Katri

I can't decide which one is better.

This feels so wrong somehow

Just drag her around....

Untitled Story

This is fictional. It's only a short passage of a draft, I'm just practicing for now, but it could evolve into something bigger.

Sleep has the paradoxical property of releasing you from your worries, sweet release. Forget the day, forget the heart, and forget regret. Sadly enough, relentlessly, sleep returns to collect the bill when you awaken. Anguish overwhelms you, and your newly roused state leaves you in no shape to handle this wave. Anguish, the feeling I fear the most. Anguish, the product of extreme uncertainty. Anguish, the product of not knowing; not knowing why you’re afraid in the first place. Today, anguish came.

Lying on my back I ask myself, where am I? The nondescript white ceiling makes it that much harder to find my bearings. What’s happened up till now? Did I miss a few years? Am I still a boy? No, I’m 28. Why can’t I still be a boy?

The curtains, I don’t recognize them. Wait. Yes. I’m in Bogotá. I’m back here after all this time, and for all the wrong reasons, but regardless, I’m here.

It’s all coming back to me... everything. Dad, I love you. Why did you keep pushing it? Why were you so god damned stubborn? Was it worth it? Did you really make a difference?

I’d been so disoriented, that I hadn’t noticed that my pillow was wet. I touch my face, and instantly realize I’ve been crying, the anguish came early this time.

The alarm clock goes off, apparently I’ve snoozed away an hour, and I’m running late. I put on my black pants and coat. I shave, and I remember my dad shaving. I remember that day in Madrid; I wanted to do it too. I was 6 years old and felt big enough to be able to shave. He had some disposable razors and gave me one, told me to be careful, and I was, because I wanted to be just like him. I love you dad.

That day in Madrid, oddly enough, was also the same day I saw snow for the first time. The snowflakes were too frail, and the cold hardly managed to keep them from melting at the slightest touch. We were on our way to a strange land called Sweden, and all I could picture was me with 15 layers of clothes, surrounded by snow. That’s all I could picture, I was excited, but was unaware of how much that country would change me. How I would not be the same person after that. How I would never belong anywhere. My sense of belonging would forever be as frail as those snowflakes.

I apply some aftershave expecting it to turn me presentable. I guess I’m entitled to looking like crap, today of all days. Today I can curse at anyone and everyone, let my drunkard rant leave no one unscathed. They would understand wouldn’t they? They would at least ignore me, knowing that I’m in no shape to rationalize what had happened.

I take the elevator, and looking at myself in the mirror I confirm that shaving and applying some aftershave doesn’t do miracles. I’m still having trouble adjusting to the light when the elevator doors open. I see a black silhouette. It’s my mother. A beacon of warmth and happiness unlike any other I’ve ever seen, but not today. Today she’s dressed in black. She has lost her true love, her soul mate, the man she met when she was only 16. She spent the rest of her life confirming what she knew only 5 minutes into their first conversation… he was unlike any other, he was the one.

Today we say goodbye to my father, and to her one true love.

Untitled #001

Snow Patrol - Open Your Eyes

My love for you will end with my last heartbeat...
...when I'm running I always think of you

SNL - ROY RULES!

Golden Hour Tower

Inner Peace

It's in these momments that we search for inner peace... and let karma take care of the rest.

OC Parody by SNL

Original

Parody

Colombia is Passion?

Revised: April 23rd (last few parragraphs are new)

Ok, I think it's time.

I've been avoiding this post for a long time, but I have to face this, and I know a lot of people will not like what I'm about to write. Especially my fellow colombians, and even less my friends working in the "Colombia is Passion" campaign.

I don't like the society we call Colombia.

Yes, like in every other place on earth there are great people there, but what I am referring to is the superior entity that comprises Colombia, the sum of all these interactions between human beings, their behaviour and the repercussions of it, leading all the way up to how government institutions and private companies were created and operate.

Colombians only look out for themselves, in a very Hobbesian self-interested cooperation kind of way. I'll give you a beautiful example, which shows multiple facets of this phenomenon in one neat package. It happened to me some years ago.

I was taking a cab back home from my Uni with a friend of mine, and at this time of the day it's very common for most streets to be clogged and just brimming with cars. We'd been on the cab for almost 40 mins and I was starting to get annoyed at the cabdriver... you know when the light is green but across the street it's full of cars, and you know that if you go you'll just end up being stuck in the middle of the crossing, and then when the others get a green light they wont be able to keep going cos you just blocked the whole intersection? Well my cabdriver did that about 8 times during the whole trip.

the yellow car is our cab, and the red car won't be able to cross now, and neither will any cars behind the red one

I hate it. This is what we call "hacerse el vivo" or to be the live one. It's supposed to be sarcastic, someone that is "live" is on his toes, it's supposed to be good, and that's why we use it sarcastically. So is he making the most out of life? Of course he isn't. He's just looking out for his nearsighted self interest. He fails to see that in this situation, there is no benefit for him, cos if he just waits for the next green light he'll most likely still end up behind the blue car. At that moment this is what was going through my head: (please skip if this stuff bores you to death)

These are cars A and B. Each one has to decide whether they will do this "epic maneuver" or not. Whoever does it will screw the other one over. If they both do it they will each screw eachother over or the next one in line. -2 would be the two minutes it would take for the light to go green again (just a random number), and would therefore be the time lost if the other guy does cheat. The 1 comes from the fact that sometimes you don't end up "behind the blue car anyways" if you stay put and don't cross, since some cars from the other direction might turn and end up behind that car. Lets say half the cars do that (I'm being generous) Therefore I guess one would maybe "win" half a block (1 minute, cos 2 minutes would be a block) if I do the maneuver and the other doesn't.

Nonetheless as you can see, the sum of each permutation would be -4, -1, -1 and 0. So in general, it just sucks to cheat for the common good. Furthermore, I'm being very generous here, cos most of the times when you block the other car you're also blocking all the cars behind that one, so in fact it would be more like -2x, x being the cars able to cross in the 2 minute interval in which the light is green. With x being anything greater than 1 Nash's equilibrium would be in neither doing the epic manuever. (this last part where I'm referring to the -2x, is a big modeling faux pas, I'm aware of that, but it does give an approximation of the impact, albeit crudely).

So what did I say to the cabdriver? I just said,"hey, you know, if we all stopped doing this, everyone would get to their homes faster". I tried to reason with him, since I saw him as an equal counterpart capable of rational thinking, and explained to him that he was affecting many more people by doing it, and that it was only benefiting one person, him. I didn't even talk about the game theory table I had in my head, I was trying to keep it simple for now.

He wouldn't listen. He thought he was still making progress by doing it. So this was the first facet. Blind selfishness. But then something very surprising happened. My friend says to me, "quit trying to reason with him, he wont understand".

I've heard that line many times, "he's just a ____, he won't understand what you're saying". What? He's retarded? My genetic code is more perfect than his? Yeah right, I have pectus excavatum for gods sake, talk about faulty genetic code. Every human being has the potential to do most in life, you just have to give them credit, and not treat them as inferior because the randomness of life played them a shitty hand. But alas, in Colombia most privileged people (of which I'm thankful to be part of, otherwise I'd be selling candy on the street) equate education with intelligence, and that's wrong. You don't become smarter when you go to college, you just get the tools to express yourself better, but the innate capacity to learn is exactly that, INNATE.

I should be able to talk to this cab driver as my equal in the sense that he is rational, and is able to learn and understand simple concepts that I lay down. The same way he might explain something that is foreign to me. We are humans, and we are equal. In this case he didn't agree, but it was because of the Hobbessian selfishness that drives most of us, but I refuse to see him as lower than me.

Most people by now are scratching their head wondering where the "Colombia is Passion" comes from and what it has to do with Colombia. The "Colombia is Passion" campaign, is done by Proexport, a trade entity given authority by the governement to handle turism matters, amongst other things. The problem that I have with this campaign is that is shows only the good side of Colombia, and even though a lot of it is true, it ignores the troubles that our nation faces. Trying to send a message abroad has to come with a high degree of sincerity, and the best way to do this is to accept that not everything is roses and rainbows, there are serious problems in Colombia, things are getting better, but there's a long way to go. Even so, being one sided makes this a very hard pill for foreigners to swallow, it'll make even the largest of optimists a bit cynical.

Colombians have as much passion as the next latin nation, maybe even less, ask anyone that's tried to walk up and talk to a stranger and see what happens. Most colombians remain in their close knit cliques, and rarely stray far from them. That is the reason why I truly believe that Colombian society's main attribute is hardly passion, but rather that self-interested drive.

So, that is what is intrinsecally wrong with Colombia. We perpetuate the system by fending for ourselves, ignoring the fact that it puts unnecessary friction on the cogs of this machine we call society. Unfortunately, we also maintain the status quo by perceiving some people as inferior, therefore increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, creating self entitlement and resentment respectively.

Colombia isn't passion, Colombia is unwavering Darwinism.

Crown

Mitt Kära Stockholm

Spring

from: sexyback

to: sexykatt

I know it's totally gay with the flowers and shit, but it turned out so damn good! argh!!

Words that should be in our everyday vocabulary

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The Conversation

You start expecting small talk, sprinkled with awkward silence, and just a dab of trivial conversation about what each one does, if they come here often, or what music they like.

But sometimes.... sometimes it's so much more. Sometimes you start talking to that person, and she doesn't look at you funny when you say that you might every once in a while have a messenger window open of that person you're really into and stare at it, hoping to see a "(girl you're into) is writing a message" blink at the bottom of the window, or just looking aimlessly at the 80x80 pixel (which is absurdly small really) picture they have of themselves. When you say that you've never had sex, but always made love, she doesn't think it's a cheesy pick-up line you always use, no, she can see it in your eyes, you mean it, you feel it.

A good conversation shapeshifts effortlessly through an amalgam of subjects, from the trivial to the emotional and stopping by at the existential. From the ludicrous pension system putting a strain on the sustainability of natural resources due to population piramids, to how do they manage to keep the stripes in a tube of toothpaste parallel all the way through... and once or twice in a lifetime a girl says something breathtaking. When asked to explain why she would avoid all eye contact with me, a pretty colombian girl once replied, "because I'm afraid you'll see through me and into my feelings". I'll never forget that moment for the rest of my life, I won't forget her for the rest of my life, and that's what a conversation is all about. Building those unforgettable vignettes that stay with you until you take your last breath.

A good conversation feeds on itself. When you observe, both parts intensify their dialogue, they talk faster, are more creative, and bounce off every possible subject. It's a flurry of ideas and emotions... and you're sharing it with this person, this conversation will be unique and unreproducible. This conversation was shared by both, and no one else.

A good conversation makes you want to be a better man (or woman). This girl challenges you, she's smart and you both feel that you have to be on your toes, each one surprising the other with their wit or their heart... Her strengths don't intimidate you, they invigorate you and you're left asking yourself, "where did this woman come from?".

The perfect conversation, nonetheless, ends shortly after sunrise. You look at your watch, and it's 6 am, and you're on a natural high. By now, you're most probably holding her and she has the most rapturing smell... her hair, her skin... this is what life is made of, this is when you wish you could freeze time. This is the most pure of all feelings, this is when you start visualizing the possibilities... dreams and aspirations... you've seen the best of that person, you will not see her like this ever again. Regardless of whether this encounter might blossom into a lifelong, deep and meaningful relationship, you will still never see her like you did at dawn. The love will be more real, the emotions and the actions will be more real, true... it will just be different. Not bad different, just different.

When you say goodbye, and walk outside, you feel the cool morning breeze, you can feel the faint humidity in the air. Everything seems fresher, and more intense, colors jump out, you're alive, or at least you feel it. Nonetheless, on the exterior you look like shit, and everyone in the train back home stares at you, some will think "lucky bastard, he got some last night", but those who have had the conversation will know, they can see it in your face. They can recognize that smile a mile away. The smile says it all, inside that train, looking out the window, you're mentally going through the whole evening, smiling when she said something cute, and maybe even letting loose a small chuckle when you remembered her embarrasing comment about having granny panties on, she'll probably be hating herself for it, but you think it's adorable. You'll cringe thinking of when you told her how you love Star Wars, but....

...you'll close your eyes when you think of that first kiss.

The Black Parade

So, I have some friends that are VERY VERY into a famous rock band called My Chemical Romance. Their latest album is called The Black Parade, and there's a special look that goes with the whole concept, and it goes something like this:

Emma, Karita and Chris all decided that it would be fun to dress up, and of course, they called up their friend Alfonso. Notorious for never doing much, always with free time on his hands and nothing better to do. So there I was, with the rock equivalent of a three guys dressed as Chewbacca, Darth Vader and Luke in a Star Wars premiere, Gerard, Fear and Regret (Chris, Emma and Karita respectively).

Sorry about the joke, you know I still love you guys. Hey, least you guys are in the upper tier of the Fanboy jerarchy:

Rocker Fanboys

Star Wars Fanboys

Buffy Fanboys

Star Trek Fanboys

Xena Warrior Princess Fanboys

Power Ranger Fanboys

Sailor Moon Fanboys

McGyver Fanboys (you know, cos of the whole mullet thing)

Ego boosting comments appreciated. Enjoy

Shitdisco - OK

Love this video, don't care much for the song though.

Random girls from a bar

So I was at this bar in Söder called Carmen, and some girls asked for pics. In case they come looking for pics, here they are. Comments appreciated for my hard work dammit! hehe.

peace out

Even More Shots From the Photoshoot

Other Shots from the Photoshoot

JP and Emo Girl

So the most amazing thing happened on friday. We were doing a photoshoot with JP, a musician friend of mine, and we were almost done. We had some decent pics, it had been a good day and we were getting close to the magic hour (last hour of sunlight).

We were close to Sergels Torg, which has a round point with a crystal tower in the middle. I told JP to sit on the edge of the round point and start playing while I took shots of him from across the street. Then all of a sudden this emo girl came out of nowhere, and she has the coolest outfit, and the big flower, and the tape over her mouth. We were stunned, she just sat beside him, and listened...it couldn't have been better if we'd planned it. Simply awesome. A very special moment indeed.