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.

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.