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.