places that I hope to return to soon, the drinks and food in a lively little area, the knowledge that it was Friday night and that Saturday promised nothing but leisure. Life can be great.