Getting philosophical

Sometimes I think there is no real reason to have a blog. I mean, who really cares what I write? All I see is my counter going up, leaving traces of some anonymous visits. It has been even a couple of months since the last time I received a comment, which means even my most compassionate visitors have left me talking alone...

Nonetheless, I find sometimes relief in the things I write. Some people go to church and talk to the priest behind a net; some others go to a bar, get drunk and talk to strangers. Perhaps I am too skeptic for the first and too serious for the second. So what I do is to drop words in a virtual container, hoping that some day they kind of hit a jackpot, or something like that.

Getting philosophical has always been easy for me. My first fellow philosopher was Santiago Forero, my best friend from childhood. Together we would see hours in his balcony talking about the most stupid, and yet meaningful things. Why does Santa Claus always bring him better presents? Why is Maria Patricia so enigmatic? Why is Oscar incapable of being a deep thinker like us? Should we throw away our Ninja Turtles and pretend we are grown-up people now? I couldn't do it, so I gave them to my brother...

Then I left to Bogota and found out too soon that the big city lacked of big thinkers. But at least there I had bigger problems, like surviving university. I also had to survive a couple of girls, one of them being seven years older than me and being one of my flat mates -God, that was as hard at the end as good at the beginning-, so I don't recall having wild discussions about the meaning of life in that period.

Later I got to know many people that would change the way I see things. The first would be Andres, who helped me to see the Matrix. Let's say, if he was Neo, I was Trinity, but without the kissing and stuff. Just green characters scrolling down the screen while a teacher was talking about currents, transistors and inductances. He also proved to be a very constructive proof-reader for my crazy theories about things, but more important, he taught me that the best way to enjoy things is to forget what they cost. I actually never put the theory into practice, but he seemed to live by the rule...

Then came Tania, my secret friend. I think no one really ever saw her -some birds in the ceiling saved her from being discovered-, but yet she was one of the most influential feminine voices of my life. We met once a month, but we talked almost every second night on the phone. I sometimes even fell asleep during our conversations, so in the morning, when I woke up, I wasn't even sure if it had been a dream or not. However, the dead tone of the telephone reminded me of the whole thing. She always said I was too predictable. She always said I was too something, actually. And she was right. But I was an engineer and she was a historian, so I think we were supposed to think different about things. That was the way it was meant to be. But I loved hearing her version of things.

There have been, of course, many other meaningful characters in my life, but for reasons that are beyond my self-analysis capabilities, I would never think of them as people with whom I consciously spoke about nothing. With Catalina it was about love, the funny side of ignorance and doing the right things. With Roberto it has been about problems, money and (his) girls. With Tomas it was about escapism and doing the wrong things. With Johanna it was about many things, but we always avoided the most important ones.

Today I would say my closest no-topic conversation partners are Ingrid and Chris. Unfortunately, it has also come the time for them to leave Berlin. With their departure, anecdotes and mental images from my last two years will become ubiquitous, joining those already making sporadic appearances around the world. But my passion for blogging will surely remain here, giving hope to the art of non-sense.