To the ones responsible

I’ve known Luiza for the past 12 years or so. One could even say we’re close friends, even though there’s been a good share of fighting between us, undercover. We talk a lot, that’s for sure, and after all these years there’s nothing that she can hide from me. I am Luiza, you see, but I’m writing this as another person in order to try to achieve an objectivity impossible in any other way. (Blessed may be Horselover Fat, and his own self Philip K. Dick, for he has shown me/us this path)

You see, I am here because I don’t fully trust her. She’s sometimes too harsh on herself, and a little bit not self-confident enough, at times (even though we’re working on that and I am proud to say that the results of late have been quite satisfactory). She was silly enough to feel bad for not listing concrete examples of things she’s done, or for not having taken part on any Olympiad like many other students (she finds them disappointingly similar to school tests to be worth the time, you see)! Thankfully I managed to convince her that none of these things mattered to her that much and that having been able to win inertia and start doing things (not the things done, themselves) is the real pride of her life. Teens, go figure.

That’s a funny thing about her, and everybody else, actually. She used to compare herself to other people way too often, and then try to fit into any sort of pattern she could recognized; even though we eventually erased this approach’s code from her brain, she still faces some difficulties due to a nasty thing called habit. (I truly hate it; she hates it too but has to deal with it. It is boring and keeps people from looking at things differently, and therefore discovering new things all the time. Because, you see, the real happiness, the thrill of living is not in knowing stuff, and understanding how they work. That’s rewarding, certainly, but Luiza secretly wishes she were able to erase every memory of head instantly, so that she could discover things over and over again and laugh for no reason at the wonderfulness of it all. She does it during subway trips, mainly, and having accompanied her though all of them I can attest that, boy, they were remarkably amusing every single time, in every single way, be it Physically, Musically, Sociologically or even Politically).

I’ll never forget a conversation we had once, during her trip to the school. She’s learned a lot more from her time talking to me on the way, and talking to people on the corridors before classes than during classes themselves, and even though she’s sort of ashamed of this “bad-girl behavior”, she’s proud of the community she was part of for those three years, and I am saying it now for her.

But anyway, as about the talk: she had just finished the Advanced School of Nuclear Energy, and was still trying to deal with the Nervous Shakedown (in capitals because it’s a reference to the mighty AC/DC song) of not feeling like she actually belonged there. It’s not that she didn’t learn anything, far from that. All the fields that work with help of nuclear energy, and she actually got back to school with a lot of information to theatrically share with her friends, try to awe them like she was awed, but people there seemed to be going somewhere quite different than her destination, and that silly little teen actually questioned her abilities.

That was a silly behavior imprinted on her by silly people who wanted her to care about what they said of her and to obey all what they said, to be silly like them, but we managed that, as mentioned before. That talk was an important part of the process, when I convinced her that, hell, she needn’t like Physics like her peers, that she could be the only one to like the lecturer who wittily said science was not just about doing math without feeling like a criminal and, hell again, she could go around aesthetically pleased by Marlon Brando in her own way, not her grandmother’s. She felt like being put into a much larger box after that, and, well, you’re welcome, Luiza. Finally she understood the true pleasure of singing “My Way” with Frank Sinatra at the top of her lungs.

It actually is a strong guide on her life, to do things her own way. During the course of this tuff year (year ended on the night of November 27th, when she finally stepped out of the bigger box to no box at all, with the help from the guys of AC/DC) she realized (and this was pretty much on her own, after being metaphorically almost beaten up to death by adversities) that there’s no use on trying to walk with boots that aren’t her own. They hurt and keep her from walking anywhere.

We also agreed that it is of extreme importance to find a personal reason in everything she does. It contains the premise “Never do something without meaning and pleasure”, but they’re not directly and totally correspondent. It also implies searching for a reason in the things that aren’t born inside of her, and it has worked very well up until now, because like that she ends up incorporating a lot of cool things to herself. Things done true to the heart can never be wrong, and they always come out sweeter than expected.

We still haven’t agreed on whether it is a good idea to kill the constant feeling of “I could have done better” or not. While it can be rather depressing at times, it seems to be an important gear of the mechanism that impels her forward. Feeling like she could do more with her time on earth, right now, trying her best to do all the crazy stuff she wants, like learning Quenya, the elvish language, or building up the courage to make (and use) costumes for herself and for orphan kids, helping her friends more often and building a motorized trolley so she can go around with her stuffed zebra like Calvin did with Hobbes. Dreaming is really important for growing, in the Luiza-Mechanism, and not feeling totally fulfilled is necessary in order to dream.

That doesn’t mean, however, that she fears failing. It used to be the biggest dread of her life, but that was reaching a preoccupying point where it kept her from jumping from Dream-World to Real-World, so I stepped in and killed that monster. It was big, stinky and spit fire from its mouth, but after a mighty battle from the depths of the world to the top of the highest mountain, I killed it and emerged victorious as a White Wizard.

She is a funny girl. Without the big, stinky monster she feels like she can do a lot of things, but I try to hold her back a little because she might end up with way too much to chew and then have to spit everything out. She’s prone to choosing gargantuous projects that she never finishes, like becoming a rockstar or teaching quantum mechanics to kids from her neighborhood (apparently, institutions that organize don’t need someone without a degree helping them… not a very cutting-edge approach). But they all basically come up when she thinks something can be improved. She finds it a little bit way too much thinking ahead of her and her abilities, and yes, she usually finds herself dealing with things far more complex than her reach. Someday, maybe?

I believe this need for fixing is rather funny. She still thinks she can change the world, but I will let her live with that belief a little longer, some good things might come out of that. But, in the end, I get sad with her when we see young people, friends even, being wasted by a system that’s far to shallow to care, or when we see a democratic machine that kills democracy. All the mouth-to-mouth attempts haven’t shown any effects up until now, but she dreams of the day when the world will be able to rebuild hierarchy with fewer stories

I guess I can say she is some sort of a rebel, but right now I can hear her screaming and asking me to explain this clearly. She hates being called a rebel without a cause, no matter how charming James Dean might have been. It’s just a reflex of her need to question everything (thanks to Plato and his idea of ascension, badly mixed with a random e misplaced-in-time contact to Descartes, backed up by a natural tendency to not accept things people told her and the potentialities of filling time with dialectics). She likes doing things her way, as mentioned, but she also likes doing things herself, direct action as the main tool for a more democratic and articulated world. She also dreams of the day when she will build a time machine and visit the French Revolution, just to take notes on how things were done and how they could be improved, come back and do it herself.

(Note: that is one of Luiza’s delusions. After a life of reading Sci-Fi book, I’ve learned all the unsolved problems and paradoxes of time travel, but at least she can dream. One day I’ll tell her to settle for the comments by Historians and documents left behind.)

I can’t finish this by saying she would be happy there or contribute to the community. I hope you can decide that, as the whole angst of having to choose a career and a place to live for the next four years could be diminished by this help. It was already softened by submitting to a process that cares about how she thinks and what her priorities are and so on, not just what Brazilian students are supposed to go through, testing upon testing. This will change some day, but up until there, I hope my attempts to clarify Luiza’s… existence were useful.



Sincerely,

Luiza Pepper (Luiza Cabral's alter-ego)