the art of being grateful

i came back to ny after three months of leaving, it felt like a quick return. i still feel like i´m assimilating all the things that happened on my last trip. on this occasion it has been more of a mapping of experiences, retracing steps, and moving forward. lingering in the past, but moving on to the present/future.

i received an email from my father yesterday around 2 am here/1 am mexico, he was wishing me a happy thanksgiving, and telling me other stuff. he got me thinking on direction, instinct, and trust; figure out what direction you want to go, walk firmly north/south/east/west, trusting with some strange intuition that life will eventually lead you to the place you need to be.. story of my life, sometimes i have to remind myself to keep gliding, taking the good, learning from the "bad", repeat.

it astounds me how we´re standing side by side so many people on this automatic impulse to move forward, most of us don´t know where we´re moving, we just know we have to wake up and move... what fuels the impulse? why do we want more? what mechanism sparks the one step after the next?
what?
life?
love?
company?
friendship?
routine?
contempt?
it´s this longing to feel alive right? and how we pinch the air for it to react.
and all of us essentially looking for the same thing; integrity, grasping a whole/hole for a rough instant.

it´s so strange to live this pre-thanksgiving buildup after not living it for more than 10 years, my family still celebrates back in mexico and to me it was just some other night where we got together and my mother made pre-christmas turkey, didn´t take much account of it until now and didn´t really understand why they still celebrated it. it felt ridiculous telling your friends that you´re having thanksgiving dinner, and you couldn´t go out. now that i am "consciously" back here, i kind of get it. i´m beginning to observe what it means to so many people. i mean this is the city that makes you move away from your family, it´s the city that makes you fight and squirm to move every which way on your own, where you never actually feel alone because you´re always surrounded, that´s why the loneliness is bearable (the distraction), here is where you can have so many things instantly (all an illusion). the city is starting to feel a bit "empty", everyone´s gone back "home", back to some origin, some place where it all began, the smell, the sight, the surrounding, remembering when you thought everything was possible, a comfort zone.
a second to come back,
another second to numb that out.

a void everyone is trying to fill, swapping cards to see what fits, constructing the puzzle, figuring out the instructions of the map, creating the way, inventing the directions... the city you had in mind.



as i was writing, i let prefuse 73s -meditation upon meditations- play on, a fusion of jazz, idm, and of course, glitch electro, characteristic of mr. scott herren. i think it´s a pretty good instrumental album for cold nights, goes well with a oversize grey knit sweater and a cup of berry infused tea.

on some other note, i´ve been getting comments on how i´m a nice person, i´m not actually sure how this makes me feel... i´m not sure i like being nice, is that bad?... should i be grateful for being nice?

i feel so disperse, i´ve been trying to write this for a while and i´ve been going back and forth from twitter, facebook, cellphone, phone, hotmail, youtube, blogger, gmail, zipeg, some movie on tv, liquor store, shower, joe goddard, prefuse 73 and a couple of four tet remixes.
i´m not even sure if what i´ve written makes any sense or if i like what i wrote, i had to write it... so i´ll hit publish post and i´ll be off.