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.