©A boca de jarro

December 28th, 2020

Dear Mr.,

Another year of my life is about to come to an end, a year of tremendous losses for people such as myself all around the world. So, I turned, once again, to my therapeutic writing here in my blog, my good old blog powered by Blogger, which to me is a source of spiritual nourishment, like water to my soul, water that I patiently pour into this profit-free jar ("jarro") of mine in order to cleanse the wounds that I carry in my heart, again, like most people who turn to art to heal themselves from all the pain life sometimes inflicts on us so incomprehensibly, just like it happened this year...

"Great art comes from pain", Cristopher Zara in Tortured Artists

As I was saying - and pardon my sentimental digressions, please, bear with me, once more, but I happen to be a highly sensitive being for the ways of this materialistic, result-oriented, money-grabbing-and-making, computer-based, code-encrypted world, even more so at this special time of this special year -, I turned to my old blog only to find that Blogger had changed so dramatically that much of the content I had so laboriously and lovingly compiled through the "productive" years since 2011 was once again somehow gone and not fitting in to the new changes recently incorporated. And I say "once again" because this is not the first time it has ever happened. Although I know that all changes are always for the better, I urge you to sympathise with a fifty-two-year-old Argentinian English teacher who teaches English for a living and who chooses to write in the language which opens most doors in the world, and who, in her rather scarce free time from cleaning the house, cooking for two voracious teenagers and a husband who tends to overwork - which, I’m positive, does ring a bell with you, guys! -, gardening, doing the groceries, the washing-up and the dishes, apart from planning English classes and correcting letters and essays in English, and working as a teacher in the outside, real world, though this year I've had to work from home, for which I had to take quite a few webinars online and buy myself a new computer and a new cell phone just to be able to keep my job and continue with the cleaning, the cooking, all at the same time, since we, as a family, were all at home working away, like so many other families around the world; so, apart from all that much and 2020 (NFC...), I also keep a blog powered by Blogger - which I truly adore - , yes, Sir, I write, and I also enjoy combining my writing with images that I find beautiful for some reason and spend sometimes even hours googling for, only to find these days some of them are gone from my blog, which is not actually mine yet, yet again, say, once more, possibly because I have unknowingly yet unlawfully infringed the laws of copyright in my blog powered by Blogger…

I keep a blog in a rather unfriendly Blogger who keeps changing once in a while and giving me complex instructions which honestly escape me and rob me of my precious time from reading better stuff than your incomprehensible-to-the-lay(wo)man set of analytic guidelines, and from writing - which I do find is even worse. Writing! What I need as much as I need therapy this year though writing is for free, mind you, well, sort of, anyway, and want and love to do, yeah, I'd say entirely for free: for my own good, for the good of the very few who still can find me on the search engines, who come to drop me a comment that I am unable to find in this amazing Google maze of the new Blogger, what with the wrong indexation, the change from https to http, Error 404, and what have you, Sir, with all due respect.

You may have noticed, dear Sir, that I have asked for help several times over the last few days through several comments and requests in Blogger Help, although my own children - who must be only a few years younger than the very brightest of you, guys, there in the fun-park-like-window-panelled-dream-like Google offices you work and play somewhere in the first world - my children here in a hot and humid Buenos Aires fear that I won't be taken seriously, poor things! But I am deeply in earnest, Sir, because I have been recently informed by a fan of my insignificant-in-the-top-blogs-ranking blog that one of my publications was "lifted or quoted without due permission" by a certain local newspaper somewhere out there in the so-called first world, a publication from my blog with photos taken by myself, photos of myself and my family in it. Tough luck on me! Who am I to complain if this kind of stuff happened to William Shakespeare Himself, after all? Still I determined, only a few days ago, that, before the end of this horrendous year, I had to become the owner of my own blog: - "Oh, yeah!!! By all means! That'll do the trick!"- I said to myself in front of my messed-up dashboard all alone at 3.00 a.m. I decided that I should buy it in order to own what is mine, and I did attempt to pay the $12 dollars a year that is the fee I would gladly pay for me to become the owner of my own work and protect my own work from being plagiarised or copied or reproduced without my authorization, or from simply disappearing from the Internet when changes are introduced or it is decided one-sidedly to eradicate relevant and high-quality social media such as Google+ to clear the way for the likes of Instagram, powered by Facebook (N.F.C. again, Sir), or Twitter, with its regrettable restrictions on characters, or LinkedIn, the bomfire of vanities where no one without contacts gets linked in, where everything is sales and catchy images with brief, momentary, to-the-point, high-impact and short-lived clichés lifted from soembody elses's genious, art, craft, pure sentimental and admonitory, cheap, shallow self-help - in the best of cases- scanty written word, as that cannot be called Literature, or soul-probing-and-searching, until-your-fingers-bleed - as Hemingway would put it -, hard-worked reflection, or even writing, dear Sir. This is what is happening to Art and Culture, Mr. Google, mind you! In Google +, R.I.P., I was only too happy to generously and profusely contribute, I found hundreds of followers with the time and the disposition to come to my blog out of sheer interest and generosity, my blog without ads or sales involved, and I was ever so very pleased to meet a bunch of soul mates with whom I have lost contact and who used to help me out when things went wrong in my own blog powered by Blogger...

So, just to make a rather long story short – long like most of my writing for postmodern standards - and sensing that I am, to say the least, bitterly disappointed and therefore angry, I beg you, dear Mister Google - being, as I am, too, forever grateful to you for giving me the chance of creating this beautiful little blog of mine of more than 500 publications now, among many other things you so smartly make it possible for me to do every single day -, let me tell you this, please, Sir: this blog, I fancy, will be part of my legacy to my own family, at least the part of family that appreciates this that I do and that does not think this is a just a passing fancy or a waste of time, a pretentious hobby to boost my battered ego. So, in short, I beg you, please, Mister Google, help me here! S.O.S., Mr Google, please, please!! I just need you to help me nicely and easily to set my blog right in the right way and to make it possible for me to own my blog.com, though I happen to have been born and to live in Argentina, which, unfortunately, though understandably, is not on the list of countries where this is a viable option...

Tough luck on me, yet again, you see!

I really hope you do something to help with these two simple New Year’s wishes I keep in my little jar at home in Buenos Aires!

Respectfully and sincerely yours,

A boca de jarro

P.S.1: Translation into Spanish available upon request.

(Dear Reader, please, do yourself the favour of refraining from trusting blindly on Google Transaltion services for the sake of my beloved Mother Tongue, Spanish.)

P.S.2: I deeply regret that the view of my beautiful jar sucks from cell and smart phones but, there again, there's little I can do about to fix it without Blogger's and Google's help...

Thank you so much for taking the time to read!