Tras haber creado mi anterior blog cecilmundo varias personas, muchos de ellos mis alumnos, me sugirieron que creara una secciòn dentro de cecilmundo para publicar mis obras de docencia de idiomas. Dado que la cantidad de documentos de explicaciones, ejercicios y exàmenes de inglès son muy numerosos porque tengo màs de 30 años del ejercicio de la docencia, preferì estrenar blog con mis alumnos a como ellos realmente merecen. En este blog planetcecil no solo iràn mis documentos didàcticos de inglès, sino tambièn la producciòn literaria de varios alumnos que se destacan en las letras. Tambièn darè oportunidad a aquellos que tienen excelentes obras pero que no han logrado publicarlas ya que en mi paìs Nicaragua todo se mueve por la marrana polìtica, y si una no pertenece a determinado partido no verà jamàs publicado su opus. Tambièn tenemos la desgracia de contar con seudoeditores quienes al no conocer verdaderamente de literatura se convierten en mercenarios de la imprenta solo para llenarse ellos mismo de dinero y fama a costillas de los escritores. Todos aquellos que deseen participar en este blog, denlo de antemano por suyo. Aunque lleve mi nombre en un arranque de egolatrìa, yo soy sencillamente vuestra servidora.Cecilia

Las alas de la educación

Las alas de la educación
La educación es un viaje sin final.

La lección de física

La lección de física
Casi aprendida

domingo, 8 de noviembre de 2009

LEVEL ELEVEN´S TRIP NICARAGUA IN ENGLISH









as good patriots and even better students of English,we should know our typical Nicaraguan foods, places and legends in any language.My level 11 students from the Saturday course and I took a field trip to Lake Cocibolca, Granada and Catarina last October 31st.




























domingo, 21 de junio de 2009

the golden lock




March 28th,2009
THE LOST EPILOG FOR THE COLONEL´S SCRAPBOOK


1660 Georg Ludwig German monarch of Hanover who became the famous /King George I of Great Britain after the Stuart line came to dead end,is born
0193 Roman Emperor Pertinax assassinated, he had been luckier as military than as emperor
1881 Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Russian officer and composer, dies on his birthday at exactly 42,from cirrhosis, after leaving us with Boris Godunov, Pictures at an Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain

AFTER ME THE DELUGE SAID LOUIS XVTH

What was that deluge about, I wish I could ask the handsomest king of France. Was there an awful lot of water or just emptiness for you? If people believe god made the world, was this the feeling the deity had after making man? Was he aware of the monster he had created? I sit here, still trembling with rage and chagrin. I´m supposed to be bulletproof, invulnerable, above feeling demeaned by petty things. My mind is reeling with stupefaction.. Is there no end to the silliness of men? I don´t want the make any more questions. I´m the Cheshire cat, smile disappearing in the midst of a windy mist. As I came I go. Not on tiptoes this time but stomping my way out, boots making a lot of noise on the way out. I want to lay claim to my time, to my right to choose and not compromise, to stop leasing the world even if the world is reduced to one single being. Can one person mean the world to someone else? And if that world crumbles at your feet because your idol had feet made of clay and you caught him or her with pants down grunting on the toilet…just like anyone?
I look at my camouflaged uniform,blue and black and light blue,splotches of indigo,and I realize it has been there for so many years and it isn´t until now that notice how well it covers my so many time injured body, this is the first time I see the beauty of its pattern. I´m not wearing a slinky black nightie, not a teddy can compensate for an ugly face, ever. Cheap silk and nylon cling to your body like unwanted sweaty skin, unsexy, undesirable, sticky, yucky. Rather dead in combat than ever being caught in that attire. Why do women want to be so ridiculous? I take out a small hand mirror and scrutinize my thousand ethnias mixture of a face. Still unlined in the year turn 50. “You, incongruously pretty face above a heavy uniform, like a Japanese doll that is so expensive and dear,” said a Honduranian lieutenant colonel to me, a man who sports his grey hairs and wrinkles with such debonair elegance. He sees me, nevertheless, adrift, worrying about my time, there is such a gaping hole in the middle of my painful emptiness. It is so hard to let go. It is so difficult to slam doors and then think about opening them again knowing that you will slam them anew.
I felt like this in July 1996. My best pal was gone, he had committed suicide, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. Unconsciously, I would lift my hand and dial his number, and then I would remember no phone company has been able to connect to our memories…No longer there. His uniforms and shoes still hung in his closet at home, and at three o clock on Fridays my stomach would rumble in anticipation because at that time we would get together for tea. I know the feeling again. My noontime is mine now and I don´t want it. At 5 pm I get skyline anxious, it is like retreating and kicking a drug habit. You still get the heaves, the shakes, the drop in blood pressure. But somehow you know there is no turning back.
I am left with a long awaited babe in arms, and now born, I just want to give it up in adoption, as if once the father is gone there is no reason for his existence. Babes and kittens can be adopted by others properly without any harm coming after, but a book?
I cannot even drown it…not even in my own tears if I have any left. You remember the scene in Francis Ford Coppola´s Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein when the monster played by De Niro drops into Victor´s nightchamber on the doctor´s wedding night, and when the doc turns him away the monster pounces on still virginal Elizabeth and wrenches her heart out ? That is the exact feeling I have when I leaf through this book for which I am writing this epilog. I was aborted by an unknown hand,torn out of my womb but unlike Zoroaster who was said to have been wrenched from mommy´s womb by a monster and then survived for years eating homemade cheese(who made it? Religious stories are so incongruous and stupid sometimes, they offend our natural intelligence), I have no sense of what to do next. I´ll go back to my short stories, good down to earth money makers and providers of the red and black wings of fame that hover above my uniform and grant me comparisons with Choderlos de Laclos, and Dostoyevsky, two officers turned into writers.
I feel the gentle shadow of Modeste, my Modeste Mussorgsky whose music I have always loved so much, up to the point that I gave him a short story about his wonderful heart. He lays a skinny emaciated hand on my shoulder and upon his touch, the anger flows out. He was born and he died at age 42 on a day like this. Like Michel Praetorius too, great German composer of the Renaissance, born and died on his birthday. Is that the ultimate gift from kismet? His shadow in Russian officer´s uniform sits in front of me, crosses his knees and smiles faintly under his mustache.
Mussorgsly says to me in his Russian accent,” I will take you further into immortality, kitten.. My Russian heart tale will always be a reference, who knows if this crazy hooky diary of this colonel you were won´t be forgotten, is there any guarantee that the entries be kept in order by the person who motivated it? Would it be a bad surprise if I told you the dearest reader might as well lose it, or get it deleted, or never mind it just to show his lady friends boasting how crazy and naïve an intellectual can be? I saw something similar in Russia, something which made a laughingstock of old Peter Tchaikovsky with his famous piano concerto no.1 WE sort of had a courteous enmity with him ,for I was a member of the Group of 5 Nationalists with Rimsky, Cui, Balakirev and Borodin and Peter preferred Western style music….You remember Peter had tailored it for the great pianist Rubinstein, a big jerk if there ever was one, pompous asshole, we hated him. So foppish Peter presents his concerto for his so called friend, and the guy listens in silence, frowning ,grimacing. At the end, Rubinstein gets up and tells the poor Peter he hates every note on it, that the concerto is vulgar and crass and sloppy and stupidly sentimentaloid, so Peter just gets up and storms out of the room in tears. Back home, Peter wrenches off the page with the dedication to Rubinstein, and when the German pianist Hans von Bulow premieres the piece, Peter dedicates it to him. Peter had been so slavishly addicted to Rubinstein, and he discovered like many others did, he had been pissing up the wrong tree. It happens. You have a phrase. Shit happens. No kitten, no need to make your eyes water. Not my intention. I´m just telling you it is not the only case in history, I want to make you feel better. Now I want you to don your uniform again, with no apologies, and smile like your colleague Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia mentioned, that it is good to smile because it existed and never mind that it ended. You have something strong in your hands, never keep the grenade. Throw it or it will blow up in your face. Simply an officer to another officer´s good advice.” I glance at the chair and only a ray of sunlight is there, Modeste has left me again. With a cupful of sound and logical counsels in order not to disgrace myself.
Dead is dead said Stephen King in Pet Sematary. I looked into my file for projects in the short story area. I had three lined up and wasn´t going to practice Nicaragua´s favorite sport: procrastination. If I had the time now it was for my use, and I would lay my uniformed shoulder to the weird wheel of producing phantoms. I just hoped I hadn´t lost my touch. If I had gotten out of a wheelchair before, against all odds, I would get out of this post partum depression sooner or later and the best medication was available: more words, more letters, more literature-I wouldn´t be a writer´s block victim or a literary cripple. It may still bother me to remember what the French said that only when the flower adores does it bear the fruit. But still there was the phrase from that lousy husband but great guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, onto victory always.

jueves, 11 de junio de 2009


Taller de Bordados Rubén Darío
Porque también con aguja se hace poesía

Masaya capital del folklore nicaragüense
Tel. 00 505 88236333 , e-mail bordadodario@yahoo.com
Desde sábanas, manteles, ropa de cama, servilletas,cortinas y faldellines
Hasta trajes de boda, guayaberas, cotonas, huipiles, chales y pañuelos.
Bordados a mano y a máquina.Al detalle y por mayor.
Operando desde 1987.
Propietarios: Juan Markovik y Mercedes Brenes de Markovik

domingo, 7 de junio de 2009

FRESH FROM THE OVEN



Newest poems by Adolfo Beteta

THE ANCIENT FEMININE LEGACY

For María Alejandra Jirón Vílchez

In your Herat exists a legacy that transcends the rivers of time,
And this inheritance is clearly reflected in your left eye.
It is the throne you majestically sit upon,
A birthright,
Of the divine being that you are.,

And the delicateness of your touch is pure,
An indication of the tenderness you possess
For those who surround you;
A microscopic glimpse of the inmense compassion
That you carry in your soul-
An ancient soul-
Who spiritually resides in the vast dimensions of such a beautiful moonchild
Who tends to hide behind the dawn
In order to avoid the negative energies
That occasionally attempt to disturb your inner silence.

But you shouldn ´t fear,
Because those anonymous to your frequency will be chased away
Efficientl,
By the lunar eclipse of the amber katana
Of your personal Ronin.
And this Ronin will never rest until you reach your full bloom
And become what you are ordained to be-
A living embodiment of your sublime feminine mysteries.


GENERATION LOST

There´s a strict type of repression in certain times.
And sometimes,
These lines become personal letters of a decadent generation
Who tend to roam foolishly
Like unlearned jaguars in the midst of a Mayan jungle.
(And to what extent?)

This is why I collect your thoughts for future reference,
(Along with the exquisiteness of your stare that penetrates me the furthest)
And this profound knowledge enables us to be,
Together,
In a coffin like state of inner peace.
(This child cries in the penumbral shadow of Isis´ throne)

And despite the fact that I´m invisible,
You can clearly read between my veins.
(Something different)

And the identification of a lost soul
Does not need any savvy technology to be identified.
It´s a lawless rule in a decaying world
That refuses to heal because most prefer to drown
In their private indifferences.

How do they manage?
Most allude to religions
(the easiest escape for self-doubting individuals)
And others to materialism.
(And this materialism comes in all shapes and forms)
This has been the downfall of many generations-
Sadly,
I have been a witness to all of them.
(Particularly my own)

The greatest gift is breathing,
But breathing is NOT easy
And if it is NOT easy,
Then I shall be the first to do so for my generation-
I just hope my efforts are not in vain.



WHEN EYES SPEAK AND LISTEN

The invisible light of Ra breached my right eye this morning
As I was riding the 119,
Sitting on a thought,
Basking in a dream.
This light revealed to me the end of men;
But not an apocalyptical end like you learned in Sunday school
Or from overzealous radicals who attempt to persuade your spirit through fear,
But instead similar to Ragnarok,
Where most men and gods alike will be devoured by a wolf-
A noble wolf.


And this end heralds the beginning of
The Amber colored daffodils that rotate piously into oblivion,
And the faster the revolution,
The more it expands-
Like a divine consciousness.
Thankfully,
I´ m not allergic to wildflowers¡
(Although I´m allergic to forced literature¡)

This is why I dream upon pauses that harbor a continuous subtle prowl

That I occasionally scrub off as if they were historic stains,
Like the Crusades.
(this scrubbing usually occurs during the quarter moon of the Autumn Equinox.)
Thus,
The unanimous solitude that envelops me is quite fashionable nowadays,
Especially in selected Egyptian circles where,
If it weren´t for the Christian gossip,
We´d have no identity-
Yet alone an existence¡

This poem is proof that prophecies disappear in the midst of civilizations,
Of how they are ignored,
Like Cassandra´s,
Yet the civilized are the first to burn and plead to the universe for forgiveness-
But the universe is deaf to your supplications
Like you were, on the crucial Saturday dusk
WhenApollo´s warning echoed from the chosen lips of the Trojan princess…
This is why I choose to live with the incurable disease of listening.
And I don´t want a cure,
Or medical diagnosis,
Nor prescribed tablets by unlearned men.
Ok,
Maybe a tablet,
But it better be Emerald.
(Enough ¡This poem must be perpetually halted because it is heading to the unborn tears
Of your next verb!)

“Perhaps the calamities of humanity CANNOT be solved by the daily application of
Shaving cream”.

(This was the academic reasoning of one Billy Flannigan from Worcester, Massachussetts, who, before his fantastic death, uttered these last words of hope for Humanity´s sake with an unmoving godlike conviction.)
I believe Billy could´ve been right,
If he only would´ve learned to listen properly.
But what do I know?
After all,
It is complex(but not impossible)to listen clearly when your left eye is trying
To understand your right one.

viernes, 8 de mayo de 2009

POETRY BY ADOLFO BETETA


It is a great pleasure for me, as a writer and lover of poetry, to introduce you to the young poet Adolfo Beteta. Born in Nicaragua but raised in Massachussetts,USA, he is also an outstanding English teacher and a great connoisseur of literature. From his book Autumn Whispers I took these poems he wrote.


Self Portrait

Advancing.
True bigot controlling his element
Forever vibrant in a poetic coma.
Dismal backgrounds encircle the flagrant ghost of his chapters.

Unknown heritage impregnates the jargon of his silence
Leading it to milestones beyond normal.
His katana orbits the mind patiently waiting to decapitate the queen.

Abel felt the wrath of Cain,
Bringing an end to certain rules.
Still elevating.
Runaway scenes tantalize the unchallenged valor that yells with zest.


Spasms of an Impossible Love

My life sleeps helplessly in your kiss.
Never will I be born to see the crystal tulips growing from your hair awake,
Freely, gently flowing, streaming madly in my face.
In a rubber prison bouncing from lunatic rage
Transparent love incarcerated in your eyes partake.

Black sun enter.
Shed misery on the weeping cherry trees leaning towards the sky.
Dying fields nurture withered magnolias falling from the lips of time
To a silver screen of scorching hailstorms trickling from
The eyes of invisible hummingbirds that encircle buried tombs.

I hear you calling from ivory mountains floating blindly in a sea of flesh
Splashing ruby colored water drops extinguishing your fears.
Grab a comet by its tail and make it change its course.
Swim in the forbidden
And as you drown in its erotic fury you will resurrect in bliss
And emerge triumphantly like a golden Phoenix out of ashes you will rise.
Naked immaculate lunar eclipses hail the butterfly rainbow chariot.

Pandemonium sleep!
Pandemonium sleep!
Pandemonium sleep!

Snowflake

You fell…
From an Olympian haven descending slowly you reached
The path I trek alone not knowing where it will lead
My feet listen and never speak
Until the day we met along my journey.

They spoke to you of past lives,
Different phases,
Romantic escapades in the forest of my thoughts
And mythological heroes immortalized in stars.
They spoke of Promethean fates and Heraklean feats,
Poetry’s paradoxical nature and the poetic justice of my life.
Alexandria still prevails in the shadow of time.

They spoke of revolutions that sparked enlightenments
And of cunning philosophers who dared to think,
Of exotic and rare poets who never kept silent
Despite the criticism society links.

They spoke of great migrations,
Cross continental tides of flux for a dream.
The route of silk they know in texture,
A frozen tundra they’ve endured.
Tropical heat waves they have suffered
And felt soft meadows of green grass grow.
Industrial changes they’ve encountered,
They have adapted to social wars,
In city pavements they’ve been nurtured,
They’ve been oppressed and said no word.

And now they’ve stopped to greet your presence,
To wonder if you’ll respond at all,
But all you did was sit and listen
And watched the Summer turn to Fall.

In spite of this you didn’t melt…

They were amazed by your performance,
A role of Oscar worth and more,
The epic soundtrack of your poise revealed to them the many doors.
They opened one and then another,
Divinely contemplating every room,
Every corner,
Until they knew that it was finally the time to rest.

I’m gently falling like a feather,
In the ravishing emptiness of your abyss;
My feet have stopped their endless journey
To rest inside a prolonged bliss.

Orgasm

Ghastly images sustain the linguistic tongue's
Granite like delivery of the humble poet.
His verses implicate the process of Evolution
Putting it in jeopardy.
But the poet's destiny is unaffected
For it is guarded by the cosmic lectures of truth.

The morbid morale of infinite thoughts brings fear
To the skeptics who doubt the notion of the impossible.
Therefore,
The outspoken poet paves the endless quest for realization.

He frantically writes the words he receives from an inspirational frenzy,
Savagely inflicting pleasure upon the paper.
This is how he reflects his theory of life,
By unloading an exotic realism only a voracious vigilante can conceive.

His weapon is yesterday...
That personal zone that amplifies his addiction.


Emptiness


Living painting,
Dashing through your woods like an autumn breeze,
Encountering the Willoping people
Who dangle like a string.

Vicious vultures circle the wondering spirits
Waiting to feed off the innocent soul.
My range is precise...
Invisible bodies invade the coliseum of Karma seeking triumph
Just to get defeated by the perception of Kronus.

Thoughts hung on emptiness,
In silence,
In the pandemonium of night.
Capricorn dwells in Saturn,
In the home of Time.
No origin is one
Complete
Whole.


Blank Page

It starts from loneliness, from an undisturbed meditative solitude inside.
I sit there curled in a grown fetus position waiting for something to occur, but nothing does.

I am surrounded by space, starless space, colorless lifeless space
Yet in the barren horizon lingers an idea that wants to exist, to emerge from emptiness.
It wants to be grasped, understood and nurtured, but it is still invisible and complex,
And in the process of deciphering it,
I discover a levitating mirror forest lurking in the midst of my evolution.
Confusing images swirl from mirror to mirror laughing, crying,
Yelling silent echoes heard only by windpipes running wild.
I close my eyes and hope to awake…

I’m still here yet not exactly there when I stopped to stare at mirrors speaking to me in strangely familiar riddles. Clink, clink…clink, clink, clink the sound is near, behind the grove the memory fragmented waterfall speaks my years in a tongue only I can understand. Piece by piece they fall like feathers gently to the unconscious lagoon whose banks I am kneeling by reaching down to grab a drink, but the holographic transcendental moments of my life slip through my fingers trickling back where they belong. I thirst, but can only contemplate my collage of nature versus nurture.

Sitting on a thought watching life pass before my eyes in rapid multi-colorful flashes of light dashes that flow within and without you bringing you closer to the glory of death in every breath I inhale, but not necessarily meaning that I will exhale and prevail to escape the clutches of my lungs… but I don’t really care if life is zooming by at such an accelerated haste.

I carefully observe the world from my placid mental state and choose to flow according to my natural rhythm. I’m all about keeping it real to myself for health, but that’s ultimately the biggest wealth one can ever attain, so I won’t refrain to what I just felt in this passing second of my existence, inner peace and great persistence to all those minds out there who demonstrate resistance don’t you fall into the void, stop, get out, and find comfort in your joy. I do declare you sit back, relax, and lend my words your ears and glimpse the process of a particular existential awareness. This is an idea that just wanted to be born from a blank page and become a rhythmic smooth poetic rage, but not against the machine that produces all these dreams of heart pumping, heavy breathing, erotic fiction – before you answer think: Am I turning you on? Wink, wink. You never felt this kind of friction, and if I haven’t satisfied you yet then you weren’t meant to read my diction.


jueves, 26 de marzo de 2009

Parthenogenesis




90th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on March 26:
1479 Vasili III great prince of Moscow (1505-33)/son of Ivan III ,father of the monster Ivan IV Grozny,did he have any idea what he would beget when he jumped on top of Elena Glinski?1577 Elisabeth of Nassau daughter of Willem I & Charlotte of Bourbon, not as silent as her dad the Stadholder of the Netherlands
1911 Tennessee Williams Columbus MS, dramatist (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Tramway called Desire)one of USA´s most charming gays
1931 Leonard Nimoy Boston MA, actor (Spock-Star Trek, Mission Impossible),Mr.Spocl from Vulcan, with the Pointed Ears, delicious. Idol of my childhood
Deaths which occurred on March 26:
0752 Pope Stephen II dies only 4 days after his election, shit poor guy didn´t even live to enjoy his power
1566 Antonio de Cabezon composer, dies, somehow I like him even though he was Spanish
1827 Ludwig van Beethoven German composer (Appassionata), dies in Wien (Vienna) at 56,raging at the storm, fist threatening the storm,what a colossal way to die
1892 Walt Whitman poet, dies in Camden NJ at 72, father of free verse, blue eyed gay who was one of the first to wear jeans
1918 César A Cui Lithuanian fort builder/composer, dies at 83 ,was so mediocre no one could even say Cui about him1923 Sarah Bernhardt [Henriette-Rosine Bernard] actress (Qn Elizabeth), dies at 77,the Divine Jewish Diva
Happened today
1526 King François I returns Spanish captivity to France, and the coward sends his son Henri (future King Henri II) to take his place
1942 1st "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz & Birkenau Camps,train chockfull of Jews, for extermination.WE SHALL NEVER FORGET

Parthenogenesis…Look Ma; no male!

I knew that one day I would be destined to produce something without the physical aid of a sweating male getting his own good pleasure on top of my exhausted body. My father would laugh about it when he said I would be capable of parthenogenesis. Asexual reproduction. My father, like my blond boss Lorenzo, so long gone, fatherly miens to understand how complex the lack of penis can make us humans who are denominated females. I subrepticiously see the stars on my shoulders and I am sure of something: I did it all alone. I owe it all to myself. Could every woman chasing falling stars or being infatuated with someone write a book? No, sir, the world would then be a library. And it isn´t. The only stars I have ever touched lie not in my each day more deteriorated hazel eyes, but on my shoulders. Dust to dust, everything goes back t where it came from .I wallow in the loose and splotched comfort of my air force camouflaged jacket. Paradise found again, not Milton´s Lost Paradise. Paradise as described to me among chimeras doesn ´t work. I ´m the freak on my own leash. It is only fair. At the end,the acknowledgements are there but passed over. We want to get to business, ma ám,says the cadet.I just wanna read the book, he says in his embryo English. Someday he will learn not to contract and say want to.
How many times we feel sorry by all those who stand up to receive an award and hear them blab about thank you wife, thank you dog, thank you milkman? Everyone gets credit because we creative people, specially those of us who wear breasts, are inured to the fact that we should be cooking or washing the floor instead of writing, we are told that the time we spend writing stuff should be given to another baby or being nice to the mother-in-law. NO NO NO:I wrote this myself .It came in a bubble of sunlight and it goes on into an arid steppe, a puszta once inhabited by delibab. Dust to dust. Only a nut would write to a muse he has never even smelled. Try smelling the muse-if you ever catch her- after a dust storm, says an imp that lives beneath the third star on my shoulder. This imp is a minion of mirth, and is constantly laughing at me. But is always so intrinsically right that it scares me. It is the same imp that tells me this creation was just another way of reached self-glorification, an easy road to self gratification. Literary masturbatory practice. Why not? Taboos are being lifted from ipsation in the physical sense. Why not lift the barriers that take writers to masterpieces..?
Books don ´t die. They have an immortality that flesh and blood will never possess. Muses get flushed down the toilet every day along with other waste materials our life produces. Did Hector Berlioz ever regret having met Henrietta Smithson and dedicating his Symphonie Fantastique to such a mediocre moneydigger? Well, his pocket certainly suffered. All to end in despair and disappointment. Can he call me as welcome new member to his club, along with Dante cuddling a doll who looks like Beatrice or Petrarch with his mummified cat still longing for Laura? No. I never took my muse to the barber, nor shared a breakfast with the shadow. As much as nobody can get pregnant from watching a greedy Mahgreb gigolo ejaculating against the wall through a webcam, you cannot take responsibility for someone who has never sneezed over your left cheek. Fairy tales are only that. Sorry. But they can yield interesting products, such as these words that now you devour. Someday my grandkids will pay their college fee with money given by this non fiction book written by their crazy yet pragmatic ancestress, and they will invent stories about a shadowy phantom dancing in the background, but whose bloodline they aren´t related to.
There is no labor blood around my ankles. No placenta to show . I gave birth alone, like a hen who saw the shadow of a rooster and laid a white egg, as my grandma used to say. I used lots of music, my knowledge of history as the historian I am, the circumstances given every day to me by life, sometimes on a silver tray, other days with a kick in the ass. I almost deluded myself sometimes into believing there was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, or a happy ending like an American Hollywood blockbuster film. The almost made all the difference. Translation into Spanish is one penstroke away from this. A hard or soft cover is only a matter of choice. The pictures will come easily and the book is done. Elton John wrote Your Song. I wrote this scrapbook, and all the time it was focused on one person: the me that I became while I was life ´s avid student.





The road untaken




Entry 89 for the Colonel´s Scrapbook

Birthdates which occurred on your SELECTED date of March 17:
1473 James IV king of Scotland (1488-1513)was so unlucky as to be killed on the battlefield of Flodden leaving 4 bastards behind and among his legitimate kids the useless James V
1787 George Simon Ohm physicist (discovered Ohm's Law), thanks Georgie
1834 Gottlieb Daimler Germany, engineer/inventor/auto pioneer-designed 1st motorcycle, and since then so many people have ended splat
Deaths which occurred on March 17:
0180 Antonius Marcus Aurelius [Marcus Verus], Emperor of Rome, dies at 58, of dysentery ,unlike Vespasian who died on foot despite having loose bowels, he died in bed and not poisoned by his not biological son Commodus0461 St Patrick patron St of Ireland, dies in Saul (according to legend), what a lovely saint
0432 St Patrick, a bishop, is carried off to Ireland as a slave, for his benefit and that of the Emerald Isle
1836 Texas abolishes slavery, legally…but is it real?
1960 Eisenhower forms anti-Castro-exile army under the CIA, old squirrel hater couldn´t do without barking orders, maybe to vent out his frustration over his impotency and his frustrated love for Kay Summersby

WRONG TURN
The driver who was behind the wheel of the car which took Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his beloved morganatic wife through the streets of Sarajevo took a wrong turn and delivered these people to the gun of Gavrilo Princip, the TB-ridden patriot who dreamt of a free Serbia. Some wrong turns are not as drastic, though.You can always unwalk the path and get back to the main artery of your life. All of you know that I am not religious. Today is Saint Patrick´s Day and green Ireland is afeast.On a day like today he was abducted to be taken as slave to Ireland. Had he stayed in his native isle, would he had become the formidable, honest to god saint he became? He converted the Emerald Isle to Christianity pushing aside the Druid religion, and supposedly got all snakes to leave Ireland.Was he aware of the steps that would guide him when he was abducted? He was barely over childhood, and out he went into the world, not exactly by choice.
Choice. Women have less choices, perhaps because of the double standard. If a man sacrifices his family to duty he is a patriot. If we women do it we are heartless egotistical bitches in search for crazy glorification. My uniform is in the closet, peeping at me, the stars twinkling on it. Have I ever been out of it, even when I don ´t officially wear it? I can´t imagine if there really is a choice once you get so far in life. Once I read Virginia Woolf´s short tale Solid Objects. A guy leaving all he had for something supposedly meaningless for everyone but himself. Some things wil never make sense to everyone at the same time. If you are running after freedom on a wild goose chase, running wild, dropping things on the way while the finicky quetzal of freedom flies into a tree, lands at a pool of desire, winks at you…how much do you have to shed to fly like it? Once obtained, the bird is just a sad creature. Heart pulsing like mad under fear, trembling, a fistful of feathers, clinging hopefully to life, begging for one more minute of life, asking you to spare him from beady eyes. It has lost its charm because freedom that is attained only to seek for a new type of slavery is worthless. No parakeet wishes to change cages, it longs for the jungle only. That is what I have always meant, and the bird is bird with or without feathers of whatever colors it may be. What I´m trying to say is that with or without military uniform the same discipline is there, the same sense of following my own code of Bushido One of my friends, now retired, says that you can leave the army but the army inside never leaves you alone.
Patrick comes to me again. Not in the religious sense, because I don’t believe in that kind of sainthood. The man who was Pat, the tall and burly redheaded who always had a jovial smile. I have a little chat with the historical Patrick. He would tell me nobody leaves all for all if all is relative. He´s about to smack my bottom and say that woman, that was a mess but it is easily arrangeable. I can still retake my path. He will laugh and comment that I painted myself into a stupid corner. Risking all for chimeras isn´t only stupidity, it is suicide. He would remind me that another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, would say, centuries after Patrick lived, that innocence is a fragile blossom and if you touch it the bloom is gone. Virtual is a delicate blossom and reality when it touches it wilts it off, is my version. I´m back in my old office, the air conditioner hums softly. But these are only the trappings, the physical skins of power or what we think is power. We have access to our dreams by what we sacrifice for them in reality. But dreams come in two versions, sweet ones and nightmares. Nothing is worth making sacrifices for nightmares. Remember how they make us scream. Words have a way of developing iridescent curves when we see them on a screen. Real concepts don ´t temptingly snake a belly dance for us. They are solid and concrete and have seven seals on their bent backs.
No, I can unwind my wrong turn. In fact I just did today. Was green-clad, redheaded handsome Pat there? Probably, as well as all the living dybbuks of my Jewish past and a few hand picked jinns from Muslim legend that my ancestress Fatma Osmanli took in her bags when she married my French ancestor? Somehow many people long to go back to the womb. A sense of welcome comfort engulfs me. My Pikachu glucometer on my desk, my Taz cushion. The iced tea, Lipton, already foaming in its pitcher in the small fridge. I take my Jungle boots off and doze off. Dreamlessly I wade through unconsciousness, until I wake up again and realize it is reality. I have just exited a murky swamp of confusion. My next class is in three minutes .I don ´t have to apologize for being me or having no time. Like Lot´s wife I want to turn around, but my computer screen confirms me I am ok.The image of my long dead ocelot floats on the screen and a smile suddenly has no choice but to explode upon my face...

sábado, 24 de enero de 2009

monarchs to ourselves




88th entry for the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates for January 24:
0076 Publius A Hadrianus 14th Roman Emperor (117-138)m the lover of Antinoo, animal assassin through his circus shows, oppressor of the Jews 1705 Farinelli "Carlo Broschi" Andria Italy, castrato, favorite of King Philip V, whose melancholy his voice drove away1712 Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia (1740-86), the perfect man, great historian,soldier,philosopher…too bad he left no issue 1732 Pierre de Beaumarchais France, playwright (Barber of Seville), a man of great wit 1746 Gustav III king during Swedish Enlightenment (1771-92) Gustav was assassinated by a conspiracy of noblemen.Gustav III was a benefactor of arts and literature

Deaths on January 24:
0041 Caligula [G C Germanicus], Roman emperor (37-41), assassinated at 28 ,he got stabbed in the balls,and he was the guy who named his horse Incitatus consul of Rome0661 Ali ibn Abu Talib kalief of Islam (656-61), murdered, was the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who ruled over the Rashidun empire from 656 to 661
events

1328 King Edward III of England marries Philippa of Hainault, but in her old age he would yank her jewels away to have them worn by his mistress
1568 In the Netherlands, Duke of Alva declares William of Orange an outlaw, because for Spaniards back then being a patriot was a sin

THE PRIVATE KING WE HAVE

One of the men I have most admired in history is Frederick II of Prussia, the Great, the enlightened despot, my Fritz. Once he told his friend Voltaire that we all had a king navigating inside our bloodstream, and that once or twice in life the ordinary man or woman were liable to feel the weight of this kingship. After many quarrels between monarch and French writer, after time has not totally faded the memory of those deeds left behind by this extraordinary king, I tend to agree with Fritz. His kingship went unhampered until he died, but before that he had lots of ways to show what stuff he was made of.
I sit alone at my PC, where I should always be left alone as a matter of elementary decency and respect for the privacy I am entitled to as a living creature, and meditate over my kingship. I remember another sovereign, Louis XIV th of France, who managed to keep his sense of monarchy even when surrounded by courtiers and cronies who would pester him even when he was grunting at the chaise perceé. Hoe many papers can you sign when you are having trouble relieving yourself? How valid is it when someone says he is going to the place where the king goes alone? The toilet? Was Louis ever alone there? Is kingship a trap like any other, stifling like marriage when your body doesn´t seem to get rid of the hormonal Alzheimer and continues feeling after you should be decorously indifferent? Is it like being a pillar of society, a stout matron who shouldn´t be wearing miniskirts after she removes her work clothes? Is it like a ball and chain similar to the married name, furthermore stifling when you have become famous under the husband´s name, the scar on the Miura bull ´s shoulder pr haunch? Atrocious, dearest reader, the Miura bull goes to the bullfight where it shall die with that mark, drowning in his own blood while only one person in the crowd-me-cheered when the bull drove his horn into the matador´s ass and nearly sodomized him in public. Silently my husband´s cat comes in to this room where I write to you, and he passes his tail over my legs. He doesn´t poke his head into the PC as others do. He sits amiably next to me and he starts washing, grooming, cosseting himself. He is a sovereign unto himself. Is he also seeking refuge from the loud invasion of cheap ranchera music that invades the living room, violating our exquisite taste for Vivaldi and Shankar? Kingship has often been raped and mutilated, in everyday ways and greater ones too. Remember the iron hot rod pushed into King Edward II of England´s ass? Or the imprisonment of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine? Or poor widowed and white-haired Sha Jehan imprisoned in the Red Fortress by his son Aurangzeb? Kingship has its own inbuilt trappings. Being a public figure runs the same way. It is a cage. No way out, not being able to fart silently while walking on the street even though gases may be killing you.
Kingship is funny. It teaches you to play god until you become addicted to the practice, unless you are wise enough to stop the jump midway. It is a mortal jump. Sometimes you are already mid air when you realize there is the abyss that pride always lays at your feet for it to swallow you alive. No net below, you kill yourself instantly. Overbearing helps you jump over the cliff. The blows and bruises I have gotten over time have shown me you can never be too stubborn. There are never higher walls than when you build them around yourself, and the first thing you must know is that if you built them from inside out it will be worse. We often paint ourselves into the corner, and we don´t always have the wings to fly way above our footprints of mistakes.
Kingship is not for everyone, which is perhaps a rather harsh thing to say. Kingship is not the same as the condition that leads someone to be a tyrant. Being a dictator is the utmost vulgarity that can exist. Nicaraguan men have a strong proclivity for this, although they would rather die than confess to it. They still mistake kingship for dictatorship. It is throwing the soup into their wife´s face because they wanted a masculine meal with lots of cholesterol and animal death in it, a meal “fit for an engineer” as rudely expressed by my stupid maternal uncles to my weary grandmother when once she had the temerity to serve delicious spaghetti. It is imposing rules with no sense in them, or trying to control the economics of a household even when they are not the main breadwinner. Not kingship, sir, only dictatorship, and we all know how dictators end up, pathetic shadows like the sad finale of Fidel Castro or Nicolas Ceaucescu, echoes of their worst times shitting into a colostomic bag. Only kingship can dignify most decisions, dictatorship alone demeans us.
Kingship is rising above our nimious details of everything suffering, shedding the old dry skin of past complexes, dusting your mind freely without being able to run scared from your own mistakes. Kingship gives a crown to our most minimal intentions,a nd puts us apart from all the miseries we have as a natural burden. Kingship is not god given,we snatch it from kismet´s hands and wear it as a crown.If the crown has thorns, well, it is up to us to goldplate them.





domingo, 18 de enero de 2009

On Daríos birthdate




87th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on January 18:
1641 François Michel le Tellier French statesman (Marquis de Louvois) was the
French Secretary of State for War for a significant part of the reign of Louis XIV. Louvois and his father, Michel le Tellier, would increase the French Army to 400,000 , an army that would fight four wars between 1667 and 1713.Classy warmonger-wasn´t he?1795 Anna Paulowna Romanova daughter of czar Paul I really as useless as her dad
1841 Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier France, composer (Le Roi Malgré Lui,España Rhapsody)pre impressionist composer
1867 Rubén Darío national poet (Nicaragua),born on an oxcart befote arriving at Metapa, now named alter him Ciudad Darío
events
1486 King Henry VII of England marries Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, together they would manufacture Henry VIII
1535 Francisco Pizarro founds Lima Peru, he was the guy who got Atahualpa killed
1644 Perplexed Pilgrims in Boston reported America's 1st UFO sighting, at least they didn´t believe it was Jesus landing with buckles
1943 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto begin resistance of Nazis, was about time

WRITER´S DAY

As sweat pours down my back like the rapids of the San Juan River-I am not allowed to use fan anymore in my writing room, words shall pour out in sweat because being a writer shall be hard work-I sit down to write this entry about the difficult path a writer follows. It is January 18th, and our national poet Rubén Darío made his entry into this world on a day like today. He was born on a oxcart, and legend has it that his parents were having one of their usual quarrels when sir hit the lady on the belly and hurried Felix Ruben García Sarmiento into this valley of tears before it was his time. Of course, later on it was said that he had been born in an old adobe corner in Metapa, the first city where Rosa Sarmiento-his mom-stopped after delivering him. Not convenient to mention those sordid details about an author coming from such a dysfunctional family. White wash everything, dearest reader, don´t mention sexual transgressions or divorces, it gives a bad read! Rosa disappeared from Rubén´s life while he was a toddler, and someone saw fit to blacken her name by saying she had eloped with another guy and left the future bard with some relatives in León. Whatever was, had to be,and our Rubén signing himself as Darío,ended up being the Prince of Castilian Letters, showing the Spaniards that an indigenous man with slack black hair can master their perfect language better than they ever did. Father of modernism, the mediocre Costaricans have tried to usurp his birthplace, and Chile and Argentina -where he lived during his youth and published his first works-also love to lay claim to him. Excellence always brings those claims, along with the green snake of envy.
I know what the green snake of envy,with its tongue of ignorance, wreaks. It is the same element that makes a husband prefer a well done steak over a new short story, and if the short story is good he will call you a pervert- It is the young woman who inherits the writer´s streak from the oppressed mother but is too comfortable to fight alongside. She wants to keep the optical illusion of a perfect home intact, although her dysfunctional family is a walking bomb prone to explode at any minute. No wonder SylviaPlath stuck her head into the oven. She spent so much time smiling cheese. But gas is too expensive to be wasted on suicide and I have never believed doing myself in will benefit me, so that is ruled out. Young talents. So wrapped up in their own perfume. So much to learn. It is so difficult to compete sometimes, specially when one is not sure if one will fulfill the promises that the fairy godmother of talent may have made. Poor comparison, but remember the Dream Weaver by Gary Wright?Bloom for one single spring, reminds kismet. It can happen to anyone.
Does walking home with a medal or a trophy compensate for the perils of a writer´s endeavours? Praise is a soft glove, over a wooden hand or iron fist. I don´t want praise. I only wish for a respect of my individuality, whatever makes me myself and not another figure in a uniform or with a degree hanging over her desk. Speaking on the phone a moment ago with my good friend, novelist Ricardo Pasos Marciaq, he tells me he had almost forgotten it was our day. In a country like ours where people don´t read and those who do only learn the newspapers in chips by heart in order to further their own lowly interests, the criminals of the story are us the writers. Hated at home for not being in the kitchen serving food to the family, viewed as freaks by our own children who think it would be more useful for mommy to be out at charity meetings, or seen as freaks on a leash by people who don´t want to shed their ignorance, writers in Nicaragua are a class apart. Pasos tells me his super blockbuster The Brothel of the Pedrarias is already into its ninth edition, I rejoice. I have caused scandal with these entries of this book, I know I could even go to jail for some of the things I say. If I were Islamic, I could even be repudiated for my views, or lapidated in Saudi Arabia.
Writing can be more complicated than the worst high risk pregnancy. But I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. I have been censored at a cheap lampoon by a directress who hated me writing about the cross dressers of history because in her family she has a lesbian and a gay sibling. I have nothing against people with different sexual choices, it is just that she still has double standards. I quit over three years ago, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been denied access to information by government sources, my internet has been clipped off, my yahoo and hotmail messengers wrenched out of my PC by a rabid consort(who has never written a single piece of literature in his life and probably won´t even do so), my mailboxes opened, every bit of correspondence read. I have endured, but not without a black sediment of spite. You are reading part of it. But it is the sediment, not the essence.
The essence is like the product of our small Mariola bee, which produces the sweetest and most golden honey of all. I am the real alchemist to change the rubble of everyday life into the gold we so cherish, golden words. Not magic, simply the act of creation.
I wrestle with demons or angels, but come out battle scarred and happy. The writer is not married to anyone, although once I made the mistake-a big one- of using my married name to earn fame. Writers are also people with feelings, something forgotten by many. Writer´s Day sees me without gift or congratulations from the people who by kin are closest to me, with whom I live under the same roof. It happened the same for my birthday last October. But rather giftless than receiving charity, no candy in jail.
I remember Charlotte Bronte writing Jayne Eyre, with her stern husband resenting every moment she wasn´t taking care of him. Do you wonder how she could have died in pregnancy? Or Agatha Christie, with her envious husband who loved to humiliate her in public.
Being a woman writer seems to bring out the executioner in the men who share our lives. We have something they may want yet are unable to possess. Minds should not fit into pretty bodies, they may think. Or into any kind of body who should have yielded babies and not short stories.
Loud, we are scandalous by nature, women writers. My consort for over 21 years standing shooes me away as a tse tse fly, afraid I will infect his brain with who knows what while he memorizes the newspapers and has wet dreams of becoming a judge before he is finished with law school.. He wants a yielding body and total service. Every piece I write should carry a dedication to him, even when he hasn´t earned it. He is by default the muse, can´t have his dark wifey bearing literary children to others. Keeping dog so it barks for others, no way-He has to eat all the profits of my work. He pokes his nose over my shoulder to see what I am writing, because he was never educated to respect anybody ´s privacy.
I know that women will be reading this and realizing that their cases may be clones of mine. Today I have been bold enough, brazen would men say, to admit that this scrapbook was not incubated in marriage. I have taken locks from your hair and made them into quills to write this. I have come out of the closet and I have kissed and told. It has been as daring as having my own child for and to myself, although that kid and I now have to admit that being someone´s ancestor doesn´t guarantee we will like each other, get along or agree on anything. There is no Spanish Inquisition-officially- so I don´t go to the stake. Physically. I am already being roasted in many people´s opinions, and that gives me a sense of satisfaction. Will I be the one here to put the bell around the angry cat? Too bad my cat Diriangen died yesterday and as a faithful companion of my efforts at the PC, he would applaud if he could read.
A hale mind has always brought upon desires to squelch it by those who cannot even think on their own. Envy is the tribute that the mediocre pay the genius, said Oscar Wilde. I didn´t even get a cheap pen for my day from the person who has most benefited from having a scholarly writer at home. But life always has the bad habit of kicking later on, when one reaps the rewards of exactly that which has been sown by us.







lunes, 12 de enero de 2009

I still would




86th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on January 12:
1483 Hendrik van Nassau-Dillenburg en Dietz Governor/Viceroy of Holland , how much did he really rule?1562 Charles Emanuel I the great, Duke of Savoy,let´s take the word he was great
1729 Lazzaro Spallanzani Modena Italy, physiologistmpriest,father of artificial insemination,my idol
1751 Ferdinand I king of Sicily & Naples, poor crowned head
1808 Paul "the Great" Taglioni Vienna, ballet choreographer,the best thing he did was father María,who invented toe dancing 1810 Ferdinand II king of Sicily, so much hassle

Deaths which occurred on January 12:1517 Vasco Núñez de Balboa Spanish conquistador/admiral, beheaded at 41 afyer he called the Pacific Ocean “el Mar del Sur”, his last name is remembered in Panamanian currency1519 Maximilian I of Hapsburg, dies, he was a real strong guy who could lift a horse
events
1684 French king Louis XIV marries Madame Maintenon, his solidité who make him revoke the Edict Nantes, the prudish bitch who never became queen, morganatic wife
1755 Tsarina Elisabeth establishes 1st Russian University, of course it had to be a woman to treasure learning

Drops and toys
The crystal drop comes down from the bottle into the translucent tube, down,into me. For one moment it is not my body, it is not the serum I must take to get rid of this hemorrhagic flu which marked the beginning of this year. Scientific curiosity nestling into me, or seeping from my pores? Today it is a year since I broke the two malleoli on either side of my ankle. But Lazaro Spallanzanni, the most useful priest I have ever heard of, was born on a day like today. Here he has me, sweating, thinking of him and the cat he loved, Romeo Amore-given to him by the Emperor Joseph II of Habsburg-and how his friendship with this Manx cat brought him to become the father of modern artificial insemination. Father.Pretre Lazaro, father of no children of his own because the silly dogma of his church demands celibacy(did he really follow it…let me laugh) but such a prolific dad of meteorology, gastroenterology, meteorology and vulcanology, and indirectly of the radar because he discovered how bats fly… I look at my almost imperceptibly twisted left ankle and a wide smile spreads over my face. The music to Father Antonio and his altar boy Andres by Ruben Blades keeps me company. Like the Salvadorean prelate Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated by shitty rightwingers, Lazaro was a useful priest. Not being Catholic nor believer of any faith, I would have felt comfortable having either one-Romero or Spallanzanni hear confession from me. Even if I had to blush. At 49 can I still blush..?
At any age, everything, including 49,blushes come handy. I guess even animals blush. When my cats fall out of a tree or turn around at the wrong time, I try not to laugh in front of them. Cats have as many imaginary drops and toys as I had when growing up. One of the greatest drops I saw was protagonized by my russet Torta. I shared a bedroom as a kid,and it had a bathroom incorporated. I usually cleaned the toilet, but one day my sister miraculously did so. She neglected to shut down the lid. Torta,accustomed to my thoroughness, assumed the lid was shut. She used to nestle there on the fake fur that covered the lid. So Torta made a pirouette in the air and fell headfirst into the blue water of the soapy toilet. I don’t think she broke anything by falling so violently in an Esther Williams fashion into the perfumed water of the bowl, but her ego was very warped. I helped her out of the toilet and let her on the rug, so she quickly crawled under my bed without even looking at me, so ashamed she was. She spent the whole day there, not even coming to eat (and she was a glutton, mind you my dearest of all readers).Her stomach churning with starvation urged her out of there around 8 pm. Torta would be prone to lots of accidents further on because she usually had a bad sense for calculating the risks involved in all her pranks. Some years later she decreed, as the queen of the house that she was, that the cuckoo clock my dad had so lovingly brought from Normandie, was doomed to die. The birdie must perish in her claws.
The clock was made of old polished wood, was very precise and every hour a blue and yellow birdie with a stupid face came out to sing cuckoo. For weeks, Torta chose to sleep on the sofa in the living room where the cuckoo was. Usually she slept on my bed. But she needed to collect intelligentsia about the ways and habits of the hated cuckoo. He was to die. One day my cat must have consulted some kind of feline oracle, for she decided it was her D Day. She had a flair for drama. She chose to let my dad know how much she hated Norman cuckoo clocks, so at the precise hour that he was leaving for work, after having lunched and napped, when it was 2 pm she jumped from the corner table, so she flew. It was like watching a stingray float gracefully in shallow waters. She caught the silly birdie in her mouth and wrapped her four paws around the clock. Cat and clock fell down to the living room Persian carpet, and once there, Torta wrenched the birdie off and proceeded to slap it mercilessly against the floor, meowing loudly in victory. She was heaving audibly, with a demonic glint in her green eyes. It was the look of an orgasmic woman, dearest heart. My father was speechless, my mother came out of the kitchen, her face covered with ghastly flour, like a phantom, for she had dropped the sack of flour when she heard the crashing noise. I came from my room to find my cat rolling in delight on the floor with her trophy. My father was the first to lets out hysterical peals of laughter, even though he cherished the clock beyond doubt. He picked up the remains of the clock but left Torta to enjoy the birdie while tears of laughter streamed down our cheeks. The clock was fixed at an exaggerated sum but the birdie was kept by Torta among her toys and when she died,it was buried along with her with military honors.
What would Lazaro Spallanzanni have thought of Torta? He was so in love with his own Manx given by his friend and protector. Romeo Amore would be put to copulate and when he was about to spurt, Lazaro would put a small cup under him to collect his seed. Poor guy, coitus interruptus. But thanks to him today couples who can´t have kids the normal way can still become parents. Romeo survived his associate by 5 years, and Lazaro died in 1799,the same year the Brits would slay the Tiger of Mysore Tipoo Sultan of India.
In my sick bed I always bring Lazaro to my side.I have his same curiosity,only I was not brave enough as an adolescent to continue on in science. Winning 5 science fairs was enough, even if one of my master projects-based on the small book of gardening by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror-got me in trouble with the damned teacher staff at the expensive American Nicaraguan School where I had the disgrace to attend high school. I was playing god and ended up not believing in god. I never forgave. Nor forgot, not even in my bed convalescing from a hemorrhagic flu, remembering the silly way I broke my malleolli one year ago.
Still saying if I had to do it all over again, having the same toys and drops. I would do it again.