Decoding Derp, pt. 2 - "dog shit"

dog shit [dɑg ʃɪt] adj.

Compounded from "dog", meaning canis familiaris, and "shit", meaning feces, to mean "the feces of canis familiaris". Related to bullshit.


In common parlance, this is to be used as a descriptor of any situation, place, or thing that the declaimer considers subpar, ill-fitted, or undesirable. Occasionally to be used as an amplifier particle. Preferable usage should depict common things which arise the dislike or passion of no ordinary person. Synonyms include "whack".

"Yeah man, what the fuck was last night? I was dog shit tired and we still partied."

"Do you like Nescafé? I see you drink it a lot." "Nah man, it's dog shit coffee, but you take what you can get."

"Don't get me wrong, I love it here and I'm definitely living the dream, but it's just a dog shit country, I mean, I don't think they take anything seriously here but they hate on America so much."

"The way they don't use dryers for their clothes here is such dog shit."

Rudimentary Foothold

The primary observation of anyone I talk to, regardless of where they come from or are currently located, is that I have an incredibly easy student life here and must that be nice. Yes, my answer to that is, yes it is. And it is easy, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to live without many major obligations, with a comfortable enough means of expenditure, and plenty of spare time with which to explore and discover anything and everything in the city – time, moreover, enough to make and establish contacts with a dizzying number of people on a daily basis. I can not wrap my head around the amount of people I meet on a weekly basis, it is quite simply a flow that does not cease. So much the better for it. With my abundance of free time, however, my studying habits are not to be overlooked, and I find myself each day doing just a little bit more of everything. Even on dull days I leave the apartment, if only to study at a coffee shop, and most days I meet someone or many people, but I get quite a lot of studying done. I finished the book I had been reading at long last and moved onto another book and so on. The ball may have taken its time to get rolling, but it's still in movement, so to speak.

So it is that I find myself establishing a network of social contacts in which I can finally function normally in the city, going out when I want to go out and doing tamer things otherwise. All but a very nominal amount of these people are actually Portuguese and live in Lisbon, if not being from here, and so I've managed to avoid the very common trap of socializing only with other students from other countries and mostly just drinking and partying a lot without taking root in the city in any meaningful way. The city may be beautiful, but that alone can't make it worthwhile; on the other hand, having people who are from here show me their take of it and things they would either ordinarily do or enjoy doing, seeing, or visiting, pays great dividends not just now but in the longer term of living here as well. Social temporality is greatly reduced because these people are not leaving at the end of the academic year, they live their lives here and can impart a much more complete understanding of all things generally as they relate to life here. In the greater scheme of things and based on past experience, I find that this allows for much easier continued communication over the years after the program has ended, with a better chance of meeting again in the future. By deliberately avoiding establishing contacts with Portuguese people, as others have done ("nah man, you've gotta watch yourself with the Por-tu-guese, they're some shady characters...it can be super sketchy dude, so be careful, papito"), I believe a crucial element of moving to a new place is missed. It is not a method of adaptation that I am well-suited to.

I can not lay honest claim to this helping improve my Portuguese yet, because I speak poorly enough that it's easier for it to allow Portuguese people to improve their English situationally. It'll come around, one can hope. I think this lays better (anecdotal) veracity to the claim that the Portuguese generally speak excellent English. Até a próxima vez, Reader.

Decoding Derp, pt. 1 - "malandra"

Because I have many moments where internet memes pop into my head and I find myself thinking "you keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" when I hear things uttered, I've decided to start a new feature called Decoding Derp wherein we visit expressions that are used repeatedly and either out of context, incorrectly, or some combination of the above. I go along with things to the extent that I don't get completely annoyed, but when I notice even my own speech patterns reverting to a linguistic equilibrium — adapting to use the same or similar words and phrasing in order to establish a 'common ground' of language — all bets are off. All of these words and examples should be read in a voice subtly and artificially accented in a manner of denial that such a thing exists at all.

Today we start with a descriptor adjective of this city, the word malandra:

malandra [mǝlandɹa] adj.

From malandro, meaning a person of a quality described as a "clever swindler", a "bad boy", a "lover or flirt that conquers women one by one". Connotation neutral; neither positive nor negative. In Brazil, can also mean "a dishonest man involved in illegal activities"; "a swindler"; "a trickster".

In common parlance, this is to be used ad nauseam to describe a city in any situation describable in negative terms and qualities. Preferable usage should depict situations in which one is under no realistic threat of harm to or violation of their person except in the imaginations of the much-satirized suburban American middle class. Synonyms include "sketchy" and its variants. Examples:

"Hey dude, don't get smoked! It's a malandra city!"

"Yeah, you know, it's a malandra city, you've gotta watch your back."

"I was walking down the street the other night man and it's like 4 AM, and even though this is a total malandra city, I think even the criminals go to sleep at some point because I didn't see any sketchy people at all, it was totally fine!"

In Which Portuguese Becomes Vaguely Intelligible

At some point, probably around when my sleep schedule seemed to correct itself and I began waking up at hours that would only qualify as a "morning period" to the Portuguese, I began the process of getting over and allowing myself to look like a complete idiot (if necessary) in Portuguese in order to get and enjoy what I want instead of the limited scope of things I've already done or tried. It's not so much that I've gotten over anything, as the way in which my cheeks feel flush with embarrassment and my mind races to correct whatever phrase or thing it was that sounded stupid, but I've just begun to make a significantly better effort at plodding along through the vaguely mortifying feeling of being unable to communicate the extremely basic things that you're trying to ask for or otherwise express, sometimes literally in front of your face. It feels like what I imagine drowning might, only there's no risk of death, so you just have to live with it until you come to terms with the fact that, indeed, there are some people in the world that think you are a complete moron and what are you doing here if you can't even get the pastry order right? It is perhaps human nature to think about these things too much and assume them to be worse than the situation actually warrants.

And so it was that I got sick of having only pastel de nata, as delicious as it is when made properly (which is not the case in many of the pastelarias that are so abundant here), and one day went into a pastelaria determined not to be intimidated by the sharp bom dia of the server immediately upon my entrance and first examination of the items on offer in the glass case. I was not going to use English, the way that might get me what I want more often but would not help any semblance of assimilation or sense of actually living here, much less my Portuguese language skills. I was going to look at the pastries until I had decided fully well which one(s) looked good to me, and then just point and order, regardless of knowing the name or not. (Incidentally, a Portuguese person I am well acquainted with told me that in common lore, a man that knows the name of more than a couple of pastries including de nata is considered to be definitely gay and not necessarily in a positive way. This was reinforced in further conversations with other Portuguese people.) The end result was that I got probably the two best pastries I have ever consumed in my life. That was nice on its own, and contributed to my mood enough with the excess of espresso I had consumed that the whole ordeal was, well, not one, but it was also really the first time I managed to get through a fluid customer service interaction (as opposed to the robotic thank-you-come-again sort that one has in the US extensively and here only when you order exactly what you want as soon as you walk in and then pay immediately) without major issues and with genuinely friendly reception from the server. Apparently the effort, as bumbling as I can be, is well-taken, because similar exchanges have only gone better since then and now waiters no longer need to switch to English to clarify what the fuck exactly I was trying to obtain.

This all goes down the drain if I'm with native speakers, though, especially those who speak quickly and quietly typical of these people, and especially not at 10 in the morning before I've had any coffee and am still not home after not expecting to sleep elsewhere the night before. Portuguese is still sort of like that though – half the time it's intelligible and I feel like I've made great progress because I understand everything and the other half it might as well be Romanian, I have no idea what is going on, and I am just as frustrated as the native speaker twisting his tongue through eccentric English to get to a point simpler than it seems. That had better change with the amount of work I am pouring into this.

On Extended Leaves of Absence

Because my classes start in March and because of my general antipathy to structured studying environments, instead preferring to soak up lots of information and study quite a lot on my own, I have profited from having a yet further-extended break. What this is elaborately worded text for is to say that I've had plenty of time to party, be a tourist, and generally act like a philistine live out all of the moments that are less befitting of my academic character than otherwise. It's not so much that I've made poor judgments or anything, but I may or may not have accidentally walked into a pole on the street. Twice. Nor am I wasting away the time completely, studying Portuguese a little bit every day and continuing to read, albeit at a reduced pace from before. Before the break started though, because I would be lying right to your face if I laid claim to reading even a full book during my break before coming here.

Everything feels sort of like life blew up and confetti has come down in its place, nothing particularly organized and everything scattered about just waiting for me to clean it all up, piece by piece, one thing at a time. I went almost immediately from living a stable domestic life, spending more time than not with a partner doing things like tending home and seeing movies, getting breakfast with my mother on Sundays, and other things that are terribly boring except for those living and accustomed to doing them on a routine basis to partying perhaps a little too hard the night I got here, becoming a tourist, and fumbling my way through a language my brain only understands well half the time. Studying in the very concentrated and intensive way that I had been doing all through the last semester would be an exercise in futility at this point, and it was not on accident that I chose my courses so that I could start later and put more effort into them when I am better equipped to do so. I can only handle so much at one time – even my room took two weeks to get completely organized. My spirit is still confused.

I feel stagnant at times and overwhelmed by things to do at others, and sometimes I have days where I step back and take a breather and things seem just fine. Mostly I pinch myself just to make sure I'm actually experiencing all of these things, because sometimes it feels like I'm watching it on a movie screen. I'll leave you with a panorama from one of the days I finally got to breathe for a moment.

Aiming High, or Welcome to Poor Southern Europe

Top 35! Aiming high! On the bright side, at least we're not in Poland.

I had to throw that photo in, just in case anyone didn't believe me from the last post. They are so proud.

It turns out that my classes are pretty much all graduate level classes, which Ana ...Sofia? Maria? Bela? Catholic name something or other... advised were probably not as difficult as undergraduate classes, not the least of which being because there are some that are actually offered in English. Taking classes in Portuguese here is fine too, but we have to get special accommodations for tests and the like, so I'm trying to keep it to a minimum. The upside to this means that I may not start classes of substance until March, the downside of this is that I will probably be taking Portuguese anyway, negating that gain entirely. Not too bad, though. I should probably keep up with the português as much as possible.

 Which brings me to my main point(s), summarized in my favorite format:

• Portuguese people are generally very cosmopolitan and have an excellent grasp of English.

• Of the dozens of people I've managed to meet in the span of just one week, people ranging from a DJ to a former vice president of Northwestern University and beyond, everyone has the same concerns with the economy and desire for their country to correct itself. They all hate Merkel/Merkozy.

• Portuguese people insist they are worlds different from the Spanish and are vaguely offended by the notion of people thinking they're similar, which is truer than not.

• Portuguese people are rather short and rather skinny.

• People are laid back and will talk about anything with you in any of the numerous instances you may find yourself seated at a table with them, drinking a coffee or listening to a cat being strangled to death the worst fado performer on earth.

• People tend to be educated, but it's not actually necessary for a job here the way it is in the rest of the developed world. Many people have never gone to college but have typical middle class jobs that don't pay nearly enough akin to the rest of the world, because if you have a job here you're fine, the problem in the economy is with those who don't.

• Portugal isn't really as inefficient as many of its south European kin, at least according to them, they just have a little problem of embezzlement and corruption in the government.

I don't have much more to write because I'm too busy doing the things I'll write about later. Ciao!

Midnight Observations and Other Miscellany

• Portugal is kind of strange because every time I feel like it's not an inefficient southern European country, something happens to reaffirm that we are still Mediterranean in character if not in physical location, as well as the reverse happening whenever I start to get irritated by the fact that I willingly chose to live among lazy southern Europeans.

• Portuguese is precisely as easy as I thought it was, and I have somehow managed not to make a bumbling idiot out of myself using it more than a respectable number of times. Dealing with Brazilians, on the other hand, skews the distribution.

• Our wonderful host university, supposedly the highest ranked in all of Portugal, and most certainly with the greatest prestige, can not seem to get its shit together. I went in a few days after getting here to talk to the person who is supposed to be in his office all week on a regular schedule to get set up as a student at the university but instead left empty-handed with no one knowing when or if he might come into the office at any point during the week.

• The soldes phenomenon of government-regulated (read: mandated) sales in pretty much all stores exists outside of France, as it turns out, and I happened to arrive right in the middle of them. Hello, Zara.

• My apartment has no climate control whatsoever like a true, typical cheap apartment building constructed in the '90s, but the location is as good as they get and the rent is low to compensate. Can't have everything I suppose.

• Given the previous, my apartment is less of an apartment and more of an igloo. Wearing layers in the house almost doesn't work between the hours of sundown to midday and taking a shower is an exercise in something resembling idiocy, futility, and extreme lack of sex appeal.

• The hills of Portugal are stunningly beautiful and great for your ass.

• The city is kind of grungy and ...well lived-in, but it's got a character second to none. As well as views. Holy crap, the views.

Até já!