The Prodigal Blog Returns

Dear Blog (don't be angry with me..),

I know it's been some time since I've given this thing any attention - the last time I posted was in October, and that was the month that I consider to be the time that I officially began to conquer homesickness. It was also about the time when Brazil ceased to be something new and exciting, and something which I could write about with great ease. I know that doesn't change the fact that I've neglected you all and my dear blog for over a month - for this, I melodramatically apologize. And now I quickly forget that I apologized and get crackin' on this thang.

So, just as a formality of sorts, I'm going to list all of the life-changing events that have happened during my radio silence: a trip to the beach (which ironically enough occurred just after I wrote my last blog entry), starting trombone lessons and visiting my teacher's conservatory, participating in National Novel-Writing Month (which I decided to fail at, due to the extreme time and attention it was taking up), getting better at Portuguese, and converting to a polyphasic sleep schedule. Now, only the first two things have to do with actual Brazilian things, so I'll talk about them first and most in depth - the second two I'll just explain briefly.

The trip to the beach, though by now rather distant in my memory, still stands out clearly as both a high watermark and a turning point in my exchange so far. It didn't start off precociously at all - there were last minute doubts as to when we would be leaving, in the morning or that evening, and as we all eventually got in the car one of the first things that happened was the two Aline's began a film - almost always a bad omen. And the car was also literally stuffed with luggage, and the ride down to Maranduba was both long and uncomfortable, and the sleep I did get was interrupted by a midnight pit-stop for coffee and a snack. And when we arrived, the dirt roads around the condominium complex type thing seemed to have at one point been raided by little children digging for buried treasure. And we had to carry our luggage up to the seventh floor at 1 am. Needless to say, that wasn't great. And the day after that was rainy, and half of our little party still hadn't arrived, so the good part hadn't arrived yet even then. When it got off the ground, we went to the beach and went in the ocean and jumped into waves, then we ate pastels and drank juice, and then we went hiking up a mountain and sat under a waterfall (the coolest part), then went back to the condo and napped, then me and the other young folk went and played guitar and sang songs, and eventually a little football as well, and then I even got taught a little funk dancing, and then we all went to bed and discussed things (I also wowed them with my gay accent). And the next day we did some more swimming in the morning, then drove home and went to Pizza Hut upon arriving. So that was a pretty great trip. Notice how I didn't satirize anything in the above paragraph. That's how good it was.

So moving on to trombone lessons. I don't know why, but I'm more motivated to practice trombone here than I ever have been before - I'm even starting to feel like I have a bit of discipline regarding trombone. It's probably because I feel like I've been becoming a different person in the past few months, and trombone and music in general are things that I fear losing in becoming someone different. But anyway, my trombone teacher is a very cool guy, and one day he asked me if I wanted to go visit his school - the Tatui conservatory. At first I honestly thought he said Tatooine, and I couldn't think of anything cooler, so I agreed. When I found out how it was actually spelled, I was disappointed, but it was still an amazing experience. I got to watch an mpb band (musica popular Brasileira), which, in a more erudite setting, is a lot like jazz, except almost all the songs are fast and minor and very difficult. It was really cool. I also watched the regular band practice (and slept a lot there), and they played some cool Heitor Villa-Lobos and even Rhapsody in Blue. But the best thing about Tatui was the people - even though everyone there was much older, I felt for the first time like I was amongst kindred spirits; they had that kind of subdued, quirky sense of humor that I've so missed, and they took music seriously and understood the art of it. The people I primarily hung out with were a couple clarinetists, a horn player, a sax player and my teacher (who's really a euphonium player), and I enjoyed their company more than anyone else's yet (not that everyone else hasn't been wonderful too, of course).

Now here you may notice the distinct lack of a decent segue between this paragraph and the last, which is because of the break in train of thought that occurred during the month long break I took after the above paragraph. Yes, my procrastination habits are a disgrace. Anyway, if I did have a decent segue, this is what you would see afterwards: ...so that chicken learned his lesson. But seriously folks, that National Novel-Writing Month thing sure was something. In case you're curious as to the details of what exactly it is, they can be summed up like this: you try to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. But after about 17 days, I realized that this wasn't really designed for people who need to socialize (or who are supposed to anyway), so I decided to assume a more relaxed approach and just finish the story, regardless of word count, by the end of the month. And that soon turned into just finishing the story. But it was done by the beginning of January, and I've adjusted my standard of "timely" enough to tell myself that it got done in a timely manner. Now I know that right now some of you are thinking, 'goodness, where oh where can I lay my hands which quiver with excitement upon this precious book?' but hopefully those people just forgot their medication (I advise anyone who hears someone say those words to call the authorities). Now, I don't know of any situation where anyone would need to read these particular 40,000 words and, come to think of it, I don't know why I'm compelled to post this anyway, but if there's some situation that calls for information on an insanely obscure novel, mine would fit the bill quite well. You never know. So here is the website at which it can be found: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AfzNVdqnq5JBZGQ4cmMzbTlfMWNuaGM4ZmY5&hl=en

Now many of you know about the new sleeping habits which I've decided to adopt, but many of you don't, so here it is. Polyphasic sleep is when you divide up your normal, single phase of sleep (the one at night, remember) and divide it up into several shorter phases spread out over 24 hours. The one I was trying originally, aptly named the Uberman schedule, consists of 6 20-minute naps separated by 4-hour intervals, but that proved both difficult and detrimental to the social life that I'm supposed to be upholding, so I decided to convert to the friendlier-sounding Everyman schedule, which consists of three 20-minute naps during the day and one 3-hour sleep period at night. Now for those of you who majored in math, these numbers will not add up to your average 8-hours of sleep, and this detail constitutes both the advantage and the skepticism of polyphasic sleep. The advantage (the one most people like about it, although I have other, stranger reasons, like the crazy thrill of a meal at 3 am) is that you have less time asleep and more time awake, and thus can pursue more cool stuff as well as neutralize more tedious stuff. And the skepticism is, of course, that you get 2 hours of sleep per day (four with Everyman, but still). And how is this skepticism answered? By the fact that, although we normally have 8 hours of sleep on a healthy night, we only spend about an hour and a half of that time in REM, the phase recognized as the one where the real resting happens. So what polyphasic sleep does is, through a couple days' worth of unpleasant sleep deprivation caused by the schedule, trains your body to skip all the less interesting phases of sleep and go straight to REM. So although you only get 2 hours of sleep, all of it is taken advantage of. Now, the doubts: aren't the other phases of sleep needed for something? According to science, not really. At any rate, these schedules have been practiced over long periods of time (years) without serious health backfires. I hope this has assuaged the panic I've sensed from some of you at this madness; more (and better) info can be found at this page written by the woman who first experimented with and refined the Uberman and Everyman schedules: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=892542&lastnode_id=124

Now moving on to the last of the [planned] topics: Portuguese. In summary, mine is good now. I can talk, I can walk (not a new thing, just a rhyme), I can watch a movie in Portuguese and follow stuff in general, I can write, and I even bought a book yesterday in Portuguese that I plan to read sometime.

Now we move on to things that I didn't put in the overview at the beginning because they happened after the aforementioned month in which I took a break from this blog. First, my parents came to spend Christmas here - it was fun to flout my unbelievable translation skills of basic sentences for them, at first at least. We also went to the beach, which they were of course impressed with, as well as a churrascaria (a barbecue restaurant) which also surpasses any inferior equivalent we Americans care to compare it with. They also brought with them four boxes of candy-canes, which I said my friends at school requested; one day I drew a candy-cane for an art project which required a Christmas object, and they all slowly gathered around my picture as though it were something legendary which they couldn't quite believe existed.

The next semi-interesting thing that occurred in this time happened a couple nights ago in fact. Me and Estevao (a cousin of my host family) were coming home from a showing of Sherlock Holmes (a shout out to Robert Downy Jr, if you're reading this - you're sexy man!) and as we got off the bus and started walking home, we noticed before long that there was a man behind us. I don't know what exactly set off the alarms for me - I don't normally freak out when I see another person at night. I think it was probably a combination of his seeming to appear from nowhere and the jangling of something that sounded like keys that always seemed to be jangling faster than we were walking. Estevao is normally nervous about "ladroes" (even at midday, much less 11 pm), but it didn't take much more than the jangling sound for me to share his sense of panic and it felt better than anything in recent memory to break out running around the first curve we came across. It apparently wasn't a very persistent thief, and as I looked back I saw him standing, looking kind of disappointed and pitiful, at the curve staring at us. This was exciting enough without a reprise, but last night Estevao and I were so fond of the film we decided to see it again, but at an earlier hour and in English (I did so miss Robert's voice the first time - that was for all you "that's what she said" enthusiasts). We took the same bus home and I felt very much like I was experiencing a kind of defective version of deja-vu; it felt like the same thing was happening, except worse - I think it was the fact that the bus was rather poorly lit, as well as sporting a prison-orange color scheme, combined with the uncertainty about whether or not this was the right bus to get home. It was the right bus, and my newfound alertness was not needed that night given the lack of thieves hanging about the bus stop. But later that night, Estevao decided we should rent another movie - I thought why not, and volunteered to accompany Estevao instead of Lidia taking him by car to the movie store, we decided to foot it on down at 10 o'clock. It seems like a strange preference, but I think I'd developed a kind of subconscious craving for an encounter with another exponent of the urban pastime of theft. So me and Estevao decided to jog down to the store in the rain and the dark, to frighten all the robbers with a display of our superior speed and impressive forethought in predicting their presence. And of course when we got there it was only natural to get a horror film. And so after another jog back to the house, a shower, and a hot dog (a robust, full, rich, Brazilian hot dog, of course, full of ultra-thin french-fries, mayo, and various sauces), we commenced watching the movie. It was a Spanish film, called Rec (like one sees in the corner of home videos), filmed in the "shaky-camera" style. I won't spoil the plot for you (never thought you'd hear that about a horror flick, did ya?), but I will tell you that it is the scariest movie I've ever seen, and that it was difficult to sleep that night, even with my new speed-sleep abilities.

And so to complete the update, right now I'm recovering from last night's film with some nice, wholesome blog writing, followed, hopefully, by an entirely uneventful day, or even better, series of days in which I can properly focus on getting adjusted to this tricky sleep schedule. So until the next atrociously tardy blog, happy clicking, all.

The IDIOCY of Blogs

Dear Blog,

As you can see, dear readers, I am in no word-mincing mood today. This blog's title is as straightforward as any straight thing moving in a forward direction. And now, having celebrated the visceral directitude of my title, let me clear a few inevitable ambiguities about it: when I talk about "the idiocy of blogs," of course I don't mean that bloggers are idiots or that the content of blogs are idiotic (lest I be a hypocritical nincompoop), but that blogs themselves - the programs, if you will - are idiots. They are stupid, stupid, stupid, worthless, backstabbing, smelly, Satan-spawn, and I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them. Now, I could stop there and move on, but I feel an account of their malpracticing evil is necessary to complete the ironic humiliation I am infliciting upon them. So what is this action that has warranted such punishment, you ask? Well I was just going to recount the story when you asked that - if you had a lick of patience we'd already be well into it. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I had just finished my latest blog entry - it was a lovely entry, too, and I clicked "post" and tucked it into the webpage before shutting down my laptop and going to sleep. I felt so secure, so safe, knowing my entry was snug and sound up there in cyberspace. Little did I know, that the bed upon which it rested was but a veil, concealing rows of metal spikes, prepared at any moment to burst through the mattress and kill my sleping entry in an unimaginably horrifying way. Of course, I can't be sure that it was a boogy-trapped bed that did in my entry, but it's gone now, and I can only assume that anyone dastardly enough to have done it would have done it with a booby-trapped bed. And so for those of you who have been wondering, crying out in the night, "Why hasn't Dorian posted on his blog yet?" it's because I have been mourning - trapped in the frustrated apathy that follows such trauma. But wait, you say - what gives you the right to blame the blog when you have no proof of it's alleged misdeed, and human error is the more likely option, especially if it was late at night? Well, dear reader, if I wanted your opinion, I'd have cared enough about what you think to type in a request for your thoughts. And if wanted a blog-sympathizer, no less, I'd have first reached into a dumpster and asked a McDonald's wrapper it's opinion on existentialism. You know what, traitor? You can just go impale yourself on a metaphorical bed of spikes. Well, I'm glad he's gone. Anyway, as you may have noticed, I am now back in the blog-writing business again, and in this entry I will recount, along with new events, the entry that was taken by the blog, in summary form (but of course it will soon become full form, due to unintentional extension; but then, I suppose, since I am aware of this, yet proceed unabated, it cannot be considered unintentional - so I suppose I'm wasting your time just to spite you).

So, to start off the spitefulness, I'll begin with the most outdated remnant of the lost blog. A few weeks ago, I got sick. Don't worry, it wasn't swine flu, just a cold - but a very specific cold that I get from extended periods of sleep deprivation, that I've fondly named Mr. Chilly-bones. The reason I say fondly is that, unlike most people, I am actually fond of Mr. Chilly-bones, disease though he may be. During my sickness, I all of a sudden had a revelation that I enjoy being sick. Not because I get to miss school or avoid responsibility, but because I enjoy incapacitation. The moment I realized this, I was wandering about the house, collecting various things that are useful to have at one's bedside when you're sick - water, toilet paper (in lou of tissue paper, you dirty people!), etc. And I had been too lazy to turn the lights on when it got dark, so I was just shuffling about the house, clutching a book and a cup, enjoying the silence and the darkness and the leisure. And shortly after I realized how much I liked that, I realized that the reason I like incapacitation is that, deep down, I secretly want to be an old person. I can't wait to be free of all the movement, both external and emotional, that makes young people so virile and exuberant, yet troubled and restless. And shortly after I realized this desire, I thought of all the other exchange students I've met here (I'll devote a blog to them later on) - all social, hip, fun-loving, easy-going cats. Well, either they are, or they want to be like that. And most of them chose Brazil because they had that personality - Brazil is the partying place, and youth is perfect for that. But exchange students in general tend to be toward that bent, and in realizing that, I suddenly felt very alienated and alone. Is it possible for me to have a beneficial experience here if I can only be a youth when I really try? It was a disheartening thought, to say the least, but I've been here for two and a half months, and have been doing well - perhaps my social networking is not light-speed, and perhaps I shall be doomed to exile from some of the more exciting social circles, but Brazil has a lot to teach me yet, and people will learn to accept my nature. One of the most important lessons I've learned here is that integration into a culture isn't learning to imitate the natives - it's being comfortable being yourself amongst the natives.

But that "summary" has reached its end, and now it is time to move on to the next, and last part of the lost blog: futebol. I know I've already discussed Brazilian futebol before just in passing (no pun intended), but that was simply my first impressions upon watching a game here, an academic assessment. Until a few weeks ago, I had never been to a Brazilian game. And so here I shall walk you through the experience. The night we decided to see Guarani (the team in Campinas, named after a Native American tribe, and, I must say, with a great deal more PC than the Redskins and the Chiefs), the crowd was quite rowdy. And I get the feeling that this was not unique to this game; Brazilians don't look at futebol as a spectator sport - the fans are very much a part of the game. At a rock concert, the musicians make the racket to make the people go nuts. If we follow this analogy, the spectators, not the athletes, are the rock stars - they make the stadium ring, and the players are inspired. So if you want to really watch a futebol match, watch it on TV - if you go to a game, you're doing all the work and it's tough to catch everything that happens (especially if you have the seats behind the goal, where you can pretend you don't have depth perception and watch the players turn into an ocean of limbs and shirts).

So here ends the recount of the lost post; from here on out, this blog entry is more (well, a little bit more) up-to-date. So, a long time ago, as I was getting to know my schoolmates, I asked them if they were familiar with the movies of Hayao Miyazaki (most famous for Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Totoro, for all you benighted readers), and only a couple people were, including a Japanese girl (interesting factoid: Brazil has the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan) who, like me, adored all of Miyazaki's work. So, and I'm still not sure if this was an unfair assumption on her part, she asked me if I was interested in going to a Japanese culture festival called Fanmix. As its name suggests, it is not full of kimonos and flower-arranging demonstrations; however, there was no short supply of Pokemon and Naruto and Bleach, as well as people dressed as characters from said shows. So by "Japanese culture," they really meant "anime fest." And the fact that there is a biannual, enormously popular anime festival in Campinas, Brazil show how wide anime's influence has become. And not only are the geographics demonstrative of that, but the demographics as well: it is safe to say that anime culture doesn't exist as an independent entity, but rather as an amalgam of subsets of other entities that anime, so to speak, mated with. Here in Brazil, anime bonds most often with emo culture and card-game nerd culture; many people there weren't dressed up as characters, but nonetheless were seemingly trying to look like vampires or Jack the Ripper, and many people there wore baggy shorts and Monty Python shirts and carried cases filled with their life's work - cards. But to try to divide up the cultures from there would be impossible (I will only mention that there was a booth selling all things medieval - how far from Japanese can you get?); I'm sure that every popular or underground culture is tied to anime somehow. And when I think about anime, it is easy to understand its popularity - although it has innumerable manifestations, there is one uniting subconscious conception of anime that our generation, having grown up at the dawn of anime, is infatuated with. And now my bond with this culture is solidified - I bought a hat there - it's either a green shell or a mushroom from Mario. Yes, I am truly Japanese now.

But let us return, just for a moment, to the topic of Brazil. Shortly before Fanmix (a few hours before, in fact), I went to lunch at a feijoada. Feijoada is a traditional Brazilian meal, composed of meat, beans, rice, and a side. Now Brazilians eat this pretty much every day, but 1) it's better at a feijoada, and 2) it's only legit at a feijoada (kind of like how hot dogs are only legit if they're grilled and eaten on paper plates). Now this feijoada was particularly Brazilian because it had a samba band. Now I know what you're picturing: a bunch of half-naked men and women stirring beans and meat in a bubbling cauldron while dancing to the samba. Although this does happen on a daily basis, it's only with younger people, and they're dancing to the Jonas Brothers instead of samba, and they're fully naked, and there are snakes too. Suffice to say, that wasn't happening here (although there was bingo!), but what I'm getting at here is that about half-way through the mean, I decided to try a caipirinha. Caipirinha is a traditional Brazilian alcoholic drink, so before i continue I'd best cover my ass before a great stone slab falls from the sky and smites me, upon which are hewn the the 4 D's, the first of which (or perhaps the third) is no Drinking. So, to please the beast of formality, I was drinking in a cultural context, with my host family and several rotary members (my counselor was even there). But in any case, I was drinking and was excited to be doing so. I was proud to have my own little plastic cup of yellowish liquid among the many others around the table. Of course, that pride was soon tempered after I took the first drink; I knew from wine that I wasn't fond of alcohol, but every time I try a new drink I hope that it will be more tolerable - that this will be the one, the one I'll be able to actually enjoy from time to time. But caipirinha was not destined to be that drink - it was a bit sweet, fruity perhaps, but retained the bitter-cough-medicine-mixed-with-battery-acid timbre apparently inherent in all alcohol. But it felt so important, like a rite of sorts, and I felt that the rite wouldn't work if I didn't finish it. So I soldiered on, taking a couple bites of rice and beans in between drinks. But perhaps, in my desire to finish, I didn't leave proper intervals between drinks. This was confirmed after my host mother informed me that I should stop because I was going to pass out. Apparently caipirinha is about equivalent to vodka. So, as I was tottering about at Fanmix, I had another revelation: aside from being perfect for old age, I'm also a natural drunk. Now, *ducks to avoid falling slab* I wouldn't say I was drunk, but I certainly couldn't have passed for sober. And in that time, I felt very relaxed and content - exactly the same way, I realized, that I feel whenever I am happy and perfectly myself. I wish I could just totter around all the time, incompetent and content, at ease with those around me and simply enjoying their company. Of course I aspire to be that way all the time... I suppose without the incompetent part, although it is nice.

Alluding to that point on incompetence, it's time I moved to the final topic of discussion: futebol. In the lost post I discuss attending a Brazilian game - now it's time to discuss actually playing the game. Yeah, I've played it at school with my friends, but recently my family (god bless 'em) found me a soccer school. Yes, it is a lot like what it sounds like - you come in three days a week after normal school (which ends at noon in Brazil, mind you), and you have an hour and a half practice. I didn't really expect to do well - I haven't exercised seriously (or played soccer seriously) in a long time, and these were Brazilians to boot. But I have found the whole experience to be incredibly insightful. First of all, I learned that these players are the most difficult people to understand in Brazil. Perhaps my schoolmates know how lingually impaired I am, and thus have learned to modify their speech, but there are few discernible words in what these people say (and, I don't mean to brag, but I've learned to discern quite a few words these days - I am a discerning machine, I don't mind saying, so it makes me suspect I've stumbled upon some pocket of society where speech impediments are at epidemic levels). The second, and more fruitful, area of insight that I've insighted is more generally about their culture. Although there is none (or at least little) of the male posturing that is so common to American sports, there is an obvious air of masculinity - an individualism and simultaneously an expectation to perform that is, of course, fostered by the fact that Brazilians have better skills than us. And why do they have better skills? I think I know that as well - of course I won't reveal the specifics on how to achieve skill effortlessly until I've contacted the MLS and the US patent office. Although Brazilian culture feeds off of their skill, their skill is a direct result of their culture. I'm not talking about the machismo part, I'm talking about the festive part. It seems simplistic, but I truly believe that it is the exuberant partying aspect of Brazilian culture that lends them their talent. The bodily freedom that it affords is the key. What is bodily freedom? Bodily freedom is feeling free with moving all parts of your body, of course. Well doesn't everybody have that? Nope. Americans sure don't. If I asked you to get up from your computers right now and dance a jig and sing a song, would you do it? Or more accurately, would you be able to do it without feeling embarrassed, even if you were alone? Almost everyone would say no, and the people who would are almost always the strange ones - you know the ones I mean. Anyway, this is because of our cultural eschewing of free movement - face it, even when we dance we got no rhythm. And when you're trying to play futebol, you need absolute freedom - of the shoulders, arms, legs, and the hips - for proper technique as well for skill. Of course this freedom also goes the other way - if you remember far enough back, I once discussed how there are more fouls in Brazilian futebol than other styles; there's a basic philosophical/political maxim that says the more freedom you have, the more you are able to infringe upon other people's freedoms. I remember a couple years ago our soccer team had a Haitian on it. Everyone thought he was a bit of a cheap shot - he was far more aggressive than we were used to, and seemed to enjoy tangling up his limbs with yours. But he just came from a culture with more bodily freedom, and that made him harder to play against both in terms of skill and physical contact.

Now, I'm done writing my blog, but there is one more bit of business I must get to. You may remember my introduction to this blog - talking about the idiocy of blogs. Well I just found another reason that blogs are idiots. Apparently, when you save a draft, you have to click on the "edit posts" button to access it. There's no other way! There's no separate section just for drafts. How crazy is that? I mean, how idiotic, how simply moronic is it that when you save a draft, you can't just click a "Drafts" button and find them all? That's how gmail works. I mean really. Anyway, the gist that I am establishing is that I found the so called "lost entry," which was actually cleverly hidden by my fiendish blog. So they are kidnappers as well as murders... their dastardly-ness knows no bounds... Argh! Must... not field... imaginary... questions... from the... audience... gah!... Anyway, I've posted it, and if you want to read it as well as my "summarized" versions above, you are free to. Just consider it like listening to a senile old drunk who insists on telling you the same story twice; I'm not quite to "senile old drunk" yet, but don't worry - I'll get there someday.

In Sickness and in Stadiums

[Imperative Statement: If you are skipping to this blog because you have some attachment to the archaic, sick idea of "chronology," cease this nonsense and go up and read the first one. This blog is meaningless if you don't read the first one.]

So... sickness. Yes, this subject was prompted by something happening in reality and not just a random occurrence in my confused head. I am sick. No, this isn't an epitaph - it's just a cold. A specific kind of cold that I have developed and mastered over the years - I know the ins and outs of this particular affliction like the back of my hand. This particular cold, which I've come to fondly call Old Coldy, develops over a period of three or four days that are marked by a certain lack of sleep. That's when I realize that I am legitimately sick and start laying down the welcome mat. It'll feel mild for the first day or so of being a real cold, but it has yet to reach it's zenith. The climax will last for maybe a day or so, and slowly subside for the next few days. All in all, Old Coldy will usually stay for about a week at a time, assuming of course, that one takes all the sensible steps in treating a cold - lots of rest, water, showering and nose-blowing, which I always take special pleasure in doing. You see, I like to make Old Coldy feel right at home when he comes to visit (I don't see him for months at a time, you see), make him feel appreciated and wanted. For, unlike all these people who feel "trapped" or "alone" or some such nonsense when they're bed-ridden, I relish my time spent sick. I only just realized it yesterday, but I really enjoy sickness. The occassional unstoppable bouts of coughing are of course unpleasant, but the overall experience I find to be so calm and wonderful. Recently I realized that I seek, more than anything else, old age. All these excitements and sensations and abilities and stresses associated with youth and capability just aren't for me; oh sure, I enjoy futebol and rollercoasters and will cut a rug from time to time, but all the while I secretly wish I had an excuse to slip away and take a walk through some woods and eat an apple. And although there aren't any woods here, I also recently discovered that a darkened, empty house is quite a magical thing, and I was content to shuffle about in the dark, carefully pouring myself a glass of water and groping about for door handles. The only problem is that I am still young, and I will soon tire of this lifestyle and heal, and will have to reenter the world running. But these past few days, and perhaps the next couple as well, have been wonderful practice for that great day when I officially turn old.

And now for my sublime and truly marvelous transition to my next subject, stadiums. Three nights ago, as Old Coldy was knocking more persistently, I, perhaps unwisely, went to a stadium to see a futebol match. And though my transition may not have lived up to expectations, I must say my first Brazilian futebol match did. I went with Estevao (you may remember him from a blog about religion), who was also becoming a man in terms of futebol. Our arrival at the stadium was most intimidating. We did not know which entrance to take, or indeed, where to buy tickets, and with security performing searches at intervals around the complex, we were searched several times. And I tell you, I hadn't expected to be asked to spread my legs, and even after I understood what I was asked, it still took me until a few moments after it happened to understand why I needed to. In any case though, we made it in, and found relatively isolated seats so that we wouldn't be too pressured to take part in whatever hooliganizing that might take place. But from the moment we walked in, the atmosphere was oppressively festive; we were about 25 yards to the left of a group of drummers who drummed for the entire 90 minutes, pausing only every 10 minutes or so to decide what beat they should switch to. And then, to our right, there was the overpowering presence of the rippling mass of fans that filled the bleachers overlooking the field from the side (in Brazil, they don't really have bleachers - they have levels of concrete; it gives the stadium a feeling akin to an amphitheater - one feels connected to the sport in a very esoteric and meaningful way). The most striking thing about the behavior of the mass, though, was its exact mirroring of what happened on the field, even the subtle aspects that you'd never expect an American crowd to react to. The mass recognizes when its team is putting together a particularly promising set of passes, and it can feel when the other team seems to be coming on stronger than they'd like. I think it's because Brazilians can somehow feel the energy of the game in a unique way, and that also probably has something to do with the 5 world cups that Brazil keeps in some glass cabinet somewhere. At any rate, another particularly striking thing about the experience was the sheer volume - I think it's one of the mysterious blessings of life that an oval happens be both the most convenient shape to arrange bleachers and an amazing acoustic device. When Guarani (the local club) scored a goal, it was like some prankster had snuck an enormous amplifier over to my proximity and placed a few quality microphones amongst the huge crowd over to the right - it is uniquely moving and powerful. And in between these explosions there is the steady beat of drums, and when the crowd senses that everything is going well, it will sing songs; after the second goal, it sang and sang for what must have been about 15 minutes, the same song over and over (and the song was only about 5 lines long too). If watching a futebol match on TV is like listening to a CD, goin

Buses: The Noble Institution, or Portuguese: The Pragmatic Language

Dear Blog,

Hello readers (yes, I'm not actually writing to the blog, but am communicating through the blog to you all - I thought it was time I came out with it), it's time once again for me to pollute cyberspace with a disastrously extemporaneous and hopelessly disorganized and unedited blog entry. And once again, I have perhaps jumped the gun in revealing to you the subject of this blog in the title.

So to explain the first topic, I'll give you some background. I've been in school for three weeks now, and for the past two and a half weeks I have been riding the bus home. But unlike wimpy high schools in the U.S., there is no special school bus to bear you home - there is an actual municipal bus stop next to the school, and you must ride a city bus home. I consider my time busing to be some of the most valuable time I spend here in Brasil (hey! I do too have a life...) - in any context, it is a fascinating portrait of people and social tendencies. But unfortunately, it usually paints a rather cynical picture of society. For example, whenever a double seat opens up, a person will always take the aisle seat - this seems fairly innocent, but I once heard a BBC story on the radio about how people will do this to discourage others from taking the other seat. Also, I believe a motive may be so that if someone does sit next to them, they won't have to climb over them when they want to get up. So it is an almost primeval atmosphere on the bus, especially at stops, when one is always watching where the new people will go - will they sit next to me? will they stand next to me? But it's all very according to plan - the open seats get taken, and every standing spot gets filled up almost scientifically maximizing space between people.

But compared to interesting aspects, all this sociology business is quite uninteresting and dry. You readers and your expectations of intellectual and academic material (brilliant though it may be, coming from me) - I'm quite sick of it frankly, and I refuse to suffer your boring demands. No more, no more. So now let us defy you and move to the lighter side of busing. Although people may be confined to the strictest of social mores on a bus, the trained eye can notice the individual humanity of one's fellow passengers in great relief than almost anywhere else. Of course I don't mean personality - one would need to interact with them to see that (which is of course punishable by defenstration on buses). What I refer to is a more esoteric idea - the experience of being driven about by a stranger, surrounded by strangers, in the bumpiest of fashions gives one a great sense of fellowship with those around you. You're all going to different places, but for now chance has brought you all together to spend these few minutes in silent contemplation of the meaning of things; and you're all connected by the same helplessness, the same faith in the laws of probability that you will not be the next ones everyone sees from a camera in a helicopter hovering above your burning symbol of broken innocence and betrayal. Public transportation is indeed like sharing a womb with 20 strangers.

Which I probably wouldn't appreciate as much if I shared their language. Being an outsider givers you a whole new objectivity and clarity about such things. But unfortunately I may not have that for much longer, for my brain seems insistant upon me slowly and painfully learning Portuguese. It's gotten so bad I can even converse to a limited degree. Luckily I still don't know most of the basic articles or the rules for past tense and gender. I also still can't understand my teachers or speak with proper grammar, but my hopes for a year of ignorance seem to have faded almost entirely; I doubt there will be a single person that I won't be able to understand by the end of the year. I shall have to go searching for college lectures on metaphyisics just for some words that are way over my head, I shouldn't wonder. But as long as I'm learning the language, I may as well satirize it, right? Right. So, I may as well begin where the second title of my blog left off. I call Portuguese a pragmatic language, but this is really more in reference to the people and how they speak it. A Rotarian once told me that Portuguese is a very difficult language, and that even most Brazilians don't speak it correctly. I thought that even if every Brazilian speaks broken Portuguese, it can't be that broken, and in that case, even proper Portuguese must be pretty austere. But what do I mean by all this? A legit question, although you could have worded it more nicely. I mean that a Brazilian can express in two words what an American or Englishman or Australian even would need four or five words for. For example, if in English you wanted to say "I'll be back soon," in Portuguese you would only need to say "Volta logo." Or if you wanted to say, "Do I need this?" you would only need "Preciso?" Even if it's not entirely correct (which, coming from me, is more than likely), a Brazilian would both understand you and not think twice about how correct you were (keep also in mind that although Portuguese is simple, you must say it correctly to be understood, which is why I have yet to have any luck communicating with strangers who aren't accustomed to my horrid accent and broken-beyond-even-their-standards Portuguese).

Now let me for a moment discuss the more general aspects of Portuguese. The sound of it is similar to Spanish, as I (and no doubt you all) suspected, but it is a far deeper and more interesting language, in my opinion. It's not all flash and speed and rrrrrrrolled R's (luckily, since my record for consecutive R's rolled is two); it's a much more subtle language, with much softer sounds. Much of Spanish happens at or right behind the lips - all the sounds are very straightforward and sharp. In Portuguese, everything happens, relatively, about a foot further back. All the vowels are much nasalier - and often they will bend them into a different vowel altogether (for example, "novo" sounds a lot like "naw-vee," and "grande" sounds like "gruhng-uh") - and the consonants are much more "tonguey." Now let me explain "tonguey" (I'm not apologizing, just explaining). Often, when they use the letter T they will change the sound to CH, and when they use the letter S they will change it to SH or ZH (you know what that is - try it and all will become clear), and when they use D they change it to G. For example: tipo is pronounced chipo, desculpe is pronounced dishculp, and cidade is pronounced cidaj. But there are also other consonantal oddities worth divulging, particularly that of the letter M. Whenever M appears at the end of a word, it is almost always pronounced like NG. I have absolutely no explanation as to why they did this - I think the Portuguese were perhaps simply the linguistic equivalent to impressionists. Back when Spanish and Portuguese were basically one language, the Soon-to-be-Portuguese said to the Soon-to-be-Spaniards, "Look here, we've had enough of all this 'strict interpretation of letters' business. Phonetics is more than just what's on the page - it's what's in your mind! An M sound is no more than an NG sound with a veil of lips, and a D sound is nothing more than a G sound that's been confined to a prison cell between the teeth and the tongue, by the likes of you, no doubt!" And so the strict-interpretation Spaniards separated from the artistically-inclined Portuguese and each went their separate ways; and I have become a happy inheritent of that rift - despite the well-hidden reasoning behind pronunciation, I feel a close kinship with the forefathers of the language, and would like to think that, should a similar movement develop within the English language, I would be on the forefront, advocating it. And as I end this blog entry, let me silence all you naysayers before you materialize in your devilish fashion, who would point out that I just made up that whole history of the language - strict interpretation of reality is just as heinous as strict interpretation of language, and I warn you to cease this foolishness before I send my flying poodle-shaped monkey to put you in your place.

Love and School

Dear Blog,

I judge this has been enough time to hype up the ending to my last blog, which promised an explanation to how I could enjoy, nay, appreciate even, a romantic comedy. So here is the promised explanation: you may alert your favorite periodicals. First, the title (which I was able to find in English via google) is The Accidental Husband. If you have seen this movie and thought it was really great, feel gratified, for I concur, and thus its cinematic quality is beyond doubt. Anyway, the main reason I thought it was so good was that I really liked the way that the two protagonists (or I suppose antagonists to one another - the lead lovers, you guessed it) had qualities exemplifying extreme behaviors of their respective sex which, at first, caused an emotional separation, but ultimately brought them together. The plot had a sort of elliptical elegance (I'm going to spoil the plot now - sorry, but I'm making a point and I'm very insensitive; but really, you know they're going to end up together, and these points aren't really emphasized in the movie, so it's not too big a loss I think):

The Woman, who just wrote a book, has a radio program, and when the Man's fiancee calls in because she's having second thoughts, the Woman tells her that she should hold out for a more suitable match - the Woman displays her pragmatically feminine and even harsh attitude towards love, and thus ends the marriage between the Man and his fiancee. And wouldn't you know it, the Man happened to be tuned in just at the right moment to hear the Woman give this advice, and is piping mad at her. So his marriage ends and he is most angry, and when he comes home to his apartment above a family-owned Indian restaurant (the owner of which, I might add, is worth half the cost of admission for his minor soliloquys) he seeks out the technology-smart adolescent of the house and asks him to try to get even, and the adolescent devises a way. He hacks into some government file and finds the Woman's birth-certificate (or some such document - I'm not savvy in such matters), and offers to change it to make the Man legally married to the Woman. The Man consents to this plan - he displays his impulsive and reckless masculinity, and thus jeopardizes the Woman's forthcoming marriage to a well-off publisher. So the Woman (unaware of the Man's instrumentality in the apparent mistake in her marital status) seeks out the Man to try to sort it out. So a lot of quite interesting and humorous things happen (which are, unfortunately, too incidental to divulge in this blog entry), each bringing the two emotionally closer together while, paradoxically, displaying two personalities which are in complete opposition. And the woman experiences exponentially increasing doubts about her marriage and, indeed, about her entire philosophy concerning love. Eventually, however, the Woman finds out about the part that the man played in their "accidental" marriage, and feels entirely betrayed, and retreats to the safety of her boring, stable fiancee, and her cost-benefit analysis approach to love. But she still experiences doubts up to the marriage, doubts on a much more serious scale - in the heat of passion with the Man, she doubted, but in the calm of marriage, she questioned: is there a sound way to calculate a suitable match? How can such a system be tested? How can evidence for or against the system be documented? (Of course she did not say these things specifically, but I imagined them because they seemed to get the issue's goat, as it were.) And on the day of her wedding, her fiancee comes to her and tells her that the only sensible solution is to leave him for the Man. This, I think, is the profound moment in the film: the fiancee, representative to a degree of the Woman's own intellectuality regarding love, forfeits her to the impulsive, reckless energy of the Man. In essence, two opposing energies, entirely of their own accord, compromised themselves in order to join together. It's like the unbreakable wall stopped stopping, and the unstoppable force stopped forcing. It was beautifully representative, to me, of the fundamental paradox of love itself, and the movie got me to contemplating that paradox as well: how can these two energies be better described? How exactly do they balance? How can one consciously nurture this balance? Are these two opposing energies ends in and of themselves, or do they contribute to a greater force, which is both the pinnacle and the foundation of true love? What else contributes to the relationship? I thought of answers to those questions that I thought were adequate, and I may explore them more thoroughly later in an essay or something when I feel like it; it may appear in this blog, or perhaps in some prestigious love magazine like Cosmo.

But this is old news - the night of the movie is close to a week past, and the pressing event of this evening is, you guessed it, berries-er, I mean, school, as is clearly indicated by my title, you fools. So - what to say about school, and where to begin. Well, perhaps I should begin with the preparation for school. Yes. (whoa! if anybody else just disassociated the word "yes," please post a comment - it would make my year.) First, I think it's interesting that there is no "first day" as we think of it - no orientation, no shortened day to get settled in. It doesn't even feel like the first day; it feels like everybody's already been there all year, knows what to do right away. The teachers don't even review, or try any rapport-establishing, or try to get to know you, or anything - they just jump right into the first lesson. I found that quite interesting, as well as increasing the fun level and decreasing the work level (you know how orientations always have forms or requirements or supplies that serve as a kind of pre-homework). But on an individual level, the question remains: what does one need for school in Brazil? Well, lucky for me, nobody told me anything, so nothing! You can imagine how relieved I was when everyone else seemed to have workbooks and monstrous notebooks and such, and I had one pencil and one small notebook, half-filled with other random writings. And when every teacher asked me if I had supplies (keep in mind that I can't be sure, but I think that's what they said), I was able to just shake my head and shrug my shoulders and be off the hook immediately - one never felt so free. Now if only one could combine that freedom with senioritis... ... ... Anyway, I shall now describe the overall schedule of the day: school begins at 7 o'clock (ungodly for such a religious nation), and people begin coming to class about 15 minutes later. There are two 15 minute breaks, before and after lunch, and then there is, of course, lunch. I didn't notice when classes changed because I've got myself into a schedule of going to sleep at about 4 am and getting up at about 2 pm, so I was a bit sleep deprived. So moving on now, I will first discuss the language barrier, which of course, is coming into much sharper relief in school. I found it rather fun having only a vague idea of the subject at hand - it especially enables you to really judge how good a teacher is. You all of a sudden see clearly which teachers can control a room, which have charisma and poise, and which ones struggle to find leadership qualities in themselves, or resort to immaturity to maintain control. In my opinion, operating under these criteria, the best teacher was the math teacher, Tomas (they all go by first names here). He was energetic and forceful and could make students laugh and get them involved rather elegantly - I also liked him a lot because he reminded me of some divine combination of Mr. Jorgenson and Mr. Bjerke (BHS students should be caught breathless just at hearing such an idea put forth). But unfortunately, math was the subject in which I understood the most, because it's hard not to recognize factorials (what with the exclamation point and all), and I did factorials like two years ago. But the subject in which I understood least, and thus was the most interesting, was physics. It was so fun watching him draw all those neat lines and the equations that were equal to Va and Vb, and when he got to electrical currents (it's hard to not naturally interpret "Corrantes Eletric," what with all the postives and negatives floating around on the board, so I did know what he was talking about; luckily, though, I know nothing about that, so I remained happily oblivious and thus rapt and attentive), he began drawing all sorts of cool diagrams of batteries and pools of water, no doubt describing the proper way to assasinate someone by hot-wiring their pool.

Speaking of purposefully misinterpreting what teachers say, there is an occasion in which I did so which will later bring me to a whole new avenue of discussion, so I shall relate it now - not because it is funny or interesting or unoffensive, but because I am a pragmatic writer, and you will just have to endure this next unendurable portion if you want a smooth transition to the rest of my blog. Ah, but before I relate that, it would perhaps be timely to tell you that in this school, it is not the students who go from room to room after each class - it is the teachers who are made to trek across the halls with no company but the sound of their footsteps and each other's hesitant and paranoid attempts at eye contact in passing and the incessant sound of the bell that is their taskmaster and owns their souls. I was tearfully proud of the Brazilian school system. Truly, Brazilian students have achieved a victory that should be trumpeted and celebrated across the world, and I hope that those reading this blog will take up that baton of freedom, run the half-lap of revolution, and pass it on to the teammate of sweet, sweet liberation in this struggle that we students struggle in for our rights and dignity. Anyway, so the gist I'm getting at here is that the teachers move around instead of us, and so the fourth teacher we had today was both our sociology and geography teacher. During her geography class, the first thing we discussed was racism. She had the rather awkward habit of every now and then asking me (in Portuguese of course) if I was understanding everything (which would be no problem if she just said "Entendi?" because I know that word, but she always seemed to choose some other wording that made it unclear to me who she was even addressing), and on one such occasion, she asked the girl in front of me (who had very kindly offered to be an interpreter of sorts, yet at the same time a nuisance because she was always asking me if I needed help, which interefered with my desire to not understand what was being taught) if I understood the subject matter. The girl asked me if I knew what "Racismo" was, and I said, yes, and thought the whole venture of communication all the more pointless. And then I was inspired to misunderstand it. So, the way I heard it (and this shall henceforth be my official version of her words, because I do love fabrication), she said, "[name I can't remember], would you please tell Felipe that he is at no point to be racist during class?" Ah, that was quite fun, quite fun.

And I suppose you're all wondering who this "Felipe" is, so I suppose that shall be the next avenue that I take. I'm not sure why, but from the first day I set foot in the school (a few weeks ago was when I first visited), the school officials insisted upon calling me by my middle name, or the Portuguese version of it anyway, Phillip (Felipe). I'll admit, it is much easier to introduce oneself as Felipe, than Dorian. I suspect I shall introduce myself as such to most people I meet from now on, for convenience's sake. So that's the story of how I came to be called by my middle name in Brazil. I think I shall discuss one last point before cutting off this monstrosity of a post (I do apologize for the length, but the first day of school is an important event indeed, and I had to resolve the romantic comedy cliff-hanger, so cest' la vie I suppose). This last point I unfortunately did not get to earlier, for it did not seem to relate easily to other topics, so I shall have to end this blog entry awkwardly and with a bit of an anticlimax, for I shall be discussing merely this: the boistrousnes of my Brazilian classmates. They are certainly a fun group to be in class with; it makes me appreciate all the more Brazilian teachers, for they must learn to talk at most unnatural volumes to rise above the din, as well as ignore the daunting numbers of students either chatting loudly or sleeping (another triumph - vive l'revolution!). I was most tempted to fall asleep many times as well, but opted not to to try to make myself more tired tonight, so that I might get more sleep. And on that note, I am beginning to feel the intended effects of my austerity, and so am most unfit to continue blog-writing, and so until next time, happy clicking.

Currant events

Dear Blog,

So first off, don't ask about the title - it was originally going to be spelled right, but at the last minute I was inspired by some muse of pure evil to change it, just to spite you and mess with your minds. I apologize, but you'll just have to live with it.

But by now it should be clear what the topic of this blog entry is; no, it's not fun happenings related to berries (not that those aren't in abundance right now), it's about general recent occurences, the first of which I shall waste no more time in getting to. Last friday was the day my host brother, Leo, left for Thailand, and since there was only room in the car for this mother, father, sister, and girlfriend to say goodbye, I was left to my own devices around the house. I chose to use my time in the wisest of ways - youtube, facebook, and pokemon. After a few hours of this, I decided to watch a movie. I looked through their collection of films, finding a great deal of concert DVDs of Christian rock bands and Elvis and various action films, when I noticed two films that I hadn't expected in the least: Life is Beautiful, and Good Will Hunting. Having seen the latter and being in the mood for something less life-affirmingly macabre, I opted for Good Will Hunting. Now while watching the movie (and I would be remiss in not mentioning briefly that it is an amazing film) two currant events of note happened. The les interesting event is that I discovered how important it is to manage almost constantly both the windows and the lights in the house. Why? Because there is a delicate balance that must be upheld between keeping the house cool, the house lit (and thus navigable), and the bugs out. For me, the latter-most of the items holds the most weight in the scheme of measuring. So, as I found out, one cannot keep the house cool and lit while keeping the bugs out, because obviously bugs waste no time in taking advantage of open windows to get to pretty lights. But it unfortunately took me some time to realize that such a balance existed, for I had never noticed the periodic dimming of lights and closing of windows throughout the house because my family are apparently adept enough at maintaining the balance that the changes administered were subtle, yet precise and effective. So I ended up spending a great deal of my time warding insects away from my food, and rushing in and out of lit rooms and hallways to avoid the bugs.

The rest of my time not consumed either in cowaring from bugs or Matt Damons long, lustrous locks was consumed in doubt and paranoia. The reason for this was that throughout the day, from the moment my family had left, it seemed, the phone would ring at an interval seemingly designed to utterly crush and break someone in my position. Now first I should clarify my position: I am an exchange student, and I know very little Portuguese, and I learned on the first day of my exchange an important lesson about phones - on my way from Sao Paulo to Campinas, my host parents handed me a phone telling me it was Aline, my sister. I took the phone and put it to my ear, and awaited something to happen. Nothing happened. She didn't speak, I didn't speak; my family tried to hold back laughter and told me to say "Tudo bem," and I said it, and Aline just chuckled, and after a few more moments of silence, my host mother took the phone and began chatting. Lesson learned: never try to talk to someone on the phone, unless they speak English. Communication with anyone who is less than fluent requires a great deal of gesturing and you must be able to pick up on every inflection and body movement to get an idea of what they're talking about. So the reason that the phone calls caused me such agony is that I was 75% sure that it was not my family calling, that it was someone else who needed to speak with them. And as the phone rang over and over again, I kept repeating that to myself, over and over - "You don't know who that is, it could be anybody. Don't pick up that phone, no! Some gruff sounding man is just going to start speaking Portuguese very quickly, and you won't be able to take a name and number or anything-no, get away from that! It's not your family, it's not!" But the same doubt rang through my head at the same time, over and over - "But who would call 15 times in one day, only after your family left! Who has the kind of urgent business that is worth calling 15 times? Your parents aren't government officials! It must be them - they're calling because they need some piece of information that they left at the house or something that Leo needs to go to Thailand. He's probably missed his plane! And it's your fault!" "No, no! It's not them, it's not them... We mustn't risk it, we mustn't risk it!" So you can imagine how warped my state of mind was, with my Smeagle/Gollum complex at work, combined with my insect shell-shock and my Damon-induced-dizziness. Luckily my family returned and the movie ended before my mental infrastructure collapsed, and were able to restore the house to its bugless state. And as for the phone calls, I was a picture of joyful and, yes, tearful vindication when, after they had returned, the phone rang once more, right on schedule, and (since my family had returned without Leo and it wouldn't make much sense for them to call home when at home) I felt the sweetest sensation of redemption, probably akin to what Smeagle felt after telling Gollum to "Leave now, and never, come back!"

Well good night; I had more eventful currants today, but 3 am is not the time for such things. I've always wanted a cliff-hanger, so here's to a dream come true: today I watched a romantic comedy... and liked it! Now you'll all be conferring fervently to discuss this heretofore impossible anomaly, so go ahead and get started, and until next time, happy clicking.

Teenagers

So the other day I was sitting in my room, playing the guitar, when this young man walked into the room (all Brazilian teenagers look much older because of the amounts of hair gel they apply) and introduced himself (rather pointless, since remembering names in a different language is, I've found, much harder than learning the actual language). Then we started chatting, in English, about the things that strangers usually chat about, and then he asked me if I wanted to go to church with he and Aline (clearly the reason he had come). This seemed odd to me, since it was, well I wasn't quite sure which day it was, but I was pretty sure that sunday had just been recently. But, as is my general rule about such things, I consented, and got ready to go. Then he told me that this was just for "chins." Rather quickly, I am not modest to admit, I picked up that he was trying to say "teens," and then I realized that this must be some special youth gathering, and sure enough when we got there there was no one there except youths frittering about, sitting, chatting, even playing fussball (which they just called futebol, to my great confusion). Not too late on, I realized that on the stage at the front of the long rectangular room, there were a number of instruments of the rock bent, a drum-set among them. From this point on, my base heart-rate increased by about 10 bpm, always at least at a brisk pitter-patter. As I found out in the car, Stevan (I'm not sure of the spelling, or even if that is his name, but I'm about 80% sure) told me that he played the drums, and thus he seemed like the most logical person at the time to ask: "Could I, um... [gesture towards drum-set and pantamime drumming]." He said yes, later. Later was better than I thought it might be. Of course, the best case scenario was that they'd tell their regular drummer to take a hike and let me play the set with them, but I suppose it takes awhile for one's drumming prowess to reach the level of international recognition necessary for said scenario to be realistic.

But on to the actual event - the show. I hesitate to call it a sermon, because it blurred the lines between church and a rock show as much as I imagine such a line could be blurred. The part immediatly after the rock show bit was an attempt of some sort to imitate variety show interviews. The main pastor-or-sorts would sit in a chair and call on people to come up and sit on a couch to the side and ask them questions of some sort (most likely about how the music affected them, or problems they'd been having, or some such thing), and before long, the pastor-of-sorts seemed to remember meetin me before the service, and, according to Aline, invited me up to the couch. I'd come to enjoy being such an object of curiosity, so up I went, and he then fielded questions from the audience and interpreted them for me. They were of the typical sort, and eventually they got to the question, "What is your biggest dream?" Still feeling a little drugged by their presence on stage, I pointed to the drums and said to play drums; I actually didn't really mean "in the future," I meant right now, and seeming to sense this, he asked me if I wanted to play for them, to which I didn't respond, but got up and sat down at the set and played Whole Lotta Love on the drums. After awhile I realized that I may have surpassed the realm of demonstration (also noticed the nods of the pastor-of-sorts), and rather awkwardly stopped, and the only fitting way to end such a cathartic experience is the explosive applause that followed. Even if it was for the novelty of an exchange student playing drums rather than for skill, it was an immense relief. And after the service was over, I got my chance to really play, which felt even better. And after awhile, Stevan came over and asked to play drums, and then I switched to the bass (incidentally, all the instruments and equipment were left lying out ready to play again - I don't know why, but it was most convenient), and we had a veritable jam session. So that was in itself a very important experience for me, but that night was also significant in a different way - it was my first real immersion in teenage Brazilian culture. But my first real interaction with teens would come later.

The occasion to which I allude was a bit later (it may have been the next day, it may have been the next week - I lost the ability to gauge time when I got off the airplane in Sao Paulo), when we went to a restaurant - a party of sorts. I think the occasion was a farewell to a friend of Leo's who was also going on an exchange. Anyway, once again it was an all-teenager assembly, and my immersion began immediately. Although throughout the evening I grew friendlier with everyone there, I also felt rather intimidated by them; as is true for teenage culture in America and most other places in the world I should imagine, the standards for fitting in are much stricter. Not to say that teenagers are mean (these were insanely friendly), but you can feel in the way they dress and carry themselves that they put emphasis on appearance, as well as the subconscious judgements being made, some by them, but most by you. For a lot of the evening, I even had the song Teenagers by My Chemical Romance stuck in my head. In the US, though, I don't have this problem. Why? This is a legit question, good job! (that's right - my blog has it's own self-referential inside jokes) The reason is because I know all my friends very well - well enough that if I break the norms, it's a joke, rather than a turn-off. That's the big lesson I've learned about teenage culture - one must get to know the people whose norms you defy before you defy them, otherwise you're just weird or even insulting. So I suppose I'll just have to let my inner iconoclast sit below the surface for awhile. Then, when they trust me and have their backs turned, I'll spring it on them. They wno't know what hit them. But I've already said too much - this information may be leaked by nosy and misguidedly conscientious friends to the people in college who will become my future victims. To those "friends" I have but this to say: it happened to you once - don't think it can't happen again.

Homeschooljeans

Dear Blog,

As the title of today's blog makes clear, there are three topics which I will address in this address, the first being "home." By this I only mean that it is starting to feel like home here in Brazil. Yeah, not as deceptively deep and delightfully cryptic as one would hope. I'm starting to form a routine here - get up anywhere from noon to two, eat lunch, watch TV/watch Youtube/nap until about 4:30, have a snack, watch some more TV, eat supper, watch a movie with my family, stay up until about 2:30 watching more youtube and checking facebook/blogging. Every now and then one of the slots will get filled with some other obligation, like shopping, or walking, or, yeah. The only thing I really need before I can truly settle in is peers, which brings me to my next topic.

School. What is school? Come on, again? Anyway, yesterday I visited my school-to-be, Colegio Julio Chevalier. I couldn't look forward to it more. It's as cozily ghetto an urban Catholic school as you can find - it looks like a regular school on the inside, until you look up and you see the grey, bare, scary-lookings ceiling that arches above you. I've been secretly longing for a school with some grit, some darkness, you know? It's just like Hogwarts! I can't wait to find the Room of Requirement. Anyway, they also have uniforms; no, they're not robes, but they are exercise clothes - nylon pants, white shirt, even a 1950's-football-esque jacket. This place rocks.

Speaking of attire, the last subject of discussion today is jeans. To many of you who know me well, you will be reading these next lines with great expectation, excitement, and probably anti-climax (oh well). To those of you who are out of the loop, I will debrief you. I haven't worn jeans in about ten years. I decided to give them up one day, and have worn cargo pants ever since. The reasons why I gave up jeans are irrelevant; the important part is in the fact that for the past year or so, many people in my social circle have badgered me to wear jeans becase, well, I don't know - they're violently fascist conformists with aspirations of global robotification of humanity (today, jeans; tomorrow, positronic brains). The point is, those people may be reading this, and if they are, they are by now pulling out their hair (or just skipping lines - cheaters) to find out if they have won the long and bloody war. The answer is ambiguous - to the unrefined reader, it may appear to be yes, they have, but a more nuanced perspective will reveal that I still reside outside their clutches. And now the cathartic moment: I am wearing jeans even as I write this; after visiting the school yesterday, we went to the mall and I bought two pairs of jeans.

How then, can my human heart still be beating, instead of a block of cold steel placed in my chest by the fascists? Well, as defense attorneys say, "Motive, motive, motive." Why did I do it? That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous conformism, or to take arms against a sea of fascists and by obliging end them. I ended up taking the latter course of action: to sleep, perchance to dream in the undiscovered country that Hamlet so dreaded - to oblige the badgerers and the narrow-minded, thereby defanging them. But in the end it was not out of obligation to them that I took the plunge; it was an independent choice. You see, I refrained from wearing jeans, not in resistance to the fascists, but in resistance to the fact that everyone else wore them - it was just a little personal psychological tool that I used to distinguish myself from other people, what with my vehement nonconformist streak and all. But that was just a small tool, for small stakes; one fittingly immature for high school. But now I am putting away childish things, and in making my appearance more normal, I make myself focus more upon the bigger fish - my truly iconoclastic aspects that deserve the attention. So there's the big reason, and here's the smaller reason - I realized how much better I look in jeans.

But having said this, I tell you all now that when I return I plan to wear only tie-dye shirts, for spiritual and aesthetic reasons: I think making one's own clothes gives them a feeling of purity and naturalosity, and since I don't know how to make clothes, I will do the next best thing - take plain clothes and make them beautiful. So I am exercising charity as well. So until next time, happy clicking!

This is a really cool picture. and we didn't even plan it!

This is the church orchestra. crazy.
If I had been drunk, I would have looked like that.

Leo and I deride something.

Well aren't I boring?

This is us at the brass concert.


This is the brass. But not the concert - these are just some guys we pulled off the street to come play in the auditorium.

I'm the tallest.

That's right - Guitar Hero with no guitars.

This is Bill. Fierce one, that.

Miscellaneous Things

Dear Blog,

The first Miscellaneous Thing I shall discuss today is that of religion. As you all know, today is Sunday, and that means it's time to go to church. What is church? What a stupid question, you know what it is. How did I get such idiots for friends? Anyway, my host family belongs to the Church of Nazarene, and (although my church experience technically isn't over, since there's still the evening service) there are two parts to the experience--Bible school (attended mostly by adults) and the regular service. Bible school resembles American church services much more than the actual service--it's just a person with a mic talking about very Biblical things. But one of the ways in which it's very different is that, to someone who can't tell what the subject matter is (like moi), the teacher seems much more like a motivational speaker or politician than a preacher (and I mean no offense by that comment). She has a pulpit, but most of the time they leave it to pace back and forth before the audience. She wasn't angry, but she had that resolute yet endearing air that makes politicians politic so well. But often her face would become more stern and her gestures more rigid, and I could just hear her saying, as she pointed upwards and out the window, "... And those high-rollers up in Brasilia don't know a thing about us" and her she points to the audience "and our good, old-fashioned urban immigrant values." And after that the audience would get stirred up and mutter agreements.

And here is when another difference crops up between American and Brasilian bible school: audience participation is rather prevalent in the latter. After this stir-up, one member of the audience began a very long, probably prepared speech. It seems that not only the teacher, but the audience is rather analogous to the arena of politics. The whole room seemed to feel like a caucus now. [note: at this point my blog transforms into a fictional narrative. I am 90% sure these people didn't actually say these things, but other than the specific dialogue and character backgrounds that I make up, the events are entirely accurate.] This man, I imagine, was probably some dejected politician who kept getting black-balled from the lecture circuit, and was now crashing the main speaker's party. He wasn't especially out of line with her platform it seemed--she was rather bemused by his audacity, and would smile and nod at all of his comments, and after he finished she gave a laugh that seemed to say "Well, somebody's got a lot to say, ain't he?" But it was apparent that his were the kind of views that were dangerously misinformed and unrefined, and though she tried to backtrack from what he said, another man soon piped up--the iconoclast. He began his long tirade about how the other man's views were racist and chauvenist and animalistic and catastrophic in all sorts of ways. His finishing comments seemed to say, "Well, I don't mean to vilify egregiously. I just calls it the way I sees it." The room was in another stir. People of all sorts were raising their hands. The speaker tried to calm people's disquiet a bit before calling on an old lady. She had, for her entire life until now, remained absolutely quiet on political issues, but the iconoclast's diatribe had poked each and every one of her values in the kidneys, and she was about to protect her conservative ideals with a raised index finger and mildly stressed voice. After the storm of truisms and aphorisms and euphamisms cleared, everyone seemed to have grown rather drowsy, and the speaker was able to control the room again, and she promptly ended the caucus there. [Here ends the extreme violation of what actually happened. All other falsification will be strictly limited to exagerration, distortion, and omition.]

The regular service is much closer to American services than Bible school, except that it shares a great deal in common with a variety show. It has an entire orchestra (I kid you not--I'd guess at least 60 members. About double that with the choir. But I suppose you have that kind of budget with 10,000 members. Wow.), which plays a wide variety of Christian pop songs, and the show even has guests. Sure, the minister from the Mt. Zion Baptist church from Missouri isn't quite as interesting as Robert Downy Jr., but gosh darn it, he made the rest of the service seem so much better. The rest of the service, by the way, is what I suppose would be Leno's monologue--the sermon. Which (already skirting the 45 minute mark, I'd say) seemed even longer in an unknown language. Lesson learned--I must get more sleep on Saturday nights.

The next miscellaneous thing I will discuss today is futebol. What is futebol? Yet another stupid question. I will no longer field questions from the readers, and that's that. There are few things to say about futebol, except that there seem to be a lot more fouls in Brazil. In one game I watched, at one point there was a foul I'd say about every minute on average for about 15 minutes. But I don't think Brazilian players are more malicious than other players (well, in that game they may have been)--I think it's just that Brazilians are so passionate about futebol, particularly about getting the ball, that they don't really take into consideration how they get the ball. Brazilians will slide tackle on a regular basis, which is a very efficient way to get the ball, don't get me wrong, but Brazilians are also very good at getting rid of the ball before the tackle gets there, and thus when the tackle does get there, there's nothing to get except the player. And boy are they got. I think the refs call so many fouls, not necessarily because the tackle looks illegal, but because the fall looks painful. But I'm sure if you asked a Brazilian who got tackled if he regreted it, he would most likely say, "I regret only that I had but one ball to pass off before the tackle."

The last miscellaneous thing I shall talk about today is driving. Brazilian driving is by far the most exciting part of my day. Brazilians can be best described in traffic as fearless. Two feet between one car and the next is no more significant that two feet between pedestrians. Signalling before changing lanes? Bah! One does not signal when one walks in one direction, one simply walks! And all the surrounding cars respect without question anyone who changes direction. It is almost a status symbol. But the bravest of all drivers in Brazil are the cyclists--motorcyclists, to be specific. Lanes? Bah! They will drive where there is space to drive, and there is space for cyclists to drive anywhere--in between cars, behind cars, in front of cars, underneath semis--anywhere. And if there is one word other than fearless that is most relevant to Brazilian drivers, it is this--acceleration. To them, acceleration is more than just a word--it is a way of life. Whay go slow when one can go fast through acceleration! Ask a Brazilian if he's trying to get someplace fast and he'll say, "No! Don't bother me, I'm accelerating!" One never saw a spedometer go from zero to 60 so fast--even in kilometers, it's unnerving to see.

One more frivolous comment before I log off. It is the most entertaining thing to me when people ask me, "So how many words do you know in Portuguese?" What? I don't have them filed, do you really want me to count them? And even then it's confusing--do you want just nouns, verbs and adjectives, or do you want conjunctions and articles and all the menial boring ones too? And even with with that question answered it's a rather ridiculous task--I know English as well as anybody, but I would still be hard-pressed to list all the words I know in English. Even if you narrowed it down to a subset, like all the words pertaining to furniture, it is nigh impossible. So whenever asked what words I know in Portuguese, I'd just say "Good morning, good afternoon, good evening," and then count to six. And then for the next ten minutes I would rack my brain trying to think of all the words I actually know so I can tell them later and then they'll laugh and be impressed at my precocious learning abilities, but I can only ever think of numbers 7-20, and how weirded out would you be by some exchange student randomly counting from 7 to 20?

Two lessons that are very different

Dear Blog,

Today as I was recovering from our 4 am stay-up-and-watch-Constantine session and Leonardo was teaching his girlfriend how to ask me why I cut my hair, it was eventually made known to me that we were attending a brass concert in about an hour. Since I had no plans, I decided to tag along to the event and see what was what. But as I was putting my shoes and socks on (I learned from a rather outraged 7 year-old the other day that it was most strange to wear socks about the house), I noticed that everyone else was making much more elaborate preparations--changing outfits, putting on make-up, etc. It was at this point that I realized a rather major error in packing that I'd made: I thought to bring 7 days-worth of "casual" clothes and a couple sets of "dress" clothes, but I failed to bring into consideration the necessity for "sexy" clothes. Even having read in a book about Brazilian culture, I failed to comprehend what it meant by Brazilians putting great emphasis on attractiveness. But I am not entirely without the potential to be attractive--I need only remember to never, ever, ever again wear that lumpy, unsightly sweat-shirt that I decided to wear in the rain tonight, to buy some suitable clothes, and borrow some of Leonardo's hair cream. I am actually rather excited at this prospect--I've never "styled" my hair before. I'm sure it won't live up to the hype I've created, but at least then I probably won't get addicted to hair products. :)

The second lesson involves us ditching out on the second concert we attended tonight (and it's understandable that they wanted to, because really, who goes to two concerts in one night, much less the two YAWN-fests that we attended?). Anyway, after we ditched, we had to walk home. It was about nine o'clock, and at first we were rather easy-going--Leonardo told me about how during the day, there are lots of people shopping here. But after we left the "heavily-lit" district, we entered the "dimly-lit district," and Leonardo told me, "Stay close. I think, this part is dangerous," to which his sister Aline replied, "'I think?' It is dangerous." And so our journey took on a more urgent mood: I noticed how we began to arrange a more strategic formation--Aline and Jessica (the two youngest) about ten feet in front, then me, and immediately behind me were Leonardo and his girlfriend (also named Aline). We would periodically look over our shoulders; our pace seemed to quicken depending on how treacherous we deemed our surroundings; and our eyes all seemed focused on the same bit of sidewalk in front of us the whole time. As people would walk past, it's hard not to suspect them of being that which you have feared happening upon this whole time, but what helped me avoid losing trust in every Brazilian person I see alone at night is to not fear the people I see, but to fear the unseen specter that lurks perhaps just behind them.

On a similar note, later this evening (about 11:30 at this point) Lidia, my host mother, was driving Aline (girlfriend) home with me and Leonardo tagging along (I tagged along because Leo asked me if I wanted to and I said sure because really, what else am I going to do? Stay home and blog like some loser?...). As we drove I noticed that we seemed to be running a prodigous amount of red lights. Leo later leaned over and told me, "It's best not to respect the lights, because it's dangerous, depending on the street. Avenues are the most dangerous." Every now and then we would stop because we couldn't see the oncoming traffic, and every moment stopped seemed to be in expectation of a window being bashed in a few inches away from my face. But not every sinister aspect of the city is so macabre: at one point, as we began to pass through a number of narrower streets that resembled alleys, Leo leaned over to me once again and said, "Dorian, are you ready?" "For what" I said. After a few misfires at the word, I realized that Leo was saying "Shemales." We both laughed, and then he pointed some out and we laughed harder. So you can imagine how strange it must have seemed to me when we began to pull into a rather shady looking lot, just after Leo asked me what the English word for a male prostitute was (we settled on man-bitch, since I said we don't have a word for it). But as it turns out was just a grocery store. But after the initial relief I felt faded a bit, a new oddity in the situation revealed itself to me. I looked at my watch. It was 12:15. Leo told me it was open all night, and although it made sense to me to be open all night (we have Wal-Marts and Taco Bells that are open all night), I never thought that anybody other than stoners or people whose car broke down and needed something would ever actually take advantage of those hours. But here we were, examining the fruit and the cheese and the dairy sections of the supermarket. I suppose it was on the way, so why not? What a wonderful country.

On Conversing in a Language that You Don

bah, pay no heed to this abortion of a post...

The Journey/The Arrival

Dear Blog,

"He came by car, then by plane." A person desiring to begin an account of my journey from Brookings to Brazil could easily enough start with that phrase; and since I share key traits with such a person that compel me to follow suit, I have elected to do so. But before that account begins in earnest, it would perhaps better facilitate the telling of the tale to divulge some of the background tht precedes my trek. The relevant detail of divulgence is that this stay in Brazil represents in my subconscious life a seminal crossing to independence, and one of my highest goals to achieve as an adult is a strong spirituality. Now as I was wheeling my way across Minnesota (partly in a tow truck, it might be noted, due to our van's transmission's inability to take the pain of bearing me off to some foreign land), I felt confident in attaining that goal, but as I left my parents standing in line to board their flight to Rome, I felt the rush of independence come upon my, along with a certain duress applied by the responsibilities of my circumstances. I felt a dull heavy stress slowly laying over me, pushing away calm and playfulness and replacing them with intense potential energy--a readiness to handle difficulies that most seek and admire, but I fear and shun. I tried reading my book on Kabbalism to regain the sense of spirituality I was so terrified of losing, but I could get no lasting solace.

It came time to board the plane and I felt a new worry--ever since I experienced a panic attack on a plane last summer, I grow nercous when preparing to fly and feel I must steele my nerves thoroughly. This amounted to a rather unhappy state in teh minutes before takeoff. But as the engines grew loud and the plane's momentum was birthed, I heard some voice of a past self, a self experiencing flight for the first time, begin a chant: faster, faster, faster. And I felt a rush of thrill and hedonism and release as the plane lifted off. It was quite a catharsis and I felt whole again. Throughout the rest of the flight, the plane acted as a sort of incubation chamber for a new self that was merging two soft and vulnerable selves into one. I think the plane was a very significant setting for this, because, having flown since a very young age, I have many pastoral memories from planes, but they are also paradoxically, a cultural symbol of adulthood. But whatever the cause, I disembarked into Houston having successfully comprimised independence and spirituality. But that comprimise would soon appear inconsequential.

My second flight (from Houston to Sao Paulo) was marked mostly by 1) the laborious filling out of customs and health forms, and 2) the moral conflict of whether I should stay up and watch the episodes of House that were so very tantalizing at this time or to prepare for what was sure to be a tasking first day by getting a good 7 hours of sleep. And as I sit here nodding off at 12:30 with a grand total of 4.5 hours of sleep, I am of the contented conviction that that guilty pleasure was as necessary as it was indulgent. But returning to the cut of the jib, as I was getting on the flight, I was, for the first time, surrounded by Brazilian people, and my individual mountain-climbing was immediately dwarfed by this summit which had so suddenly and sneakily presented itself. As I got off the flight, mind entirely numbed by sleep-deprivation and food from hell, I realized that I must prepare myself to spend a considerable amount of time for the next few weeks practicing my role of the village mute.

But as the day progressed, and how slowly it seemed to do so, my family, who are wonderful beyond description by the way (beyond description, that is, to a pseudo-inebriated person such as me, but wonderful despite), proved to be a very inclusive force, and I greatly relished those delightfully awkward moments when, following a minute or so of conversation and glances in my direction and giggles (depending on the converser), Leonardo, my brother and English-speaker extroaordinaire, would say something beginning with "Um, they wondering..." At a birthday party we attended, I would even often find myself the center of attention (I was even given the first piece of cake, which was apparently most significant because everyone cheered and clapped as I received it), and my family would prove to be some the the warmest people I've met. The language barrier doesn't keep me from enjoying their company; it actually makes them more interesting when they're speaking all these word-type things that I can only sit back and absorb. I think if I can muster the energy to pay attention, I will be able to figure out this language deal before long. But I'm afraid I won't be able to do even that if I don't end this... post... of sorts, before long, so with that I must bid you all a happy clicking as you quit your browser/tab and go back to the productivity you wrongfully abandoned for this. Boa noite, tchau!