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!