"What a sinister picture", I thought on Sunday as I cycled along the Mar Bella beach promenade and saw hundreds of bodies in bathing suits on February 4. A lot of volleyball, a lot of exposing the raw winter skin to these incongruous 23 degrees that were reached. I actually had to make some effort to think this, to go to the areas of the brain that deal with argument and reason, because my body still doesn't know, that this is wrong, that it's a palmar symptom of global suffocation and drought, and he is so epicurean that he just wanted to take off his sweatshirt, stay in his shirt, park his bike, sit on a terrace, close his eyes to the sun, order some potatoes.
I did all this, while writing in a chat "unbelievable day, we will all die", because one is conscious, but not made of stone, and because as an inhabitant of this very strange era that has touched us, I am well trained in cognitive dissonance. To think one thing and do the opposite, and reconcile them both, and add them to the long list of contradictions that keep us alive.
Another contemporary exercise that we have to practice in groups is to unlearn what we have learned, but not everyone is handing in their homework on time. For example, there are still people who think, and we will hear it a lot in the coming weeks, that if you are a young woman in a nightclub and you enter a reserved with a footballer, you know what you are exposing yourself to. Because yes, because it has always been like this, this is what happens with footballers and discos, and also with film directors and the young women who agree to go up to his house.
In the five different versions that Dani Alves has given about what happened in Sutton and in the statements - true self-sabotage - that Carlos Vermut offered in the El País article that exposes his sexual abuse of several women, one perceives the same perplexity, as if they were saying: but this has always been like this, at what point did it become a problem?
Re-educating yourself, and allowing yourself to be re-educated, requires forgetting the ideas that are so worn out that we are comfortable and understanding that what seemed natural has never been natural.
