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.

south side of the world

Today I was walking in Morumbi, strange newish neighborhood that brings together richest and poorest. When Bush was here he stayed in the Hilton Morumbi, with the above pictured view (yes, I have friends in high places) out on the highway and the favela alongside it. It was the first clear day in at least three, and there was a fingernail clip moon in sky. As I came up to the highway I saw a teenage kid in a baggy favela sweater standing by the red light where exit ramp cars make their first stop.

I had a sinking feeling, thinking I might have to share a long light on the same corner with him, have him ask me for something and see that I'm a gringo, here where you can't even carry a laptop type bag with peace of mind at any time of day. To my relief the light turned red as I came to the corner and the kid went out among the cars as I crossed. As he approached the nearest one he lifted up his sweater and twirled 360 in front of the hood before moving to the driver side window with his hand out. I made out the flour-white face of a grampa through the blue tinted glass, waving him off angrily.

Then the kid repeated the twirl in front of another car. I had first thought it was the beginning of a dance performance, as juggling is a common red light peddle technique among the young, but there was no show, only the twirl. Is he showing his shapely torso? offering his body to a more lecherous grampa? is he showing that he's hungry? Halfway down the block I realized what it was. He was showing that he didn't have a gun in his waistband.

Explicitly showing you don't have a gun is a good practice considering that in this same neighborhood last month a couple was shot to death in front of their 7 year old when they stopped at a red light . Unfortunately it doesn't have the intended effect. Just like the translation client of mine working in a skyscraper near there who made me suspicious when he assured me that I didn't have to worry about him paying me for my work.

I kept walking and there were some pink cumulous clouds low on the horizon, the five or six skyscrapers ahead of them in relief, it looked like a still of a hollywood-sized seismic event that was leveling the city, the stack of cloud a plume of dust, the buildings in the foreground the next to go. It looked so strange that I thought it might be the smoke from the plane that crashed here yesterday, but then I remembered the TV had showed that that specific end of the world event was down to embers and assigning the blame.

In Brazil we have that phrase about the gift horse and it's mouth, but what we really need is the phrase --"don’t wait too long to look at a fox’s mouth or else you will be caught prying at its butthole as it walks away from your henhouse." Only years of cultural acculturation would make this phrase instantly understandable, so let me bring you up to date.

The Buddha above pictured was a gift, though a special kind of gift, a gift from a friend who is selling everything they have to fund a move to another country. It’s a parting gift, a gift that came along with the amply priced pieces of furniture that we took off her hands. A ‘couldn’t fit it in my suitcase, and I love you’ gift.

The giver, a fox both in 70’s and Aesopian parlance, gave us the Buddha. She told us to put it on the fridge and surround it with coins, a charming gesture which instantly reminded me that all religions are equally stupid. Then she stayed at our place for an increasingly tense and unhappy three weeks, during which we saw past the 70’s fox and watched the fable unfold like a slap to our face.

Exactly which animal we are is debatable, perhaps best assigned by another person. Indeed what animal would feel intensely uncomfortable with an already-former friend staying in the house, hogging the computer, bitching dinner guests she’s never even met before, filling rooms with smoke at 9 in the morning, and eating food in quantities designed to be just small enough not to pay for anything, but do nothing about it? Some weak, stupid animal. I go for Donkey. But maybe our petty bourgeois manners and offenses taken fit best with something like a chicken.

Anyway, the moral hit home a few days ago, when the phone bill arrived and the disappeared fox left R$200 worth of droppings in our cupboards, which are now, like the Buddha whose coins went for bus fare, so dastardly bare.

of montreal

Yes yes I am so happy to be here, but OH GOD, I miss our time in Montreal. The city where we met, the city where we spoke all languages possible, neige, duas, poutine, chocolat chaud, iceskating, movie store, casita…
It was us and the world. Sometimes we wanted to be part of outside just to look around, talk to people just to have the big pleasure to come back to our little world one for each other.

Death becomes her...

We are all familiar with death in his above pictured manifestation, black robes worn low, generous if outmoded gillette. I was chatting with an friend this weekend and he was telling me about a short story by Woody Allen, who happens to be very popular in Brazil. Indeed, as Brazil has adopted the Ramones as their own and are proud to say that they're more popular here than Queens, cinephiles with flexable metatarsels are want to say the same about Woody.

Is it really true, as they have told me here, that he can´t find funding for his films in the US? And if it is, would that be for artistic reasons or for those so emphatically stated by Mos Def in his solo debut comparsion with O.J.? (track 10 as stated by my compadre)

One theory goes that Mos had tried to find different director to fit in with his white-people-can´t-be-artists argument, but exhausted an entire rhymebook trying to flip 'Polanski', wisely discarding "couldn't keep it in his pants-ki."

Anyway, as my associate paraphrased the Allen story which in turn parodies the Seventh Seal, since he was speaking Portuguese, he called death a 'she.' This is because death as a noun is feminine, just as for instance, a pen is feminine. Indeed, a direct translation of portuguese would have everyone talking like sailors, "Ah the wind, look at him blow" or "How is your lawnmower? He's a little bit broken."

This is kind of funny because when an english speaker hears these gendered pronouns, we tend to picture pens or chairs or wind with the accompanying genetalia and facial hair, in the spirit world of their essence that is. Or at least I do.

In fact used to play the game- Why is that noun a man or woman? Why is the sea a he? Is the foam his beard? Because he´s strong? Couldn´t he be a girl, a harsh mistress that takes you down into her womb when you drown, poor sailor you? Maybe, I reason, its because when the gender was assigned they didn't know that life first came from the sea, in which case the womb cycle-of-life thing would be a shoo-in and the sea would be a girl.

But what all but the most silly second language learners learn is that when latin-speaker says these nouns, they don´t think about the gender, they assign it correctly as a matter of grammar, but they use he/she in the same way that we use 'it', and not in the spirit of rum-drinking, plank walking, barnacle-bearded seafarers.

So even though my associate called Death 'she,' if he (finding himself in a woody allen type position vis-a-vis the reapster and of a silly woody disposition) were to lift the robes of Death on a prank, he too would expect to find what could only be called a boner.

Say it like a surfer;

boooner

He calls us T and Ta Ta

His first word was Cheese!

Rafael my nephew turned one in February. Today he sat in my lap at the computer and watched videos of himself. Were I as tech-savy as he, I would have filmed him as he watched himself, just to show the calmness on his face.

Remember that movie, Baraka? The best image was the first, the Japanese monkey in the hotspring, soaking in no-minded pleasure as any human would. His look was a little like that, passive, pleasured, supremely calm,I think because the clip we were watching of him he was just chillin, walkin around grandpa´s house and getting followed by the camera. When he sees a video where he is laughing, he laughs again.

Is this because the joke (in this case getting grampa´s hat put on him) is still funny?

Anybody who can tell me what is going on in this 16 month year olds head as he watches himself on video please tell me. He started smiling for photos when he was like 8 months, and now, like the rest of us, he looks at the screen on the back of the camera after the picture was taken to see how it came out. He knows how to turn the electronic keyboard on that was brought out from Her childhood closet to be pounded on and its automatic songs danced to once again. He can also plug a charger into a cellphone with his little hands. Also, he has never complained that he didn't like the sound of his voice on tape.

Today I taught him to turn the little wheel between the two buttons on the mouse, which made the moving picture of him grow and shrink. Its amazing to see how easy it is to learn the relation between button and action. It is easier than, for example, A-B-C. He will rule the world.

What scares me a little bit is that when he points to himself on the screen he says nene 'baby' so there is a small chance that all of this is going horribly wrong and that we and thousands of other over-technologied families are are creating some new sense of the self that will spell the end of all civilization. But then again maybe Rafael is the savior, the only one to actually break oin through to the other side, to run 360 loop-de-loop in the go-kart and not fall at the apex but come sailing through. Having yet to fail at anything, his smile was made for that moment.