I, the media consumer...

The life and times of a starving vagabond is many things and nothing at all. It is an attempt to practice English, which allegedly is my second language. Sometimes it is a conduct to free my shoulders through cathartic ranting or disjointed—but therapeutic—narrative. Most of the time, it is just about post-consumption impressions.

While the starving part of the blog's title comes from a story of two close-friends (cousin Shaggy and I) driving through Mexico without much money and eating boiled potatoes and eggs, cheese and hard bread for one week, it also reflects my urge for consumerism and consumption of narratives in any given media format. I hunger for stories presenting diverse points of view that may—or, most probably, not due to my intrinsic stupidity—widen my perspective on the condition of being human.

Being human is so amazing, so different: there's almost 7 billion different ways of being human in the present; plus some three or four billion death ways of being human since the beginning of homo sapiens. Can a single individual experience the whole spectra of humanity? My answer is no, being human is a conjunction of the person, his/her ideas and actions, people interacting with him/her (with their ideas and actions), surroundings and the succession of random events that, all together, I come to call life.

In recent years, I have become a consumer of other people's points of view and have got it with mine. Curiously, I have started to find more and more taxing—and kind of useless—to be in social gatherings where there are so many people that makes it impossible to have a true dialogue leading to the exchange of opinions. I find myself leaving parties with small pieces of information from this or that person and end up reconstructing a story that has my point of view inherently embedded. I want to learn what you think about love, honesty, ethics, vengeance, religion, death and whatnot. I don't want to reconstruct your ideas through dilute and disjoint one minute burst of conversation and end up creating what I think is your narrative from my point of view. I rather read, listen or watch them whole in media. Thus, my consumerism—my desire to gather and collect enormous quantities of information—is born.

Trying to turn my consumption of media for the better, I use it to practice my English and synthesis skill. I'm not trained in aesthetics nor semantics, thus my reports on the consumed works are nothing but online dumps of impressions left on me by them—and a sorry excuse to use English in a non-scientific context—. Anyway, I hope the Last Weekend Movies or Last Month Book series of posts help you choosing a film, tv-series or book to kill time with.