Doi tudo

Iris is on tv, and doi tudo. Doi ainda mais because one of our houseguest dried thier face with one of our towels after using a caustic facial product, staining the green towel white. Cassete! The role of towel use in the fortunes of our guests would have been a key post had this blog forced its way into existence 6 months earlier.

The weather is grey in our city, and if you recall the weather reporting I promised to do, its a dark day indeed. Our house, I must admit, is governed by seasons...

And Iris? Oh she's the girl whose booty be in my face every time I walk by a newspaper stand. She is seasonal as well, the product of Brazilian Big Brother, meriting another post. The show has ended and the housemates are busy staying on TV as long as possible. Some who went before them have made it into Novelas and other tv shows. Iris, a working class hero, besides the big bucks for playboy, has landed a billboard holding a jar of olives and the TV commercial that just passed in which she announced that thanks to a new credit plan, a digital camera is with reach of everyone.

The Weather Underground

To prove my newly remember autofocus, I'm going to start a project that I've planned for a long time. It's a list of Her maladies. Similar to a weather forecast, this information is useful for all those who plan to spend a day inside the wide outdoors of her personality, as well as for the creation of a historical register amassed in the hopes that a pattern might one day emerge to explain such profusion.

Today is a tough day to start. Heavy cough and difficulty breathing in the night time- so much lying on top of me wasn’t impossiblizd by gravity/phlegm physics. This condition was, however an improvement to Monday, where the not-uncommon state “doi tudo” (everything hurts) was declared.

I'd sworn I'd wear purple

I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe it- I had become just the blog I swore I would never be. You know, one of those horrid blogs who delight in picking nits out of hair of others, lint off the fabric of society, kinks in the Rube Goldberg machine of language.

Gente! Disculpa! From now on I promise I’ll stick to mowing my own back yard, as the original intent of this blog was much the same as the gardener’s- to grow and watch grow your own.

Aquela coisa chata

Why do words, suddenly appear,
so every time, you can hear
just what they mean, and all the things
they’re supposed to do?

This phenomena of the suddenly appearing word is part of living as a foreigner inside a language world. Starting out, it can be an incredibly basic word, even one of those that straddles the line between word and sound, which you then realize is everywhere. I can imagine a visitor to English one day finding the language full up of like like like everywhere he goes, stumped as to how he didn’t hear it before.

The longer you hang around a language, the more you feel the right to dislike a word, and that happened to me with a basic Brazilian word that's used in an annoying way. The word is Aquela- that. Reference the above foto and her most famous song to understand the special way it’s being used.

That thing, that thing, that thiiiiiiiiiiiinng, is what I want you to hear. Now imagine if the song were “the thing, the thing, the thiiiing.” It would be missing something.

The answer, besides that thing, is emphasis. This is the way people be using it down here.

I identified/hated the word for the first time when I was overhearing a conversation on the bus, in which a very performative storyteller was telling about another time he was on the bus and there was a couple having a fight. But it wasn’t a fight, it was that fight. Indeed, it seemed the couple had started having that fight. But considering that the reason for the fight wasn’t known or much less communicated by the storyteller, so that aquela, a specifying word specifying nothing, wasn’t just some sauce for your sentence but actually a hotdog bun with no meat and all ketchup.

There is another guy who I know who, instead of sending a hug like everybody does when they are hanging up on the phone, he sends that hug, much better because he is playing off it, and at the same time implying that his hug is special and memorable, which it certainly is since he be 5 foot 2.

Day in the Office

One shitty thing that can happen is that you have to sit down and interview someone and they turn out to be your doppelganger, he was bearded like me, small headed. But when I extended some kind of look across to him acknoowldeging this, a kind of open look, it went totally unregistered. I had to sit there and speak, deciding whether he had ignored it or missed it completely. In the end though, I got a chuckle out of him. Then I went out and wrote up my sincere report.