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.