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.

Plodding Along, or "Continuamos"

Bullet points are back in style, mostly because I decided that I was too lazy to write up 700 more words of drivel just now.

• The extent to which everything is quieter and generally less laden with charades in the apartment now is absolutely striking and I'm not complaining whatsoever about it.

• I found a new room for only slightly more per month in an ultra-modern apartment shared with other students, so I'll be moving in April.

• We're moving into the point at which I've been here long enough that with some of my friends it's no longer "how awesome that you learned so much Portuguese so quickly!" and is instead just "why, exactly, are you not using all that Portuguese?" Should fix that.

• Playing tour guide makes me realize the extent to which I actually have put a remarkable effort into assimilating as much as is realistically possible here, to enough of an extent that I can say I know at least something about each general section of the central city. I like that.

• I now embarrass myself in Portuguese in new ways by being able to give directions, order food for multiple people, and other general things in the public sphere without issue but barely having anything to say in basic chit-chat and banter.

• I can't tell if I have exacerbated breathing problems (asthma-like) or if I'm just sick, and whether or not the dust and dirt I can't seem to get completely rid of in my room is the culprit for that.

• Life is much easier when you have little to no dishes to do. So I adjust my eating habits accordingly, even when I'm home.

• A friend of mine is coming in a couple of weeks with a "care package" of random American hygiene products, because holy shit the same sorts of things are absurdly expensive or impossible for me to find here.

• I have enough crap that I would like to give some of it away, and by that I mean various articles of clothing and a couple of pairs of shoes. I have no idea where to do this here.

• I do now have an idea of where to recycle things, though, and the city is surprisingly recycling-friendly, something I was not expecting at all.

• I have begun the entirely typical spiral of talking to everyone from places where I am not significantly less and all of the many people I've met here nearly constantly, to the small detriment of my inter-continental networking abilities, such that they ever existed.

• My first two classes got cancelled so it will not be until the seventh full week of my sojourn that I actually have a class I receive credit for here.

• I opted not to bother with the Portuguese course here after all, because I am learning Portuguese rapidly and better in an organic, social way than I would otherwise. No lazy Europeans complaining about how they don't speak Portuguese involved (that's my job), no faux Brazilian accents. Great.

• I spent three days in the north of Portugal in the city of Porto, which I will write about at length at some point when I have motivation.

• I still can not speak Portuguese well without either coffee or alcohol in my system, and preferably both.

Derp of the Day

College advisor can't spell "advisor", student doesn't meet with her to discuss schedule.