Happy New Year, and Other Cliches

I know I've taken something of a break from posting recently, but worry you not, I have taken video which I'm editing and will resume posting more normally between now and when I get back to Lisbon and am overwhelmed by obligations again. However, it is New Year's Eve, so I thought it would be fitting in the general theme of reflections on this blog to post some of mine.

I started 2013 accompanying my then-partner to an Alcoholics Anonymous drag show in Dallas and find myself closing the year in Barcelona in less forcedly sober company. The passing of another year feels to me much like birthdays do, an underwhelming turning point that exists mostly to pause and reflect on what has happened until now, a reason to celebrate something and, preferably, enjoy the company of others for a day or two. Yet for all of the differences that the year has brought, all of the changes and lessons learned, I only find myself continuing along a path that started long ago, moving from step to step in a systematic manner that only roughly corresponds to the months on the calendar, finding occupation and purpose in my pursuit at a rhythm that only the adventure itself seems to determine.

So on the surface of things, much is quite different indeed. One look around this site reveals, in metaphorical and superficial terms, the extent to which that is true; I registered the domain and took care to redesign the site to the extent to which I am capable of being satisfied short of recoding the entire layout, and so on. I moved to a different country and learned how to worry about money in a more productive manner. I learned more about what it means to live for yourself as your own person and ended up with tattoos that, in their own little way, represent that. I learned how to get over my inhibitions for speaking a second language and found myself conversing more naturally and fluidly in both French and, in particular, Portuguese than I ever could have imagined. Fluency is something I take seriously, if at the same time discredit to an informed extent now. I visited new countries and new places which gave me a reality check on just how spectacular and fortunate my circumstances are that I am able to do so. I started to express myself more creatively, letting my writing develop and making videos, among other things. I figured out how to eat better on the same amount of money spent each week at the grocery store with just a little bit more effort in the kitchen on my part, and in turn my satisfaction with the way life is going is much higher than it was at the same point of the turning of the calendar a dozen months ago.

A dozen months of phrasing makes all of this seem like a lot, like a marathon of time has occurred, but the reality of aging and preoccupation with the so-called real world have informed me decisively that it is not and never will be. On the contrary, each moment, good and bad, seems more and more fleeting, and the importance of not getting too far ahead of myself seems all the more potent. I look back on the year that was primarily because it is a habit of mine to look back on times past, short and long, and draw something out of them that I can use in my creative energies. Yet I also have taken in part of the lesson in my daily life that the cliche of new year's resolutions tries to grasp at, which is that looking toward the future with purpose and clarity 

On Not Being Full of Yourself

"We were talking the other day and it was noted that it always seems like you know exactly where you're going by the way you walk." I was told the other day that I walk in a very particular manner, and the irony of appearing to know exactly where I'm going as a result is not lost on me. I walk with purpose though, to be sure. And today is all about that.

Since the corner of life and the productive world I have come to find myself in happens to be an area where finding the most diplomatic way to convince others of your value is of top priority, I have reflected long and hard on the place of my creative output in the grand scheme of things and whether it is in vain or to some means. The conclusions I come to bounce around primarily between the idea that although I enjoy my writing and my visual creativity, it amounts to very little and that energy and time would be better off spent learning code or doing something else, and that to some end, it has become clear that little by little, month by month, post, image, video by piece of content produced, my writing (in particular) and my other projects are the things I enjoy most doing and that following in the pursuit of that ideal can take me in directions that may bear other fruit. In other words, I have no certainty of where I'm walking, but by continuing to just do so and do so with purpose, I look like I have all the certainty in the world.

Yes, but what's the point? Let's not pat ourselves on the back or navel-gaze too much.

The idea is simple: it is easy to over-acknowledge the real-world value of the things you do or the skills you have and to put yourself, unwittingly, in that dreaded category of "special snowflakes" or "lazy millenials", the concept of which I spend so much energy expressing myself against. In other words, it is easy to think too highly of yourself and expect greater returns on your efforts than are warranted. That does not have to mean not to do anything, however, and having a certain aptitude for something can be recognized with humility and the knowledge that you can always do better, regardless of what you've already accomplished. In my case, this applies to any number of things, be them my studies, my language learning, my writing, or my photos, all of which I receive comments about, to all of which I deflect by insisting that none of it is nearly so worthy of flattery. I have never been one to take a compliment well anyway, but part of that is because I'm always conscious of the role of you can do better in motivating myself to do anything.

Instead, I try to focus on the technical side of things, talking about what I enjoy and what I'm relatively good at, and work on strengthening things that are weaker. When I have the opportunity to talk to people with more relative success than I do on similar endeavors, I try to have constructive conversations about what they're doing and how they go about it instead of just complimenting them, and when others come to me in a similar manner, I try to do the same. My Portuguese might be legitimately good, but I could be better with idiomatic expressions and prepositions. My photos might have nice color and/or composition, but perhaps I could work on focus and scaling. And so on. Amid the energy you put into something you enjoy, recognition is natural and does come eventually, in my case trickling in slowly but surely from my photos and my writing. It's all in the name of recognizing the merit of the praise of others while humbly suggesting that you could always be a better version of yourself. Any good project should always seem to some extent incomplete by its creator, especially in creative mediums, with some detail or other that could be improved or expanded upon. Mine is no different, and perhaps you, while reading this, feel similarly.

Hitting the Road Again

I apologize for the lack of a post, video, or anything else either Tuesday or Saturday (my tentative new schedule for content), so no excuses about it, and here we go.

Many people travel for some, if not all, holidays. My family and I never really did that when I was growing up, except for the Disney World trip on one of my first spring breaks that instead turned into us going yearly to visit relatives in an altogether different state. This year, however, being my first entirely on my own and coming from a different place in the world as well, I examined my options and thought about where I would want to and could go. I decided on Barcelona because I wanted to visit somewhere I hadn't previously, somewhere I had enough friends that I could stay with them and see the city from a more personalized perspective, it's one of the lowest-cost flight destinations from Lisbon, and because it's not nearly so cold during the winter as other destinations. Sorry, Paris, but I hate snow and temperatures that are in the single digits Celsius. So I'll be going for not quite three weeks, including spending New Year's Eve in the Catalan capital.

The idea that has popped up with one of my friends is to rent a car—it's apparently a cheap endeavor in Spain, so long as you return the car still in Spain—and get to know all of the environs of Catalonia, the region being sufficiently compact in size to take the time to drive around without spending a fortune or necessarily needing to spend the night away from home. If this happens, I'm hoping to also be able to see Valencia, since I'm unsure of whether I'll have the interest or equivalent amount of time to spend in Spain again, let alone appreciate it. I'm just not that roused by Spanish culture, the language, or the collective history, to be frank. I wasn't particularly moved by Madrid when I went to it, although it's a fine place, and that's a good summation of my feelings toward the country. My interest is primarily in regions that have stronger conceptions of independent identities, like Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. But then we would be getting into the social politics of what Spain is as a unified country and other things I'd rather not discuss on this blog, at least at the moment. Suffice it to say, I have tended to have more interest in other places. So that being said, the opportunity to take some time and really get to know a region of the country is a welcome adventure, because it is out of the ordinary for me and will be something I am entirely unfamiliar with; I speak no Catalan and have difficulties understanding it in writing, I understand Spanish just fine when spoken or written but do not speak it, and we have the aforementioned cultural reference regarding the country itself.

That idea is similar, coincidentally, to an idea that I've had in mind for a long time but for some very obvious reasons have never had the opportunity to do: renting a car and doing a road trip, Iberian-style. I would love to be able to get in a car and get to know much more of Portugal, go through Galicia, see the Basque Country, and beyond. Portugal is somewhat surprising in being a place that really requires a vehicle to see and do everything on offer, alas. That trip will be quite some time in the making, until then, Catalonia will be a sort of test run.

So in the spirit of moving around and seeing and doing new things, of course I've taken my blogging and videos into account. For you, the half-dozen or so readers I get consistently, I have a couple of questions: do you prefer reading posts or watching videos? If you prefer writing, how would you like to see Barcelona incorporated on the site? If you prefer videos, would you be interested in watching vlogs from Barcelona? Let me know in a comment, a personal message, an email, a tweet, whatever way you feel like contacting me.

Video: What's My Name?

You probably know my name. Or maybe you don't. In either case, here's a video on how to get it right:

Dynamism, or Branching Out

"What, what is it?" I asked.
"Oh, it's nothing, I just forgot about how there's a "smart Sacha" too."

I was out with a friend the other day trying a new café and as we were talking, the subject bounced around substantially between projects, ideas, events, and other goings-on in our lives. There was much to be caught up on, not just because plenty of time had elapsed since we had seen each other, but because it seemed that each of us was, at least in terms of ideas and energy, working on a lot of things at once. Between projects being worked on in the real world to entrepreneurial ideas in the city and building experience in our fields in whichever ways we could, my friend was taken aback by the idea that sometimes I actually do go to class, that I study for a master's degree, and that on some level, I understand political theory. I'm not just Sacha the Blogger, but Sacha the Thinker ("lawl", I think to myself, writing that as I have) as well. It was an "aha!" moment of realizing that I might possibly have it in me to be a multifaceted person, the kind that wakes up early in the morning and has a wide array of professional endeavors to provide both meaning and sustenance to life. For my chilly, pragmatic demeanor, it was a rare glimpse of unbridled optimism.

So the point, then, is that perhaps in the midst of being concerned about working prospects, whether due to reasons of economic crisis or generational hurdles, with an open and active mind and a spirit open to taking on new projects wherever possible, things can happen. You can register the domain and work on the project and bounce ideas around with friends and, who knows, perhaps one of them will stick and you'll bring it to fruition. Perhaps your design work will lead to freelancing which will lead to consistent clients who will refer you to a studio, or at the very least, help you build your portfolio so that you can start your own. Perhaps the colleagues you're befriending really do like your ideas or find you to be a legitimate part of the program and might know someone who knows someone else who can refer you to the lead for interning as a political analyst after all, perhaps your associate knows someone who can help you secure the legal documents you need to reside legally for enough years to be considered a real immigrant, perhaps studying your little side endeavors might lead to ideas that bear real fruit with just a little bit of application after all. When my friend commented on the number of ideas I had, I recoiled and said no, not at all, I feel like I don't have enough, especially not enough that are bringing in the results I want just yet. But perhaps with the right energy, in due time, they will. That seems to be the place I'm at, lazy millenial or not, and I think we could all learn something from it. I'm working on it.

Waking Up Early

I've recently finished the first of several evaluation periods for my MA program, the effective equivalent we have of midterms, meaning that roughly each six to eight weeks we have a flood of papers, exams, and other forms of evaluation of that period's classes. Our classes are split up into small segments because of the fast-paced nature of the program, and so we get a 'taste' of each subject, through the collective of which it is presumed we will come to a sophisticated understanding of the principles of political science that our program deals with in particular. That and hopefully something to push us along through a thesis, alas. So I survived, despite notifications by my alma mater that it would be rescinding alumni access to its VPN soon, and I came to some conclusions about time management that I had never fully been able to realize as a personal habit before.

Productivity is obviously very important as a graduate student, the more so as an immigrant to a new country, but I have a tendency to be scattered and only infrequently manage to collect my energies in one place, which leads to mixed results in terms of initiative and moderate success in terms of academic pursuits. My distractions written about previously didn't really help in terms of this period, but I found that after a paper or two I managed to hone in on what needed to be done with greater focus, perhaps aided by nothing of mine being broken by housekeepers or dramatic goings-on in the apartment otherwise. Yet find my focus I did, and I found that with my schedule seeming to be impossible, I accepted the responsibility as just that and plugged through it. My Portuguese language course runs from 8 AM until noon, which means that I have to get up early in order to have time to eat breakfast and get there within a reasonable window of the class starting. (I'm laying no claims to punctuality in arriving to class in this country, because it doesn't happen.) When faced with midnight deadlines for papers and homework in that class, it came to be that I saw myself needing more time in the morning to regroup myself, organize my days, and get going with enough fuel to last through both the class and my other obligations without stopping.

More time in the morning. How? I am not a morning person.

Those were the thoughts I had initially, and it's true that I'm really nothing of a morning person. There are very few people I want to see, let alone interact with before 8 AM rolls around. If I don't have to wake up before 9 AM, I generally try not to. However, necessity rang, and I've come around to waking up anywhere between 5:30 and 6:30 AM each day in order to reach my objective. There's a lot to be said for the amount of willpower it requires to motivate yourself to get out of your bed, face a cold, dark, and silent apartment, eat breakfast, and organize your day in just a couple of hours before walking out and getting started with things. There's a lot to be said for actually doing it, the follow-through, and I've mostly managed to do it. Like anyone, I've had hiccups, days where I didn't hear my alarm and slept until noon, others where I woke up only with enough time to eat and run out the door, but the majority of the time I wake up in the dark hours of the early morning and do as I'm slowly getting accustomed to, learning to relish the time I have to think my thoughts, be alone, and get my creative energy flowing. For someone who prefers to stay awake until those hours of the day, it's a radical change. I don't go to bed that much earlier, but I utilize my time awake more efficiently.

This is all a part of themes of late that revolve around setting realistic goals and attaining them, evaluations of what exactly it is that those goals are and what purpose they serve, and a lens toward where that will push me into the future. Perhaps it's not realistic to wake up at noon one day after going to sleep at 5 AM and say "today I will go to bed extra early, by 10 PM, and wake up and do yoga and cook a full breakfast at 6 AM!", but setting more attainable goals seems to work. Waking up at 5:30-6:30 after going to bed at midnight leaves me tired, but the benefit to the rest of the day outweighs the relative sleepiness. The extra productivity is more satisfying than the perceived comfort of not doing it, and it leads to other decisions which expand on that. I'm also eating better since I've started this particular habit and, upon balancing my accounts, found that I'm spending much less money than I thought.

So the purpose of writing this, I suppose, is to say that it can be done. I, in particular, can overcome my natural tendencies to laze about until the ugly hours of the morning and instead turn the ugly hours of the morning into useful ones. They might not be any more attractive, but with a shift in perspective and willpower, they're no longer enemies. It's all part of the process of actually doing the things that we think would make us better versions of ourselves, and in my case, I needed to start somewhere. Let's see where that goes.

The Groove, or Lack Thereof

"What's going on with you? Your focus seems to be very off lately."

This question was asked of me recently after an exam, but it seems pertinent to everything else. I haven't posted much save for some random bursts of Portuguese inspiration. We all get in a funk sometimes, and this is no different. The difference for me right now is that I keep coming back to write a post, looking at the blank space where a title and post text should go, and staring at it until all the energy to write anything has dissipated. So it has gone that my attention wavers in class and papers and tests are a battle of settling down to the task at hand. None of this is for want of coffee, if anything I should drink less of it. Nor is it for want of things to do: between morning classes of Portuguese, night classes regularly scheduled for my MA, an evaluation period, visitors in town, and negotiations with people over starting English lessons (mama needs the dolla euro bills), I have plenty of things to do. I'm not bored, I'm just a little off.

So as I was walking the two kilometers to my university to turn in a paper—scatterbrained, unfocused perhaps, but always diligent with obligations—thanks to the metro going on strike and the buses being too full to catch conveniently, I got to thinking. As it goes with most things, my focus is not so much out of sync as it is out of sync with the things to which I am obligated, which is to say that when I am doing my coursework or thinking about writing a blog post that isn't yet another winding missive, my mind is elsewhere. Whether it be concerning ideas for working, creative projects, increased interactivity with Portuguese in my life, or other things I find myself engaging in more heavily, those are the things which I find myself wanting to spend time on in place of much of what I'm doing where I'm doing it. The ideas are not inherently bad, just misplaced in context.

I have never been particularly good at reconciling these sorts of conflicts of interest, so I've turned to asking and observing friends and acquaintances to figure out how they get on with it. Now I'd like to try something new and turn to you, the few people reading this blog, and ask you: what do you do to keep all of your priorities in order, all of your activities in check, and channel your energies both where you see fit and where they're required, all without feeling a little bit crazy? I find myself retreating into personal space and using other means of feeling grounded; as I was walking from the university, I decided to delay going home and wander, letting the serenity of a stroll alone sink in. Let me know your process in a comment, if you'd like.

Portuguese Grannies

Often I will take my headphones out of my ears for the sake of listening to the transient noise around me, the murmurs of conversations happening in a now mostly understood language, the hum of cars going by, and so on, for the sake of feeling somewhat more connected to my surroundings and getting a grasp on the reality of everyday life lest I feel incredulous that I am experiencing what is happening presently. I am something of a natural eavesdropper, always fascinated to hear the banal details of peoples' everyday conversations, the intrigue of all the women that the bros around are chasing after or the nothingness of milestones accomplished by young mothers' firstborn children. When I'm not disparaging them for bumbling around, old ladies seem in particular to have the most interesting insights, and as I was sitting down to have a pastry and a coffee one day, observing two chatting grannies, it led me to reflect.

What I realized in that moment is that I have a fascination with the idea of what it would be like to have a Portuguese granny—or really familial roots of any sort here, to be sure. A granny in particular, though, because the matriarch of the family seems so rooted in Western culture as the maiden of all particularly good memories of childhood, a fount of sagacity for our young adult selves, a dose of perspective lost in decades before our generation, and occasionally, unmatched wit.

So as I observed the grannies sitting together, friends of many years, or perhaps family, having a snack and chatting about among themselves and the young café attendant, the thought struck me that I had never fully considered the idea of cultural roots and the formation of a cultural self. It is a concept that stems in large part from the family matriarch for the simple fact of her having passed on her cultural understanding, language, cooking skills (or lack thereof, in some cases), and so on—all of the things that combine to give us a sense of who we are in relation to the place we are from and why it is like that.

They do not speak English, and a naive part of me still has a bit of a shocked reaction to an upbringing in a less connected world where my own language was not so widespread, the influence of my native culture that spread along with it so prevalent. The grannies, then, in their own way, offer an insight into what it means to be a part of a certain culture, they retain the knowledge and manner of the path taken by the country to establish itself in the current age and provide for the younger generations in the best ways seen fit for the task.

As an outsider, the fascination comes from wondering what it would be like to be a native member of the society you've voluntarily chosen to stay in, what it would be like to have the language you spend half your time speaking in but in which you still don't feel fully comfortable, to have relatives to pick you up at the airport after a trip or people to visit in a different part of the country when holiday season comes around and all of the activities and traditions that come along with that. It is also the fascination, in the inverse, of wondering what kind of an impact residing for so long in a foreign country will have on the same process you have gone through in your native country; how the act of acclimating and acculturating might somehow twist and bend, or perhaps mold and transform your own "cultural DNA", if such a thing truly exists.

Yes, I speak perfect English, but what of the day that comes when someone tells me they thought I was Portuguese for the sake of my speech and not appearance, or the Portuguese person assumed to be British for the authenticity of their accent and various mannerisms? There seems to be a fluidity about culture for those who have stepped outside of their own, who take on multiple cultural identities in a way that those who stay in their home cities and countries do not seem to have.

Given the expectations of those left behind, I am left to reconcile that I will just have to continue spying on grandma at the bakery, pondering my own thoughts while my own family is somewhere else quite far, doing and speaking of equivalent things, each in their own particular manner, pertinent as they are to where they are and where they are from, as though they truly belong there.

Things I Wish I Could Do

(Or were better at)

1. Sing. I'm pretty sure I'm tone deaf. I'm pretty sure I misjudge how many people are in the house when I think I'm alone and thus also are pretty sure I'm tone deaf.

2. Drink coffee black. I've got this down with espresso, but give me a larger cup without (soy)milk at your own peril. Pass on the sugar, though.

3. Pretend to care about things that don't interest me better. I'm nodding my head and artificially adjusting my intonation laudably but my face is giving me away, ruining everything.

4. Throw side-eye/give the death glare. My mother is particularly good at this. I am not.

5. Schmooze. With antisocial academic types in particular. Never does my music sound better or the book I'm reading capture my attention more.

6. Set a schedule. Sometimes I go to bed at 11:30, others at 5 AM. I feel like I have no control over this. Some polite people have informed me that this is called "being a twenty-something", or variously, "being a (graduate) student".

7. Travel. I often look at flights to places I want to go, waiting for the money to pay for them to telekinetically appear in my account. Eating takes priority, though.

8. Be less clumsy. And when I at last throw stellar side-eye, it will be to anyone who can eat flaky, crumbly, delicate anything without getting it all over themselves.

9. Put my obsessive-compulsive quirks to productive use. Less organizing of my living space and earthly possessions, more workaholism.

10. Push all of the bumbling people around here out of my way. But that wouldn't be polite.

Writing, You Say?

No, I haven't died or somehow otherwise disappeared into the (rotting, crumbling) Portuguese woodwork. I haven't stopped writing in favor of other creative mediums like my videos, much as plenty of people have asked (who knew that the number of people who pay attention to my things online grew from 3.5 to 7?). I just haven't had much to write about without feeling like I'm doing the virtual equivalent of sucking wind, because I'm trying to take all of my endeavors in a direction somewhat away from the diary-like format of yore.

So I'm still capable of writing long-winded blog posts, but I find the utility of writing about inane details of my life a little bit less relevant or interesting, and I think those who do read what I have to say would probably agree. I have been seeing much better interaction and engagement from my videos than I typically would from any given written post, and I'm not particularly surprised by that. It feels more interactive and doesn't require as much attention. In this age, our attention spans have shortened to those of something that might grow in a garden. A turnip, perhaps, or a strawberry. Part of this is that I don't really think I'm doing much outside of my creative work (which you invariably see posted here, which is the point) that's of note, since my classes are going much as they ever have, much along the lines of anyone who has gone to school knows, much as any graduate student can relate to, much as any twentysomething who successfully exited a period of senioritis and moved on to other ventures can attest to. It's chugging along, slow and steady, and the anecdotes of note are more like snippets, instead of spreads.

Despite this, since the rebranding and redesign of the blog, I have had record numbers of pageviews and other general traffic between my blog and my main video channel month on month, something I would not have expected given the perceived paucity of my posts. Perhaps it is, indeed, easier for people that I have everything collected under a common identifier, or perhaps I'm just having a temporary blip of good fortunes for my productive energies. It would be foolish to assume that there isn't some kind of a marketing effect when you have figured out the logistics of targeting and how to "brand" yourself accordingly, and in some small way, I have done just that in the way that happens to accommodate the skills that I have or wish I had. So the point of all of this is, then: no, I haven't disappeared, and in fact I am very perceptive of the increased attention I've been getting for my overall creative efforts. I recognize that this still serves as a personal blog, a personal site, videos reaching a very small audience, so the increase in traffic, however relatively small, does not pass me by. I hope you'll stay with me as I produce content designed to be of increasingly better quality.

UPDATE: I would also like to take this time to note that I have been going through posts to add labels to them to make the site further navigable. They can be found at the bottom of posts, and I may add them to the sidebar in the future. If there's something you'd like to see me do with the site, do more of, or do less of, please let me know in a comment or an email!

Video: Nude Beaches

I think the title speaks for itself. Watch to see what I have to say about showing epidermis at the oceanfront:

New York

I'm not really sure how I managed to make it so long without getting to New York, that epicenter of cosmopolitan travel, that city of hopes and dreams in the eyes of so many, that almost mythical "it" factor that few succeed in describing well; New York City, the ultimate destination for someone as nominally well traveled as I seem to have become. Yet I hadn't, and so upon invitation to spend a few days in the city with accommodations accounted for, I couldn't turn up the offer.

Owing to its size, New York is many things to many people, and there are as many opinions about how the city is, what is good or bad about it, and what you should do there as there are people there at any given moment. It is the realization of the cliched American melting pot, a break from the comparative homogeneity of cities elsewhere in the country from east to west, a reminder that we can somehow manage to still be American even without segregating ourselves into cul-de-sacs and sports utility vehicles. New York is perhaps jarring to the content suburbanite but feels immediately familiar to the aspiring urbanite, the young professional priced out of the exact center of his home town but who passes most of his time there anyway. New York is your home town's downtown on steroids, regardless of the borough. It seems to never end, and what you make of that says as much about your background as of the city itself.

What is striking about New York is precisely that it is not striking; the immediate familiarity gives it a sheen of Anywhere, USA coating the sidewalks, the potholes, the peculiar beggars hollering down the streets, the tables of small and pretentious Manhattan restaurants that serve mediocre food. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about New York except that it is a city that makes an art of compartmentalizing, a place where you are free and have the resources to do and be whatever you would like at any moment you would like to, so long as you know what that is or at least have a decent reason for doing so. I suspect many of those who don't end up liking the city never figured out why they were there in the first place, they just expected New York to happen for them.

New York is a fine place to visit as a foreign tourist, but is designed in a way meant to be utilized and enjoyed to the maximum by Americans, newfound or taken for granted as birthright. It is not a museum of a city, the love at first sight that comes with the decorative lattices of Paris or the avant-garde edginess of Berlin. No, New York envelops you and lets you digest it before you decide what to think of it, before you decide what your purpose for being there is. New York will spit you out if you come to lack that purpose, moving onto the hoards of starry-eyed newcomers eager to take your place in it. The city is not boiled down into a Disneyfied garden, instead you are expected to know where you are going before you go there, right down to the paucity of signage in the subway. It is the quintessence of American dystopia, the idea we all seem to buy into of stark individualism and aggressive money-chasing while on the same hand forcing the less stellar reality into an unavoidable collective. It's fine dining on every cuisine you can think of and twenty minute waits for your subway train to arrive to take you to your underpaying job in a different borough. It's two-faced and unapologetic about that. The magic of New York, it seems, lies in its brash disregard for any imposed sort of order.

Infographic: Hierarchy of Needs

Posted without comment. Click to enlarge:

Welcome to sashyenka.co

Before I write about New York and my thoughts and observations from going there, I would like to note that there are some big changes going on here...again.

I decided that it was time for me to consolidate my online presence with coherent "branding", or in other words, that I use the same moniker/username everywhere on the internet and ought to solidify that usage. 'sashyenka' has been part of my online presence since at least 2007 and is short and simple enough to where even people who are not good with foreign-sounding words like my mother can remember it and say it aloud with no real issues. To add to this, I have ideas for taking my writing in new directions in the coming months, and I have a lot of YouTube ideas formulating, so I wanted a cohesive space from which to launch all of my creative endeavors. Call it a personal site without the resume if you'd like. Stylistically I wanted to work with something neutral and minimal. My personality does not play well with clutter, and I know that there are a lot of things to compile here, so I made the best of it. Blogger is still the platform I'm using and will continue to be unless something truly crazy happens and I have a need to create a more formally hosted site.

As a result of this, some of my older posts may get hidden from public view. This is a part of a general cleanup I am undertaking of my online presence, clearing out needless old things and pruning what I have active. Since I'm done with undergrad and moving into a phase of being more held to my own decisions, this process is imperative. I would like to take things like writing a little more seriously, so some of my content will simply not be suitable for public viewing. This is not to say, however, that I will be enforcing a form of more rigorous self-censorship; fundamentally I keep this blog as an outlet for my creative expression and that will continue to be the case. This same process can be seen across parts of my other social media outlets, and I think this is all for the better.

I hope you enjoy the new look and will continue to enjoy what I produce into the future. I would have been hard-pressed to expect three and a half years ago that I would continue along in such a manner.

Finally Found

I announced by various means to very little fanfare that I have been accepted into my MA program at Católica in the past week, which has put the keystone into a creeping perception I've had of the time I'm spending at home in Denver for the short summer period. While I find myself pulled in many directions, I feel like I've managed to steer them all toward the end point that I actually want for myself. I feel almost totally in charge of myself for the first time.

I have a lot to cover in this post, but I'm going to try to write as concisely as possible, because the idea of a drawling blog post irritates me in the current moment.

I flirted with the idea of writing the word home in quotation marks just now, and that's because I find myself now occupying the space of tourist in the city I was born and lived in for twenty years. This may be the last time I live here for a while, or it could be that I'm taking a break for just a year or two. I don't know yet, but the point remains that I am as much a visitor here as I am a resident now, and it is peculiar given the reflexive familiarity of all that is around me. I have blissfully few obligations to fulfill and the presence of mind to actually accomplish them now, and it seems that for all of the strife in determining what I wanted and was going to do with myself, the dust has settled where it needed to. The only downside to the intentionally reduced duration of stay is that I'm finding it near-impossible to find formal employment, which I had intended to secure for the summer months. I am surviving somehow despite that, however, and have gained the perspective of not needing to discontinue my newly-acquired observational habits from abroad while I am here, for there are people in other places who know nothing about where I am from and I am discovering new things to appreciate about being home while giving up on the idea of being landed anywhere in particular.

I have held on linguistically despite the scene changes since Lisbon, my Portuguese suffering not at all despite being immersed in French and then English for extended periods. On the contrary, I felt it more difficult to start the motor, so to speak, with French when I was in Paris, whether for exhaustion, for the sake of continuing to use and think in Portuguese, or for the knowledge and anticipation of speaking English all the time immediately thereafter. I was reduced to a terrible Franglais that is not particularly befitting of my knowledge or capabilities, but given the situation with my friends, it worked out fine. Paris is as much a home for me as Denver or Lisbon as ever, if not more so between all three now as I come into my own and spend more time in each place. So I find that my Portuguese is sufficient that I think and function in it side by side with English much of the time, albeit with obvious shortcomings in some manners of expression for want of vocabulary. It is a peculiar self realization, as I never anticipated overcoming the block I have always had of verbal output, nor in that particular language. Now that I know I can, I will continue on with the Portuguese course I was taking to hopefully build upon that progress.

Being single in the place where I was so desperately holding onto a relationship that was coming to an inevitable, crashing end has been less bothersome than I expected, much as the interactions I have had with the other half of that equation have been. My perspective on being social, aside from the context of a relationship, seems to have shifted with the lessons learned from my Portuguese spring; I have made a more pointed effort to spend time with my actual, longstanding close friends than I might otherwise have, yet I have also pursued meeting new people (read: menfolk) for the sake of taking life by the horns and not getting trapped in an unnecessary melancholy. Without the yoke of feeling like I need to hold onto an intimate relationship in order to preserve that connection, my life feels more dynamic and I feel more in charge of myself. I enjoy myself. I like being single. I don't foresee that changing in the near or even somewhat more distant future. I'm happy to be living my own life and having new experiences without trying to force myself to take root somewhere or in some sort of situation that is not fulfilling for me. That process has come full circle.

Full circle: with the arrival of shitty weather in Denver, that seems to be symbolically fitting of everything happening right now.

Paris

Paris has the unwavering effect of being a place in which I fully realize the profoundly altering moments I seem to experience periodically, be they by chance or simply because there is something about this city that encourages such things to happen. This time is no different, and so it is that I find myself acceding to an unfamiliar place of adulthood, of thinking, and of perspective in how I want to move my life forward. Or at least so it seems that each time I'm here things coalesce into a large step forward–in retrospect, perhaps, not as much.

The point remains however that this time around is no different, and here I am submerged in newfound thoughts come from the end of the financial and social bubble that was my undergraduate education, the idea that at 21 years of age I should probably have an idea of what I am doing or at least want to be doing with myself in the short years to come that I can call myself a twentysomething, and the realization that due to the cozy nature of my undergraduate years, like many others, I am perhaps a bit underqualified for what I am capable of doing. The Portuguese chapter of my life is, with due tidings, not over, as of the submission of my application to a political science master's degree program at Católica, a somewhat ironic (hopeful) return to the university I had so many frustrations with just a year prior. I feel the motivation of the close of my six month period of being a graduated semi-adult vagabond, the end of a placeholder course to keep me doing something with my time, not very much money, and the knowledge that all of these are signs that point to the necessity of doing something in the very near future. I have a couple of months to spend in the United States before beginning to realize more acutely all of the things I've spent so long whinging about on this blog in Europe, so I find it imperative not to sit idle, if for the very simple fact that my bank account quite simply cannot bear that kind of pressure.

There is something to making a break with the college bubble, as I so incessantly refer to it, learning to wean yourself off of a reliance upon others for whatever it may be that you want. This doesn't necessarily refer exclusively to financial means, naturally, but that social life outside of college is also almost radically different: there is none of the ease of meeting new people who have the tendency of fitting into the neat format of your interests, career, or academic path for the simple virtue of taking a class together or having an institutional structure which encourages rapid group formation. No longer actually being engrossed in the grind of serious classes also results in a disconnect between both the exchange students fretting about how to manage partying too much versus studying as well as the working class, those who have left their university years long behind and are actually sustaining themselves independently despite the economic crisis. The financial element is more obvious; despite being an only child, there is an increased reluctance on both parts between me and my parents for me to continue to freewheel in their money, me with the desire for more autonomy over what I'm doing with my cash and them for the simple desire of having more in their own pot to do with as they please. So I find myself in conversations with, variously, Damsel in Dismay and my mother about ways of working in such a manner that can cater to the skills I actually have, whether my experience shows it or not. I'm reluctant to talk about such things, mostly because not a single thing is yet in motion, at least until my "vacation" is over, and also because it's something I would rather look at in retrospect, like most other things.

I have no active desire to spend the next few years in the United States, though I no longer reject moving back altogether. Having as much "downtime" as I did put more into perspective what I want, for want of an institutional structure to tell me what I want, and I've come to see that I do want to spend more time in Portugal, productively though, with the intent of allowing my Portuguese to transcend the barriers of fluency I seem to have been on the path toward. I also want to make something of the connections I have been slowly but steadily building in Paris, with the intent of working here after I'm done with my degree in Lisbon, however unrelated the work itself may be to the degree I will pursue. I need experience more than I need to suffocate myself with the idea of trying to work exclusively in a field that, even in Europe, land of administrators and bureaucrats, is somewhat saturated. Beyond that, I don't know, and I don't need to try to plan my life out ten years at a time. It suffices to say that the motivation I have is driven by a tangible feeling, a desire if not impulse, to expand my horizons and continue traveling to major cities (and a continent) yet unknown, to provide for myself the means to do so comfortably and in the fashion I prefer. It's not going to pay for itself.

My only remaining question is: why is it always Paris? Is there something in the air, the overhyped bread, the finicky weather? Something to the particular smell of the metro, the chirping manner of the French spoken? In any case, I'm not complaining.

Your Train Will Depart Shortly

So it is that I find myself having departed what I have come to refer to as the terra lusófona, the "Portuguese-speaking world", for want of my experiences being limited exclusively to Portuguese people, regardless of the fact that the time spent is, in fact, in Portugal.

I arrived in France, Paris to be more exact, less than 6 hours after finishing the process of packing my bags, loading all roughly 55 kg of luggage into a small car, bidding goodbye those in the old apartment I actually got along with, rushing to check in for my flight, and managing to get through Lisbon's airport security in approximately four minutes. Partly because I left much of my packing to the last minute, and partly out of concern for the weight of my luggage, I had to leave many things behind in Lisbon, left with as amigas at home or in a bag for me to reclaim from a different friend when I return (god willing) in the fall. Emblematic of everything, but actually of nothing, this post will not be a droning elaboration of melancholy, how I feel my life is fractured, or how I somehow left a part of myself in Lisbon. I've expressed all of those sentiments before.

No, instead, what actually has happened is that I haven't had any time to stop and strangle myself in my thoughts, to be overly sad about those left behind, to ruminate about the future, or anything of that sort. The primary thing I've been preoccupied with is the state of my bank accounts, horrifyingly low as they seem, but that's a matter best left off of this blog. I arrived to Paris and schlepped my heavy luggage through the RER, falling down from the unbalance that comes from exhaustion while trying to get my bags off the train and continue along to the metro to get to my friend's apartment. I managed to arrive with surprisingly little difficulty, despite the Parisian metro lacking much by way of assistance for those with baggage or disabilities (the same thing, by the view of some), only to receive the details of a train I would need to catch to Nantes just a few hours later in the afternoon. I was so effectively drunk from exhaustion that I forgot to pack underwear to take with me for the following two days, a very sexy reminder to be perhaps better organized in the future. The point of all of this is that my time is currently being spent so very much in the moment that I find myself doing nothing in particular much at a time, always seeing someone or doing something at the last minute and without hesitations or regard for how it will look in retrospect.

This is the most important lesson from the close of the spring stint in Lisbon, the idea that one must quite simply shed all preconceptions and accept that things happen to much of an extent the way they will happen, without need of being forced or thinking about them too much. Wrapping my head around this concept has not been an easy process, and to say that it was a particularly festive spring, full of merriment and gaiety is to speak utter nonsense. It has been difficult. I have gone through the (admittedly cinematic, at times unnecessarily dramatic) experience of letting go of love from a distance, of losing my social circle and my previously established notions of sociability for an extended period, experienced more of the regrettable poverty that the country finds itself in, and even the weather, as if to say fuck you express its solidarity, has been abnormally awful this year. I am not painting the full picture, as there have been moments of being up as well as down, but the trend was much more downward this spring than upward, as it had been a year ago.

I feel much more at ease as I do what I'm doing in Paris this time around than I did in March, perhaps for the simple fact of having digested all of what happened leading up to now. I managed to finish a book I had been reading for over a year and moved onto another. I am speaking both French and Portuguese without lowering my level or forgetting too much of either one. I have been simply enjoying things to the maximum extent that I can, because perhaps at last that is where I am supposed to be, enjoying my actual vacation for what it is. The sense of calm that had come over me has transformed into a persistent, even insistent tide of good energy which is allowing me to focus my creative energies and think more about the things I want for myself in the future and how to realize them. I'll write a different blog post about that.

I'll miss Lisbon, but I left lacking a particular sense of sadness or melancholy for leaving. That city has become so utterly familiar to me that when I walk around it, it just feels like home. I feel a certain command of the streets, regardless of whether I know them, the kind that only comes from when you have so utterly absorbed somewhere into your sense of being that it is forever a place of home for you. Even my Portuguese has become something I could confidently call fluent, if on the lower rungs of the relatively subjective scale of fluency. I have no fear of chit-chatting with baristas or waiters when ordering food, I do and get what I want when I want it, and I no longer translate things into English in my head. Those left behind will either be there when I intend to be back, or are good enough friends that I have full confidence that I will see them again in the future, in some other new place worth exploring. Até mais, Lisboa.

Blue Skies Redux

A good friend of mine recently wrote a post about the wave of contentment and still serenity that accompanies the unconstrained portion of the beginning of summer, entitled Nothing but Blue Skies?. You should go read it. She's a fabulous writer.

And on that note, I've decided to transcribe my own redux of the same topic, because I find that I'm on a similar frequency. I've stopped short of listening to Doris Day on repeat, but the feeling of a quiet acquiescence of a tranquil, steady, if temporary, existence at the moment has come over me, accompanying the greater realizations achieved in my most recent post. I have roughly two weeks left currently in Lisbon, ten days to follow that in Paris, and then what should hopefully turn out to be approximately seven weeks of leisure in Denver, perhaps working but not forcing the issue of anything unnecessarily. I'm getting along in my proceedings uncontroversially at the moment, and I don't feel put upon for the first time in what feels like months. I also happen to be the only person in my apartment of seven at the moment, something that will change only to the tune of a fluctuation of one or two people in the coming eight days, which is allowing me breathing room to, as the cliche goes, just "do me". The space is allowing my creative side some room to formulate new projects, which I'll write about later if they come to fruition.

It turns out that when left to my own wits, to just do me, I take more spur-of-the moment decisions, but ultimately for the better. I have nights out where my excessive drinking doesn't lead to a blown-up incident at home but rather just an average night of clubbing and coming home early in the morning. I have gone to the beach at a moment's notice. I have simply lived, breathed, and perceived the simple nature of all of those actions without ulterior motive or feeling to drive myself crazy with neuroses about it. I have less of a sense of calm before the impending, inevitable storm than my friend, but therein lies the main difference between us: she is a workaholic, someone who consistently and persistently overloads herself with chores and assignments until she physically, if not mentally, needs a break from it, and I am a somewhat more "type B" personality than that. Yet there are impending duties and responsibilities, regardless of the way in which the plans I am trying to effectuate turn out, and I have a full understanding of what needs to be done to plan for everything to go as smoothly as possible. I'm just not going nuts over it. Apparently wavelengths travel a great distance.

Seasonal Sentiments, or Move Along Now, Plenty to See Here

Spring seems to be dying hard in Portugal this year, as yet another mixed week of shitty rainy and chilly days thrown in with sunny and hot days worthy of going to the beach and the month at last being June has come to pass. For my own sake, I hope the warm weather comes to stay, as I have been banking on being able to wear the tank tops I decided to purchase and am being driven progressively neurotic in the same way that the weather itself needs a Xanax.

As to the actual content of this post, a brief conversation recently with a friend put into glistening perspective the very real fact that, indeed, someone else always has worse problems, and that personal blogs have the tendency to be navel-gazing whiny introspection on the non-issues that seem like such big deals to the audiences we all seem to lack. I try to make light of that in this blog but have the circle-fulfilling awareness that I end up doing the same thing as I have just disdained, writing as I do to bitch complain about things when and in the manner in which I do. Alas.

Yet as my time in Portugal this time around winds to its overwrought conclusion, the main impression I'm left to digest is that this spring in particular has been marked by difficulties more than great progress, a consistently muddy patch of winding road. Each epoch is different and needs to be, and so it has happened that everything seems to have been processed through a filter of conflict and resolution this spring, that being the theme to all aspects of the most important things going on in my life. It has been a time to take a break from the imposed, if fleeting, institutional order to life that college represented and dig into myself and the root of my character and how I can transition from having an external structure to the way my life is run to having to create that structure and order for myself in the actions I choose to undertake and the direction in which life will head now that the fundamental building blocks have been at last put into place. Not only in an academic sense, but in the nature of my relationships with others as well–the cozy bubble of undergraduate life being what it is, social upheaval has been quite natural to the overall uprooting I have felt over the course of these months.

There have been ups to accompany the downs, although admittedly the downs seem to have taken the more dominant share of things. I have learned to desire the United States at the same time as my Portuguese has at last become conversational, if not on the cusp of some kind of fluency. Living with someone who has come to be a good friend has also showed me that the tensions of living with friends can sometimes boil over into incidents that may not be reparable. I have felt liberated and free to do to my heart's content what I choose on my own path at the behest of no other while spending months reeling from the manner in which a very profound connection and relationship has all but shattered beyond repair, and certainly beyond recognition. The necessity of all of these things happening as they are and have is becoming increasingly clear the closer to being in retrospect they become, yet I am still not there, and as such the processing lag continues to be a persistent stressor much as any of the other things left unmentioned here do as well. I may have finally chewed through what I bit off, but my jaw is sore.

A Cup of Coffee

I believe I have a tendency on this blog to overlook certain smaller facets of cultural life in favor of more heady intellectual matters, the academic side of cultural issues, or other similarly lofty concepts, but today I had a stark realization amid the confusion that happens when you feel like your life is simultaneously falling apart and building itself up from its platform.

While the other students have ebbed and flowed from cafe to cafe around the buildings—there are five in total—I have opted to stick to the one that seems to have the best quality of coffee and least amount of hassle when paying for it. This is partly a result of my natural tendency toward routine and partly because I find people-watching more interesting in that particular cafe than any of the others. The prices are all the same between them, so that is a non-factor. So as I was standing there, fumbling with the cord on my headphones in order to be polite and not have music blasting for all to hear around me as I got what I wanted, the same woman as usual actually smiled at me and said "bom dia, querido! Um galão normal?" to which I smiled back and replied that, yes, just the galão as usual. For reference, a galão is an espresso with three parts milk, served in a glass; whether it is more equivalent to a latte or a café au lait depends entirely on which brand of coffee snobbery you subscribe to and who is making it. It was only after I managed to carefully guide the coffee and my things to an open seat, the balance or depth perception for which I've never had in appreciable quantities, that I realized the very subtle, but strong cultural and social implication of being a regular with the cafe workers, them accustomed to what I order to the point of being friendly (at last!) about it and not impatient if I would actually like something more or different on a given day.

It figures that such a thing would happen right as my course is approaching its end, although whether I come back in the fall is yet to be determined (more on that later). Yet the significance of that gesture of recognition, an act of becoming just a student customer as any other instead of one of the frustrating ones who doesn't quite use the tools of the language to master the fast-paced line or decide what he wants on the spot, that is something that I have perhaps previously overlooked. It's the kind of gesture that isn't culture-specific, one of the things I take for granted in the United States because in service environments it is a given because of my native fluency and, accordingly, perfectly sound situational familiarity. It is the direct counterpart to the Gringo reaction, a tacit nod that yes, we recognize your place here. It's the kind of gesture that makes the difference between just being content with the intellectual side of staying here and finding it fully enriching. It's the kind of gesture that makes the more difficult side of recent events feel less hopeless.

Interruptions

Related to the Art of Letting Go, I can only remark that sometimes life has a way of tripping you up and seeing if you break your nose as you fall on your face, or if you catch yourself with your hands and continue unscathed.

Sometimes you are meant to get a perfectly well-reasoned message on a subject that has lacked coherent thoughts that still manages not to be the signal you were hoping for, sometimes the signal has to hit you upside the head in order to sink in appreciably. Sometimes you are just meant to be sad about something that has just happened, be it a departure, a termination, the apparent loss of something significant, or anything otherwise, and that means that the downbeat music, the tears, the night of drinking excessively and making poor decisions about the manner of conversation and with whom you choose to spend time on Skype just need to happen. And once the hangover that makes you feel as though you're going to die—or at least as though you want to—has passed, once you take a shower to rinse the drunk off of your body, once you start to eat the comfort food that you didn't really need but have decided to eat just for the sake of it, once the mess in your room has been cleaned up and sorted out, once everything has settled, life will move on. Positive notes that have come to emerge unstoppably need not be trampled on, just embraced. Sometimes these things happen and they just need to, to fuel growth and understanding in retrospect, to make way for a paradigm shift, to alter the course of where you thought you saw yourself going in the way that will ultimately keep things interesting and dynamic for some time to come. Taking a moment to acknowledge that some emotions and feelings are inevitable but don't need to be dragged out is another way of taking a deep breath and getting back to work.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

On Life as a Gringo

There is an irritating but persistent manner about Portuguese people that due to the fact that I have (somewhat) blonde hair and an accent, I must not speak Portuguese very well and need to speak in English to do very easy things such as repeating the fact that yes, I really did say that I just want a coffee, stop making me repeat myself, thank you. It is not for want of talking loudly enough or enunciating myself clearly, it is as simple as the idea that those two things combine—especially, nay, to a degree of magnitude more so as the summer months approach and tourists begin to arrive en masse—to form the metaphorical equivalent of a neon sign on my forehead that flashes "Gringo!" every time I open my mouth. It's not that I mind speaking English, to be sure, but it's an obviously disrespectful assumption made automatically even while I am speaking perfectly decent Portuguese. Sometimes I quite simply did not hear what they said, others I was not paying attention. Sometimes I am bewildered by the fact that they didn't seem to catch the simple thing I ordered, others I am just annoyed by the useless necessity of repeating myself. Mostly it isn't personal and it would be more courteous to repeat what was said in the language we had otherwise been using. This is something perhaps more grating the longer I spend here and the ever more banal such interactions become, in which I can not lay any legitimate claim to having "off days" that would preclude me from being able to function in the world of food or other service even to the point of bantering somewhat. I may be lazy, but the language, at least to that extent, is all up there in the 'ol cabeça. Similarly, I often hear comments like "oh, how do you know so much Portuguese, do you use Google Translate?", "you look a little red today, did you go to the beach?", and so on.

It is a manifestation of a cultural insecurity, the collective doubt as to why someone would want to bother learning Portuguese here in the first place, much less spend an extended period of time here, doubt that someone who doesn't look like the prototypical Generic Portuguese Person speaks their language because the country is small, doubt that this person conforms to cultural norms as a result, doubt that this person is more than just another grating fair-skinned, lighter-haired insensitive tourist. I have never experienced anything similar anywhere in France or francophone regions of Europe except when in groups of several people where the language being spoken was English, there they opt instead to simply repeat themselves or explain themselves in a different manner. I suppose the weather makes up for it.

The Art of Letting Go

I have written and rewritten this post a few times, namely because the writing process involved for it has consisted largely of me being excessively hungry and/or bitchy and in the mood to vent, rather than reason out concepts sloshing around in my skull.

In relation to a post I made while I was in Paris last, in which I wrote of learning how to chill, entailing learning to meditate on the go and taking a step back from the minutiae of things that consistently bother me or are a source of stress, I have come to find the process impactful on my social life, which recently has taken something of a nosedive for various reasons which are not important for elaboration on this blog. Whether it's dealing with exes, dealing with those in a precariously undefined middle ground, dealing with friction with others in day to day life, dealing with changes in nascent friendships, dealing with the unreliability of others, or simply dealing with not feeling satisfied socially, the main lesson I have drawn out of recent months has been to move along and figure out how to let go of preconceptions or attachments to things I would normally find very difficult. Perhaps I'm writing more and more about personal subjects of late, but these are the most pressing things in my headspace, as would naturally occur when you take a few months of a breather to regroup yourself and get ready for whatever the next phase of life has in store.

So as it comes along, the universe has thrown a bevy of increasingly negative social situations at me rather consistently for several months, things I can't deal with by running away from them, and things that are not necessarily in my hands to influence. The only option is to disengage and understand that sometimes taking a deep breath and letting go of my attachments to certain ideals, people, or engagements is the only way to ensure that I don't end up in the psych ward. It's been one of those awakening moments in which I have realized that for as organized, rational, clear, or logical I may feel as though I'm being, sometimes that is simply not enough to make another person come around to my point of view, that some people are never going to, and that the implications that may have on my conception of the future are not as earth-shattering as they seem when they are being dragged along for months on end. Once you get to the point at which differences become obstacles, there is no sense in trying to turn them into the vehicles for growth and personal expansion that they may once have been. Even with others less familiar, those sources of common daily frustrations or needless stress be it from passive aggression or conflicts of personality, the same principle holds. Some hills are just not meant to be climbed.

For as obvious and cliched and reminiscent of the self-help industry as this all seems, the lesson is much harder to learn and apply in practice than it is to write out or give as advice to your friend who has just spent the whole time talking to you about their problems, letting their coffee go cold in the process. I have moments in which I wonder to what extent it was useful or necessary to extract myself from a social environment in which I at least had the advantage of having close ties to fall back on when loose ends fell to the wayside or when things got difficult from more significant others, or what I'm doing to make of experiences if not to share them with the people who are supposed to be there around me. For as much as progressive types, and especially those in the mental health industry, talk of process, that is exactly what the adjustment to change is. Problems don't go away just because you've meditated once, and good days are paired with equally challenging ones. I suppose what I'm getting at in this whole thing is that I seem to have learned how to navigate that course without completely drowning in it in the process. Letting go is an art form.

On Creativity, Productivity, and Why Don't You Do Something with That?

Do you ever imagine your life as a series of quotes from the back cover of a book read about whatever mundane thing you have going on recently? The praise or subtle criticism about the course of events that have led you to end up sitting in the same café on the same corner for the fifth day in a row, wondering why it is you're sitting there again, why you're thinking of your life in back cover quotes, why exactly you're doing anything—or really nothing—at all in that particular moment? I don't really entertain notions of being well-known or recognized for the creative work that I produce, but I entertain thoughts like that. Those thoughts are fueled by any number of things, but often it's the idea that perhaps I do write decently, a recognition that I'm essentially incapable of being creative otherwise, and the incessant voice of family and others close to me telling me that I should "think about doing something with that", i.e. writing a book or starting a column or, god forbid, doing freelance work. I'm unsure of how realistic the idea of writing a book proposal based on the experiences of a somewhat idealistic and naive gay boy from a mountain state who happens to travel infrequently and chose to live in a poor country is, but I do know that that's exactly what it seems like these "boosters" are intent for me to do.

On the one hand, I understand that family and friends are there to be your cheerleaders, to fib to your face when they say things like "Oh, your writing is really funny all the time!" even when you have posts that are more ramble than chuckle, "No, I didn't hear anything! Someone came over?" even when they were listening to their music with sound-canceling headphones in when that Brazilian man came over, "Your food is delicious, you're such a good cook!" even when you cook something that may have been beyond its actual expiration date and not just the one labeled on the packaging, and so on. On the other hand, I laugh at the idea that there are actually people in the world who have the same level of idealism as I do with none of the jaded cynicism that keeps me in check somewhere in the middle as a pragmatist. The reality of the situation is that I hardly garner the interest of the 400 or so people who I have as friends on Facebook, much less the unknown individuals who look at my photos on Instagram or the things I may happen to post (infrequently) on other outlets of the internet. I get excited when my posts reach 30 unique page views. I have no idea how that would translate into a book. I cringe at the idea that my thoughts, which flow freely, if in excess at times, would suddenly require a deadline. The surest way to kill my creative process would be to put an externally-imposed structure on it, as the whole point of this blog and my writing in general is that I am in complete control of it, and it is my main creative outlet.

Even still, I do like any recognition I happen to get for the things I have written, and I attempt to disseminate to a larger audience my more popular works or those I happen to actually like. The feeling that you've done something productive, instead of the online equivalent of writing in a frilly diary with a fuzzy pen, is something that can not be matched. So I entertain the idea that there is an alternate universe in which my writing could serve as some kind of more productive means, a way of reaching a significantly larger audience than I have any realistic expectation for with this blog, and that's when I find myself in the cafe, probably on my phone, listening to music on repeat, pondering the "what if". I wonder what the dramatized translation of that would be.

Things I Miss About the United States

I am at the juncture of being away from the United States for just long enough that, beyond appreciating differences, I am actively chafing at them. Wouldn't you know, even someone fraught with a case of wanderlust can show signs of having roots. Let's dive in.

• Food and the Culture of Eating Outside of the Home

The wide variety of flavors and textures from all over the world available in a matter of minutes, from which there is yet another array of options in which to take them is something I take almost for granted in the United States. If I want Vietnamese soup or Punjabi curry or sushi or soul food or Mexican dishes, whatever it is I'm in the mood for, it's available and not a hassle to come across there. Here, not everything is available—Vietnamese food is essentially nonexistent, Mexican food is Lusified to the point of not really tasting anything like Mexican food, and many of the other things I normally consume on a whimsy are either expensive or more of a hassle than they're truly worth it to find. Despite the fact of there being new and interesting things to try here, I miss being able to be bored by too many gastronomic options around me more than almost anything else. I miss being able to order things on menus with near-infallible reliability and the ability to order with minute precision; it is not uncommon for cafés and restaurants to be out of just one ingredient for something here, leaving options unexpected.

• One-Stop, 24-hour Shopping

Stores of almost any sort, any business enterprise for that matter, are not legally allowed to operate 24 hours a day in almost all cases in Portugal and across much of Europe. In the United States, the idea of a regular grocery store not being open 24 hours a day is something of an absurdity: take Wal-Mart, with its ubiquitous (if derided) presence in the country. Seldom is their modern store that is not open all hours of the day. 24-hour service is the norm, not the exception, and this has extended to the most common and largest grocery stores across the country, be they in the Kroger family, Safeway, or otherwise. Whole Foods is the only major exception I can find to this. Not only being able to go to the store at 2 AM on a whimsy, I can also find a surplus of varieties of every basic item I could possibly need at almost all of these same retailers, from personal hygiene and pharmaceutical needs to home goods office supplies, food, and everything in between. When we complain about a grocery store not having something in the United States, it's usually either because they don't have a particular brand of what we were looking for, or because we wanted a more obscure, niche-market item. I sometimes wonder about the availability here of things I wouldn't blink an eye about in Denver. I miss being able to get every small thing I need easily, without having to go to several stores, worry about the time of day it is when I'm going, worry about going on the wrong day of the week, or anything else along those lines.

• Sociability

The friends I have abroad are fantastic people doing interesting things in a plethora of fields, to the extent that my life is much the greater for having them in it. The day to day reality of living abroad, however, is that a lot of my interactions with friends and people in general involves surface-level linguistic interaction, difficulties in communicating, and in certain circumstances, contenting ourselves with the company of each other without actually communicating very much at all. I revolve around constantly learning from my environment and am prone to causing situations from which to learn from, to diving headfirst into things, and this includes language and the process of self expression, but perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned recently is that the art of communicating with someone who speaks the same language natively and similarly shares your culture is not to be taken for granted. The way I speak English is entirely different with non-native speakers out of reflex because I find it grating to have to repeat myself because I talk too quickly in my particular accent or my Americanisms are lost on even very competent English speakers. I miss having a cultural and linguistic foundation from which to be able to better get into the nitty-gritty aspects of my character and connecting more closely with friends.

All of this and I still can't seem to want to stay put for very long at a time.

Things I've Learned at 21

• There will always be something broken at the end of the wild night out, no matter how inconsequential.
• Some people are flaky. Others just need an ice-breaker.
• No matter how subtle you think you're being, your roommates will always know what you're doing.
• The moment you decide to eat less is the moment all of the most delicious and unhealthy foods suddenly appear in your life.
• Hangovers and sleep are inversely correlated.
• A lot of learning languages is the art of bullshitting your way through interacting with other people who don't really understand you but don't stop you anyway.
• A man who continues to pursue you even after seeing you at your autopilot worst level of drunkenness is either a winner or very frustrated.
• The moment your age becomes one number larger never feels any different than the moment right before it.
• Economics lessons in inflation become personal when the average cost of a decent bottle of wine rises from 1.85€ to 2.25€.
• You should always counterbalance your questionable life decisions with a general scheme for accelerating the otherwise good things you have going on.

Cultural Identification

One of the hardest things to come out of the experience of studying abroad during my undergradutate career and living as a non-committed adult in Europe again thereafter has been the concept of reconciling what exactly the purpose of traveling this far and spending such prolonged periods of time away from my home country is. Coming from a country so large in which it is possible to live without considering the existence, much less the differences of, other countries and customs, to living on a smaller continent with a multitude, to a great order more, of cultural identities and differences is a lesson in what exactly an American cultural identity is and can be. To put it more simply, regional differences aside in the United States, there is a certain strength in the connected and continual nature of American culture throughout the entire country, and it is possible to grow up in the United States without perceiving that you belong to any specific culture whatsoever; the "default" exists so widespread around that it is easy to overlook how it is unique relative to others. A good example of this is the way in which we mistakenly tend to believe that our standardized accent, the "neutral" American accent featured in most news media and without extreme variation in large swathes of the country, is in fact "accent-free". Nowhere does this seem more obviously untrue than outside of that native context, in other words, in a place where what is taught (if not used in common practice) is a different variety of English. Relative to myself, as it were, is a creeping sense of assuredness in myself and my place on foreign soil.

I have spent a lot of time trying to "become European" by way of transforming my appearance and mannerisms so that at first glance I could be mistaken for a generic person from an unidentified European country, usually ascertained as from the north or east, and to a large extent that has worked. More importantly, though, this has been as an attempt to overshadow that which distinguishes me as obviously American. When I speak either French or Portuguese, I speak with good accents, noticeably foreign but hard to pin down as to their origins; I spend much time training myself to hear and emulate the sounds of each language both because I'd like not to sound like a philistine and because I find it one way of acknowledging that I make an effort to assimilate myself into my surroundings. Yet despite all of these things, my Americanness persists, and bit of it trickle down even so far as into my accent — the way I vocalize vowels tends to be more open and approximated than native French or Portuguese really allow — and it doesn't take much time to divine where I come from upon meeting me. Yet the reflection that has grown on me in my most recent months here has been to more fully own and embrace those things which make my American self come through. I have long since shed any pretensions of "becoming European", but what has happened in a more accelerated manner recently has been an acceptance of my role as The American within my social circles and managing the expectations that come with that against the reality of who I am when presented with the prospect of meeting new people.

Contrary to what we tend to fear when going abroad, my overwhelming experience has been that of interest and excitement in my cultural background as opposed to conceptions of ignorance and assumptions of folly. As opposed to sharp criticism, I find much more friendly comparison, regardless of where people come from. Instead of needing to exchange my culture for a new one, shedding the past and transforming myself into something new, the essence of what I am writing here is that I have come to realize a multicultural existence in which I am obviously foreign in any country other than my own, but my personal background is closely linked to a multitude of cultures, languages, and customs, and that is what I have to contribute regardless of where I am. It seems so simple once you reach a conclusion, doesn't it?

Pensamentos, Take 2

The finer details of life. It's a cliched concept that has spurned a quasi-industry of self-help books, purported experts, and many a vacation for the sole purpose of losing oneself within oneself. It's a lofty goal to attain for anyone, though less so those in the higher strata of the socio-economic spectrum, and the idea is kind of ridiculous inherently because how can we begin to define what it is? What are they, where do we grasp them, where can they be bought, what does the box look like? This is, what I have begun to gather, a particularly American way of looking at the world, and yet I arrive at having to dismantle that particular cultural yoke in order to pursue them within myself.

My post-graduate space is, of course, marked by the time I am spending in Europe doing approximately nothing (and nothing can be a whole lot of things, let's not get so literal as I am wont to do), the relationship I have cultivated with a certain bodhisattva and how it is deconstructing, reconstructing, enriching, and detracting from all the rest, and how all of this is supposed to sum up to a platform from which I will leap into the next phase of adult life, be that a master's degree or the commencement of a professional career.  Yet coming to Paris and having two weeks to occupy my own head space free of the banalities of life as I am accustomed to it and the obligations that come along with being at home in Lisbon or Denver, being received in an optimal fashion, and breathing somewhat more introspectively has given me a needed refresher on greater perspective and allowed me to stop viewing the loose ends around me as rope with which to form knots from which to hang myself, others, anything at all. Overwhelmingly, to the extent of requiring a change in linguistic environs, the message has been to stop thinking so much about the minutiae that perturb, period. Just stop. There is no elaboration.

So I have taken on, starting in Lisbon but continuing along much more in Paris, the idea of retreating inward and appreciating the more basic details of life—the sensual pleasure of the texture, smell, and taste of food, the full-body experience of the way the sound waves reverberate within oneself when listening to good music, the physical excitement from the intellectual challenge of discovery and growth. To think that a pursuit so simple has caused, in its own way, such a fair amount of grief and strife in my personal life is to oversimplify, yet it has. It's taken this long for me to fully grasp that this is all to say that part of self-actualization and part of being your own person sometimes means that you don't have to have complicated or finely elaborated explanations to things. Sometimes things are as simple as the brevity with which we describe them, and that should just be left at that. Sometimes the grand adventure is banal and mundane, and sometimes the satisfaction derived from that is acute. I could stand to learn from that in my own writing, don't you think? I, uptight by nature, reserved and literal, pragmatic and organized, rigid to a fault at times, obsessive always, am learning to chill out.

Alas.

Fiefs at Their Core

Each day I spend in Paris is ultimately comfortable and I feel naturally at ease with myself and my surroundings, not to mention the social element involved. But it's gotten me thinking about how in some ways, I feel split between three quite distinct places and the circumstances that surround them. My home by birth and raising is Denver, and it is there in which I feel the most naturally at ease socially, as though what I do and the friends with whom I do it come naturally and with such ease that I think very little about it. I am firmly based in a social manner there, and my closest friendships and most tumultuous love affairs have happened there. Lisbon in certain ways is analogous for me to Denver, with the distinction that it represents a certain exertion of agency in my surroundings and a greater intellectual and spiritual effort to allow myself to adapt and become a part of my surroundings. What I have done by birthright in Denver has come to happen for me by choice in Lisbon, and the choice to call Lisbon home has had a profound impact on how I see myself as well as the trajectory of my future; the connection I have established with the city weighs on my considerations for how I should proceed with the next stages of life, slowly as that image is becoming clear. Paris, on the other hand, is mainly a city of aspirations and projections for me. I have not had the opportunity to experience how my life might work as a resident, but the moments I have been accorded on its soil have proved among the most satisfying of my life, in which I connect more fully with all of my senses than anywhere else. I have been aided by linguistic ease more so than in Portugal, and I have never experienced anything other than open embrace by Parisians. My experiences in Paris embody the way I feel like I should be living my life, tastes of which I enjoy in both other locations.

Yet I am coming to arrive at the conclusion that I'm fully satisfied in none of these three places, and that in place of full-on fulfillment, only the mixture of the group collectively seems to provide me with a sense of realization. I feel most myself, most enamored with my life, and most in tune with my thoughts and feelings when I can comfortably hop between all three places; transience appears to be the glue of steadiness and consistency that I crave deeply in my life and mistakenly pursue. The symbolism of these three places is that of interconnected fiefs, a micro-world of fully globalized commerce that manages to retain individualized identity and expression. They bicker with each other, their relations freeze at times, one grows in emphasis over the others, yet they are all bound together. The silver lining in my hesitance to decide between any of these places, between any of the potential options that abound in each one for what I could be doing in six months, a year, however long, is that I consistently manage to preserve those options. Perhaps that is the most important thing of all.

Parisian Redaction

The original draft of this post was written at 2:30 in the morning as I awaited the time to pass so that I could board my KLM (via Air France) flight to Paris by way of Amsterdam, cost covered by an exceedingly generous French man who has an exceedingly French manner of interest in me. Life could be less interesting, I suppose.

Twelve days in Paris. I'm not sure what I'm more surprised about, the fact that I am actually able to go back to my favorite city more than once this time around, or the idea of being able to spend an appreciable amount of time in which I won't feel rushed to "do" the city the way that I tend to otherwise. June should prove to be more of that, and yet, here we are in March. Last year at this point, the only major trip I had made was with E to Porto, and that doesn't count for nearly as much in terms of great travels because we stayed in the country. It was worthwhile, but not as life-altering as each time I step foot on the polluted trottoirs of the City of Light seems to be.

Stop short of calling me a believer, but in some ways the timing of things is nothing short of providence. While I had spent some time recently ruminating about the problems revolving around my intimate life, time has changed things quickly and I find myself in awe at what I'm doing. I have never felt more in the moment as I do sitting here in Paris, wondering how this happened and planning what I will do for the rest of the day. Instead of worrying about particular or petty details of anything at home, whether in Lisbon or Denver, I am taking in the things I appreciate most in a city that facilitates it readily. I am professedly a bit tired of my thoughts as well, similar as they tend to be, revolving around Portugal, my future, my intimate life, and all the rest that comes along with those, so taking a leave of absence feels like just what I needed at just the moment I needed it. Intellectually, I have been digesting Portuguese at such a steady pace that I can easily say I speak and understand at a much more advanced level than when I arrived, but it still stands that I have hit a point of operating on autopilot leading up to flying away, and a detour in a different linguistic paradigm is encouraging me to continue building upon both, rather than losing track of myself trying to bend my mind into speaking perfect Portuguese. I'll speak good, if imperfect Portuguese and French, and they'll both get better bit by bit. I understand better now what most people mean when they say that taking a year or however long off was the best decision they had made between undergraduate and graduate studies—I feel a resurgence in my intellectual creativity as well as my overall creativity.

In the meantime, though, I have nearly two weeks to try not to spend too much money, take photos, revert inwards while subjecting myself to the ultimate form of outward expression, and take the most out of life. In Portuguese, the word is aproveitar. In French, as I noted so many times in the past on this blog, the equivalent is profiter. I am grateful I have been able to experience what those words mean in their respective cultural applications.

Ruin

At home in this apartment, most of us, the dear inhabitants, have taken to each other in such a familial way that we do in fact refer to ourselves as a família. We are seven in the house, and this is the case with the exception of one who we believe will not remain much longer here by preference. Each of us has someone in particular in the house with whom we get along and interact most frequently, and we all convene at times in a way that doesn't allow for any stone to go unturned or any problem fester longer than is absolutely necessary. If one person has excellent news or something happened, the rest of us will quickly find out, and the same is true of bad news. It's a nice way to live, a way of appreciating the smaller details of things from day to day.

All the better, then, that I was encircled in a web of loving safeguard when, quite suddenly after having dinner at a restaurant on the same block as ours, I received notice of a purported text message breakup from someone who openly professes disdain for text messages and is recalcitrant about conversations by such a medium, among other things. The ensuing implosion of mental stability was predictable, but the immediate response from a família worked remedially. That the wine we had to wash it all down was of decent quality helped too. It follows, then, that life seems to have become a little bit like a telenovela in that regard, one week things going terribly and seemingly into an abyss and the next all being well and good, if perhaps a bit too much so.

It appears that there is something about the changing of the seasons, at least biennially, has the effect of throwing off-kilter even the seemingly best of relationships, the most stable, the closest of bonds. Fall comes and toxins seep into the cracks of what had once seemed like glorious destiny, until my obsessiveness and tendency to open up cans of worms at every small opportunity given suffocates the bad as well as the good out of everything by the time spring rolls around. I either have the nerve to say nothing or open my mouth and let the words spew out with no rhyme or reason ad nauseam. Communication becomes erratic and the problems more profound than the language and referents used to express them. It does not fail. So it is that this time, hopefully, after an unproductive video conversation and the resolve to breathe and become collected again, all will not result in terminal cessation as is the conclusion to most such affairs as they have happened for me. I would like to learn to mend instead of amputate, and I wonder whether it can or will happen. In the meantime, I have photos to take and pastries to eat.