For pretty much any Portuguese reading this, the painting on the side shouldn’t be unfamiliar. Although is not just a Portuguese thing like I thought, unfortunately it’s quite infiltrated in our culture.
It seems it all started in the UK in the 80’s, when a Spanish orphan painted the first version which ended up believed to be haunted. The painting is called crying boy and nowadays it even has a fan club. Well, maybe because Portuguese are, in a way, masochistic, the painting can be easily found on open-markets or even at some more classy art shops. This wouldn’t be a problem if a big percentage of Portuguese families (maybe my sample is biased. anyway) didn’t use it to decorate their happy homes. I guess people see in it some sort of beauty to which I’m not sensible to. Well, at least not in the same way.
The whole reason of this post it’s, perhaps, to express my strong hate for this painting. Along the years and unaware of it at start, I developed an incredible aversion to it. With all respect to whom might like it, I think it should be banned from all homes.
There is a good reason for all this and, actually, is quite simple, although as much egocentric. When I was just a kid, even before I knew what a painting really is, my mother had the unfortunate idea of hang one of this things on my bedroom wall. Can’t really blame her, she likes it a lot, and was thinking the best for me, but eventually I started asking her to remove the damn think from my room. Well, some years later she did, but moved it to the corridor wall just in from of my bedroom door which isn’t that different. I can’t precise if the painting is still there, I eventually started to ignore it completely and now I hardly go back to my parents home.

Today, I’m still not very much into painting – that’s an art I still don’t understand, I guess. Anyway, my bedroom walls don’t have any so, to replace it, there are a bunch of photographs, lots of postcards and two huge maps: one from Utrecht – already quite in a bad shape of the use I gave it while in The NL, and a even bigger map of Europe where I tagged small post-its at the places where I have friends at [edit: (the ones abroad)]. Some people think it’s funny, others think it’s strange, while some just think I’m nuts. Maybe I am, but I still find it to be a cool way to tease the imagination when everything else fails to keep me concentrated on whatever I might be doing. Plus, it’s a nice way learn some geography knowledge which I miss a bunch.