Soliloquy on Becoming like Every Other Adult

"Aren't you so excited to leave? I can imagine it must be so incredible!"

Those are the words that come almost verbatim out of the mouths of almost anyone I describe leaving for Portugal to, at least anyone who isn't in my immediate circle of close friends. When I go on to express that I have mixed feelings about it, and that I'm still trying to just get through the bureaucratic process of graduating before it will sink in, I'm met with ambivalence or surprise that I'm not positively shitting myself more excited about it. The truth, as I have learned it, is that not to have mixed feelings about something is not to have analyzed it and thought out the full context of whatever that something is. The other truth, as I have learned it, is that red tape and bureaucracy are things that will never end in adult life, not after college is "over", and especially not when you're moving to another country that has enough of its own problems to be welcoming in more potential economic liabilities.

I wrote about this before, but the point of this post is that I can be forgiven for a downtime in my pursuits of interests while I'm in the middle of a sobering reality check that involves all aspects of life, from finances to relationships. At the same time that I've reconciled my relationship to my own country with my desire to get out in the world, I've become aware that, despite my youthful years, time is not as abundant as it seems to be; instead of thinking about figuring out what I'm doing with myself, it must simply be done. The amount of things that need to go right and align themselves for what I intend to do in Portugal is staggering, and yet, it's not a degree of magnitude worse than what I had previously gone through to spend a significantly shorter period of time there. Anything I have to do after I've actually arrived in the country seems the easy part.

The world of undergraduate studies is a cozy bubble, which I find coddles the friendships and contacts you build and makes it easy to live in a world of the temporary—a space in time where you know things will, for the most part, not last, but where the day of reckoning is far enough away that you don't have to worry about it. Now I'm worrying about it. Moving away from the comfort of going to and from class, working short hours, and seeing people with flexible time schedules exacts a huge strain on even the closest of relationships, and part of leaving is also facing the idea that some of that strain already existed, it just wasn't brought up, because college life reduces its importance. There is tension constricting the amount of socialization I can bring myself to do and which others can bear to put up with, knowing as we all do that at some point I'll be on another continent and unable to communicate and build connections with the same ease, grace, and thoughtfulness as naturally occurs in person. I'm forced to consider my place in an intimate relationship. This process of bursting the bubble of college life to move onto other pursuits is a solemn note in accepting that when you're putting yourself out there, you really are on your own doing so.

When I stop and think about it, things are going the way they should be. But tell that to the gray hair that popped up in my eyebrow.

Gay

It's over, I voted, now let's move on from all of the amateur punditry that's been going on since the campaigns started and the media picked up on it. But bravo to Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, which all voted to affirm that people like me deserve logical and not religious sensibility in the legislation affecting us.

So, it happened. I watched a whole season of RuPaul's Drag Race in one day (among other shows), vegging out to drag divas, heathers, and their t. It made for entertaining television, but I felt the same sensation of being a little dumber afterward that accompanies watching the Real Housewives or the Kardashians. It was a day of cotton candy and cheesecake for the brain in the form of wigs and duct tape.

Identity, culture, belonging. These concepts are thrown around so often in the collegial environment, discussed over coffee or tea in the late afternoon with friends who have the same malleable beliefs and understanding of lower-division coursework that you do, conversations accompanied by the vague feeling of advancing yourself into a progressive new social era. Without this kind of thought, though, we might never come to build on our understandings of the world or question the things around us. These three concepts are things I find myself frequently questioned about by other gays most often, whether being derided for not engaging enough or out of innocent enough curiosity.

I think what interests me the most are the accusations I get of somehow not being gay enough or of engaging with our culture. But you're always denying your culture, you're just not outspoken or political enough, you're such a bad gay. I hear it so often, and I don't know what that means. I challenge anyone to present to me a solid showing of what we could call a singular gay culture. That doesn't exist, nor should it, because the whole point of queer culture is the idea that we're all crazy little critters trying to make the most sense of the world the way we're in it with all of our differences—cultural and otherwise—and they're all perfectly okay as long as you're not harming anyone else along the way. It doesn't require loving Cher or being an activist or being androgynous or anything else that is thrown at me as an example of what I should be doing to be a "better gay", for as wonderful as all of those things are for the people who do. The idea is humanist at its core, which is why you hear similar concepts repeated ad nauseam in feminism and why most people with higher education in the social sciences have embraced this concept to the point of expanding upon it without second thought.

Here's the thing. With all respect to our—and I say our, because whether you're fully a part of gay culture or something of a "gay secular" like myself, it affects us all—very important political history over the last fifty years (and we can all be so thankful that it's happened so quickly), something which I hold of utmost importance to be aware of and build upon, I've always felt like a foreigner in gay-specific cultural events. When I go to pride festivals, I feel the same indifference as I would to any other festival, with the addition of guilt because I feel like I'm supposed to feel more passionate about something that just feels like a parade, a city event, another notch in the calendar of summer activities in the public sphere. It's just there—in my lifetime it always has been—and I have no true emotional or personal connection to it. Every time I've gone to Pridefest or attempted to involve myself in other gay community groups, I feel myself a cultural outsider in these groups of people who work so hard to be all-inclusive. This sense of gay community, this idea of cohesiveness that we espouse, rings false to me for the simple fact that there are people like me who don't fit the bill of engagement most prominently offered. When I feel like I'm forcing the issue, it's negative, and it doesn't give me any motivation to engage further. When I don't engage in these specific ways is when other gays start telling me that I'm a bad gay and that I'm rejecting my culture.

The same goes for the heart-wrenching stories of coming out and hardship that many support groups and other gay functions are built around. I have deep compassion for the hardships of coming out and self-acceptance that so many have experienced, but I never had that experience. I don't connect with it in a personal way, I can only have the compassion of knowing that suffering for trivial matters is never acceptable and that it takes courage and strength to work past it into a better place. I grew up in an environment where even those who held nominally negative views toward homosexuals never had a problem with it in me. The way I grew up, it was never an issue any further than people just wanted me to confirm it to them and then we would all collectively move on to more pressing concerns like breathing, what's on the television, what have you. I've never personally felt the effects of discrimination or violence, I've never been told to leave somewhere because I'm gay or threatened for it or anything else in that vein. "Gay, so what?", not "gay, what's wrong with you?" My mother publicly claims up and down that she never had any suspicions about it but she and I both know that's not really true, that she had given me plenty of space to tell her or not until I did at the early age at which it happened. I always knew, and I never struggled with it or the idea of being different from the other boys as far back as kindergarten. Even then, my socialization never put me in a position of clashing with the swinging scale of heteronormativity; if I wanted to play with the girls, no big deal, and if I wanted to play with the boys, that was fine too. I've been a socially abnormal creature for my whole life and being gay was always quite literally the least of it. Nothing changed through grade school, high school, or college either, where the other students were indifferent and the other gays had similarly comfortable lives of acceptance as mine.

I'm a so-called millenial and grew up in front of various kinds of electronic screens, and accordingly I had to learn about gay culture from the internet and whatever shows happened to be on basic cable. It was like most of my knowledge pursuits, Googling and Wikipedia-searching for factoids and an understanding of how these things worked. It was one of countless things over time that I've completely immersed myself in learning about, things which I couldn't enumerate if I tried because it's just what I do with my time. I'm obsessive with things in that way. I could always intellectually relate myself to these gay things I read about, but in practice being campy and embracing lots of the things we typically assign to gay culture was foreign to me. I don't believe anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes with me has ever doubted my sexual orientation, superficial identifiers in the form of campiness or lexical quirks or anything else are unnecessary. I've taken a liking over time to more and more things that we think of as gay, in part due to their expanding presence in general American pop culture and in part because I can appreciate that sometimes we do stand out in our own peculiar way. It's just never been the whole picture—a small and significant part of it, but by no means the whole thing. I am not and have never been the kind of gay whose life revolves around it, due to the circumstances I've had throughout my life and the work of others past who have enabled those circumstances, which is no less reasonable or okay than those who do. Call it secularism if you want. I'm not rejecting or denying gay culture, I just accept that my relationship with it is an in but not of situation, and I think that's what many have a hard time understanding.

So I watch the wink wink, nudge nudge of Drag Race feeling both like I have some kind of cultural agency in viewing it and like it's the ultimate realization of a particular format of reality show that lends itself to over the top everything and thus that I am completely in keeping with pop culture "normal". I can not credibly say I have more than a passing interest in drag, as entertaining as it is, nor can I credibly say that it's something that's completely in the mainstream despite great recognition of RuPaul and his show, so the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The point is, it doesn't make me a "better" gay for watching it, it just means I'm comfortably following a similar pattern of interaction with the overly broad umbrella of queer culture that I always have. I don't need to have interest in or be entertained by drag queens just because I'm gay, but it's all the more salient that I do and am. I think my story is more normal than it might at first strike you.

Post-Grad Redaction

I know I said I was going to write about racism, but you're going to have to wait another post for that. It is worth mentioning that the current semester still needs to be finished, but with such rousing things going on as studying ocean waves and plotting cross-tabs, sue forgive me for not caring just slightly more. What's on my mind is what comes next, and with not so much time remaining, that's probably where it should be.

Portugal is looming again and the uncertainty with which it is happening is the only control variable in this experiment of an adventure I seem to be embarking upon, complicating everything for myself a little bit at a time. The general idea seems simple enough still, despite its obvious seams: go study Portuguese through May or June, get work preferably teaching English to pay the bills, do an MA in European studies for two years, figure out the rest of life somewhere in the meantime. The problem is that life is both expensive and not so simple, and there are plenty of things about Portugal that compound that expense. In purely financial terms, two years of living in Portugal as a student would not cost very much relative to other Western nations, but the raw cost is still a lot of money to account for when employability is not guaranteed. The social cost is less obvious, but has implications for, well, employability as well as my overall state of content with the direction things are taking.

To elaborate on social capital, the idea is fairly simple: it is much easier to advance personally and professionally when you are surrounded by others in the position in which you would like to place yourself. Doing that is made much simpler when communication is not a barrier; the subtleties of communicating with a fellow native of your cultural and linguistic background put that person in your favor significantly more so than even the most adapted and linguistically proficient non-natives. It's a device that you can see at work among study abroad students clinging to their countrymen and the way that we react rather negatively to people not speaking the predominant language of whatever area we come from. I can't claim that in pure academic or professional terms either of my circles in the United States or Portugal is better for the sake of personal advancement, but I have a much more natural time connecting to native English speakers, which is not to deride those who are not. My Portuguese friends will recognize this in themselves—I had many conversations about how they feel less expressive and less like their genuine selves when speaking English than when speaking Portuguese, although their levels of English fluency are excellent and self-sustaining, posing only sporadic problems to communication. Unsurprisingly, in my short time being back in the United States, I have come to realize and appreciate these things and take advantage of it by talking too much.

The MA from Católica remains a highly strategic option for me, it being immediately in my field of interest, a program they would happily accept me into, and costing much less than programs anywhere in the US. I still have some reprehension about it from my time spent taking classes there, though, mostly due to the nature of taking (some, not all) classes in Portuguese and not feeling as though I get as much out of them intellectually as a result. I have a much better time motivating myself and fostering creativity for academic pursuits in English. The upshot is that my work would not have to be done in Portuguese, giving me enough room still to make of the degree what I want. I'm dithering on it, but it remains the best option I have immediately available for graduate school.

I have also given up on any notions of remaining in Portugal on a permanent basis for various reasons to do with both the country and an elaboration of what I've already written about communication. For all of the positive aspects of the country, it is very easy to get a sense of being an outsider in a way that will not change regardless of time spent. Language aside, much of the ties that bind in the country revolve around family situation and history. Portuguese politics and economics are shaped by the country's history of poverty and wealth disparity and their social effects, whether they have caused emigration, corruption, or despair...so much as you would hear it from them, at least. It remains a wonderful place to stay, but my time in the United States has informed my own greater cognizance of the benefits to an 'insider' status, whether that be as simple as language or as complicated as being from somewhere and intrinsically familiar with it. Although I am confident my Portuguese will over time increase in fluency, French will likely always be the secondary language I am most comfortable in. It doesn't take much symbolism to demonstrate why that would pose problems for settlement chez lusitana. The main point is that I've gauged my need for adventure more accurately now and have been allowing that to inform my continually developing thoughts on where I'd like to see myself end up. I'll probably expand on this more clearly in a future post. Just don't count on it being in Boulder.

Travel Writing, or All of the Snowflakes Take a Class

I'm not posting more because my little fingers are absolutely exhausted. I've crapped out written essays for five graduate seminars and the final essay for an undergraduate class in the last month, amounting to (significantly) more than ten thousand words, and my fingers, my brain, and my body are all exhausted. I haven't had a break since we went to Brussels, really. So forgive me if my efforts at writing are a little short recently.

I'm taking a travel writing class because the University of Colorado lovingly forces us to take classes that have nothing to do with our majors, weeding out those who are good at playing Student from those who either lack the critical capacity to excel at a wide variety of subjects or, more simply, don't give a flying fuck care. This is the same reason that I have (had) to take not just one, but two classes about the weather and a laboratory for it to boot. I study political science and a smattering of languages, does it really seem like I care about cumulus formations? Your answer is here.

So, anyway, I'm taking this class because it's full credit for the course in just five weeks, making my life in the fall a lot easier when I would rather be focusing on finding money wherever I can to save my little pennies (and small they ever seem to be) in anticipation of moving back to Portugal. I was going to take the other requirement for writing, because they insult your intelligence (read: charge you money you didn't need to spend) not once, but twice, except that class was the lower-division seminar and there was not a single, remote chance I was going to listen to an aging queen from the vaunted communications department tell me how to write killer sentences. Doing so would have been like handing wads of one hundred dollar bills to the university only to have them light them on fire and laugh right in my face. The travel writing class is, mercifully, less intellectually offensive, and so I decided to stick to the course and try not to be too late for riveting sessions of eloquently-put navel-gazing. It is more or less standard fare so much as class goes, but that's of less interest, and anyone with a reasonable amount of sense can understand that I'm happily plodding along – to say that I'm particularly invested in it would be an injustice to the entire concept, really. The readings are good, and I think I'll add them to my quickly-overflowing bookshelf after the course is over.

The thing I think I like the most about the class, however, is the group dynamic and all of the exaggerated introspective nitpicking that is involved in it, the professor gliding happily through material and most of the other students going along with it, interested as they are in the idea of writing about themselves and getting credit for it. It's a rather steep contrast from the political and more engaging environment that was (ironically) Católica for the last couple of months there, with even the students engaging in discussions on things relating to the classes we took together during break periods and afterward. In general, the class is particularly well-suited to Boulder and the cultural mannerisms that emanate out of it, the idealistic leftism and supposed cultural openness that fails to be much of either one of those things in actual practice. The group is mixed, including East-looking individuals, working-class people eking out their education in the expensive People's Republic, transplanted and vacuous students of Greek life organizations, individuals who use their participation time to attempt to show the rest their intellectual capabilities but end up repeating the professor's words in a more long-winded manner, and so on. Those who have gone to university in the United States will be immediately familiar with all of the above. Conspicuously absent are any minorities or those who spent more than just their childhood being raised in any other cultural context, save for perhaps our token quasi-foreign student who has been living in the United States long enough that no one would be any the wiser had she not pointed out this fact to us.

Herein lies the issue I take with the class, and on some level, Boulder more generally. What I sit for an hour and a half listening to is a group of people from socioeconomic backgrounds comfortably enough established to be paying to go to our university and affording the heightened cost of living in the town surrounding it without having to exist or more generally interact with others from outside of that same sphere talk about traveling and going to places as though they are objects to be tried or as though people in other places are somehow so different that their differences make them objects of recount instead of the individuals they actually are – profound revelations like "the people were so nice to me there!". It's the common problem you run into of people wanting to try a lover from another place as though they were a kind of food or wanting to do a country as though they're another level on your computer game.  I've written my thoughts about this before on enough posts that they don't all warrant links. I suspect this not to be true of certain individuals (including our resident not-quite-foreigner), but for lack of their participation in class, I can't know for sure. I would like to hear their thoughts more, to see whether a better social understanding has sunk into someone in the room not responsible for our grades, but I'm not holding my breath. I could do likewise, but for the same reason that I hold little hope, I don't contribute much. Chicken, meet egg.

Granted, this is an entire blog dedicated to navel-gazing and my thoughts and formulations on traveling and my own experiences have evolved over time not entirely (or, perhaps, even mostly) outside of the realm of what I complain about, but to make a class out of it at least allows me to put that into perspective. There's a reason why travel writing serves a niche market, and it did not take me very long to figure out why.

Miscellaneous Fuckery

• The primary reaction I get to mentioning Portugal to Americans is "oh, cool! I had a great time in Brazil when I was there!" Sometimes these things just write themselves.

• More fun with Google:
• Two observations from this: first, how obscure (read: irrelevant to the world) does it imply that the things I write about are that such a thing would list my blog in the top place? Second, can we just revel in the idea that some college student desperate for sources stumbled upon this blog looking for something to cite? I can only imagine the horror that might have ensued upon further reading. Published and added to JSTOR, I am not.

• I went from the beach to the weather alternating between actively trying to kill me by means of baking or drowning. At least pick one, and also, can I go back now?

• I still have yet to understand how so much food gets put onto the plates in restaurants, how that could possibly be profitable, and why on earth people actually consume all of it (including myself).

• For as much as I love El Corte Inglés in Lisbon for being the most "American-style" of all of the grocery stores, it holds not even the smallest candle to an average American grocery store in terms of sheer absurdity in selection and quantity of goods. My first trip to the grocery store was a nightmare of staring at 18 (I counted) different brands of essentially the same cereal, frozen between both the volume and the inflated cost of each one. Other products have not served much better.

• The upside to being back is that I have been reunited with my closest confidants with whom I can fret every possible detail of life away, not the least of which being how I will be able to afford to pay to fret my life away.

• Bagels. Who can live without them? Not I, Reader, for I have been consuming them voraciously and without seeming end.

• I discovered, to my own mixed reaction, that I acquired enough shirts in Portugal that I can wear a different one every day for almost two months before going through all of them. For someone accustomed to not owning more than two weeks' worth of clothing, this fact is hard to process. It could be worse, I have known more than one person to have clothing filling multiple closets, including years-old items that still have the shopping tag on them.

• Driving: can we just collectively chill the fuck out? You Denver drivers have it so easy.

• The United States: good for mobile batteries? My phone has had much better battery life on the exact same manner of usage here than in Portugal. Someone with greater technical knowledge please explain this to me.

That's all for today. It hasn't been quite long enough for the absurdity of things around me to normalize and allow me to focus on what isn't.

Things to Which I Have Not Yet Adjusted

There's a bit (or more than) of truth in all of this sarcasm, so take it with good humor.

1. Air conditioning. Why is the United States so cold in the middle of a hot summer?
2. The enormity of everything. We're not exactly hurting for space, are we?
3. Public niceties. Why is everyone smiling at me? I don't know you people.
4. Bad English everywhere. It's like I didn't leave a foreign country, except these people have less of an excuse.
5. Food portions. How is it that restaurants can afford to serve this much food to people per dish?
6. Prices. How is it that Listerine only costs $3 for 1.5L? That would be nearly 20€ in Portugal.
7. Coffee. What is all of this liquid, and what have you done with the espresso that's supposed to be in it?
8. Suburbs. Where did the city go? I can't find it.
9. Drinking. Why must I be prohibited from doing this? Life is not the same without beer and 2€ wine.
10. Geography and climate. Why is it so dry here, and where did the beach go?
11. Dogs at home. Why are these creatures so fat and smell bad? Stop licking me.
12. Customer service. Why are you so efficient, and why are you so friendly? You must be getting paid a lot to care so much.
13. Restaurants. See: food portions. Also, why can't I just pick where I sit? And why are you in such a hurry?
14. Diet Coke. Why do you suddenly taste so foul, what has my exposure to Coke Light and Coke Zero done?
15. Punctuality. No comment.

Things Everyone Should Expect to Hear from Me Upon Arrival

A small post in light of many recent long ones.

1. What do you mean I'm not legally allowed to drink in this country?
2. What do you mean the buses only come once every 30 minutes?
3. Where is the nearest Chipotle?
4. What do you mean I have to drive there?
5. What is that in metric? (also: what is that in Celsius?)
6. Why is a shot of espresso more expensive than half a liter of coffee?
7. No, they don't speak Spanish in Portugal.
8. What do you mean I can't watch this content in my country?
9. Olá-oh, uh, hi.
10. When does the grocery store clo–what do you mean it doesn't?
11. The drivers are so polite here!
12. Why are you eating dinner so early?
13. Why is there so much to choose from?
14. Everything is so big here!
15. It's so amazing that everyone understands what I'm saying here.
16. Where are the bagels?
17. I can pay for this with my credit card, really? Are you completely sure?
18. Why are there so many bills, where are the coins?
19. Yes, I know what I'm doing after graduation and no, I'm not telling you about it.
20. Ciao.

Permutations of the Linguistic Paradigm

After five months of living and learning a new language, I breathe somewhat easier with the knowledge that my language skills have improved over the course of this time enough that any sort of multilingualism I may possess has become more tangible to myself almost as much as it seems to be to others. But what that really means is that I have grown an awareness of what exactly it means to be multilingual in practical usage, just such a thing no longer being only a theoretical concept that is not in use except in a classroom or as a topic of light conversation. Using multiple languages each day has opened up new approaches to the task of learning them, forcing me to realize the extent to which I can actually speak other languages versus simply being a good student of them. Being surrounded each day by individuals who are using English as a second language has given me somewhat more insight into the expectations one may have of other individuals speaking their language; I find myself in the role not just of communicating with my friends and acquaintances, but also in the perpetual role of being a teacher, explaining words and colloquialisms, phrases and grammar, that seem to me quite simple but to those not otherwise familiar clearly does not make sense. Taking this in reverse, I understand my position as a non-native speaker in each language in which I command some level of proficiency – taken in this light, my fear of speaking incorrectly is shed and in its stead I find myself more concerned about having the adequate means of expressing the thought of which I am trying.

This became readily apparent to me in Paris, being there as I was functioning entirely in French — if not perfectly expressive French, mind, but indeed in no other language — and passing my time and interactions in a manner somewhat similar to that in which I find myself when interacting with people who speak English not necessarily well, but adequately enough to keep talking to them. "Tu parles très bien français!" is the equivalent to the "your English is very good, really!" which we never cease to tell foreign speakers as we listen to them excuse their deficiencies in saying something because their English is poor. Indeed, even in Portuguese, "estás a falar português muito bem!" is not so much to say that I am speaking Portuguese that well, it is just an encouragement to keep doing so. When in Paris, my French grew and retooled itself both to catch up from not having used it and also because I was learning so very many words and connotations in context, I learned the very painfully obvious lesson of the necessity of being around only that language in which you would like to be speaking or learning in order to do so. While I have learned a remarkable amount of Portuguese in the five months I have been here, my lack of being continually surrounded by it has inhibited my capabilities to speak.

Happily, to this end, I have found myself these last weeks much more surrounded by Portuguese than I had otherwise been, the seminar in Brussels being a crowd of Portuguese students (save, more or less, myself and one other) speaking in their native language and switching into English only occasionally, as well as various times in which my group dynamic has shifted to a majority of Portuguese speakers who are confortable in the knowledge that I understand what is going on and can speak their language, switching to English only when directly addressing me or when it becomes convenient. I can leave Portugal now knowing that I will not drown if I am not speaking my own language and that those who enjoy my company still do so even when I am less talkative because I am absorbing their language and not imposing my own to dominate the social order. In such situations, I become the student in place of the teacher of language, and I derive no small pleasure in doing so each time this barrier cracks and it happens without feeling forced or unnatural. This, I believe, will be the only way I can come to feel comfortable enough to just speak casually in Portuguese the way I do in French. Time is the only other factor that is necessarily, in which we will see what will happen. I have six months of down time now, so it would incumbent on me to make good use of it.

The Essence of "Déjà Vu"

Welcome (back) to Paris. Sound familiar? I decided to come back nearly as last-minute as I did going to Madrid, having had issues attempting to book my flight with Vueling and their poorly designed online reservation system. I ended up taking Aigle Azur instead, an airline which approximately no one seems to have heard of before, but which also seems to be perfectly decent anyway, except for having had to pay an exorbitant amount for my ticket three days prior to flying. Oh well. Any company would be expensive in that case, I suppose.

So I'm in Paris, but the trip as it has developed has been an extremely different séjour than last time, there has been no sense of wandering aimlessly, of being a tourist figuring his way through a grand city, of learning how to be and what it means to be, in an almost literal sense, alone in the world. Instead I am visiting (and staying with) friends, seeing as many of the numerous people I had become acquainted with the last time around as possible and certainly meeting plenty of others. The experience has allowed me to be much more connected with the city on a personal level; I am no longer overwhelmed by the busy nature of commerce owing to its size, instead with friends I can breathe easily and enjoy new places in any given part of town without over-thinking anything. I can order my coffee and gelato without thinking anything special of it just for the sake of having been coffee and gelato ordered in a city often considered a living museum. I have taken no pictures whatsoever with my camera despite having brought it. I have instead been received as though I were at home, enjoying speaking a language in which I have no inhibitions for want of experience and confidence, one in which I can express myself adequately well and more or less completely, one in which I need not switch to my native language in general when I find myself short of understanding something.

Thus lies the difference between Paris and Lisbon for me, but although linguistically life may be easier, let me not mislead you into thinking that Paris is so much the more homely for me than Lisbon. That would be a disservice of an order of magnitude, as I will explain. I am not Portuguese in any given sense; I am neither yet a full-time resident nor was I born with any kind of cultural inheritance that might make up for the legal disparity. Nowhere is this more true than when I am going about living my life in Lisbon however I may do so, observing all the time how typically or not I am American and drawing comparisons of that in direct relation to native Portuguese people, everyone noting well the distinctions involved when a foreign person arrives to integrate themselves fully, slowly as it may happen. This is to say nothing of the linguistic issue. And yet, being in Paris for me has allowed me to see from a perspective of appreciable cultural as well as physical difference — much more so than Madrid, which is close enough in relative terms to Portugal physically as well as culturally —the extent to which I have adopted a Portuguese spirit and feel most at home in Lisbon. Mannerisms of all things, from the hours at which I prefer to dine to linguistic quirks that fit more flexibly in situations than English or French, have become my own in an inadvertent way, myself only noticing that I behave in such a manner when outside of the environment where such things are routine. It has taken stepping completely outside of so-called Iberia to realize the way in which I have become Portuguese in some way.

I feel completely at ease and at home in Paris, able to communicate fully and effortlessly, not having any problems navigating the city however large, transitioning seamlessly into my cultural surroundings such that it is no one's immediate assumption that I'm not from or at least very well acquainted with the city. And yet, Paris is not home. It may never be, in a literal sense, but in a more philosophical way there are pronounced obstacles that render it foreign. I have written about the ways Denver and Lisbon are similar, and I believe that at a profound level this impacts the way I feel toward Paris. I'm not from somewhere so large, nor have I ever lived somewhere nearly so large, and so much as I am content in it and prefer it to its natural opposite — I adjust extremely poorly to sparsely-inhabited areas —, I am not a product of it. It is too large and too expensive to become quite so intimately familiar with even after a long time; it is, owing to its size, almost inherently impersonal. It is a city saturated with tourists and people chasing their own dreams of Living in Paris, their version of being a privileged youth vagabond "finding themselves" in Europe, people from everywhere but France figuring out their own abstract ideas of what it means to be French and trying to be accordingly so. For better or worse, there is a distinct lack of cultural fixedness in Paris, the clichéd concept of a typical Parisian being something that exists only as an element of cultural mythology so far as I have discerned it, Paris cosmopolitan and fluid in reverse correlation to Lisbon's provincialism and rigidity.

This is all to say that I have become more deeply attached to Paris than before, more personally connected to it, but I will be happy to return to life in Lisbon, to life at home. I miss Lisbon already, the way that someone without a wandering soul misses the creature comforts they have from their lives wherever they may be based. In Lisbon I have found something of a base, a place from which I can quench my thirst to know and discover more of the world yet unknown that itself has become so of my own doing. I may always feel a bit like a wide-eyed child seeing the reality of the world for the first time despite that being very much less the case as time goes on, but I at least have somewhere to return to, relax, and feel the comfort of being myself completely uninhibited. Paris is a delight, but a delight as a guest.

From Portugal to Paris, Continental Affairs

June is proving to be a busy month with a seemingly endless amount of papers, new seminars, traveling, and money to be taken out of my wallet by governmental agencies and other quasi-official things that are necessary, if expensive. I'm leaving Lisbon for Paris for five days shortly, having arranged almost as much at the last minute this trip as I did Madrid, being limited only by the fact that flights become exorbitantly fucking expensive the closer to the day you purchase them you get. I managed to find people to stay with and I can already feel the excitement and connection to the city I left with prior to departure – in other words, the trip will be much the opposite of how Madrid went. More on that will necessarily come later, but for now I have other, more pressing concerns to attend to.

The much more consequential news is that I have, as of this Monday, enrolled in a Portuguese language class running from February to June, marking the first segment of both my return to academic life in the post-graduate period but also to Portugal in a definitive way as I had been hoping to work toward. There are many things remaining to do, but the work is not for want of being done: having begun the enrollment process (something I keep trying to call 'inscription', despite that being the wrong word, because in Portuguese the word is inscrição), I will then, in consecutive order, pay the enrollment fee and get a document for SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras, or the Portuguese version of border control and immigration office), get Portuguese health insurance, and meet with SEF to extend my residence beyond the end of September as it was granted for my current academic program. It's a lot of running about and sitting in offices mostly not doing anything except for spending money for the pleasure of sitting in offices not doing anything. It's a bureaucratic way of saying that I'm enough of a special snowflake to stay in this bumbling little country, and I'm not bothered by any part of the process – indeed, I've spent enough time sitting around in offices waiting for things to happen and become organized and resolve themselves that I'm at a bit of a loss if such things are not actually happening.

I know what you're thinking. "Good job, you really buried the fuck out of that lead there."

So in order to clarify, what this means is that I'm moving to Portugal. The details are progressing forward as they naturally would in the order that they should and with all of the hiccups that come naturally with such things. There is a lot of work involved, a mind-numbingly large amount of work involved to put in toward moving. The process of moving anywhere is never easy, much less so moving somewhere an ocean and national boundaries away. It is a monumental change in life, this is something that can not be understated in any way, yet at the same time, I am plodding along through each particular step of the way of this without becoming overwhelmed in the process, without losing my sense of self, and without losing sight of the things that are important and give meaning to and reason for doing anything I do in life. I have not lost track of my ongoing process of learning Portuguese and integrating my lifestyle into the Lisbon sphere, nor have I lost track of my intellectual pursuits and academic responsibilities, the necessity of putting work in to finish basic classes in order to graduate in December, and so on. By doing everything one step at a time, one bureaucratic office, one meeting, one piece of paperwork, one social interaction at a time, I have figured out how to breathe and be, for the first time, my own person on my own terms equal among those around me with no exceptions. I am not magically independent at the stroke of a pen, the likes of which you might see in a movie or hear in a pop song, but I have a sense of personal legitimacy that seems to have reached a point of saturation both within myself and those around me. It is a rewarding path to follow.

Just the same, as the reality of being truly rooted in Portugal begins to sink in, the idea of somberly parting from dear friends on an indefinite basis fading quickly with the knowledge of return in six months' time, I find myself with mixed emotions toward both Lisbon and Denver as places I consider home. At a relatively superficial level, the two cities are remarkably similar: they are of roughly equal populations both in the city proper and including the suburban environs, they are similarly provincial with a streak of cosmopolitan and cultural brilliance if you look in the correct places, they are in similar economic positions, and so on. Such similarities have struck me at a profound level, making me realize that at least part of the reason I feel quite so much at home in Lisbon is that it is inherently familiar in its character. Lisbon is a city at the nexus of a culture always trying to pit itself as adequately well-accomplished and relevant much as Denver has a similar complex from its geographical isolation within the United States. With Denver being my home by upbringing and Lisbon my home by matter of choice, I have already found myself with a form of dissonance, realizing at the same time as I have come to love Lisbon the positive aspects of what I have in Denver. The impact of moving — the prospect thereof, rather — being what it is, I appreciate Denver as a home of mine in a way not entirely possible before. I do not miss my friends or family in the sense of a painful, longing lack of their presence, but I value their continued presence the more so given that sticking around with me doing the things I'm doing can be an exercise in great frustration at times. On the other hand, of course, I feel much the same about Lisbon, having made highly valued friendships with people which will continue to grow all the more upon moving back (although in the case of G, perhaps the most prominent of these figures, it is ironically not quite the case, since he will go back to Brazil at the end of the summer). I believe this sense of feeling alive and the connection with everything around me is what I've been chasing after for all these years.

The Castilian Diversion

I decided to go to Madrid entirely on a whim, having been fully convinced after talking to a friend living there for the month who happened to have time and space for a visit. I had been thinking about going to Spain since I got here, but tickets to Barcelona became prohibitively expensive and I ended up deciding not to, but Madrid opened up as an option after G, my Brazilian friend, missed his flight home from there a couple of weeks prior and had to take a bus back to Lisbon, which turned out to be a cheap and comfortable option. After looking into it, I decided that the price was right and left for two days to Madrid a matter of hours after deciding to go in the first place. It was a snap decision that proved to be an astute one as well, which I will elaborate on further.

Before getting to describing the trip, however, I must note that my relationship with Spanish as a language and hispanic cultures in general is a long-standing love-hate affair, me having spent many years dating or caught in complicated relations with men from throughout the Spanish-speaking world, attempting feebly at various times to learn Spanish, embracing the language and the cultures that it opens oneself up to, and then invariably rejecting it all entirely and proclaiming a great disdain for anything and everything Spanish. Of late, I have found something of an equilibrium, living with a multitude of Spaniards in my apartment (and building, more generally – everyone in the building knows each other to some extent) and having a more nuanced, Europe-specific experience of cultural exchange. The result is that I find myself understanding the language very well — but not perfectly well — and being able to interact with everyone to some extent regardless of a language barrier, but having to an appreciable extent a boundary between cultural habits and mannerisms. It is still a foreign land and culture for me, even though there is a great level of mutual understanding between us; this is all to speak nothing of the differences between Spain and Portugal, something that has profoundly affected my perception of the country. I went to Madrid unable to have any specific expectations, knowing only what my friends who had recently visited had told me and other more obvious facts about it as a city in general; I had no preconceptions of how the city would feel, what would be best to do, or how I would like it before going.

So it happened that I left on an overnight bus for Spain, the cost being the same as a flight that a more intelligent person might have booked several weeks in advance, expecting to sleep but instead finding myself observing the rather tasteless and undignified sort of people who take the bus on the alternative to ALSA, which was fully booked for that night, followed by a short moment of concern over the fact that the bus broke down an hour outside of Madrid for want of fuel. A refueling and a short nap later, I had stepped foot into an ugly bus station at an ugly hour of the morning onto a marvelous, truly spectacular metro system and headed to my friend's apartment. It is a metro that, in contrast to Lisbon especially, just works: the trains run on time and there are notices for when the next trains will arrive at every platform, you almost never wait more than 5 minutes for a train, the system covers the entire city, and so on. It is comparable in feel and scope to the Parisian metro, if not nearly as visually appealing in general — the system is what I would describe as "functional" in place of "beautiful" in that it is not well-designed in a visual sense, but it does get you where you need to go with the utmost of efficiency. Portugal and its entitled, ridiculous public transportation workers who can not ever seem to do their jobs correctly or serve passengers with a shred of decency but never hesitate to go on strike could learn a lot from the brilliance of the Madrid metro.

Madrid is, of course, a rather large city, comparable in size to St. Petersburg or Dallas, and you take notice of that fact almost immediately when you arrive to the center — Gran Via, in my case — and step foot onto the calles that wind around and lead to everything the city has to offer. It is well-built city, the streets being compact and the buildings large, and you never feel as though life is not happening everywhere around you. That is the main feeling I got from Madrid – for better or worse, I got the distinct sense of it being a city very much teeming with the life of madrileños, the place where lives are made and ruined, stories are made, and histories built for the occupants there. Just as well, there is not one particular architectural style that dominates the city or pattern to the way the streets work, there is just a little bit of everything, much as there are people of all types and walks of life everywhere as well. Perhaps as a result of this, you do not see the effects of the crisis nearly so visibly as in Lisbon (and Portugal in general), except perhaps in the form of the "Compro Oro" people and shops that occupy only the most touristic areas of the center of the city. I will note that I did not find madrileños very well-dressed (less so, indeed, even than Lisbon), nor did the city feel particularly cosmopolitan, there being an overall lack of other cultures and people save for the tourists staying there just as temporarily as myself.

Plaza Mayor

Palacio Real

Parque del Retiro

Parque del Retiro

For as large of a city as it is, once you turn off of the main tourist thoroughfares, their presence largely stops and it does not feel like a place that is as much of a tourism destination as it ostensibly is. I wonder whether Barcelona feels much more so or not. I saw each major plaza, park, and general tourist spot on offer in the center just shy of going into any museums or cultural attractions, the energy for which I had run out of entirely, as well as a choral concert at the Auditorio Nacional de Música de Madrid located rather outside of the center itself. I left the city ready quite certainly to get back to Lisbon and with a much more concretely established sense of Lisbon as home and Portugal and Portuguese as being what give me a home-like comfort that is incomparable anywhere else I have been as of yet. Madrid was great to visit, although I am not completely inspired by it as a city mostly as a result of lacking a strong personal cultural connection. Fair enough, it allowed me to learn something about myself and gave me a break from routine and daily habit of Lisbon that I had needed more than I realized.

Traveling Reconsidered, or Contemplations of Position

I have made the decision not to travel quite as extensively outside of Portugal during my remaining time of this particular stay in the country for myriad reasons, the likes of which have been discussed introspectively on this blog to give it its very purpose for existence. I'll explain: because of the way my stay has worked out, I have been hesitant to solidify plans to travel, whether for weekends or otherwise, because life has happened at a pace too fast for me to ever quite get settled into anything other than the fact that I am no longer capable of waking up at a decent and respectable hour of the morning, preferring instead the latter portion of that period of day closer to what some might consider lunch time. In other words, too much is going on that I find myself ill at ease with adding so much more stimulation in the form of visiting entirely foreign places in languages I know nothing of and meeting (yet more) people I will connect with for a weekend in person and a lifetime online, all indeed because I am seeing, doing, and feeling so many things in a way that is remarkably similar but in the same place. The temporality of these months has made itself readily apparent and I am fully aware of it – there is no need to add to it. Going back to the United States will not be an easy process, however long the duration of my stay there, and the difficulty involved is directly inverse the amount of chaos and rooting that is taking place here.

To speak of all of this is, of course, not to overlook the fact that a kind of rooting is actually happening here and that I am working out the details of going through the process of turning what was originally a sojourn into a complete relocation to a country I had not previously expected anything from, much less a connection and opportunity as significant as this one. Part of the significance of this has sunk into me in the recognition of the need to discover the entire country and not just Lisbon, however lovely it may be, because the impression of a city may not necessarily be the same for the rest of the country you expect to reside in on the long term, but also because Portugal is a small country in every sense of the term and there is no particularly good reason not to see each region of it. Instead of a grand tour of the Iberian peninsula, I will instead have an interesting and sufficient tour of the western portion of it.

Such is all of this that I found myself at the beginning of March in the middle of what would turn out to be an unending upheaval playing host to a friend who, given the fifteen years of our friendship, is more of a sibling in spirit than just a regular friend. She came for ten days, being possibly the only person I could entertain without needing respite for such a period, and we decided to visit Porto as well as allow her to let Lisbon sink in amid all of the wonderful things it has to offer tourists and locals alike. Despite the fact that we are very similar, both generally speaking and by virtue of time spent and having been more or less raised together, we are as different as any two given people are from each other. In traveling together we bonded over those very differences, which as we have gotten older and somehow managed to begin to become semblances of adults have also served to strengthen our senses of self and the character necessary for any fully grown person not to be just a parrot of those around them, helpless and hopeless pieces of grey Silly Putty who interest no one and excite yet fewer. So I found myself thinking about these things, observing how she prefers to relax and take a moment to breathe when going somewhere for the first time as opposed to doing all of the touristic things you can pay insignificant sums of money to have sit in photos on your coffee table compiled in a neat, artsy book anyway. As has become clear on this blog, I prefer to run at a frenetic pace — sometimes literally, as even my parents could not quite keep up with me on the Paris metro — taking in and seeing and doing as many things as I can cram into any given period of time so that I can take the full bite, chew, and digest at some other, later point in time.

Thus, in some sense, I have adapted her approach to my stay in Portugal, taking a moment to breathe and allow myself to simply enjoy the things in the country I was intended to be in instead of running around to as many somewhere elses as I possibly could. The rest of Europe will still be there when I get back, whether it has imploded in on itself in more abstract ways or not in the meantime. So we went to Porto and didn't cram each and every possible thing one could do in the city into the three days we decided to spend there, deciding instead to focus on the historical center of the city and the river. We had to figure out just as well what there was to do in the city as we had to actually do it. Luckily, we stayed in a hostel, so that process was made simpler than it otherwise could have been, and yet it still happened. We took a walking tour both on our own and with a guide, ate a whole host of things including a pizza that had three entirely unexpected layers of meat underneath the cheese topping and of course the famous francesinha Porto is known for, did a tasting of Port wine, socialized with people from across the world, stared at pigeons, managed not to get charged for one of the dinners we ate, and did at various points nothing at all. We were relaxed about seeing the sights of the city and we were also trying to be somewhat frugal (although that went out the window with an unfortunate pack of sunscreen and after-sun lotion in Cascais after we got back) and we enjoyed all of it quite as thoroughly as it should be. I know that if I had been on my own, I would have felt more driven to see and do more, but I felt a most different sense of satisfaction out of the trip having gone with someone else and done differently. I intend to step back a bit and enjoy the rest of Portugal similarly – Coimbra, Évora, Albufeira and beyond.

Missing from this charming view of the Ribeira area of Porto is the blow-up doll (or just sexualized mannequin) prominently affixed to one of the balconies on the streets leading there.

This is the ungodly meat and cheese calorie-bomb confection known as the francesinha — "little French girl" in Portuguese — that is a specialty of Porto and claimed all across Portugal as a national dish.

An Elaboration of Previous Sentiments

Sometimes things happen in life that take the things you have spent some amount of time thinking about, be it large or small, and shift those very things into being the point of reference from which you begin to accept that the things you wanted — or did not want — have become the situation in which you find yourself. What is less predictable is when these things happen as you are exiting a club at 6:30 in the morning, your body confused by the fact that you are still drunk but the sun is out anyway, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that you have still not managed to schlep your way home and crawl into bed before becoming hungover later – or at the very least, thirsty and feeling vaguely disgusting, as though it were some sort of personal affront. It doesn't matter though, as you all look out onto the sunrise from the miradouro, in awe of the beauty of the previously unknown hour of morning, in the company of a group of people with whom you feel perfectly comfortable to be and do just as you naturally would, throwing all reservations to the wind.

Such is the irony of that moment that the individuals involved are together in a happenstance, temporary manner, some less so than others. The general idea, however, is that the course of where things are going has made way to allow for a sense of social comfort and awareness makes room for the ability to think about those all-important life decisions talked about previously on this blog in small part. Despite the fact that a good friend and many others I am acquainted with here are in the same position as me, staying for an extended but short period, and that even some of my lovers in the city are trying desperately to leave the country for better working prospects elsewhere, my sense of social stability in this particular moment in time allows me breathing room to reflect on life and the opportunities being presented in it, to make the decisions necessary to carry through other decisions that up until this point were hypothetical things that I spent time wondering about but not having a realistic or pragmatic sense to take completely seriously.

The city itself, moreover, has become utterly familiar much in the way that Denver has, despite the fact that I have yet to see or do absolutely everything that there is on offer. Much can be said of both places, frankly. It is in just such a way that Lisbon has come to feel like and, really, be home, a place where I live in the comfort of familiarity and knowledge of my surroundings without so much as being able to be completely familiar or know everything or, indeed, most things about the city and the country. I'm able to become more intimately familiar with the city as the stress of not being completely familiar with how routine, day-to-day things work here versus how I am accustomed to doing them in the United States fades and my perspective on the use of language amid all of it changes. I have begun, in small part, to scratch beneath the surface of how the city lives and breathes, what places there are to see, what things to do, what foods to eat, and so on. Progress comes in many forms. Those who know me well understand similarly well that I feel best and am able to excel in the things I endeavor to do when I am engrossed in a routine in a setting I hold no antipathy toward. It is no coincidence that my greatest productivity upon returning to the United States last summer happened sitting outdoors over espresso in the most urbane environment Denver has to offer. It is perhaps also no coincidence that I had been unable to take full advantage of the time when my classes were in limbo and I felt as though everything was in a state of upheaval.

I don't yet know in specific detail how exactly what I have in mind to do after graduating will happen, but I have a general idea and I've got the feeling that it will come to happen much the same way the rest of the things are now.

Chatter and Prattle, or the Part of the Journey Wherein You Stare Idly at Nothing

I sit on my new bed bouncing gently on the flimsy IKEA springs, my eye drawn to the bits of color scattered about among the stark whiteness of the walls, so modern as they are, exhausted in mind, body, and soul, for reasons apparent only as they reside in the puffiness of my eyes and the lines underneath them. A couple of days have passed in anticipation of having plans, inhaling eagerly in anticipation of the numerous things to be done, and then failing to exhale as something unravels each time and the thrill of being among the company I prefer to keep is delayed a day or two or indefinitely further. This is a normal part of life, but it is contributing to my exhaustion as I end up doing plenty of things but none of them as I had planned originally. I am generally too much of an organized person accustomed to planning things out, highly amenable to consistency and put under stress to its alternative, so the lesson is perhaps to chill the fuck out to breathe and allow that life sometimes happens without you holding the levers.

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I don't believe there is any Vietnamese food in all of Lisbon. Certainly there is none that I have come across to speak of. I need my fix of pho! Portuguese readers, all 2.7 of you: fix this. Or at least provide assistance so that I can.

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There is a tangible strain in my interactions and relations with people from home. I kvetch of boredom and draw blanks, struggling to remember my connections to the soil of the other side of the large pool of water separating us, but my antipathy to the university and general disconnect from life at home at this point is such that the process sits at more of an ebb than a flow. I'm not so terribly bored, really (although I am irritated by the boredom forced upon me by virtue of the ongoing scheduling circus), nor do I not want to share or listen to what's going on, I just find myself recounting blankly when the appropriate time actually comes. There are also worse problems to have than claiming a sense of dullness to the inevitable regularity of life as it happens here in meeting new people and living through the daily adventures that come with being in a culture still new and a language still alien, as a certain endearing fellow put it to me recently.

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Having moved, I find myself quite joyous at having all of the creature comforts I expected to be living with upon arrival but instead got used to living without at the old apartment, an almost perverse happiness at living on a baseline standard that is by no means unreasonable. I do, however, like the feeling of being more connected to smaller things in life; the joy of simply being able to make a stovetop espresso is more satisfying than it may appear in writing to be. It is just as well that the apartment itself is stark – both in its blank, undecorated white walls and unvarnished angular design and its grand scale. It is magnificently large, enormous by any standard, and in combination with its cold modernism, we the occupants are left to make of the space that which we desire. This means interacting with each other frequently, in our case, eating and studying happily in the common space, and generally establishing a sense of life as though the apartment were some sort of canvas upon which to do so.

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I have determined the extent to which some of my friendships in this city have begun to run in realizing that I can have heated conversations with noted differences about things highly sensitive without it ruining acquaintance afterward, which is remarkable in and of itself but all the more so given the short period of time. I've also developed friendships with very different sets of people, which is proving to be highly appealing as I am able to have a wide range of people with whom I can exchange ideas and contacts, blather on about anything and nothing, and rely on to be able to get out of my house and go do whatever the hell it is there might be to do at any given time on any given day. I am also not alone in the various nightmarish bureaucratic goings-on left still to do as a result, for which I am completely grateful.

The wheels keep turning and we're moving...somewhere. Think of it as that point of the road trip when you're driving through Kansas and you realize that you've been doing nothing but staring at flat, idle landscape for several hours and all of a sudden you have to use all of your energy to put yours eyes back into focus.

The Travails of Setting an Agenda, or You Are Not a Special Snowflake

As time continues to tick away, days turning into weeks which then turn into months which then turn into the pleasant and sunny weather of the seasons steadily approaching, I've found myself in the trap of dealing with a university that does not seem to function efficiently as an institution, nor that can provide for students at a basic level what should be and is very simple elsewhere in the Western world. With schedules changing constantly at the last minute, professors and secretaries not answering emails, room numbers for classes that are actually happening not assigned, and more, the job of being a student is made a burden much more so than it reasonably should be.

So it is that I find myself each day with with an abundance of time, everyone I know asking me aghast why it is that my schedule is so open and coveting more of the free time I would gladly exchange for their paying jobs and European Union citizenship. As a person accustomed to a normally rigorous schedule, this lapse of professionalism and urgency at the university level is something not typically experienced, leaving me confused and with no small sense of needing to occupy my time doing what would otherwise be a baseline standard of productive academic work. I need to study, otherwise there is no point for anything at all – I am a student, thus it is my job to study. So I've discovered a lesson out of this nominally "studying" abroad trip about which no one informs you, whether for lack of insight or assumption that you'll understand this as part of the general deal and move along with it, which is to say that self-motivation to get up and do important things for the sake of doing them, without any other impetus, is an incredibly difficult task to manage. It is an exercise in self-discipline that we don't get in our cozy university setting, where our schedules may be determined by ourselves, sure, but the system is a well-oiled machine designed to push you along through it without so much as thinking about the task at hand on your own part. We have our majors, they have classes, you take them, you do the work, you graduate, you get a job, you go to work each day, life works out without needing to get up each day and ask yourself why it is exactly that you're doing these things, you simply do them because there is an implicit necessity for doing so.

I am not one to whine about how difficult things are, at least not as a means of delaying their progress or accomplishing them, and so I learned very quickly that not having a schedule means it is necessary to set one for yourself in a realistic way that can maximize the opportunity provided by the situation. Yes, I still get to enjoy the perks of free time, waking up late (which can be attributed in large part to the state of the apartment in which I have been living, for that description see here), seeing friends at any hour I desire, being flexible with where I can go and what I can do, and so on. On the other hand, I spend any time not spent in the company of others or in transit studying, be it Portuguese in various forms, reading literature relevant to what I am supposed to be studying, sifting through sources to rewrite a paper on which I am working with a professor in Boulder, and other things. It is staggering, but whenever progress toward something happens, ultimately I feel less like I'm doing nothing for no reason and more like things have some sort of purpose. It can't replace actual courses, since it is only for those I get credit to transfer back to Boulder, but it does firmly establish a legitimacy to the claim that I am doing work here that is otherwise necessary.

I imagine this is how the grating charity harpies we see on the television in all their dolled-up splendor feel on a daily basis, not really having the constraints of anything but where your energy can take you and produce, except in their case it's always some sort of cosmetic line or charity for premature blind minority children who have one arm and a drug addicted parent, this is a huge problem, think of the children! and I am trying to figure out the best way of using my time so that I can establish European contacts and learn the skills necessary to be able to come back on a more permanent basis. The lesson is mostly a reinforcement of the concept that no, no one really is a unique and special snowflake with a God-given right to everything you want just because you wanted it "really hard!", no matter how brilliant everyone spent your whole life telling you are, how much of a child prodigy you were, or so on. The most important piece of advice that someone told me repeatedly from an early age was not that I was so incredible but that being incredible means nothing if you don't apply some effort to make it that way, which is to say that the concept of intrinsic value is essentially only what we make of it and even the harpies we deride on the television have more merit than you if you're doing absolutely nothing. Genius wasted is no better than determined mediocrity was how it was put to me as a child, with all of the exaggeration of that verbiage, and I try to do things to show that it stuck instead of just thinking that it did and applauding myself for trying so hard! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go finish a book.

Thoughts on the General Strike of March 22

Bullet points to reflect the nature of my immediate reaction coming out of witnessing the general strike on March 22 that swept the country:

• The obvious thing that provoked the strike is that people here are absolutely miserable living in a free-falling economy; with a bloated government cutting pay, reducing benefits, and contributing to the declining economy by reducing its spending to European Union "kosher-certified" levels; corruption, both perceived and real; and the offensive nature of their leaders claiming the need for reductions, liberalization, privatization, and so on, while living extremely lavishly themselves. The mood in the country is one of hope that things can get better but bitter, painful frustration at the situation and, indeed, a desperation to go back to better times.

Variously, "No to Privatization!", "More Social Justice, No Inequalities", "Unemployment is Exclusion, It is Not a Solution!", "No to Forced Work!", "Austerity is Poverty, Work is Progress", "To Fight is to Invest in the Future", "Bigger Salaries, Better Hours". 

•  At the same time, the message emanating from the strike was very abstract and contradictory. On the one hand, they want more work, a better-functioning economy, and the benefits that come from those things. On the other, they are entirely opposed to working more for the same or reduced pay, something common among all public-sector workers across all countries affected by the crisis in order to boost productivity, and they want the government to provide the jobs for them. They oppose private-sector investment in goods and services currently provided by the government for no particularly clear reason except that it would mean the government could afford to reduce the workforce it is directly responsible for, and in turn cut costs, costing them jobs that the government added (in many cases recklessly and excessively) during better times to begin with. They don't want inequality, but they want to maintain their own standard of living, as long as the government is providing for it. We all know how hardline planned economies have turned out in the past half-century (the Soviet Union is gone and faced economic hardship, Cuba is crumbling, and even China embraced the free market so that it too would not collapse), so why is the precedent being ignored? I do not support these messages, in their basic forms, coming from the strike – I do not see any credible reasoning behind the vilification of the free market.

• If the message is "to fight is to invest in the future", why is the message not tuned to the things that will safeguard their future? I did not see a coherence of focus during the strike, instead it appeared to be more of a general forum of complaint. The strike seemed lacking in sensibility, since the energy spent could be better focused on working harder, making better products, investing political capital to hold those necessary accountable and effect real change, and so on.

• I find "fascism of the market!" to be a laughable message at best, when the government cannot afford to pay the salary guaranteed to public sector workers now or before, despite how god-sent and permanent those jobs seemed to be. I do empathize with the message that ordinary people are getting screwed out of robbed of their pensions, because here we have people who thought they were paying into a system to guarantee their future under a system not designed to be able to afford them what the government was selling while its very leaders were profiting from government euros and the private sector. This is much more a matter of political accountability, in my view.

• The violence that erupted by the police at the end of the rally was entirely senseless and unacceptable in a strike that seemed no more sensible in and of itself, except as a barometer of public sentiment.

Stirrings, a Continuance of a Motif

I sat there shuffling uncomfortably, stirring in discomfort while attempting not to engage with the ongoing conversation, at times pretending to read whatever I happened to have on the screen of my unassuming tablet device. A friend of mine I see on a regular enough basis that the time we spend together is often passed in comfortable idleness had run into friends from the design school, a small troop of particularly trendy students wearing their hair in variously bouffant and abstract cuts, shaved on one side but not another, cut here, grown out there, wearing tight clothing with plunging necklines and tailored angles that would make a person like myself look foolhardy at best.

"Por que ele não fala, não fala português? De onde está?" "Ele é americano de Colorado, percebe português mas não fala, ou melhor, fala português mas não quer. Então só fala inglês mesmo que possa falar a nossa!" "Olha, é que não quer ou não gosta? Há uma grande diferença, sabes!"*

*"Why isn't he speaking, he doesn't speak Portuguese? Where's he from?" "He's American from Colorado, understands Portuguese but doesn't speak, or better, speaks Portuguese but doesn't want to. So he just speaks English even though he can speak our language!" "Listen, is it that he doesn't want to or doesn't like to? There's a huge difference, you know!"

I interjected to my friend in English, understanding the conversation, and he used it as the perfect case in point. "Não," I wanted to say, "não é que não quero falar – é só que falto palavras demais para expressar-me. Estou a tentar."** The point, however, is that I didn't, and I continue to remain hushed in similar situations, occurring with steadily increasing frequency as the network of people I interact with is augmented by means of the people I already know, the amount of people who don't or don't want to speak English following suit accordingly.

**"No, no it's not that I don't want to speak – it's just that I lack too many words to express myself. I'm trying."

This interaction, par for the course on the most typical of days, wherein I am expected (and fail) to live up to a certain baseline standard of speaking the host language that I have proven capable in more courageous (and inebriated) moments, sit in direct contrast to that of just a few days prior during the commencement of my first political course at Católica, a class on journalism and politics in the public sphere. It's the only one of my seminars that I have in Portuguese, and the course has been reduced from five to three meetings for reasons known only to the depths of time at this point, forcing the condensation of a course already dense in intellectual material, if weak in conceptual innovation and conviction. So it was that I spent three hours in complete horror, an excess of espresso coursing through my veins in the vain hope that I might be more alert and catch the slurred, mumbled language of the professor a little better, as if the words were particles floating around the air like some kind of political alphabet soup, there for the grasping if only you can get past how scalding hot the whole ordeal is. The other students were all Portuguese of course, and thus without problems it commenced and plodded along, me taking notes from the slides and listening painstakingly attentively to make sure I caught the details that I could. I managed to understand the general idea of what was going on, but I lacked any sort of understanding of the subtle and nuanced detail of the lecture, a fault that does not sit comfortably with me in normal circumstance and much less so given the one in which I find myself. The professor speaks in the exact manner of Portuguese that renders my comprehension effectively null and void, and that is precisely what I was hoping would not happen. The evening resulted in a heavy burden of stress that left me tired more than anything else.

In the aftermath of the class, and in ruminating on the matter of both scenarios as matter of contrast, I came to the conclusion that in fact I probably should live through such stresses more frequently and, indeed, that is much the same experience as the foreign students I tend to acquaint myself with must have on a frequent basis until at some point you really do catch each word, consuming each letter until the soup has digested into phrases of meaning and true consequence. For that, it must also be said that the stress incurred from feeling like drowning in a foreign language that is just slightly out of grasp from listening is in fact the same as daring to speak and sputter and stumble through the words you do know to express yourself as the foreigner making an effort to say things rendered much more nimbly and effectively in the commonly-understood mother tongue. There is not a grande diferença between the stresses of both situations. In both, there is enough of a linguistic base upon which to build, to progress, and to grasp the situation at hand that simply doing more of it would be the best enabler for current and future progression. In both as well, the overwhelming tendency is to run away just as the stress begins to build, before the lid of the pressure cooker is closed and you're forcibly steamed into a mushy lump of pliable knowledge.

I'll stop with the food metaphors eventually.

The point taken out of all of this is that at some point the process of learning the language is as vain and hollow of an excuse as the Italian students' complaints that they didn't speak Portuguese were the handful of times I went to that class. It is a lesson that I believe students of language in universities often are not forced to confront, which is to say that it is not the process of learning the language itself that bears any kind of merit, the usage of the language as a tool of communication being inherently the merit that is sought. In the context of living abroad, it is the ability to expand social horizons and remove cultural boundaries by using the language of others that is meritorious, not being recognized for having a certain knack for the rapid and thorough acquisition of linguistic rules and knowledge of aspects and quirks of language. Not speaking just becomes annoying and lazy instead of understandable after a certain point.

There are other things that present themselves as issues for me breaking down the speech barrier, namely issues that have everything to do with my manner and personality and nothing to do personally with anyone involved in the situations where I should be talking to them. I, like both of my parents, am more than a little bit obstinate and more generally stubborn and as such immediately lose the desire to say or retain an idea of anything I would want to say when I'm commanded to speak. "Say something!" elicits utter, deafening silence from me, no matter in what language the words are spoken, be it English, French, Russian, Portuguese, or so on. I have heard it forever and done the same thing forever, and at this point it's not always deliberate so much as it has become a reflex. Скажи что-нибудь. Ты что не говоришь? Parle! Parle! Dis-moi quelque chose. Say something. Fala! Fala, agora não falo inglês. You'll wait a long time for an answer to that one. The other thing is that despite being a remarkably social creature, I don't actually tend to have much of anything to say when thrust into a group of new people who all otherwise know each other, unless being asked questions or introduced more generally and expected to say a couple of things about myself. In Portugal, in my experience, you are expected to interject and thrust yourself into conversations to make your presence known, to order food and get what you want, to do anything socially more broadly speaking. It's a different manner of socialization that I'm not completely used to and I still function without that concept having fully sunken in yet.

One of my frequent points of advice for people that come to me for it is to stop trying to do things and simply to do them if they want to advance toward their objectives, something that anyone who has played an individual sport or had deadlines has surely played before. Stop thinking about it, stop complaining about it, stop dwelling on the task at hand, and just do it. Nike has built an entire brand around this very concept. Let's see if I can channel the Nike in me.