Getting psyched (out)!

i'm starting to get really tangled up in the details. it's really frustrating because everyone i've met on the road or online who has done the area i want to visit has basically played it by ear and done really well for themselves. But the more i talk to my family, the more problems i seem to have....


Prob #1: the route

it's not just that there is alot to see on limited cash and time, it's that within the timeframe i've established (3 months) i have certain specific targets that limit the rest ofthe trip, namely salvador for new years and recife for carnaval. moreover, brazil is a third world country making places more distant than they look on the map: some roads are good and some are crap, making it sorta impossible to calculate travel times.

the current plan: fly to porto seguro (bought the ticket last night), do southern bahia for just under 2 weeks, salvador for new years. chapada diamantina after new years for maybe 2 weeks, then i have no idea how i'm going to kill time getting from chapada to recife for carnival. maybe kick it in salvador, maybe slowly work it up the coast. after recife it gets cloudier. i may book it to jericoacoara (may need to go by way of fortaleza), and from there go to são luis.


Prob #1a: CHAPADA vs S.BAHIA

the biggest issue with the route right now is where to start. apparently i've got my time priorities reversed. i thought i needed to give myself more time to get to know chapada, but apparently 2 weeks is way mroe than enough time, whereas southern bahia is totally worth seeing. moreover, the beaches are really hard to get to, so it's time consuming. also, it's a really relgiious area, so everything is basically going to come to a dead stop for christmas. i've been told by two different family members to do chapada first, then go south, then cut back north for recife. still, apparently going to chapada at all might be a bad idea. according to weather.com, december is actually the areas heaviest month in terms of rain volume, and the park is notorios for suddent floods that can be quite dangerous (especially if you're unlucky enough to be in a canyon at the time)


prob #2: money

read last post for more details on that one. today was my last day of classes and paulo basically offered to pay me R$500 for 4 days work; 6 classes. 4 with him, 2 with another client at his office. that's roughly 1/16th of my current budget, which by the calculations/assumptions i'm working with right now could keep me on the road another 6 days. sticking around is quite tempting, but it means losing a week to buy a week if that makes sense.


prob #3: the flight

Given the route problem, changing my ticket to salvador so i can get to the chapada seems like a good idea. but if i take paulo up on his offer, then my ~2 weeks becomes one (also subtract travel). if i stay a 'week', will I have sufficient time to really do chapada? of course, maybe i don't need to do EVERYTHING available there. maybe i'm being a greedy little eco-tourist.

still, i'm not even sure i feasibly CAN change my ticket. see, i got the ticket online, and didn't register for the site when i did it. i got on online promotion, so i'm not sure if i even can change my ticket, but the info they sent me looks optimistic. thing is, i think i can only change the ticket online. so i went back and registered, and now it shows my username with no reservations, and no way to add tickets bought before registration. and i've tried calling both phone numebrs they offer, and so far i've been sent back to the website by a voice message and put indefinitely on hold by another.

i'm going to try calling back tomorrow during business hours. hopefully i can work my way backwards through this list

Logistics

So excluding airfare to and from the north, i've set aside roughly R$7000 for the trip (according to my most recent calculations); somewhere between US$3k-4k, toward the lower end of the spectrum.

given that i'm going to be travelling during the high season, new years in a party town, and carnival at a party, the question is of course: will dave's money last?

i might end up finding that i need to pick up a job on the road. if i'm lucky, maybe i'll run into some rich tourists going somwehre cool and i could offer up my services as a guide/translator. with my superior local guidebooks and language proficiency i could totally pull it off. i heard about a friend of a friend who lives in europe doing nothing but getting free rides to travel to the coolest area of brazil as a guide. so he also gets to travel europe.

hopefully it won't come to any of that. I think the money is going to last, according to calculations i've made and people i've talked to. i'm going to pad-crash as much as possible through my mom's and my own connections (including couchsurfing.com). the parties are certainly going to hurt a bit though.

still, tonight my uncle had a sit-down with me and told me he was worried about how i was handling myself with respect to the trip. it felt like an intervention. he was really addressing how i've been putting shit off lately more than anything, but he used that as a platform to tell me that he felt the trip would cost more than i'd thought. my most recent calculation turned out to be more than i'd estimated for him and airfare is looking like less than he'd predicted, so all's well so far. still, he did spook me a little.

i'm a versatile kid. i've traveled a ton in my life, solo too. everything always wokrs out. this trip isn't going to be any different.

i might have to fast for a week or two towards the end though.

when travelers colide

When I was up in Recife I met this aussie traveler named Tom who was backpacking South America. He passed through são paulo this weekend, so i offered to show him around (sadly i couldn't give him a place to crash though). Last night i took him and his hostel crew (total party 9 people!) out to vila madalena to ó do borogodo for some traditional samba. we got tehre an horu before the usic started, and they all decided to get some food. well. we got back 2 hours later to find the place was crazy full plus a line, so we went next door to grazi a dio, the club georgiana itnroduced me to (did i mention she broke up with her bf? shame i'm skipping town).

we had a good time. sambasoul was playing and did that thing they do. music ended sorta early, but we kicked it until we were the last kids there. looking for an after party we got some drinks at a tiny bar set up in a parking lot, which was soorta wierd but cozy. the bartender was kinda unfriendly but it jsut added to the whole drinking in a parking lot atmosphere. some other guy there said he was trying to compile a book of drink mixes and that he felt it aws almost complete. i had the honor of giving him the white russian recipe. i'm pretty sure he doesn't actually know shit about cocktails if he didn't know that one and thoguht his book was complete.

today i met up with tom and his friend joel again in the center of the city to visit some museums. i only had a little under 2 hour to play cause i had stupidly arranged for a make up class with a student that day and had a chanukah dinner with the extended family to get to afterwards.

we never made it to the museums. we were all still sorta hungover and more interested in food. i took them to liberdade, SP's answer to china town, where we ate alot. really good food. eating with tom and joel was alot of fun cause they had been eating basically the same thing for months (i suppose i have too) and needed the diversity. their elation rubbed off.

wierd coincidence: on the way to meet them, i ran into some relatives on av. paulista. crazy crazy crazy. 4th biggest city in the world by population: you don't jsut "run into people" here. by the way, ehre's how complicated the relations get down here: the family i ran into are my mom's cousin's brother's daughter and two grand kids. so i think my 3rd and 4th cousins?

i hung out with that crew again later at channukah, which was well timed; as i'm leaving in a week, so it gave me a chance to see the family again. we had a goofy arts and crafts contest making little menorahs out of potatos we painted and decorated with stickers. we didn't ahve a dreidel, jsut a die. we enver got aroudn to playing , but i would've been DOWN to play some craps at chanukah. i always thought it was funny how we encourage litle kids to gamble, why not step it up and teach em a real fucking game, right?

Ugly blog

so i'm playing with the format right now. the goal was to pick the widest template possible. i know i'm prone to writing a lot, so i figure if i have wide margins at least it doesn't look quite so long.

problem is the color. the template was all white and shit and well that a) hurts to look at for a while, and b) is an unnecessary waste of energy. not that billions of people look at my blog or naything but hey, i do what i can.

but see, i am shit for matching colors. if you thik you got a cool scheme for me, shoot. otherwise the color scheme of my blog will probably only get worse.

hell, the only reason my clothes match sometiems is cause i only have bland colors. blue, white, grey, black, green, brown. and a handful of bright colors i occasionally wear.

interesting post today, right? whatever, next week is my last week in town. once i hit the road they should get pretty cool.

Getting mean

I'm pretty sure i've bitched about him before, but i really hate this one student i have, paulo. he's 54 and by pure coincidence related to a close friend of my mom's. He's a wealthy business man, and has no respect for our classes. today was the straw that broke the camel's back. I wrote the following while drinking a much needed caipirinha at a nearby bar immediately after the events described.

Paulo asked me to come to class early today. We normally have class at 5:30, and he'd asked for 4:30. No way, I said, but conceded to try for quarter to 5.

I got there 4:40-ish. And Waited. And waited. and continued to wait, filling out a news-stand logic puzzle. I listened to 2 full albums on my MP3 player. I checked with the receptionist: he knew I was there, he just wasn't ready for me yet.

After 6:05 rolled around I'd had enough. I went to this secretary and told her I was leaving. I was annoyed. frustrated. direspected. a little angry.

She said paulo had called me up to his office. was he for real? i decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and walked upstairs to find his office empty. He was still in his meeting. apparently he thought that changing the ambience of my waiting room might get me to stay longer.

I waited for 5-10 more minutes, after which he finally showed. I was pissed. I've taken alot of shit from him and now was time to unload.

"David, how are you!"

"I've been waiting for over an hour. imagine if i had come at 4:30."

my voice was cold and bitter in its grittingly polite, monotonous lack of emotion.

"I'll pay you for your time!"

"that's not the point paulo. I udnerstand you're a busy man but just because my hours are flexible doesn't mean my time is worthless. these are my last twoo weeks in town. there are many other things I could be doing with my time. would like to be doing with my time. This is my job, paulo. you show little respect for the class and disrespect me on a regular basis by regularly taking phone calls, leaving to do business, starting class late and ending class early."

"i totally agree. i understand---"

"No paulo, you don't. I have a flexible schedule and not that many students, so i usually put up with this sort of stuff. i'm a patient guy. but you're about to get a new teacher and he may not be. he may have a much tighter schedule and will not be able to wait around for you like this. also--"

"yes, i understand. I need--"

"No paulo. let me finish. also, it's very difficult to teach when you don't know how long the lesson is going to be....."

and so on. I was calm and composed the whole time, wearing the poker face of anger only people who smil and laugh all the time can pull off. Lecturing him i experssed most of my personal grief with him as a student throguh the lens of his tentaitve new teacher's needs and limits. it aws all stuff i'd bitched about to others before, including students, so it was a long time coming and bound to happen given that our time together was coming to a close.

He made excuses. "i was busy." "I thoguht you were teaching felipe" (another client in his office who wasn't scheduled for class today). Doesn't matter. not the point. i wasn't. you still show very little respect for me or my classes.

He said he was free until 7. i was really not in the mood to give him a class by this point, but i decided to play ball anyway.

and THAT's how i ended up doing the most passive aggressive thing i've ever done in my life.

"ok, we're going to play a little game. a vocab exercise. I want you to put yourself in my shoes. I want you to try to come up with as many words as you can to express what emotions you might be feeling. I've already given you two: 'annoyed' and 'frustrated.' can you thin of any others?"

he stared blankly at me, trying to beat his poker face with mine. it's a game he plays when he doesn't like an exercise. it's his time so i usually just give up and little him read out loud from Cigar Afficionado or Wine Spectator (yeah, he's that kinda guy. i really loathe our classes). But not this time.

"Can you come up with any other words for how you might feel, besides annoyed or frustrated?"

I waited for a response, face unchanged in cold crystallzied boredom since he called me up to his office.

"you know what, i've got this really bad headache. right here, on the back of my head. how about we have class tomorrow?"

"we've already scheduled for class tomorrow, paulo. so yeah"

"yeah I just really want to go home and rest. it's this headache."

"Ok Paulo. I'll see you tomorrow."

Damn right you've got a headache. ME. lecturing him, getting m gripes off my chest, then subtley telling him to go fuck himself with an english exercise had been cathartic enough. i already had the win. i didn't mind letting the control freak end the class on his own terms. i didn't have a class prepared anyway.

12/5/07
sipping a caipirinha from 6:20(?)-6:50. could've gone home/somewhere cool at 4 after my last class, but instead i've gotta deal with rush hour. really, paulo wasted 2.5 hours of my time, not just 1.

Follow up

No troubles at all. changed my flight for the very reasonable fee of $220 to March 17th, giving me what should be ample time to travel brazil, and more importantly piece of mind that I don't need to pack my bags as soon as i get my paycheck today (how wierd is that timing? mayb i'm supposed to leave or something).

Everything is going to be OK.

The best laid plans.....

...aren't as potent as bad habits.

I am a pathological procrastinator. it's gotten to the point where i wonder if i don't have some sort of subconscious self-defeating drive. in college i often put off major assignments to the last minute, completing them in high-octane coffee driven all-nighters that would leave me cracked out with the shakes the next day (an inconvenience during exam week, to say the least).

i never changed my flight.

i kept telling myself i would do it today, or tomorrow, or damnit i'm doing it by this weekend! December. i was going to have done it by december. Tonight. I was going to do it by tonight. around 1am i opened the eMail from orbitz i received for my original flight itinerary to find that my flight was not aroudn the 13th as i expected. my flight is on tuesday. this tuesday.

i'm supposed to be on this plane in 42 hours.

i had planned this whole backpacking trip. new years in salvador. carnival in olinda. natinoal parks. beaches. parties. girls. top it all off with a week in rio with my cousin then fly home.

the reservations office doesn't open until 8am tomorrow. if i can't change my ticket, a one way flight in march will cost me over $2000. that's almost the entire budget i had saved up for this backpacking trip. Hell, with the R$/US$ convertions, it might even be more than i had saved up.

Lately, i feel like i've been jsut been getting irresponsible.. i think it's cause i'm bored. the other day i accidentally left the stove on after making eggs (on low!) for like 4 hours. tonight i smoked a fat cuban cigar on my way home only to find my relatvies had arrived a day earier than i had thought they were going to (did i mention they dont know i smoke?). and the energy put into my lessons has gone way down too.

what is wrong with me????

Cyber Sprawl

For a little while now i've been thinking about doing an inventory of my cyber identity. After a comment dan made on one of my recent pots, i think it's about time.

This blog started as a mandatory assignment for an anthropology class called "life online," so this feels pretty appropriate

Just organizing this is going to be a pain. I tried doing this functionally, and that didn't work. I'm going to do this by username (i'm not gonna actually post em though. internet paranoia!):

google: gmail (primary email account), blogger (techinically i have 2 blogs, but teh ootehr i only set up to figure out how to link picture from flick to a map i made), iGoogle homepage, Orkut, google mesenger, google maps, scheduler. so that's at least 8 google services. man, i sure hope they don't turn out to be big brother.
wvrs: my work email
AOL: my AIM sn
XFire: mesenging app for gamers. only way to get in touch with one of my friends.
bored.com: used to be my primary email account. now i only sue it as a registration email for sites i dont wanna give real emails to. But ehy, now i have hotmail and yahoo emails for that.
hotmail: MSN messenger, which I literally only use to talk to 1 person. lame.
meebo.com: flash IM app that let's me use all my messenging services simultaneously (minus Xfire). thank gd.
yahoo A: Flickr account
yahoo B: 2ary Flickr account
Travbuddy: online community of travelers. I have 2 travel blogs (with geolinked pictures on a travel map!) and participate in forums whe i get bored. I'm starting to host pictures there more than flickr, and facebook is falling behind.
Couchsurfing: internet community of travelers who support each other by offering places to stay. cool, right? i'm trying to work my way in for some free housing on my backpacking trip, but i dunno if i can work up teh refs in time
Wikimedia: i sued to have a wikipedia addiciton. because wikimedia is retarded, you have to set up an accoutn on each project. so i have shaggorama accounts at en.wikipedia, pt.wikipedia, en.wikinews, en.wikibooks, en.wikiversity, en.wikiquote, and en.wikimedia
Uncyclopedia: keeps me from vandalizing wikipedia
Facebook: my primary social networking tool. I only have orkut to appease the brazilians. travbuddy is taking over pictures though.
Livejournal: i have a friend with a LJ blog who locks 2/3rds of his posts, so i got an account to see what he's up to
youtube: i don't post videos, i just use my account to comment (read as criticize) other peoples movies and collect favorites and subscriptions
dailymotion: same thing

depending how you count, that's 30 different services listed. Damn

and let's see....i know i must be missing something... I read fark all the time, but don't have an account there yet. I play boggle online sometimes. and i have usernames at some newspapers, but i don't think that counts. i'm trying to set up an accoutn at zooomr.com because i heard they let you upload and as many pictures as you want with no cap on bandwidth or storage, so that's cool, but somethings been going wrong over there.

i have a feelign i'm going to be adding to this list as i realize how much i left off it. Fucking internet....

Using my assets

here's how cool I am:
-not only did i not have to get a visa to enter the country (brazilian baby!)
-not only am I not paying for rent (living with family baby!)
-I have connections.

My network in brazil is not limited to my family. My mom grew up here and has friends spread out all over the country, and many of them have invited me into their homes.

back to the weekend.

Fri I saw the brazilian side. Saturday I hit the argentinian side which was SPECTACULAR. way cooler than the brazilian side. I got stories, but i think i'm gonna put those on my travel blog for now. fuck..why do i have 2 blogs??!? this is bad..but yeah, sunday i went to paraguay and bought soem shit that doesn't work. Then it started to rain. I'd already done the big 3 things to do down here, and fuck the torrential rainforest downpour, so i decided to come back a little early. i called the bus station, and they said there was room on all 3 buses to São paulo. Of course, with my luck that day by the time i got there that was no longer the case. So i did the next best thing and arranged to go to Curitiba, a coastal city where i coudl cget a connection to São paulo. Buses leave every hour to SP from Curitiba, so I didn't buy the ticket to São Paulo.

And good thing too. I ended up spending two full days there. My mom has an old friend who lives in Curitiba. In fact, she had been trying to get me to live down there instead of São Paulo when I first started organizing this trip. So this weekend I got to know Curitiba and my mom's friend's family as well as Iguaçu!

I'll post more details about argentina, paraguay, and curitiba in a bit. I've decided this should be the "master blog," and anything i post to the other blog should be logged here in some form. So yeah, i'll get around to that later.

Adultery

blogger, it's time we talked. sit down. have a drink, I need to confess something.

I've met another blog.

I'm sorry, it just sort of...happened. I don't know what this means for us. I still want to write you! this other blog....what we have is different from what i have with the other blog. It's jsut such a pain in the ass trying to post pictures to you blogger....this other blog, it's a TRAVEL blog. I can post date entries, import pictuers directly from flickr.....it even keeps a running map!

i'm sorry blogger, i never meant for this to happen. A backpacker told me about the other blog, and one thing led to another, and now here I am....a blogging bigamist.

Maybe I'll cross post, maybe i won't. we'll see.

I don't know what the future holds for us blogger. This should only be a temporary division of my attention.



please visit my new travel blog . if nothing else, it has a map and pictures. old posts aer written with much the same content as this blog, but at least there are pictures.

Birthday at Iguaçu

It was David's (my uncle) idea. This weekend is a long weekend because of some crazy roman-catholic holidays or something, so why not take a birthday trip(Question mark) going to iguaçu now allows me to focus my longer backpacking trip in northern brazil.

the idea was originally leave for the falls in mid december, go to florianopolis for new years, then work my way up the coast to recife for carnival...a LONG way up the coast. Now the whole carnival plan is much more doable.

so last week i bought bus tickets and a shitty back pack (shitty as in no frame and minimal padding on the hip straps). I left são paulo as always with paulo's disapproval, but with a very full backpack: i decided to use this trip as a guinea pig for the bigger backpacking trip. what have i learned so far (question mark): gotta get some padding for the backpack.

left late last night on a red eye bus. seated behind me was a couple from bermuda: a local who married a canadian. 'i was an underwriter, she was an accountant' 'sounds romantic...'

i learned alot about bermuda. wierd little place. apparently it's reached critical mass with foreign business moving in. mainly insurance companies. moreover, they have more accountant jobs than they can deal with. all sorts of wierd shit....seriously, the country sounds like it came out of a douglas adams novel.

so we arrived this morning and after moving into the hostel (which is a PALACE for a hostel. even has a bar by the pool), i hit the falls with another kid form the hostel. i'd post pictures, but i'm having trouble connect my archos, but i'll try again later. to say the least, the falls were SPECTACULAR. loaded with toursits though, and none of the hiking trails were open to the public. they are all operated by a third party eco-tourism company, so if you wanna hike, you gotta get in on a bigger package. fucking lame ass. hopefully the argentinian side will ahve some hiking, but i doubt it.

in search of hiking, i went across the street to another national park, parque das aves (park of the birds). I was suspicious of this park from the get-go and my suspicions were verified upon entrance: not a national park, an aviary. just a big zoo. i mean, it was cool and they had nice birds, but it was really anti-climactic and i was kinda dissapointed.

still, the night is very young and i've got time to get shit-faced and party. i mean hey, it's my birthday!!! although, ain't nothing special about turning 23....maybe my auto insurance goes down or something.

Technologically Savvy

My Birthday is next week, and my first (and probably only) gift arrived yesterday from my mom. A digital camera, a gadget i've been jonesing for for along time now, and am quite frankly pretty stoked on. Tog et it here, my mom passed it along to a friend who lives in rio who happened to be in the states, who gave it to her daughter who was visitng but lives in rio, and i went to her house to pick it up. I never even got to meet ehr to say thanks in person, she had her housekeeper send it down in a chocolate shop bag. It was raining at the time, so i decided to hang out at the building and learn to use it a little.

I felt really 'mission impossible' flipping through the manual of a gadget i recieved in deceptive packaging from a contact i didn't know and never meant at an apartment building where i felt kind of unwelcome.

Afterwards I hung out with my friend georgiana who lived nearby, and ended up crashing at her pad. I'll post pictures soon, but this damn computer is too old!

But yeah, back tot he point, camera = awesome. it's a Pentax Optio M40. about the size of a credit card, it's really light and has tons of features (although it doesn't have manual control of the apperture or shutter speed...it does have ISO sensitivity though, which i guess osrta controls the shutter speed...). It has optical zoom, and records at a maximum resolution of 8mb. Also, my mom got a 128mb sd card, which suits me fine. From poking around online i think it cost my mom under $200, which is perfect.

it is exactly the camera i wanted. it's small. it's light. It has optical zoom and records at a decent quality. it's cheap enough that i won't feel too bad if it gets jacked.

the last bit is important because next month i plan to hit the road and backpack north through to march or so (fuck, i still need to change my ticket and extend my leave at the firestation!). the whole purpose of this trip was to see brazil, and although i've gone on about one serious sidetrip a month, i haven't seen nearly as much as i wanted to. So as far as traveling is concerned, i'm happy not to have a professional camera on me.

Along with clothes, i plan to take this camera and my Archos (Media player). I had originally intended not to take the archos with me on my travels, but ARCHOS + CAMERA = LETHAL COMBINATION. here's why: the archos isn't just an mp3 player and movie viewer, it's 40GB hard drive the size of my hand. and it's pretty light too. I'm going to look into the cost of a bigger SD card for the camera, but i feel like taking the archos along will probably give me more versatility.

I will be much more bummed if my archos gets jacked than my camera. But at least I can back up my music collection on my old 80gig external before i leave (the uneven power currents here have been wreaking havoc on it though, it's been glitching alot lately and some folders are becoming corrupted).

Class and soccer

I meant to make this post awhile ago, but mess outside from the pending soccer match reminded me to get my ass in gear.

so about a month or so ago i attended a soccer game between corinthians and spfc, the two são paulo teams. corinthians are traditionally "the people's team," whereas spfc is the upper class team. Corinthians where here first, and their stadium is way out on the edge of the city. SPFC is much newer, and their stadium was built in the middle of a wealthy area.

the rivalry between spfc and corinthians is probably one of the most serious in brazil. the game i attended was called a "classico." SPFC were the favorites by far, well on their way to winning the championship (which they may accomplish tonight, if not next week), whereas corinthians had been having a shitty season.

everyone i talked to, corinthian and spfc fans alike, warned me not to go sit with on the corinthian's side. apparently, i don't look corinthian enough; i look like an spfc, and that could get me lynched. I reluctantly took their advice to heart.

as the game got under way, both teams raised their respective banders: huge flags that span a chunk of the stadium. the ends get passed up the crowd, and people wave them by beating on the underside. after a minute or so, they get lowered. The corinthians raised theirs first, an eagle. then spfc raised theirs, a dragon. a tear formed in the banner, just below the dragosn head. as the banner was raised, the tension caused the tear to spread, ironically cleanly beheading the dragon. a very bad omen.

it was a dirty game. there was significant fouling on both sides. at one point a fight broke out on the corinthians side. as the police poured into the stadium to quell the small riot, the spfc fans started cheering the cops on, saying "break them!" ugly, ugly business.

there were much fewer corinthian fans than spfc at the game, probably about as many as attended on that first, cold game i saw with ben. but they were waaaaaay more into it than the spfc fans. the spfc cheers barely circulated the crowd, staying focused only in the hardcore-fans section. moreover, the cheers got super repetitive despite the vast repertoire of cheers. the corinthians, on the other hand, were on their feet, dancing and singing the whole game through.

no goals were scored. bad energy filled the stadium. finally, with about 5min left in the game, the corinthians landed one on the spfc goalie.

wow. spfc couldn't even cheer. the stadium erupted with the songs of the corinthians. i couldn't even hear the beat of my team's drums.

as the game came to a close, i decided it would be a good idea to get teh hell out of dodge. i started moving towards the exit a little before the goal was scored. as soon as the game ended, i was outta there. outside the stadium were more cops than i have seen in one place in a long, long time, forming human walls in full riot gear, dividing the corinthians from spfc as much as possible. i had to hoof it over a hill just to get to my street (which actually pops out right in front of the stadium, but the cops wouldn't let us get to it for a ways).

leaving the stadium was a racket. singing fromt he stadium, singing in the streets, people honking horns (even taxis!), flags waving out car windows, fireworks exploding all around... suffice it to say, all the spfc fans had removed their shirts before hitting the street.

at one point, while waiting for a light to change a car drove by carrying some corinthians. they taunted my group waiting at the intersection. one of the people near me responded, mumbling one of the ugliest thigns i've heard in along time: "allegria da favela." happiness of the ghetto. that's what the corinthians were to this guy, a ghetto team. many people seemed to share his sentiment.

when i got back to the house, i sat down at the computer and started messign aroudn on my email or something. i could still hear cheers and sirens and explosions outside, even though thehosue is a ways from the stadium (by outside, i mean RIGHT outside). the explosions got closer, as did the sirens. then, i started to hear scuffling in the busshes by the window. it was 2 corinthian fans, being chased by the cops for setting off fireworks and generally being unrully. the cops landed their spotlights on em pretty fast, but i mean damn, what a mess.

i found it really itneresting how the class division in the city bleeds into soccer. soccer is the lifeblood of this country. you better believe they talk about soccer pretty damn early on the news. the victory of the corinthians was a victory of the lower class defeating the upper class.

the corinthians hadn't beaten spfc in many years. it was quite an upset.

The best thing to happen to the internet since wikipedia

Ok. I'm not special. I like to go online as a diversion just as much as anyone else. But i also use the internet as a tool for self-motivated study.

today i was trying to find a material for a class i'm teaching today. One of my students is a film teacher, and i wanted to use the "Learning from Youtube" class being taught at Pitzer College, my alma mater, as a topic for discussion. sifting through blog posts, i came across the following incredible fact:

UC BERKELY IS POSTING ALL OF ITS COURSES ON YOUTUBE.

i alerady have a degree. who cares if I won't get college credit? i wanna learn. I never got to take an anatomy class, now i can! hey, if i wanna brush up on my ochem, i don't need to go to a library!

UCB, you guys are awesome. i hope otehr schools follow suit. home-schooled kids are gonna eat their hearts out.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=ucberkeley

Psychiatry

[for context sake, it's worth noting that i'm watching garden state while i write this]

it's been a while since i've posted a good rant, so maybe this has been a long time coming. Today I came across a book review for "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became A Mental Illness". I definitely plan to read it.

For at least a decade now, I have had issues with psychiatry (what an ironic way to phrase that). my uncle, a clinical freudian psychoanalyst--last time i checked freudian theory was...archaic?--loves to tell me that he is sure i will ebcome a psychologist. I can't blame him. my interest in philosophy of mind has me browsing through at least as many books classified as cognitive science, neurology, and psychiatry as philosophy books. also, psychology would be a fine way to blend philosophy with medicine. But i have too much against psychology as an institution to seriously consider jumping in.

"Shyness" addresses one of my many reasons for hating on psychology: the ideology of better living through chemistry. Psychiatry attempts to cure illnesses of the mind, but a large number of these "illnesses," as robert pirsig points out, often can only characterized in the context of culture. A disease in psychiatry is basically anyway someone can be "different" from some imaginary norm, usually in a way that "disrupts" their life. basically, is someone has a character trait that makes them inefficient as tools for society, they have diseased minds.

According to the Shyness, there is another way psychiatry characterizes diseases: if we can give drugs to cure it, then we should. I often like to use ADD as my exemplar anti-psychiatry disease. Sure, there exist people who's inability to concentrate is a legitimate disability. But let's be serious here. The LARGE majority of the ritalin-popping public are just poeple who think the pill helps em out.

So let's call this shit what it is. Social anxiety disorder may exist. But the vast majority of people who take paxil are jsut your average run-of-the-mill wallflowers. fuck, i'm one of em. but i don't need paxil, i jsut need the right environment. i happen to think certain parties have hostile vibes, and just don't get comfortable enough to jump in.

still. right now i'm living in a foreign country where i previously only knew family; no one my age. I go out on my own all the time and have tons of fun, and am making friends more easily than i ever have in my life. fuck paxil. not taht i've ever been on it or anything, but i think that most people don't need drugs, they need experience. most people aren't mentally ill, they're just humans.

who the fuck do psychiatrists think they are, telling people they are abnormal? almost every psych-major i knew in college was in it to figure out what was wrong with themselves. shit, freud was so fucked in the head he even managed to project his neuroses onto more than a few of his patients.

Of course, then there's always the conspiracy-of-capitalism paranoia that is often attributed to western medicine by alternative medicine types. but the author makes a pretty convincing case for this kind paranoia with respect to american psychiatry. inf act, it's sort of the focus of his book, as i understand it.

From the article:

“Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder,” a product director for the drug told Advertising Age magazine.

fucked up, right?


ugh...i just invited my uncle to talk about the article. his newest attempt to get me to become a shrink:

uncle: "you need to get psychoanalyzed! just as an experience!"

me: "you think i've never been to a psychologist?"

uncle: "not a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. it's different! you will see, you will like it. it's very
close to philosophy."

maybe i should become a philosophical counselor. it's very close to psychoanalysis!

Rosane

So i've written bits and pieces about this kid, but i think at this point she deserves a full post, at least.

i met rosane last sunday. it was really random that we met at all. i met this guy thiago at the party and he convinced me to stick around. he brought me down to this post-party at a reggae bar,
where i was perpetually on the verge of leaving.

Rosane doesn't go out much. she doesn't smoke, or drink, or even curse much. she hangs out with lots of people, but only considers three people in her life to be true friends. Sunday night she went to the beach to surf with a few classmates (note, not friends), and they convinced her to swing by olinda on their way back. she normally never even goes to olinda, less to bars.

As she walked by about 20 feet away, we saw each other. i thought she was cute, but didn't really have the balls to make a move. apparently neither did she, so instead she asked her friend to go talk to me.

we hit it off, but only got to hang out for about a half hour before she left. The next day i called her up and was blown away by the phone call. she offered to take the bus in the middle of the night to see me (not the safest idea) and suggested dropping school and work for a few days so we could get a motel to check out a local beach. needless to say, i'm not used to this kind of attention. according to shaun's friend roberta, this kind of behavior is apparently not unusual for the local girls.

according to rosane, this kind of behavior was very unusual for her. she's not accustomed to making this much effort for people she barely knows, nor does she normally open up to people she's known for so little time.

she says that she likes galegos, guys with blond hair and blue eyes. but she seems to have been especially stricken by me. she keeps asking me to stay and be her boyfriend. she offered to move to rio so we could be closer together. she cried today while we listened to a Ben Harper song - She's only happy in the sun, which turned out to be surprisingly appropriate for the moment (it was fun trying to translate for her).

it's killing me. i barely know this girl. i feel like i'd be crazy to rearrange my life for her, but we get along together really well. i like her alot and she seems to REALLY like me, which i mean is kinda unusual for me. usually when i pursue girls, i either get nothing or a good friend out of it. that's what i've got, lots of old crushes turned good friends. my list of "one's that got away" is much longer than my list of past girlfriends.


so now i'm in the midst of a conflict. she seems pretty crushed on me. i can either allow myself to crush back, or i need to be careful not to lead her on. have i been leading her on? am i leading her on? has she been leading me on? maybe she's just on the rebound. she met me 3 days after breaking up with her boyfriend of over two years (she said that in brazil when people break up, it's usually long after things go sour; only when there's nothing left. still, the guy left her a lipstick message on her mirror one morning when she was out with me. did i mention he's a cop?).

i left recife this morning. she just wrote me saying...well, all sorts of intimate things i feel would be innappropriate to post here, but among them were the phrases "i didn't go with you to the airport so you wouldn't see me cry," "i need you," and "if you find a way to be with me, i'm here."

I can't shake the feeling that i might be letting something really good pass by for poor reasons.

I told her i had to go back to são paulo to earn money so i could travel more.

i have a little journal in which i jot down my thoughts. i track the ideas by number, not date, to keep it from turning into a diary. one of the entries in my journal expands on a value judgement i made about myself. i used to think that having a strong relationship with a woman was the most important thing in the world to me, but in traveling i've learned that i'm just not ready to settle down right now; i cherish my freedom. after this experience with rosane though, i've learned that the freedom is a huge tradeoff, completely sacrificing any possibilty for a relationship of the kind i used to pray for.

maybe my values haven't changed as much as i'd thought.

in my journal, i called myself a traveler, which i thought sounded free. rosane called me a nomad, which i think sounds lonelier. her assessment might be closer to the mark than mine.

a busy week

wow.... i haven't posted all week. i'm gonna skip around alittle here.

wednesday night i went on a date with rosane that went super well. lesse....shaun was still sick, tom had already left...or did he leave that day? oh yeah, and i went to janga beach wed, real shithole. polluted. real fine sand, got all over me.

....ok, time to work backwards.

thursday (yesterday) i wandered around olinda, took some pictures, talked with some local artisans (one of which offerd me a room for rent during carnaval)....then i tried to hook up with Alex for dinner since he finally rolled into town last night. his cell died mid conv so i didn't know exactly where he was. my first try was the espaço ciencia where his exposition was, but that turned out to be totally closed. the next attempt was this shitty mall nearby (i tried to hitch a ride on the bus but they wouldn't have it. i mean shit, it was one stop, and all i had a was a 50!), and he wasn't there either. had chinese mall-food for dinner, went back to the hostel, then went up to Sé to here a choro. there was a rehearsal going on there that was awesome. alll young kids, i don't think anyone of em was even as old as me. they were super good, and were rehearsing two songs, farol (lighthouse, in reference to a landmark here) and dança da latinha a song i recognized and sung along to, althouh i'd never heard it sung to a choro beat before (eu quero uma latinha pra botar uma bebe...). at the rehearsal i ran into thiago for the THIRD TIME. he took me into town to a little samba bar where we hung out. from there we wandered around and randomly found ourselves at an outdoor fashion show, then headed back to the bar. on the way there, i bought a bottle of Axé da fala, a local drink taht was super sketch. i bought it from what looked like a closed bar. thiago goes up to the bar and starts calling out "THIAGO!!" the other thiago pops his head over the wall, takes the order, and passes ove ra bottle of the homemade drink. it was pretty strong stuff, apparently loaded with herbs or something. good, kinda had a mediciny after taste though. we talked it up with a group of kdis we ran into for awhile, then i went home. i needed the rest.

tuesday.

monday first. fuck, i've already blogged about monday...

allright, no excuses. tuesday. tuesday!!! tuesday was terçã negra! i got to know shaun and tom better over breakfast then helped tom hitch call the bus station to figure out when his bus was leaving.then the three of us went into the old city to kick it a little. got to play translator some more (plus tour guide), kinda fun. it was also nice seeing the old city in the light. i can't believe i forgot to bring my camera, i'll just have to jack some pics form them. tom met up with his friend from recife who showed us a great spot to watch the sunset over the city. shaun and i went back to olinda soon afterwards. while shaun took a nap (he was getting sick) i did laundry by hand for the first time. lotta work, but worked well. kinda embarassing that i had never done it before. somewhere in here tom came back. kinda late shauns girl, roberta, and her friends came by, and we all went to this local bar to warm up. there, we met roberta's friend's younger sister, 19 i think, and her like 30 year old swiss/turkish bf. wierd wierd couple: he met her a year ago during his like 4 wk vacation here, apparently they stay a couple all this time, now he's back and they're a couple again, and he plans to take her back soon to marry him in switzerland. wierd wild stuff. we caught the tail-end of terça negra, a big bloc party with "afro" music, then went to the bar zero um (01) to here some reggae. cool place, and wouldn't you know it, there was thiago. same fucking guy man! he's always at the good parties. oh yeah, i also bought somethign from a sketchy street artesan who was selling mainly smoking related art. leonardo ("not 'da vinci', 'da VIDA!' ") made this thing he called the "coco loco," it's this goofily carved coconut. i'll post a picture of it. definitely never seen anything quite like it.

allright, i'm all cuaght up, time to talk about today. today i went to the mercado riberio where i had passed through yesterday because i saw them setting up for something today. see, this famous brazilian actress XUXA was coming to town, and the city organized a big carnival-esque display for her. quite frankly, i just wanted to see the show, but everyone else wanted to see her. i waited for a long long time. i talked it up with some local SAMU folks (paramedcis), and sat on top of a very uncomfortable fence for much longer than was advisable. after like 2 hours the show finally started. it was awesome, huge walking dolls, marching maracatu band, crazy frevo dancing, dudes with spears doing another dance who1s name i forgot...very very cool. much shorter than i would've liked though, and had a bad view. As XUXA was leaving, people kinda stormed her bus, so i took that opportunity to get a better view of the real show, and in so doing almsot got stabbed by a charging spear dude. very very cool stuff, i wanna come back here for carnaval real bad. so yeah, did that, had some tapioca for lunch (i've been eating alot of it. good local food, they heat fine yuca flour to make pancakes and put cheese and meat inside), bought some local art sicne it's my last day in town then kicked it at the hostel for a little. tonight i'm meeting up with rosane again. hopefully we'll make it to this big Choro show. a popular brazilian reggae artist, Adão Negro, is also in town so maybe we'll do that. or maybe we won't get around to either, she's not coming by till late. either way, i'm sure tonight will be fun, and tomorrow we're going to porto de galinhas with her to learn how to surf. i leave in the wee hours of sunday morning, so i dunno what i'm gonna do sunday night. hopefully i won't spend it at the airport.

Porto de galinhas

yesterday at the party, the two spanish girls from the hostel (ainara and sara) and I arranged to go to a very famous beach just south of recife. i woke up at 6:30 without an alarm cause i'm a freak like that, did some qi gong, then had breakfast with them. we hit the buses and, surprise surprise, it took us 3 or 4 hours just like for calhetas (we'd been told this bus was faster, even though the beach was further away). thank god we woke up early.

when we got there, we were dissapointed to find that the beach's most sought after feature, tidal pools off the coast that form ddep swimming pools, weren't going to be available to us because the tide was high. still, the beach was gorgeous and we had a great time.

we bought fresh fruit on our way to the beach. among the fruit we picked up was a "caju." now, this fruit looks pretty wierd. my mom has a wax one at home, and after years of playing with the wax version and never seeing a real one, i long ago came to the decision they didn't exist and the wax fruit was just sort of a cool idea. wrongo tanto. seeing a basket of caju for real was like seeing a unicorn walking around. i had to have one, and they taste even wierder than they look. we also bought mango, which has become the fruit-mascot of my time her ein brazil. really, i can't believe how long it took for me to try mango. the kind the guy sold us was one of the no-fiber kinds, jsut soft and tasty. mmmmmmm

on the beach we feasted on the fruit and fresh crab chowder from a cart vendor, one of many on the beach (as with all beaches in brazil). i picked up a little sunburn out of my no-sunscreen-wearing arrogance, and made a new friend in the form of a stray dog who hung out with me after i pet him for awhile, but was above eating an orange slice i tossed him (not above sitting at my feet though, little cutie). we ran into him again as we walked back to the bus, which was funny cause sara, who was on a walk when i met the dog, apparently doesn't like dogs. sucked for her, cause the mutt followed behind her much more so than he did me, little cutie.

we had pizza for dinner at the beach (deciding catching the bus wasn't worth running back as we had walked a long distance..did i mention that as the sun waas setting the tide was finally low enough for us to have hit the pools? what a jip!). i'm sure i've mentioned that i love brazilian pizza, but i'm gonna put it in print one more time for good measure. the pizza here rocks, and even though this place was mediocre for brazil, it was still quite quite tasty. the spaniards didn't see any significant difference to spanish pizza though. maybe that means brazilian pizza really is european tasting?

sadly, they're heading out tomorrow so i won't be seeing anymore of em anytime soon. good people though, so i'll definitely keep intouch.

i've been really happy with all the freinds i've been making through this hostel. i've decided hostel's are the only way to travel, an opinion which will probably get me into trouble at some point down the line.

after we got back to the hostel, i met some knew kids i hadn't seen around, a canadian named sean and an ausie named tom.....woah, that sorta rhymes! they seem like good kids, so i'm sure we'll hang out. also, i called up rosane, a cute girl i met at the party last night. for details on that call, read the end of the previous post.

in summary, this girl was so forward it made me sorta paranoid, enough so to ask sean's pernambucano friend roberta if i should be worried about a mug-setup. the short verion of her explanation is no, and the anthropological lesson i learned from her is that northern brazilians aren't just forward, they totally reverse the order of courtship we have in the US: first they get to know each other's bodies, then they decide whether or not they like the person.

makes sense to me. brazil sure is different from the US though. i think tonight i experienced real culture shock for the first time in my life. i mean, this girl wants me so bad i thought she might be trying to rob me!


NEXT POST: david gets robbed.

WAWAWEEWA!!!!

good lord, i'm having too much fun here. After boa viagem, i went to maria farinha. gorgeous, gorgeous beach. that night i went into the old city to party. the bus dropped me of alone in a relatively bad neighborhood. bad like i was offered crack by some kid waving viles at me from across the street. I asked a cab driver if he knew about a bar i'd heard about and he told me that he didn't and would i like to go find it iwth him? uh...red lights flashing in my head, i quickly realized he was just a reasonably well kept homeles guy hanging out by a cab and quickly crossed the street. luckily, i met a super cool couple after i finally found the bar: irish guy married to a brazilian. suffice it to say we drank alot and got happy as larry.

the next day i decided on a whim to go find a beach i knew nothing about besides what a guide-to-beaches told me --sought out for diving-- and what Pedro (cool kid who worked at the hostel) knew. i left at around 11, which was a mistake because i was on the bus for three hours. i had to hoof it from the bus stop to the beach, touching sand at a neighboring beach about after about 30min. finally, exactly 4 hours after i got there, i rented a mask and went snorkeling. i was not dissapointed. in the space of an hour, i saw about 25 different kinds of fish ( il ost track around 21 or 22), crabs, snails, hermit crabs, sea urchins, shrimp, tons of diferent kinds of plants and alga and corals, a sea anemonae barnackle kinda thing that receded when i touched it (i almost wrote my name in the stuff).....lotta cool life. after wards i goofed around in tidal pools and ahd a victory snack on the naighboring beach Gaibu, where i took a picture of a kid doing a weelie on the sand. he thought i was crazy. well, i couldn't havce been any crazier than the kid on the bus (by bus i mean van with 20 people in it) who insisted on taking pictures of and filming me with his knew camera phone. i'm the subject of the first film he ever made! how cool is that!

that night was wild. i was supposed to meet pedro at the hostel then hit this party up in front of catedral da Sé, but he'd left as soon as he got work (7) and i didn't find him at the party. what i did find when i got to the HUGE party (8) was two cool spanish girls who i knew from the hostel. we drank and watched capoeira, then randomly met a local poor surf intructor named tiago. he taught us how to dance coco, a really simple looking stomp kinda dance that's surprisingly hard to get the hang of. the girls went to bed so they could wake up early, and tiago and i went on to the beach bars as the party migrated. there we drank, met his friend rodrigo who introduced us to two italians he'd met. after hanging out with them for awhile we continued on to find a chess board at the bar (how cool is that?).

interlude: northern brazilians are really forward, at least in terms of sexuality. i thought it was wierd that tiago kept trying to get girls attention by touching their hair, but then 2 girls passing by in the crowd casually caressed my face and told me they thoguht i was handsome (actually, they said some dirtier shit than that. still, too bad they were ugly).

now back to the bar. waiting for a chess game to open up, i saw a cute girl in the crowd. a few minutes later, her friend came up to me to tell me she thought i was cute and would i like to meet her. we only got to hang out cause she had to leave about 30min later, but how's this for forward: over the phone tonight she offered to take a bus at 10:30 (from boa viagem, where you're not even supposed to walk the streets at night) to come by, despite having stuff to do the next day. moreover, she casually suggested ditching work and school for a few days so we could rent a room at a nearby beach for a few nights. WILD.

here's how in shock i am: i have actually been entertaining thoughts that maybe, just maybe, she wants to mug me. i mean....DAMN!! another pernambucanan i talked to assured me that she's actually displaying fairly normal behavior for the area. still, my head is SPINNING.

Olinda

Recife is hot as hell. I am practically on the equator, and this area of brazil doesn't get much wind (it's actually cooler further north, i.e. on the equator, cause of the wind). The sun here is more intense than any sun i've ever been exposed to. You look up into the clear sk y, block the sun with your finger, and you can still see those incredible halo around it. when clouds pass under it, they almost always make sundogs. I hit the beach yesterday and it was almost unbearable. thank god for the free beach umbrellas set up and the easy access to beer.

i moved out of the hotel to a youth hostel in ol inda. it's much cooler here. the people staying here are awesome, the place ahs a hammocks and a kitchen, olinda is safe enough to walk around...much more my style. little further from the beaches though.

last night i went out with a good group of kids who are also tstaying here; in town for some kind of pharmaceutical conventions. we played this game that's like a cross between indian poker and 20 questions: everyone gets a four-letter word and puts the paper on their head. they ask the group questions to try to figure out their word. we played for like at least 2 hours.

oh man, we laughed so hard at the dumbest shit. at one point, one girl' word was her own name (rafa). she learned that her word is generally at her house, but not right now, was very close to her at the time...i almost died when she guessed the word as "you" (voce). so close, and yet so far. her word before that was "two " (dois), a word i'd given her, and she spent the first hour just trying to figure out what class her word belonged to.

another girl got the word "alive/live" (vivo). right off the bat i thought it was real hard, so i jokingly whispered to the girl who gave her the word "what happens when she asks 'is it alive?' " oh man, she overheard the question and was like, "Ok, it's alive!" and then started asking a bunch of different animals and shit...it was so bad. then someone told her it was a verb conjugated to the first person singular, and her train just jumped the tracks. she just let out a string of four le tter verbs. it was so sad.

another kid got laugh, and was told that it was a part of him, and his was big, but it's not part of your body.

...clearly , i had a lot of fun with these kids. we went out to a nearby bar afterwards and drank and ate and listened to music...real goo dbunch, i think they're leaving today or tomorrow. too bad, too bad.

i was getting bummed out about travelling alone, but i like the hostel situation. did i mention it's also super cheap here?

allright, i'mn gonna go shower. fucking heat man....

RECIFE

So i'm finally spending some of that money i've earned!

i'm in recife right now, way up north. i'm in my hotel instead of enjoying the nightlife cause the food is really heavy and it's apparently not safe to walk the streets anywhere.

right after i got here, i asked the front desk wher ei could get a nice meal cheap nearby, and they recommended a restaurant 3 blocks away, then arranged a ride for me. in fact, they insisted. the hotel made it sound like they were protecting me form the prostitutes. to their credit, the hoes are EVERYWHERE.

still, not being able to walk outside at night is pretty lame. i only picked this overp riced hotel cause the cabbie said it was in a safer enighborhood than the other one i was thinking of. what's the point of being in a safer neighborhood if you can't walk outside?

Nina quer mais paginas en portugues na internet

e chato que não tem muitas coisas en portugues na internet, por que eu não sei ler ingles!!

quero aprender a ler ingles, não so para ler a internet. Eu gostaria de entrar en um escola de ingles, so quando eu ficar mais velha.

she didn't realy want to write any of this, i had to force it all out of her. but hey, now my nine year old cousin is published.

I am the greatest english teacher ever.

yesterday, i taught an english lesson to an advanced student using the following materials:

1) a page long essay summarizing Kuhns "Theory of Scientific Revolutions" using excerpts form the wikipedia article on the book

2) johnny cash - boy named sue

3) Kirpal - "you kicked my dog!" prank phone call
-->i brought the kuhn in as a response to a discussion we had last week about 'Heroes" where i started bashing the science of the show, particularly how they present evolution. we started talking about heroes again, and tangentially she started talking about indian accents. so, i showed her a good strong pakistani accent. she udnerstood the whole thing the first time around and laughed the whole way through.

With these materials and a hw review, the lesson lasted about 2 hours.

Also I'm reading John Krakuer's "Into the wild" with another student. After our little 'book club' lesson, we tag-teamed a piece about Pélé on the uncycloopedia (the browser froze so we lsot it before he posted)

I am like the best english teacher the world has ever seen. Fullbright scholars, kneel before me and my greatness!!

Opus? Dei be Ridikulus!

This past weekend was a national holiday so i hit the beach with my family. they own a house on a small private beach directly between to very popular beach communities: Ubatuba and Caraguatatuba (awesome names, right?). the house is a part of a small, gated community composed entirely of houses. no resorts, no hotels, not tourists, no crime. just beach property.

On either side of the beach is a large hill. at the top of the northern hill is a huge church that was allegedly built by Ops Dei on the vatican's orders.

Immediately upon completion, the church was sold to an american company called "Sunrise Homes," that will turn it into a resort-hotel.

There are many, many reasons why this is fucked up, and I will outlien a few of them here. First, and most obvious, is that the property was built illegal (this whole diatribe is based on rumor by the way, but the story adds up). Builing resort properties on this beach is illegal according to local zoning. The first attempt to build the church did not pass, hence the papal orders. Brazil is a roman catholic country, so they do what rome tells em to and allowed the church.

moving right along, building a church means they don't have to pay taxes. in my opinion, if you build a dog house and then put a cat inside the day you finish, you didn't build a dog house. similarly, opus dei did not build a church, since no mass will ever be held inside (unless a rich couple decides to get married there). in my humble opinion, this constitutes tax evasion.

now here's the real kicker. Who funded this little operation? sure, the curch may line its pockets with similar enterprises, in which case old ivnestments just built up a new one, but think about this. A cathedral was being built in a poor, catholic, beach community. The build recieved the support of the people, who gave what meager donations they could to support the church, which is now being sold.

I feel that this is really fucked up. I plan to write a leter to the vatican, but shit, i've barely goten around to writing letters to my friends.

besides, when I sign the letter "MARX," they might disregard my opinion as a heathen.

Throw transportation down the well

if the sudden surge in posts isn't telling enough, i've had alot on my mind lately. i've also had more time on my hands. maybe the two are related.

i need to start working out my future a little bit. I just got out of a talk with ruth and david that started with me wondering with how i shold tender my earnings, and led inevitably to how long i plan to stick around, when and where i'm travelling, where i plan to go when i'm done here, and of course fillign me in on their travel plans so i can try and make mine coincide.

david causally pointed something out that is very important to consider. he told me that he was afraid for me (with respect to my travelling) because he recognized taht i am kind of spontaneous and like to act in the short term, whereas many of the things i wanna do really require liong term planning. at the time we weer talking about going to carnival in rio. i don't just need to figure out travel plans and junk, but i need to hook up with a samba school. before any of this hapens, i need to see if i can exchange my return ticket. if that happens, i need to put in for a leave extension from the rescue squad.

see, this is exactly whty i don't like making plans.

i asked david about a road trip we had done about 10 years ago (man time flies!). he mentinoed to me that the road we took wouldn't be a bad one for me to check out again, if i could rent a car. i started talkign about how road trips were my style and began to wax reminiscent about my x-coutnry trips in the US and sleeping in cars when david immediately jumped on me and said "if you sleep in your car, you WILL get mugged." i started laughing because his certainty was nuts. i wasn't laughing becuase i didn't believe him, but because this country is just so wierd like that.

anythign and everything you do, you are at a high risk of getting mugged in one form or another. jstu about all of my students, friends and family have been "assaultado" at one point or another, or even multiple times in a mroe than a few cases. one of my students told me about a time a biker snatched his glasses right off his face.

brazilians like to remind me how "violent" their coutnry is. as bad as the country is, unless michale moore lied to us, the US is MUCH more violent than brazil. here, sure, you are more likely to get mugged. big whoop. my glasses mysteriously disappeared on the bus, i got conned in rio, and some cops fucked with me. big whoop.

You want violent? let's talk to ex-DC mayor Marion Barry for a second: "Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." nough said.

still, i don't udnerstand how sleeping in your car can be more dangerous than camping. locked doors oughta win the security contest over tent flaps, right? oh wait, no guns win.

Latest steven spielberg travesty

Crimes against culture commited by Steven spielberg:



1) he "remastered" the star wars movies. once art is produced, leave it alone. Or for fucks sake, at least leave the original available. CG looks like crap next to the scenes with models and miniatures. Artists are never satisfied with their work...

2) he ruined A.I. by conitinuing the movie way after it should have ended. Cheap shot against Kubrick if you ask me: dude was dead and couldn't stop it.

3) he shot the star wars prequels. enough said. at least the third one satisfied what we ahd been waiting for. Too many new characters and politics and cg and general retardation in the first two...in general in fact. and he totally fucked up yoda.







Spielberg has performed yet anotehr sacriledge: to be released in 2008, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be the latest edition to the indiana jones TRILOGY. guess we can't call it that anymore. I mean, what the fuck is this, rocky? Indiana can't be old. it doesn't make sense. I thought harrison ford new better than to sell his soul like this.



I met spielbergs son max when i was at pitzer (kid goes to pomona). seemed nice enough. too bad his dad is a douche. I kinda pray someone kidnaps the kid and demands spielberg never sit behind an editing computer or within 200 yards of a respected actor as ransom. no offense max, but we have to save society from your dad.

if it HAS to be done, we should at least just let the raiders guys do it:

The State of the Union

Friends, Friends of friends, strangers who pass by my blog, distinguished readers. we meet here today by law and custom to consider the state of Dave's trip.

I am currently at something of a halway point. The original plan called for a five month trip, and we have recently reached the 2.5 month mark. Looking back on this trip, some of my intentions have been fulfilled, as have some of my fears.

I have spent lots of time with my family. I usual do not get to spend much time with my brazilian family, or even see them more than once every few years. this trip has provided me with an opportuntiy to get to know my family better, and even meet a few new members.

I have traveled. I have been to a variety of local beaches, a farm city in the interior and of course rio de janeiro. yet I have not traveled as often or nearly as far as I had originally planned.

I have worked. My recent pay days have resulted in a deficit of R$1152 from my agency and R$420 from one of my clients, with another R$640 expected form other clients. this equates to jsut over US$1000 spending money, rounding down deductions for food bus and cell (which has been a pretty shitty investment thus far). Hopefully, the bulk of this money will go to future travel, as that was the idea to begin with. I have recently learned that travel is more expensive than i thought, and most of the things i wanna do i should give more time to than i had planned, especailly for the price.

I have partied. I have met many cool people. but my party average has been stable at approximately one outing of note per week, far below the revelery originally planned for the trip, likewise the precedent set while Ben was in town. this problem at least can be easily remedied, and shall.

One of the fears I expressed early on was an uncertainty in my capacity to meet people without contacts my age, without taking classes, without co-workers. In the above described parties, I have met many cool locals, as planned. yet, my loneliness persists. I ahve always been comfortable in my own skin and have no problem entertaining myself on my own, but a few friends would be nice. The friends i've made seem like really cool people, but i haven't had the opportunity to hang out with anyone more than a handful of times which has been a dissapointment.

Clearly, this situation is complciated and will take some thought. there may be no solution readily available, short of befriending the homeless who do not have jobs or school to get in the way of hanging out. Not good drinking buddies though.

Mainly, what needs to be considered is the duration of the trip. The big question is, am i erally at a halfway point? i want to build stronger relationships. i want more money for travel. I want to travel more. I could do all of these thigns if i commit more time to this adventure.

the more time i spend in brazil though, the less time i ahve to spend elsewhere. Will i travel the world? will I travel latin america with ben?

Moreover, will i continue my education?

that's probably the biggest question of all. Med school has always been on the horizon, then i started thinking about grad school in philosophy. lately i've been entertaining thoughts about fidning a neurology program that would allow me to do philosophy of mind. the logner i wait, the harder it will be: my MCAT will expire.

i came down here largely to find myself, and the process has begun, but certainly has a way to go still. i need to start thinking about my next moves. i hate to think about the future in general, but at this point in my life/trip some planning is clearly necessary.

Entertaining myself

So this weeknd David and Ruth went to Ubatuba. I had already arranged with Paulo to have class on saturday to make up for one he missed; athis week had been busy for him, and he'd actually missed a few. normally, i wouldn't give classes on saturday, less in the morning, but he's my most loyal fan, so i bent for him. well, he canceleld on me at the last minute, no surprise, meaning i cuold sleep in! still, to late to go to ubatuba, whcih would've been cool.

i'm glad i didn't go though. i had a good weekend.

i sorta wasted my friday. i kept telling myself i was bored and that i would go out. well, 11pm rolled aroudn pretty fast and i spent all night in front of the tv. But that whole laziness jsut made me more stoked on saturday, cause I HAD to make up for my lost friday.

saturday i met up with nayara and some of her friends at an art exhibit in the city center. I got there n hour late cause i waited for a bus that never came. waiting for the bus i ran into a friend of Falvia's (my cousin), so i got on the bus with her and went to a neaqrby metro. the art exhibit wasn't my style (old religious carvings from the center of brazil), but i got there so late that we practically left right after i got there anyway. nayara's friends all bailed, so nayara and i wandered the city a little.

we checked out this beautfiul cathedral called Sé, where there jsut happened to be a police wedding going on, so it was kinda fun seeing the honor gaurd and hearing the police band. the cathedral had a huge organ that spanned the back of the cathedral, apparently only one of 4 or so of its kidn in the world!

afterwards we grabbed a quick bite to eat, then lazed towards the buses. on the way there, we passed a mall that was featuring a really really good beatles cover band, so we checked it out. a few weeks ago a local cover band (recognized as one of the best beatle cover badns in the world) set a world record playing throuhg the entire beatles repertoire front to back in one set; i think this was them. they even had the voices down, i was super impressed. still, i couldn't et over the fans. these people realy loved the beatles. it was wierd seeign so many people singing along in english, and it was great hearing heavy accents on certain words.

after a few songs, nayara had to get on her way so i walked her back to the buses. i decided to hit up a few friends and see if anyone could hang, so i called up basically everyone i could who wasn't family, only to find no one could hang out. everyone was either working or sick or had plans....it was crazy. so, i continued my little adventure. i went back to the beatles jam, heard em out till the end, then wandered the city center.

the city center is kind of...a shit hole. it's touristy during the day, but at night it's all goths, tramps and cheap porn vendors. don't ask me why, but there are tons of goth kids in são paulo. you'd think being a goth was hard enough with the alienation and teen angst and all that, but i mean, FUCK, these kids must be nuts to rock the black, heavy clothing and long hair in brazil. whatever. it's hot enough for me, anyway.

there wasn't anythign to do after the beatles quit, so after i'd satisfied myself wandering around, i jumped on the metro hoping to find a new bar to hang out at in villa madalena. i got off a metro stop early since my last experience at the villa madalena stop sucked (ben and i couldn't find any cool bars then got hassled byt he cops at gun point). i got some bad advice about a road to check out by the metro guy, so i kept on going and ended up back at the Ó Do Borogodo, a samba joint and realy enjoeyd a few weeks ago.

i got there about 2 hours before the music started, so i bought a beer, and started warming up, which was kinda lame cause i was there alone and they give you HUGE beers, meant to be worked at with groups of people. so i decided to invite myself over to a table occupied by two girls. When i asked if i could sit down, the cuter girl answered me "Disculpay, No fahla pour-two -gase." no fucking way. last time i was here, i met Georgiana and spent the whole night speaking english. saturday night, the first table i sit down at jsut happens to be the only english speakers in the joint.

One girl was from miami, the other form finland. they were nokia workers on a night out. not the most interesting conversationalists, but it was nice talking to another american who had been in the country about as long as me (of course, i speak portuguese and she don't, mwuahahaha). When ricardo arrived, i ditched em to say high.

I mentioned ricardo in passing a few posts back. I met ricardo at a feijoada Alex (flavias bf/fiancee/husband) brought me to a while ago. Ricardo, a professional musician, was the birthday girls bf. they're no longer together, but that's neither here nor there. Ricardo told me at that party that, yeah, he'd be totally down to trade english lessons for samba lessons, and we traded info. well, i never got back to the kid, and i wasn't going to let this chance slip by. I got his info, and we are def gonna do it.

ricardo plays the pandeiro (a kind of tamborine), and he plays a MEAN pandeiro. i was skeptical when i first saw thing, kind of wondering why he was the only percussive element in a badn with 3 string instruments and a flute/sax player. all i can say is that i am ready to leard from this guy; it sounded like he was playing 3 drums at the same time.

but yeah, the ó was fun as usual. met 2 cute jewish girls, Talita and her friend Ligia (super rare to meet jews outside of hebraica, i've been finding), and their friend Fernando. Talita was super cool, a psych major at PUC and a kidnergarten teacher at hebraica. def wana see her again. her friend was cool and really outclassed me as a dancer. i asked her for a lesson and she jsut kept giving me advice about trying to feel th usic...damn theater kids. their friend fernando was a good guy too, spent some time in canada an dpicked up a taste for football and hockey while there (i foudn someone to watch the super bowl with!!!!).

leaving the ó, i entered the twilight zone. Not only did the cab driver recognize me, he rememebred i was an english teacher, and the street i lived on. woah der. i hadn't been to the ó in at elast 2 weeks, maybe mroe; last time i visited was the ngith before i left for caconde, which was before rosh hashanah.....i mean, damn!

one of the worst parts about going out on my own is that i have no backup, no one to help me piece things together from the cryptic artifacts occasionally unearthed when seeding through the nights wreckage the morning after. sunday morning i was thumbing through my notebook and found what i thought was an email address for "fernanda - canada." WHO THE FUCK WAS FERNANDA?!?! I DON'T REMEMBER ANY FERNANDA??" i beat my head against the wall for about two hours before i put canada and hockey together, realized the 'a' was an 'o' and remembered who it was. super frustrating, not the first time, and far from the last. Hopefully i'll pull a system together to keep this sorta thing from happening, like taking notes wheni get emails or something.

whatever, i think i've been doing pretty well for myself on my own. there hasn't been a single night i've gone out on my own and found myself unable to meet a few new really cool people.

so sunday i slept in and decided to go check out a fair in liberdade, the asian district. the fair was cool and i wandered aroudn there basically all afternoon, and picked up some books that were on reserve for me at the bookstore.

I had bought a dvd of Child's play a few days before cause it was super cheap (packaged with the amityville horror, the two of them were less than $7!! and this was in a legitimate store!). i was decided from the hangover and all the walking, so i decided to just kick it with a beer and a pizza with the movie that night. well, the pizza took for ever and turned out to be a poorly choiced order, and i couldn't figure out how to get the dvd player to work, so that plan kidna went to hell, but it was nice vegging out in front of the tv anyway.

David and Ruth got back to find me half asleep on the couch, painfully trying to stay awake to watch the man in the iron mask (which was a dissapointment).

I slept alot, danced alot, met some new people, and even caught a few new sites. I'd say it was a pretty successful weekend.

Tiiiiiiiime, is on my side....

So far, this week has been awesome, and it looks like it will continue to be so. The weather these days has been kinda lame (overcast, cold, windy). But you know what? THIS WEEK IS THE WEEK OF FREE TIME. I've had tons of cancelations, so consequently I've had more Dave time lately than i have in a while. today I had my first free weekday-afternoon basically since I started working!

I started the day by waking up early, biking to a local park where I did my qi gong, which I hadn't done in weeks excluding sunday. i've been meaning to practice more, and just the practice i've done these past few doeshas been really energizing. My cousin flavia was thinking of starting tai chi classes. if she ever gets aroudn to it, i'm totally in. if not, maybe i'll teach her my qi gong...

afterwards, I had breakfast at a bakery. I usually have breakfast on the run, which means some kinda fried food i can walk with or a pão de quejio (baked ball of cheese bread).

after this glorious morning, I still had time to run crazy errands on av. paulista before class. I hadn't made it up to av. paulista in WEEKS. I used to spend all day there. lately Faria Lima has been my home base and I don't like it nearly as much. Paulista has a great bookstore, a museum, a park, all kidns of crazy buildings, cool street vendors, and metro access. all faria lima has is a mall, some restaurants and an internet cafe, but it's where all my students are at.

Paulista sorta became my stomping grounds when i got here. It felt good to be back.

I'm going to write more letters. I finally got aroudn to sending Laura chernin a postcard in nepal. we'll see when that gets there. so that just leaves like 20 billion people i need to write and send things to. i was going to write on sudnay, but i spent all day playing with my cousins (a worthy sacrifice, those kids are hilarious). maybe i'll knock some more names off that list this week.

lord knows i have the time :D

Kol nidre

tonight was the first night of Yom kipur. We had a nice pre-fast dinner at the house with my aunt, uncle, his three kids and two grand children. Afterwards, we went to the temple. Of course, i knew no one and had crazy trouble following the service: not only were the translated portions in portuguese, but the few prayers I shoudl have known by heart were either slowed down alot or sung to a different tune, making it really really hard to keep up!

but that's not why i'm posting. I'm posting because as we were walking back to our car, some dude driving by called out the window, "JUDEUS FILHO DA PUTA!"

It was pretty clear to me who the "filho da puta" was in this situation and although i am trying to experience as much of brazil as possible, I have no intentino of geting acquainted with their prisons. My uncle on the other hand had other thingso n his mind and chased after the guy. I couldn't let my 60yo uncle get his ass kicked by some anti-semite, so I followed him.

My uncle gave the guy a good scare. When the asshole saw him coming, he almost hit a car trying to get away. David (my uncle) chucked his keys at the car since they were the only things handy, then foudn a rock and continued the chase as the car went around the corner. he never got a chance to use the rock, but luckily he didn't get hurt either.

I don't know how common this is. One of the people on the Caconde trip relataed a very similar experience that had happened a few montes prior.

I would have liked to have caught up with the car and beat the guy through the open window he shouted at us from. I would have liked to have thrown things and gotten all worked up. But would good would that have done? if he thinks badly of us, that behavior certainly wouldn't change his mind or encourage positive attitudes towards jews. If he thinks badly of us, his opinion has that much less value and shouldn't effect me. If he thinks badly of us, fuck him. It's Yom kippur, and i'm focusing on my own sins tonight. I don't need to worrya botu some other asshole's problems.

Watching my uncle chase after the guy when I had made the decision that "fuck him, he's jsut some asshole" made me wonder if i had done the right thing. As a foreigner, playing it safe makes sense. As a Jew, I believe my pacifism was the right decision as well.

Shanah Tova.

Stay safe.

Peace.

Camburi

So last thursday I called up Pablo (from the caconde trip) to see if he was down to get some beers. He said he was busy, but would hit me back on Friday. Well, on Friday he called me up asking if I wanted to go to the beach with him, his brother, and another friend.

I ended up blowing off the PUC kids again to go to the beach. It’s been at least a month since I’ve hung out with them, so I feel kinda bad about that, but the beach was sick and pablo’s little group was nothing but good people.

Saturday and Sunday we went surfing. The water was great, but the weather was so-so. Still, great time.

Coming back from Camburi, My friends surprised me when we stopped to eat at a foreign pizzeria franchise (one of only two or so in the city) where we had to wait 20 minutes for a table. They were all over the place, talking up its great food at a low price. What was the restaurant you ask? Pizza hut. Fucking pizza. Same greasy, gross pizza as the states, but the restaurant was made up to look respectable.

Really, they weren’t selling pizza, they were selling an image. They were selling a “first world” experience. It hadn’t really occurred to me how impressive that image is to people down here until driving back from Camburi, we saw a billboard for a whorehouse (really. No shit. Billboard for a whorehouse) that advertised itself as “your night in the first-world!” I laughed, no one else did.

Caconde

get ready for a long post folks. sorry. i had a really raelly good time this weekend and i've got a lot i wanna put down.

thurs evening i left for caconde. The trip was off to a shaky start: i ate fast as hell to get there on time, which i was only one of 2 people to do. waiting for the bus, the people who trickled in only got wierder and wierder until finally after about 5 people some normal folks started showing up. despite an alleged age cap of 25, i was easily the yougnest person on the trip, the oldest being 42. i bunked with 3 other guys who turned out to be pretty cool, even the the kid in the bunk next to me snored like he was sucking his dying breaths through a straw.

friday we went white water rafting. i took the front of the raft, which was a challenge since the commands were in portuguese but was fine anyway. we hit some really fun rapids; the water was fast and there were some surprising drops. as often as possible, our guide would pop us into hygros and spin us around with the raft filling up with water, sometimes working the raft to buck people out. towards the middle we stopped time walk the raft aroudn a dangerous class 4 and took a break to cliff jump into a really big rapid at the end of the series. it was high enough that I could flip off....coolness.

saturday we went "cascading:" rappeling down a 45m waterfall. the guides set up a guideline over the fall for safety which was super lame, forcing you to fly over the fun parts. i've rappeled plenty at the squad, so after one run i wasn't really down. I convinced the guide to elt me go without the guide line which was MUCH COOLER. i slipped and slide a bunch on some parts but didn't hurt myself. i got rappel right into and udner the fall, which no one else had the opportunity to. at one point, there is a negative space behind the fall, so i had to invert right under the fall. totally sick, thrilling as hell, lots of fun.

Caconde is out in the middle of nowhere. hella stars like WOAH (cali enough for ya?). thing is, it's the southern hemisphere, so i couldn't find anything i recognized besides the milky way which was GORGEOUS. a friend pointed out a few important constellations (scorpio, the southern cross), and i saw 3 shooting stars.

Being in the boonies, the locals don't stay in caconde if they can help it. this results in a phenomenon i had never before imagined: the party scene is overrun by high schoolers. friday night we hit the town and couldn't find a girl over 16 out. pretty, pretty lame.

saturday night, on the other hand, was AWESOME. for some reason there were less children around, more kids our age. a friend of a friend who lived in town set us up with his neice, juliana, who was really cool and managed to find us rides to this party we were trying all night to get to (she was so cool, she arranged rides for her friends but didn't go herself until she found a way for us to get there. cool chick, huh?).

at the party i ran into a friend of ju's i'd met earlier that night, adriana, a 21yo recently graduated nurse who wanted to work on ambulances. i spent the night hanging out with her and her friends who were all really cool. they did these silly litle dance rituals where they would all fall on the floor and kick their legs, or just tackle each other...cool locals. We ended up hooking up and my friends from the trip saw us, so the next day i'd developed a reputation as a "pegador" (loosely translated as pick-up artist, pimp, or maybe man-slut. good connotations, good connotations) which was kinda embarassing.

dri's cousin's fiancee was super drunk and generally alotta fun. she kept encouraging us to kiss, which made me feel like i was in middle school, but whatever i didn't really mind. at one point the drunk cousin caught me in the face with ehr cigarette, nearly taking out my eye. i've still got a little burn on my cheek, maybe 50mm from my eye. close call folks, close call.

dri, her cousin, and the drunk fiancee gave me a ride back in their car that night. the drunk girl had to pee really bad but was to drunk to get anything out, so we kept stopping on the way back, which was fine cause it gave us a few last make-out opportunities on the way back. we ended up beating my crew form the trip back to the motel even thoguh they left before us (they had stopepd for food). they literaly pulled up right after us, so they basically started busting my balls as soon as i got outta the car.

by teh way, folks from caconde showed me crazy hospitality. i got invited to stay at 2 people's houses and a wedding in may!

i spent the bus ride back to SP trading jokes with the guys and watching borat and episodes of south park i'd gotten from one of the nerdier guys on the trip. the jokes were sometiems really ahrd to understand/tell, but the effort taught me a bunch of new vocab, and the fact that i could appreciate brazilian humor built up my confidence in the language a little more.

all in all, an AWESOME weekend. i'll post pictures when i have em.

VIVE LA REVOLUTION!!

So this friday is the brazilian independence day, Sept. 7th. consequently, it's a national holiday. i've signed up to go on a random trip to some place called Caconde through a jewish comunity club called "Hebraica." hopefully i'll meet some cool folks there, and if it sucks, at least i get to go white water rafting (they cal lit "Cascading") and maybe see some nice chunk of nature.

also, the brazilian people have been really dissatisfied with their government for along, long time now. on the 7th, there's going to be a country-wide panelação. "panela" is portuguese for pan, like pots and pans. a panelação is a very brasilian method for showing discontent: they bang pots and make noise for a couple of minutes.

i know about this demonstration because of an email my aunt recieved a few days ago. she seemed excited about it. my uncle said he'd been waiting for something like this and proceeded to show me how many books he's written or organized relating to teen violence. i have a strong feeling they got caught up in a chain mail, but we'll see what happens.

did i mention i think my english is getting worse? i spend all my time speaking english to people who speak it poorly, and i think it might be getting to me....

a moral dilemma

this will probably seem lamer than lame to anyone reading it, but this is has been bothering me all weekend.

my biggest client, Paulo, is this middle-aged dude who's the president of a lartge real estate firm here in são paulo. i don't jsut say biggest because well, the man is intimidatingly huge, but i teach him 4 times a week. i need horsu, so that's GREAT, even if our classes move frustratingly slow.

the dilemma: last friday, one of his associates came to me asking mehow much i charge. i gave him the breakdown, then remembered paulo is actually my client through this company that hands me business for a cut. in other words, if i take paulo's associate on, i make more money (double, actually), but run the risk of charging him less than paulo is charging, which would be, well, fucked up. worst case scenario: i get fired (obviously). why is this so bad? well, not only would i (might i?) lose my clients, but i'd also lose my main resource for learning material, i.e. textbooks.

i encountered this company through my cousin who is good friends with my boss, so i actually ran into my boss at that brithday part on sat. i couldn't bring myself to talk to her then. i really feel like i should talk it over with my boss instead of just jumping into this client head first. it sucks that i make chicken feed with this company, but the fact is i need their books.

i ahve other clients. maybe i shold decline the client, and not take on any more clients through this company so i ahve mroe time open for students who will pay me directly. of course, taht might make me a worse person in context....

i'm not perfect, damnit.

birthday

The family down here has this really cool tradition they do for kids birthdays; instead of hiring entertainment, they have the kids write a play. it soudns campy and i suppose it is, but it's actually really cool. the whole family helps out in the creative process, and everyone has a role in the play.

Saturday was the first time i got to participate in one of these plays. my young cousin/neice/whatever you wanna call her Lis turned 9, and had a space themed party. her play was super cute. there was an ambiguous problem on the moon that had to be resolved in person, so she flew to the moon with a couple other astronauts (aunt, uncle, grampa), passed an american ship on the way up (me), encountered an alien (sister), ate at a cafe on the moon (mom, grandma, nanny), and in the end saved the day (the problem was smoke coming from the aliens moon-marshmallows or something...she convinced the alien to sell ehr recipe to the restaurant, and they all lived happily ever after). she even wrote a little song, and of course tehre was plenty of other childrens songs incorporated which was wierd cause you know i've never heard children's brazilian music and every one else knew the words.

but yeah, really cute birthday, and i was glad i got to participate. i'll put up a picture in the near