I have learned how to be an adult in some ways, but I have not yet mastered the art of keeping cool, calm, and collected at the onset of little crises. Especially when it involves the refrigerator breaking and oh my god we're going to lose all of our food we won't have any money to replace it we're going to starve to death we're going to have to live in a box we're going to die homeless.
Where to Buy Korean Food in Barcelona
Before reading this post, watch my vlog about the Korean supermarket in Barcelona to see how to get there, what the store looks like, and some of the products I get when I'm there:
Before I came to Barcelona, one of my main complaints about Lisbon was always the lack of Asian foods, products, and stores. Lisbon has a lot of Chinese immigrants and, as a result, a handful of Chinese grocery stores, but if you want anything outside of the Chinese sphere of food, you'll be pretty hard-pressed to find it in the Portuguese capital. After much sleuthing, I discovered that Vietnamese food—a staple of where I grew up—essentially does not exist at all in Portugal, there is very little Thai food, the selection of Japanese food is sparse and westernized, and Korean food is limited to a small number of products imported by the Chinese grocery stores and one (1!) food court with an experimental Asian cafe that offers two (2!) Korean dishes. All to say nothing of the rest of Asia, which as you can imagine is sorely lacking.
So as I was preparing to come to Barcelona, I made a note to take advantage of the city's greater size and more international culture and find all the foods I love and lacked on the other side of Iberia. There is just one Korean grocery store in the city, a bit to my disappointment, but it offers a complete selection of ingredients you need to make your favorite Korean dishes, including some pre-made dishes, but more on that in a second. There are other, more general Asian that have some of the same products in the center as well, so you're never too much for want of options. It is not, however, the same as beloved Hmart or Pacific Ocean Market (in Colorado, where I'm from) of home, gigantic supermarkets filled to the brim with generous hours. Where those supermarkets are more comparable to local Alcampo or Carrefour in size, instead, Han Kuk Market and the myriad other Asian grocery stores are more comparable to smaller-format stores like Lidl and convenience stores, on the smaller end.
Getting back to the Korean market itself, though, the products follow some trends. Everything is labeled in Spanish somewhere on the product packaging, but if you don't know what you're looking at and can't read Korean to figure it out, you might have a harder time identifying things than you would in English, as much can be lost in translation. This can be particularly true with the pre-made products, like kimchi, which are often just transliterated from the original Korean. The products themselves also tend to be Seoul-centric in origin: for example, the soju is exclusively Seoul soju, so if you're looking for things you know from other regions, talk to the workers and see if they can import them for you to the store, or take the Seoul alternative. The workers themselves are friendly and speak good Spanish, but I haven't talked with them in English so I can't confirm if they also speak it. If you're ever in doubt, they'll happily help you with what you need as you're shopping through the store. When you pay with a card, you'll be given the option by the card system to pay in euros or your home currency, which can be helpful to avoid conversion fees.
The homemade kimchi tends to be medium-high in spiciness and on the fresher side of fermentation, but they have many different kinds and amounts you can buy. I've seen regular kimchi (baechu kimchi) in small (around 300g) and large (around 850g) boxes, cubed radish kimchi (kkakdugi), and many others each time I've gone. It's well-made and tastes good, but keep in mind that it's fresher than you may be used to if you eat it home-made and let it ferment more! They charge per kilo, so if you want a little more or a little less, don't forget to let them know.
So to wrap it up, my summary: it's not Hmart, but it'll do in a pinch to satisfy your cravings for Korean food at home. Alimentación Coreana Hankuk can be found on Carrer del Marquès de Sentmenat, 91 just a short walk away from metro station Entença (L5).
Before I came to Barcelona, one of my main complaints about Lisbon was always the lack of Asian foods, products, and stores. Lisbon has a lot of Chinese immigrants and, as a result, a handful of Chinese grocery stores, but if you want anything outside of the Chinese sphere of food, you'll be pretty hard-pressed to find it in the Portuguese capital. After much sleuthing, I discovered that Vietnamese food—a staple of where I grew up—essentially does not exist at all in Portugal, there is very little Thai food, the selection of Japanese food is sparse and westernized, and Korean food is limited to a small number of products imported by the Chinese grocery stores and one (1!) food court with an experimental Asian cafe that offers two (2!) Korean dishes. All to say nothing of the rest of Asia, which as you can imagine is sorely lacking.
So as I was preparing to come to Barcelona, I made a note to take advantage of the city's greater size and more international culture and find all the foods I love and lacked on the other side of Iberia. There is just one Korean grocery store in the city, a bit to my disappointment, but it offers a complete selection of ingredients you need to make your favorite Korean dishes, including some pre-made dishes, but more on that in a second. There are other, more general Asian that have some of the same products in the center as well, so you're never too much for want of options. It is not, however, the same as beloved Hmart or Pacific Ocean Market (in Colorado, where I'm from) of home, gigantic supermarkets filled to the brim with generous hours. Where those supermarkets are more comparable to local Alcampo or Carrefour in size, instead, Han Kuk Market and the myriad other Asian grocery stores are more comparable to smaller-format stores like Lidl and convenience stores, on the smaller end.
Getting back to the Korean market itself, though, the products follow some trends. Everything is labeled in Spanish somewhere on the product packaging, but if you don't know what you're looking at and can't read Korean to figure it out, you might have a harder time identifying things than you would in English, as much can be lost in translation. This can be particularly true with the pre-made products, like kimchi, which are often just transliterated from the original Korean. The products themselves also tend to be Seoul-centric in origin: for example, the soju is exclusively Seoul soju, so if you're looking for things you know from other regions, talk to the workers and see if they can import them for you to the store, or take the Seoul alternative. The workers themselves are friendly and speak good Spanish, but I haven't talked with them in English so I can't confirm if they also speak it. If you're ever in doubt, they'll happily help you with what you need as you're shopping through the store. When you pay with a card, you'll be given the option by the card system to pay in euros or your home currency, which can be helpful to avoid conversion fees.
The homemade kimchi tends to be medium-high in spiciness and on the fresher side of fermentation, but they have many different kinds and amounts you can buy. I've seen regular kimchi (baechu kimchi) in small (around 300g) and large (around 850g) boxes, cubed radish kimchi (kkakdugi), and many others each time I've gone. It's well-made and tastes good, but keep in mind that it's fresher than you may be used to if you eat it home-made and let it ferment more! They charge per kilo, so if you want a little more or a little less, don't forget to let them know.
So to wrap it up, my summary: it's not Hmart, but it'll do in a pinch to satisfy your cravings for Korean food at home. Alimentación Coreana Hankuk can be found on Carrer del Marquès de Sentmenat, 91 just a short walk away from metro station Entença (L5).
Video: Circle Lens Review
This week's video is about circle lenses and the pair I ordered. They're designed to enlarge your eyes and enhance their color, in my case going from brown to green. Go watch:
10 Things I've Learned as a Grad Student
1. Never have you known so much information and felt so much like you know absolutely nothing at all about what you're studying.
2. Never have you been so good at detecting when people are pretending like they know more about what they're studying.
3. Never have classes felt more redundant than graduate seminars, especially those that have some undergrad attendees and their habitual circular questions.
4. The above make for the best environment you can find to meet other people to talk about intelligent things and feel like you're being challenged, validated, and learning all at the same time.
5. The above make for the best environment you can watch number 2 happen in real time and watch people claim very sincerely that they know everything there is in the world to know, simply because they pondered it for an instant.
6. There will never be a satisfactory balance of 4 and 5 inside the university, there will never be too much of number 4 outside of it.
7. When no one else is around to talk to about your big revelation or help you work with ideas for a paper, wine is there for you. Grad school is actually a cover for a budding specialization in enology.
8. You can trick yourself into considering money a relative or abstract concept, rationalizing and theorizing its existence into something you are detached from, until you have none and bills are due.
9. You never realized that nuts, and not their legume impostors, and berries, were such a luxury and so delicious.
10. Your thesis is not so much a tangible thing as it is a relative concept, something that happens in phases you're only aware happened in a void of space, time, and wine consumption.
2. Never have you been so good at detecting when people are pretending like they know more about what they're studying.
3. Never have classes felt more redundant than graduate seminars, especially those that have some undergrad attendees and their habitual circular questions.
4. The above make for the best environment you can find to meet other people to talk about intelligent things and feel like you're being challenged, validated, and learning all at the same time.
5. The above make for the best environment you can watch number 2 happen in real time and watch people claim very sincerely that they know everything there is in the world to know, simply because they pondered it for an instant.
6. There will never be a satisfactory balance of 4 and 5 inside the university, there will never be too much of number 4 outside of it.
7. When no one else is around to talk to about your big revelation or help you work with ideas for a paper, wine is there for you. Grad school is actually a cover for a budding specialization in enology.
8. You can trick yourself into considering money a relative or abstract concept, rationalizing and theorizing its existence into something you are detached from, until you have none and bills are due.
9. You never realized that nuts, and not their legume impostors, and berries, were such a luxury and so delicious.
10. Your thesis is not so much a tangible thing as it is a relative concept, something that happens in phases you're only aware happened in a void of space, time, and wine consumption.
Video: Are You Excited?
This time around, let's talk about why people insist that you should be excited! all! the! time! exclamation point! with no real reason other than that there isn't anything else to relate with. Go watch:
Home is Where the Bags Are
Why is it, I have often wondered, that the questions of being a young 20-something begin their nagging in the early hours of the morning? Somewhere around 1 or 2 AM, when I'm otherwise on track to go to sleep, every pondering I might have creeps into conscious one after another until a ball of anxiety comes, only to dissipate into not enough sleep.
When we are in transit, for however long, what had once appeared routine and stable vanishes. Where we are, what we do in that place, and the people we come to know in that place all have a way of making themselves feel comfortable. They define us for what they are. We take them for granted because it's always been that way, or in the case of moving somewhere new, because that's what we came to do there, intentionally or not. We are the sum of our surrounding parts, validated by our participation in them. Yet when we move, that changes, and we have to start over and reconstruct the routines, the contacts, the comfort of familiarity. We become undefined in the new place simply by virtue of having no parts with which to form a sum, because those parts were left behind in memories somewhere else.
In the process of moving my things, first from the apartment I was living in, now from the friend's house I'm staying at, and amid all of the uncertainties of moving, the same questions of purpose and good faith in my own decision-making have come up. I have vacillated between being absolutely sure of my path, questioning it to the point of worry whether it was a good decision in the first place, and being ambivalent to everything about the move. For as much as I accept each move and each change as a part of life, a process that I have actively and willingly participated in, and one that I have mostly determined for myself, the sensation of letting life flow and not being in control of the outcome also pops up. I don't have any certainty about where the course of my actions will take me, but when I look back on the most momentous of the decisions I've taken—including, let's not forget, coming to Portugal in the first place—I never had that comfort. Comfortable decision-making is another way of lying to yourself that you know everything. If the decision is too exciting or too comfortable, it is an unfinished affair.
So I have come to the conclusion, after making myself at home in several apartment in Lisbon, with short periods of staying at this friend's house interspersed in between, that home is not a permanent anchor that will immediately provide us with a cocoon to retreat into from our real world selves. The highs and lows that we experience happen at home just as much as they happen outside of it. We can put as many posters on the wall, rearrange the furniture so many times, deep-clean the rooms, and spritz the air, but each place that we make home is a passing phenomenon. People come and go and their importance in life changes; some who may seem close often prove not to be and others who seem distant can come to be like family. Home is where the bags are and where our most important possessions reside, for however long, in whatever capacity.
Home doesn't have to be one house or one apartment or one building in which you spend years of your life nesting, attempting to create a domestic utopia. Home can be a dramatic sublet, a creaky old room on a high floor, a mattress on the floor in company that you enjoy. Home can be anywhere, so long as you take it there with you, because home is where you feel that you are realizing those things that make up who you are.
Video: Wine O'Clock: Changes
Aside from a new video, you can also now follow me on Bloglovin.
In which I make a video about how oops! I'm moving and everything changed because that's what it always does in the fall:
In which I make a video about how oops! I'm moving and everything changed because that's what it always does in the fall:
Notes from September
Although my posts around here appear consistent thanks to my activity elsewhere which ends up here, it is true that I've landed in a bit of a slump of writer's block. September has come and gone, and I'd like to recount some of the things that have been going on in the meantime.
September is a time of changes, and this year is no different. This year seemed to have a lack of a proper summer, with excessive heat, beach visits, and lots of social moments in the newly-freed time everyone is supposed to have at some point during the season. Then September came and threw the beginnings of fall at us, and without warning, the cozy routine of the past year seemed to disintegrate almost immediately. Most of my closest friends in Lisbon are leaving the city in pursuit of work or study, and there seem to be new opportunities around every corner.
The most visible change around here is that I stopped writing as much, and I'm still unsure of when I'll pick up the steam again despite my goals to write twice a week. I happened upon a bit of writer's block while becoming more creative in other areas, which has led to me designing more graphics, working on a podcast with Casey, making more videos, and other fun and creative projects that end up taking the wind out of my writing. I'm still around and still doing things, what's changed is that I'm more dynamic about it.
Singer, video maker, and all-around fabulous human being Meghan Tonjes created an idea and a hashtag #30daytodo starting in September as a way to focus on taking your life and shaking it up one thing at a time. With an average of 30 days each month, one small thing taken off a list becomes more manageable than the lofty resolutions we tend to set for ourselves and forget about as quickly as we set them. I didn't create a list of 30 things to do in September, but did take inspiration from the idea to do some cleaning house and figure out what my priorities are for how I want to live my life now and not just in the ambiguous future. Sort of like Pinterest, but for life habits and not creating a dream wedding. And in the same spirit, I have an actual cork board with some of those things pinned to it, because I'm nothing if not literal:
All of these changes combined to make me reevaluate my current living situation as well. The apartment I live in is fine, in the sense that on paper all of the conditions are great. I have a lot of space, very few roommates, an abundance of privacy. As with anything, cracks have appeared over the course of these months, and I now find the flights of stairs a tedious impediment to my desire to leave the house much of the time, the noise from the street is so loud and constant as to interrupt my creative endeavors, the ceilings too high to avoid echo, and so on. The little things that I chose to overlook because of the on paper conditions are now liabilities that were bound to pop up. Yet instead of moving house to another place in Lisbon and plodding along, September brought with it much bigger changes, and I'll be moving to Barcelona at the end of this month instead, taking a leap and seeing what comes of things.
It's time. It was time. I'll write a proper post about moving soon (I don't want to jinx the innumerable layers of bureaucracy I have to get through), but in the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for an October filled with more things I make, from videos to graphics, and beyond.
Video: A Year of YouTube
I made a video about my thoughts on spending a year on YouTube, making videos, and what the concept of online community means. Go check it out:
Adulthood and Staying Put
It seems to have been an eternity since the content I've placed here was a written post. There are various reasons for that, since I haven't been idle in the meantime, but I figured I'd preface this post anyway, as I usually do. The site has also been revamped in the meantime, with a continually evolving About page, cleaned up sidebars, and more visible options to follow what I'm doing elsewhere. I like the logotype better too, and who knows, perhaps I'll start to draw things for the site itself instead of just posts.
In my latest video, I make a disclaimer life update saying that I haven't been up to much of anything. That isn't entirely true; from the preface alone you can tell I've been busying myself with projects to improve my skills in the areas I enjoy most, but which can also be of use in the freelance world and perhaps eventually in a professional capacity as well. There is a lot that seems to have thrown itself up in the air since the end of my MA courses, and money is naturally the underlying factor in it. Or, well, a lack thereof. However, I have a hard time sitting still, so I have been creating and working on skills while trying to find work and freelance jobs and have been reflecting on this process of being more or less free as an adult to do so.
It is peculiar to arrive at 22 and suddenly be fully in charge of yourself, your finances and sustenance included. Living quite far from family helps to add emphasis to the point, since there is only a minimal, intangible connection that you can have with the people who can support you and help you through life's problems as a last resort. I have come to find myself in a place where the problems of life are made somewhat more difficult due to local conditions—the employment situation of Portugal is much worse than urban America—which offset the benefits of my choice to carve out a life in a new environment.
Yet it is precisely the freedom to make such a decision that comes perhaps as the greatest surprise, since it is not just one day that you wake up and a button has been pressed so that you are doing everything you want in your life. Many of the things we do before arriving at the age of majority set us up for what we will do afterward, as if the fluidity of time were only there to smack us in the face in retrospect. We grow up with binds that serve to imitate the responsible choices we have to make as adults: semesters that lead to progress toward a diploma, summer jobs that lead to experience for admissions, practice in extracurricular activities so that we might be able to perform them in front of others later. As an adult, there are no such structural binds, no inherent requirement to make sure that we do what we're doing with targeted points of accomplishment, we must simply do for ourselves lest we suffer the consequences of being homeless and living in a box down by the river.
So we work and do what we need to in order to eat and stay housed, but there are no limits to what is possible. In a way, this freedom has the opposite effect, creating an anarchy in which we have to set up routines and seemingly inevitable goals or marks of progress in order to have comfort. As a traveler, however, realizing that there is nothing tying you to to the place you have spent some time in, whether it is your childhood home or where you have studied or worked for a few years, is both liberating and terrifying. There may not be the comfort of home or any certainty of what lies ahead, but you're always free to change scenery and try things out somewhere else. Bureaucracy can be dealt with, languages can be learned, cultures can be absorbed, money can be earned. The only thing that can stop you from making that leap is a false sense of security in where you are and what you're doing simply because you have been there for some time and have been doing that for some time.
I have come to a similar point, feeling attached to and absorbed in Portuguese culture due to exposure and interaction, yet often find myself very decisively on the fringes of it. Thinking along these lines, it is hard to envision a future living elsewhere instead of just taking time to travel. Yet the requirements of work and establishing some form of a career for the sake of sustenance put a damper on travel, and so the question of mobility comes up. Where might there be new adventures, cultures, languages, and opportunities to be had in the face of pressure to stay put? For the time being, all signs point to Barcelona. But the path to get there has not been met without a hearty, perhaps arbitrary, resistance.
In my latest video, I make a disclaimer life update saying that I haven't been up to much of anything. That isn't entirely true; from the preface alone you can tell I've been busying myself with projects to improve my skills in the areas I enjoy most, but which can also be of use in the freelance world and perhaps eventually in a professional capacity as well. There is a lot that seems to have thrown itself up in the air since the end of my MA courses, and money is naturally the underlying factor in it. Or, well, a lack thereof. However, I have a hard time sitting still, so I have been creating and working on skills while trying to find work and freelance jobs and have been reflecting on this process of being more or less free as an adult to do so.
It is peculiar to arrive at 22 and suddenly be fully in charge of yourself, your finances and sustenance included. Living quite far from family helps to add emphasis to the point, since there is only a minimal, intangible connection that you can have with the people who can support you and help you through life's problems as a last resort. I have come to find myself in a place where the problems of life are made somewhat more difficult due to local conditions—the employment situation of Portugal is much worse than urban America—which offset the benefits of my choice to carve out a life in a new environment.
Yet it is precisely the freedom to make such a decision that comes perhaps as the greatest surprise, since it is not just one day that you wake up and a button has been pressed so that you are doing everything you want in your life. Many of the things we do before arriving at the age of majority set us up for what we will do afterward, as if the fluidity of time were only there to smack us in the face in retrospect. We grow up with binds that serve to imitate the responsible choices we have to make as adults: semesters that lead to progress toward a diploma, summer jobs that lead to experience for admissions, practice in extracurricular activities so that we might be able to perform them in front of others later. As an adult, there are no such structural binds, no inherent requirement to make sure that we do what we're doing with targeted points of accomplishment, we must simply do for ourselves lest we suffer the consequences of being homeless and living in a box down by the river.
So we work and do what we need to in order to eat and stay housed, but there are no limits to what is possible. In a way, this freedom has the opposite effect, creating an anarchy in which we have to set up routines and seemingly inevitable goals or marks of progress in order to have comfort. As a traveler, however, realizing that there is nothing tying you to to the place you have spent some time in, whether it is your childhood home or where you have studied or worked for a few years, is both liberating and terrifying. There may not be the comfort of home or any certainty of what lies ahead, but you're always free to change scenery and try things out somewhere else. Bureaucracy can be dealt with, languages can be learned, cultures can be absorbed, money can be earned. The only thing that can stop you from making that leap is a false sense of security in where you are and what you're doing simply because you have been there for some time and have been doing that for some time.
I have come to a similar point, feeling attached to and absorbed in Portuguese culture due to exposure and interaction, yet often find myself very decisively on the fringes of it. Thinking along these lines, it is hard to envision a future living elsewhere instead of just taking time to travel. Yet the requirements of work and establishing some form of a career for the sake of sustenance put a damper on travel, and so the question of mobility comes up. Where might there be new adventures, cultures, languages, and opportunities to be had in the face of pressure to stay put? For the time being, all signs point to Barcelona. But the path to get there has not been met without a hearty, perhaps arbitrary, resistance.
Graphic: Ramen
I was messing around in Illustrator and came up with this simple graphic as a tribute to the fuel for college students and lazy people everywhere. Try putting an egg and some green onion in yours! Click for full size.
Recipe: Rustic Cabbage
After making this various times and tinkering with it until it came out just the way I wanted, I decided to make a graphic to share this recipe with you all. It goes great with dumplings, rice, and endless other dishes. You can substitute the sesame oil for any similar oil as long as it is similarly fragrant—eastern Europeans might like sunflower oil, for example. I hope you enjoy, let me know how it is if you decide to make it! This recipe is available in Portuguese as well as English. It's in A4 format so that you can print the recipe out if you'd like, but don't remove the credit or modify the design in any way.
Depois de ter feito isso várias vezes e modificar ele de pouco a pouco até ficar exactamente como queria, resolvi desenhar um gráfico para partilhar esta receita com vocês. Fica muito bem com bolinhos de massa (os chamados «dumplings» comuns na cozinha asiática e do leste da Europa), arroz e outros pratos inumeráveis. Podem substituir o óleo de sésamo por qualquer outro óleo semelhante desde que seja similarmente saboroso—gente de leste se calhar gostaria de óleo de girassol, por exemplo. Espero que gostem e se decidirem fazê-lo, digam-me como ficou! Esta receita está disponível em português tal como em inglês. O formato é A4 para poderem imprimir a receita a vontade, mas façam-me o favor de não tirar o crédito nem modificar o desenho de qualquer maneira.
Depois de ter feito isso várias vezes e modificar ele de pouco a pouco até ficar exactamente como queria, resolvi desenhar um gráfico para partilhar esta receita com vocês. Fica muito bem com bolinhos de massa (os chamados «dumplings» comuns na cozinha asiática e do leste da Europa), arroz e outros pratos inumeráveis. Podem substituir o óleo de sésamo por qualquer outro óleo semelhante desde que seja similarmente saboroso—gente de leste se calhar gostaria de óleo de girassol, por exemplo. Espero que gostem e se decidirem fazê-lo, digam-me como ficou! Esta receita está disponível em português tal como em inglês. O formato é A4 para poderem imprimir a receita a vontade, mas façam-me o favor de não tirar o crédito nem modificar o desenho de qualquer maneira.
Video: Wine O'Clock: Sunny Sunday
Talking about why Portuguese people are so preoccupied with the protection of my pale skin, working on the podcast, and more this week. Go watch:
Video: Wine O'Clock: Kale
This week it's wine from Setúbal, Tumblr (http://sashyenka.tumblr.com), and wondering what all the fuss with kale is all about. Go watch:
Video: Wine O'Clock: Less Than Famous
This week, I talk about why I make videos and do other things despite a lack of fame or a real desire to gain it, I at long last got my harem sweatpants, and more. Go watch:
You're Not Allowed to Say That
Today's post is a little more heady, so if that's not your cup of tea, more funny will come in the form of a Wine O'Clock video soon.
It recently came into my observations that it is often words with little meaning or respectability gather the most cultural cachet. In real terms, this happens when people learn to swear in a language before learning how to speak it more fully. Swearing is perhaps the best example, but there are many others that often involve colloquialisms and idioms. As a native speaker of a language, it often feels wrong in an inexplicable way, to hear foreign speakers with a weaker grasp of the language use colloquialisms or swear a lot. It comes out sounding unnatural, for as much as we wouldn't blink an eye from our own perhaps equally heavy usages of the same words and phrases. We have surely all experienced some form of this, without needing to have spent time abroad in the company of mostly foreign speakers, the one person you know who sort of jarringly inserts fucking into every sentence or gets idioms wrong but with alarming frequency, as if the mental thesaurus were lacking entries for expressing the same things in more clever ways.
The opposite is also true as a learner of a foreign language. In my experience, at least, it feels wrong and unnatural to use perfectly common and acceptable colloquialisms, and I shy away from them as much as possible. In Portugal there are a number of examples, something cool is something fixe, much of something is bué de something, and we shouldn't forget how people curse things. Yet for as much as I speak Portuguese, and most decisively in a European continental way, to the merriment of my mostly Brazilian cohort, I can't bring myself to speak using those terms and expressions, opting to find a different way of forming my thoughts. It feels unnatural for them to be coming out of my mouth just as it is surprising to Portuguese people that an American would be speaking their language with some level of fluency to begin with.
What I've concluded about this is that swearing, colloquialisms, and even most idiomatic expressions—the hallmark features of native speech in knowing how and when to effortlessly use them—carry a certain cultural agency with them that is hard to adopt. Doing so authentically usually involves being somewhere for a very long time, assimilating as thoroughly as possible to a place, like the immigrants to countries that have lived there for a generation or more. The agency that we lack to say the slang word du jour of our peers is the same as recognizing that regardless of how much effort is put into it, your roots are still elsewhere. The words form a cultural boundary that only external forces can overcome. You might be able to talk Saramago or Chaucer, but only with difficulty will it be bué de fucking cool to talk in a way that pretends like you always knew how to say those less important things.
It recently came into my observations that it is often words with little meaning or respectability gather the most cultural cachet. In real terms, this happens when people learn to swear in a language before learning how to speak it more fully. Swearing is perhaps the best example, but there are many others that often involve colloquialisms and idioms. As a native speaker of a language, it often feels wrong in an inexplicable way, to hear foreign speakers with a weaker grasp of the language use colloquialisms or swear a lot. It comes out sounding unnatural, for as much as we wouldn't blink an eye from our own perhaps equally heavy usages of the same words and phrases. We have surely all experienced some form of this, without needing to have spent time abroad in the company of mostly foreign speakers, the one person you know who sort of jarringly inserts fucking into every sentence or gets idioms wrong but with alarming frequency, as if the mental thesaurus were lacking entries for expressing the same things in more clever ways.
The opposite is also true as a learner of a foreign language. In my experience, at least, it feels wrong and unnatural to use perfectly common and acceptable colloquialisms, and I shy away from them as much as possible. In Portugal there are a number of examples, something cool is something fixe, much of something is bué de something, and we shouldn't forget how people curse things. Yet for as much as I speak Portuguese, and most decisively in a European continental way, to the merriment of my mostly Brazilian cohort, I can't bring myself to speak using those terms and expressions, opting to find a different way of forming my thoughts. It feels unnatural for them to be coming out of my mouth just as it is surprising to Portuguese people that an American would be speaking their language with some level of fluency to begin with.
What I've concluded about this is that swearing, colloquialisms, and even most idiomatic expressions—the hallmark features of native speech in knowing how and when to effortlessly use them—carry a certain cultural agency with them that is hard to adopt. Doing so authentically usually involves being somewhere for a very long time, assimilating as thoroughly as possible to a place, like the immigrants to countries that have lived there for a generation or more. The agency that we lack to say the slang word du jour of our peers is the same as recognizing that regardless of how much effort is put into it, your roots are still elsewhere. The words form a cultural boundary that only external forces can overcome. You might be able to talk Saramago or Chaucer, but only with difficulty will it be bué de fucking cool to talk in a way that pretends like you always knew how to say those less important things.
Pride
Since we're in the midst, or perhaps the tail end of, pride season, I thought it would be timely to reflect on the value of the word and the celebrations we see in colorful form throughout the world. It can also be viewed as a part two of my previous post on my experience in and relationship with the queer community.
As my previous post alludes to, pride for me is about more than the queer or excessively-lettered-acronym community and its struggles for equal rights and social normalization. To borrow a term that has become loaded from what I flippantly call the cult of political correctness, but has also been described in articles I've read as the "internet moral police", I come from the relatively privileged position of benefitting from coming from a place where many of the objectives of said process of social normalization have successfully taken root and have accordingly never suffered any trauma for the sake of my status as some form of a minority. I relate with my less fortunate peers not from personal experience so much as an overarching desire to see and understand the viewpoints of more humans in the world as simply being human, and respecting our differences in the process. I want to see equality and justice for all, in a world not run by aging white conservative heterosexual men; I do not want to see any specific group prosper more than another.
Pride for me, in turn, takes on a meaning that is more wrapped up in my own peculiar weave of minority-status and privilege-wielding. Since I live in a foreign country and spend a significant amount of my time in yet another one, all of these considerations are compounded when we apply local context and the extent of my integration into them. I am not just me, an average white queer male college student, I am a all of those things plus the addition of being them as an American in a continent where it is intellectually voguish (in the best of cases) to find fault in all things American. Pride in my situation means contending with a very different set of social difficulties than my contemporaries in the US, but especially my contemporaries in the relatively progressive enclave I was raised in. So let's take a look at all of those elements instead of writing anything more about their meaning.
Pride for me is:
As my previous post alludes to, pride for me is about more than the queer or excessively-lettered-acronym community and its struggles for equal rights and social normalization. To borrow a term that has become loaded from what I flippantly call the cult of political correctness, but has also been described in articles I've read as the "internet moral police", I come from the relatively privileged position of benefitting from coming from a place where many of the objectives of said process of social normalization have successfully taken root and have accordingly never suffered any trauma for the sake of my status as some form of a minority. I relate with my less fortunate peers not from personal experience so much as an overarching desire to see and understand the viewpoints of more humans in the world as simply being human, and respecting our differences in the process. I want to see equality and justice for all, in a world not run by aging white conservative heterosexual men; I do not want to see any specific group prosper more than another.
Pride for me, in turn, takes on a meaning that is more wrapped up in my own peculiar weave of minority-status and privilege-wielding. Since I live in a foreign country and spend a significant amount of my time in yet another one, all of these considerations are compounded when we apply local context and the extent of my integration into them. I am not just me, an average white queer male college student, I am a all of those things plus the addition of being them as an American in a continent where it is intellectually voguish (in the best of cases) to find fault in all things American. Pride in my situation means contending with a very different set of social difficulties than my contemporaries in the US, but especially my contemporaries in the relatively progressive enclave I was raised in. So let's take a look at all of those elements instead of writing anything more about their meaning.
Pride for me is:
- Being an under-spoken member of the queer community, donating when I am able to money to targeted interests that promote an end to legal mechanisms that keep people like myself in a position of being discriminated against and resisting the small and often overlooked acts of repression that are taken for granted by so many, such as it being somehow impertinent to hold hands in public. Because of this, I don't feel the need to wear a rainbow flag or attend parades or partake in specifically queer-oriented activities, for which I am often called a "bad gay" by less enlightened peers. Shame on them. I am proud to be a supporter of the cause in my own way.
- Not standing by for casual acts of -isms, correcting friends and family on jokes taken to be innocuous, harmful patterns of speech, unenlightened views on controversial topics. I'm not perfect, nor could I imagine being an internet (read: tumblr) vigilante about it, but in my day to day personal interactions with people, I do my best. I'm proud to be proactive about continually being a better version of myself by learning and becoming more enlightened over time and passing that along to others.
- Standing up for what is good about being an American. The reality of life in Europe is that you are, as an American person, confronted with hostilities in greater number than the admirations of American people and culture. These come in the form of passive actions as much as the other way around, such as from well-intentioned "oh but you know other things so well", among other things. I may not think everything that is done or everyone from my native country is the best, but it does not stop me from liking it, appreciating it, and even often holding it in higher esteem than others. I am proud to be an American, even if it makes up just a fraction of my pluralistic conception of self.
- Embracing a pluralistic view of myself and the world. I am proud to be many things at the same time in many different places and situations, and I want nothing more than to live in a world where those around me are as well.
If you made it this far, tell me in a comment or a tweet (or an email, or a passenger pigeon, or what have you) what the concept of pride means for you. As the cliche goes, this sort of introspection should be embraced the year round, not just during a couple of party-fueled weekends in warm summer months.
Video: Wine O'Clock: Day Drinking
This week's #wineoclock features an excellent Alentejo white wine, an update on the harem pants, adventures in "bean cookies", and a Brazilian flair in homage to the ongoing World Cup. Go give it a watch:
Ten Things About Staying at Home
I've been at home more days than not in the last ten since I got back from Barcelona, so here's a list of the things going on in my life in no particular order.
- No, the dishes really won't just wash themselves. You have to get up and scrub them or face the passive-aggressive wrath of your otherwise less-hygienic roommate.
- Resting on the laurels of your supposed levels of hygiene as an excuse not to shower for four days is unacceptable.
- Coming up with new ways of making the same ten ingredients in your cabinet will make you feel like a rocket scientist, except that if you share your discovery on social media, no one will care.
- You will not fuse to the sofa regardless of how hard you attempt to.
- Any activity that warrants actually leaving the house calls for a bath in cologne, even just a stroll to the supermarket.
- It is entirely possible to trick yourself into thinking that you've been productive because you found new music, watched a show, and cleaned the house one afternoon. Don't fall for this.
- The more time you spend at home, the more enticing buying cheap trinkets to decorate it with online becomes. Don't fall for this.
- You will suddenly find yourself in a routine and get bored of being in your routine with no seeming recourse from it. You will then get bored of being bored of it.
- Inspiration will strike at random and run away from you just as quickly. Do something with it right away instead of thinking better of it and procrastinating on what you think you ought to be doing instead.
- The more hours you spend on it, the more you realize that instead of interacting with people on social media, you're just interacting with lists and half-baked articles on blogs and "news" sites, like this one.
Video: Wine O'Clock+Project
Alentejo red wine, the first internet mention of the (not-so-)upcoming project, 80s fashion, iPod mishaps, and more. Go watch.
Getting a Reputation
Once, when I was in high school, we got a crop of new teachers at the school who would begin working with us. One of them came up to me after a short while and greeted me with “Hi, nice to meet you. Your reputation really precedes you.” At the time, I had no idea what that meant.
As I’ve gotten older and come into my own as an adult, the concept has clarified itself considerably. My MA colleagues tend to describe me as “coherent” and it extends beyond just them. Professors, former colleagues, all the way to friends of many years and family would all describe me in similar terms. It is possible that I have maintained a roughly similar character as time has gone on, although I feel that I have changed considerably since my adolescence, but the primary difference between then and now is that I’ve become consciously aware of the reputation I have and actively cultivate and maintain some aspects of it. The main lesson of being an adult, much more so than others and beyond managing the increased levels of responsibility that it entails, is that of being aware of yourself in relation to the world around you and accepting what you can and can’t change about it.
The difference between the ideal version of ourselves—the effortlessly and impossibly motivated, well-eating, frugal, extra-ambitious, workaholic versions of ourselves that we may envision in our minds when thinking about when making resolutions at the end of the year that will go unresolved—and the real version of ourselves has much to do with this concept of awareness. We are all capable of doing what we set out to do and put our energies toward, but invariably we don’t always do everything, or do everything that we attempt to perfectly. Projects can languish, procrastination can rule, lower targets can be set out of necessity. Managing how you are seen by others is a balancing act between composure, social communication, and demonstrating your cachet through action.
It's also a bit of a roulette wheel that involves other people doing much the same and what kind of moments you happen to encounter them in. Sometimes you get off to a bad start with people simply because you get off to a bad start with them, others the reverse is true. Sometimes you can solidify habits that you weren't aware were major parts of your character simply because a critical mass of others pick up on them at the right moment. The part that matters is how consistent you are in doing things and how aware you are of what you're doing, even passively. If you can pick up on the things you're doing by not doing other things or the implications of what you're actively doing, you can direct your behavior in a way that lets you stay in charge of your persona to others.
So I may be relaxed about my punctuality in social contexts (ed. but if you're a potential employer reading this: my work ethic is meticulous and I am both punctual and proactive.) but I am known for the quality of my pursuits and what I put out in the world, from academia to cultural outings, and I like it that way. I could be more of a workaholic or more of a morning person or more of a social butterfly, but my way of being social serves my needs and interests and I feel comfortable knowing that I have a handle on it. I think we all could benefit from that.
It's also a bit of a roulette wheel that involves other people doing much the same and what kind of moments you happen to encounter them in. Sometimes you get off to a bad start with people simply because you get off to a bad start with them, others the reverse is true. Sometimes you can solidify habits that you weren't aware were major parts of your character simply because a critical mass of others pick up on them at the right moment. The part that matters is how consistent you are in doing things and how aware you are of what you're doing, even passively. If you can pick up on the things you're doing by not doing other things or the implications of what you're actively doing, you can direct your behavior in a way that lets you stay in charge of your persona to others.
So I may be relaxed about my punctuality in social contexts (ed. but if you're a potential employer reading this: my work ethic is meticulous and I am both punctual and proactive.) but I am known for the quality of my pursuits and what I put out in the world, from academia to cultural outings, and I like it that way. I could be more of a workaholic or more of a morning person or more of a social butterfly, but my way of being social serves my needs and interests and I feel comfortable knowing that I have a handle on it. I think we all could benefit from that.
What is Home to a Traveler?
I have travelled, if not extensively, at least an appreciable amount around Europe now, enough to have a sense of cultural preferences, things I like about traveling generally, things I dislike about traveling, and where I could or should plan out my list of next places to visit for the first time. I’ve reached a point of getting to know the countries of Western Europe in particular to such an extent that I’ve seen three different types of places emerge: the places I love and could easily see myself living in, where I feel in tune with the culture and (probably) speak the language; the places I like to visit, but don’t appreciate on a profound enough level to consider moving there under normal circumstances; and everywhere else, from indifference to active hostility. What is it about the places in the first group that makes them different?
My first reaction is to say that it’s a gut instinct, that you just experience it, a certain feeling whether upon arrival or after a short time spent in a place. You connect with the particular energy of a city when you enter it and just know that it’s right for you. That, however, is not too satisfying to the inquisitive person asking why? So I’ll elaborate on it with a little bit about each of the three places I’ve come to accept as such and why.
Lisbon is home. It is the city I actually call home, where I have my legal residence, where all most of my possessions reside, and where I study and (look for) work. It got to be that way by accident, but I made a conscious decision to come back time after time, because it has a very familiar mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that I connected with quickly coming from Denver, with the advantage of an extremely mild southern European climate that doesn’t know or understand snow. Lisbon has many layers despite its small size; it is strikingly beautiful at a glance but a further look into the nitty-gritty of it reveals plenty of ugly faults. It’s a city where walking the streets gives a strong sense of opportunity, a sort of “what if?” that I resonate with, seeming to always spend my time wondering more about the future than living in the present.
I have often described Paris as akin to visiting relatives: it’s a home you can always go back to, but too much time in it at once gets frustrating. Once you’ve taken your time to tourist your way about the city, it opens up different faces of itself to you in neighborhoods you wouldn’t have had a reason to visit if you wanted to see any of the innumerable landmarks, museums, or other points of interest to visitors. It’s less expensive than the touristic side of the city can make it out to be, and has just as much of a diversity of people and lifestyles as a city of so many millions ought to. I learned French from an early age and get on quite naturally well with French culture; I’ve never particularly experienced the supposed snootiness or arrogance of Parisians the way they’re famed to be. Quite the contrary, I have made many close friends who constitute a social base that lets me feel at ease and at home in the city of lights.
Barcelona combines the things I like most about Paris and Lisbon in one city while being a microcosm of political issues that I study academically. I find the city easy to access and not lacking any of the creature comforts that I am accustomed to from the other side of the Atlantic, though linguistically it is still more inaccessible than Paris or Lisbon. As a linguist of sorts, the challenge of diving into a new linguistic surrounding is a positive point, as life feels more dynamic when everything is a discovery in how to go about the routines of life differently. Barcelona is less overwhelming than Paris and larger enough than Lisbon not to feel like an overgrown village, with modern and well-functioning public transport alongside a pedestrian-friendly footprint. Had it not been for Lisbon, Barcelona would probably have become my “other” destination outside of Paris.
Despite being well-known and large cities with considerable touristic volume (less so in the case of Lisbon), all of these cities have something that works for my rhythm of being. They’re different from the places I simply like but wouldn’t live in because in each there’s a personal element—be it the cultural similarities of Lisbon and my hometown or the southern European cosmopolitanism of Barcelona—that distinguishes them from the crowd. I’m inclined toward southern Europe perhaps because my linguistic knowledge propels me there, but also because over the long of time I seem to have adapted plenty of its mannerisms considered typical. Quite the opposite is true of many people I know, yet when comparing notes on why the conclusions are much the same: the places you could call home might be different from where you came, but they resemble it (or are diametrically opposed to it; the principle of side of the same coin applies) enough that their choice only seems natural.
Where would you call home if not for where you’re at now, why?
Video: Wine O'Clock Wednesday
It's #wineoclock Wednesday, except posted on a Thursday. This has become a regular thing.
The Worst Date Ever
"I'm sorry, I can't give you a ride home. I'm going to be late catching the bus to my haircut."
"No, it's fine, I live pretty close to here, I'll just walk."
Those were the parting words on our first date, words which would normally not lead to any others. It started innocuously enough, best of intentions in the days leading up to a planned outing. It was supposed to be a quirky, charming affair, a light lunch of Taiwanese street food followed by an introduction to an herbal beverage known to mimic Xanax—an alluring suggestion for a first date for someone as wound up as I am.
A sensible person would probably not have chosen to go with their mother for a routine, if heavy, breakfast mere hours before all of this was supposed to take place, compromising both preparation time as well as appetite. Instead, I waddled from car to car, filled with breakfast burrito and pangs of regret as I realized I would have to rush through the shower I had yet to take. My clothes smelled of cooking oil, as the breakfast joint had an open-air kitchen but was, well, a breakfast joint, so I had to change those as well. I headed off at the last moment to rush through midday traffic and pick my date up late from his class after not being able to find the building his school was in.
Getting Older, Projects, and Housekeeping
I know my insistence on using the Oxford comma must surely stick in the craw of some of the English majors I have the acquaintance of, depending on which side of the fence y'all (see what I did there?) sit on, but I don't care. I'm going to keep using it until you pry the literacy from my cold, dead brain.
We've come again to the time of the year where the number representing my years in existence clinks up irreversibly. When I was an undergraduate teenager, I felt that it would never happen, I would never reach a point in time where I was old enough to be considered an average functional adult in the midst of my cohort. Here we are, all these years later, and as the cliche goes, I'm perplexed that nothing really seems dramatically different in my mind. Physically, I can feel the difference, sure, but upstairs not so much. Being an adult isn't so much about feeling like an adult (spoiler alert: no one does), but the largely hidden responsibilities that come along with it. And no one tells you this until you're in the middle of figuring it out for yourself, willing the dishes to just clean themselves.
Despite being away from Lisbon (again!), progress is steady on what I am planning to unveil for my yearlong project for this site and social media. It will not be a grand departure from the past or a big break in style or offering from what I have largely been doing and that has been enjoyed by friends, family, and the occasional newcomer, but more of an evolution and a challenge to make my personal space something more fruitful. Unlike when this site officially became this site and not just a travelogue Blogger account, a redesign is not in store, as I prefer to make fine adjustments and tweaks as I both learn better how to code what I want and the necessities that the web demands change. I don't like big changes when they are unnecessary but get bored of things if they are stagnant; I have been increasingly described by colleagues as "coherent", and perhaps it's fitting. More on all of that later, though.
In the meantime, I'm off to enjoy the pleasant spring of Barcelona, pondering political questions of no import to my studies and pretending to be more of an Iberian cognoscente than I really am. The schedule I lined out toward the beginning of the year has been essentially obliterated, but I'm here as ever.
We've come again to the time of the year where the number representing my years in existence clinks up irreversibly. When I was an undergraduate teenager, I felt that it would never happen, I would never reach a point in time where I was old enough to be considered an average functional adult in the midst of my cohort. Here we are, all these years later, and as the cliche goes, I'm perplexed that nothing really seems dramatically different in my mind. Physically, I can feel the difference, sure, but upstairs not so much. Being an adult isn't so much about feeling like an adult (spoiler alert: no one does), but the largely hidden responsibilities that come along with it. And no one tells you this until you're in the middle of figuring it out for yourself, willing the dishes to just clean themselves.
Despite being away from Lisbon (again!), progress is steady on what I am planning to unveil for my yearlong project for this site and social media. It will not be a grand departure from the past or a big break in style or offering from what I have largely been doing and that has been enjoyed by friends, family, and the occasional newcomer, but more of an evolution and a challenge to make my personal space something more fruitful. Unlike when this site officially became this site and not just a travelogue Blogger account, a redesign is not in store, as I prefer to make fine adjustments and tweaks as I both learn better how to code what I want and the necessities that the web demands change. I don't like big changes when they are unnecessary but get bored of things if they are stagnant; I have been increasingly described by colleagues as "coherent", and perhaps it's fitting. More on all of that later, though.
In the meantime, I'm off to enjoy the pleasant spring of Barcelona, pondering political questions of no import to my studies and pretending to be more of an Iberian cognoscente than I really am. The schedule I lined out toward the beginning of the year has been essentially obliterated, but I'm here as ever.
How Cleaning Your Toilet Makes You More of an Adult
“Good morning, happy birthday! I have something very special planned for us to do. Grab your dirty laundry and follow me,” my mother greeted me on my 13th birthday. She proceeded to show me how the washing machine worked and the proportions of detergent necessary for each type of clothing, as well as the importance of removing lint from the filter in the dryer. “If you want me to do your laundry for you, you can pay me. I’m sick of this shit.”
Adolescence dropped unexpectedly and the process of becoming an adult does so as well, albeit more gradually. You don’t wake up one day to “surprise! Today you’re an adult.” In fact, most of us don’t ever really feel more grown up than our late adolescence, it’s a condition put upon us by the passing of time and increasing responsibilities that entails. We’re adults because we have to be, not because we asked to be—and that means that some of us never quite get there, either.
So where does the toilet come in? It’s very simple. Part of the process of becoming an adult is establishing a level of autonomy and independence from the environment in which we’re raised. For some, it means moving out of their parents’ house altogether, for others, it means paying them rent or increased levels of autonomy within the household domain. Perhaps separate groceries, perhaps cleaning the house more, but the underlying principle is the increasing of responsibilities. When you move out, in particular, there are endless untold surprises, things that pop up as expenses and inconveniences that we take for granted in the cocoon of our familial homes. Things like toilet paper, food, and yes, even the toilet.
Much like adulthood, the toilet is always there, and it is always a necessity, whether we like it or not. We are physically obligated to use it, and for the interest of our health and sanitation, we are obligated to clean it. When you leave home, whether it was your responsibility or not previously, it is yours now. The consequences are heavy if it doesn’t get done, even if it’s easier to put off indefinitely. So it takes much of the motivation and willpower that could be spent, say, watching the television or on the internet, to get up, put the gloves on, and get intimate with the porcelain bowl. It takes acknowledging a continual responsibility and addressing it consistently and with an effort and skill adequate to ensure that you’re not putting your health at risk because of the state of your toilet, to say nothing of the embarrassment of inviting guests over to a filthy home.
Cleaning the toilet isn’t fun. It isn’t sexy, nor is it a particularly noteworthy event, something to recount to friends and family after accomplishing. It’s just one of the things we’re obligated to do, thanklessly. Being an adult is often like that.
Home in Transit
As it were, my time in the gay hotel is coming to an end after seven months of intrigue and boundary-pushing, and I find myself moving into a new apartment with different conditions at the beginning of April. It got me thinking about the reality of a living situation versus our expectations of how it should or will go, since this will now be the fifth place in which I've lived in Lisbon, not including staying with friends when I didn't have a room of my own.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.
Video: Hungarian Chocolates
I got to taste Hungarian chocolates and Japanese ramune candy thanks to friends who went to visit their hometowns. Go watch the video:
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Ten Unglamorous Things About Traveling
- Arriving to your terminal/gate too early only to wait for a flight that is delayed.
- Missing your train to the airport by ten seconds only to wait for a flight that is early.
- Schlepping through terminals only to find that your flight's gate changed for one on the other side of the airport.
- Schlepping your bags that feel like they have bricks in them only to find that you didn't pack enough upon arrival.
- Not having enough battery power in your electronics only to find that the only outlet within a ten kilometer radius of the gate is being occupied by a schlumpy man playing Candy Crush on his phone.
- The dry excuse for a sandwich that passes for an in-flight meal.
- Sitting between business travelers with an inflated sense of self-importance who insist on purchasing discount tickets but expect business-class service and don't shut off their phones at any point during the flight.
- The person who insists on testing out exactly how far back the seat in front of you will recline, forcing it unnaturally further.
- The person who insists on testing out exactly how far forward your seat will contract, forcing it unnaturally further.
- Getting your passport stamped after standing in line for an hour, despite the image you project at home to your less well-travelled cohort.
Video: Barcelona Take 2
I had a lot of fun putting this vlog together. I've also been taking more video when I do vlogs, so there's more fun to be shared. Go check it out:
The Travel Bug
A lot is written about traveling, so much so that it has its own genre. I have been loth to define exactly which genre of writing I'm pegging myself into on this blog, with the idea that tendencies can emerge that I can hone in on gradually. If I put myself into a box, my natural instinct is to figure out any way possible to get out of and destroy it. Yet I do my fair share of travel writing on this blog, lifestyle-ish, travel-related, personal to a certain point, all as it may be, and today I wanted to share with you some of the things that motivate that nomadic itch that I get that seems to be a fundamental part of me.
I read a flippant comment on social media the other day about how people who feel the need to travel all the time and get away are insecure in themselves and maybe if they just calmed down and did something about their problems they would feel fine staying put. That graphic, in nicely-done typography, set in a relatively well-stylized overlay as is common these days, really stuck with me, not the least of which being because it came from someone who spent the better part of a year living abroad, traveling frequently, and professedly enjoys the experience herself. While I don't disagree that traveling to escape from problems is a bad thing, it was such a strong message of needing to stay put and that it was shameful to leave your rightful (in this case, original or current) place. The negativity was biting and the message was less of a call not to pretend like every indebted Eat, Pray, Love excursion is going to solve all of your inner problems and more of a call to make people feel bad about themselves. I don't support that.
My personal story is one of a persistent resilience in the face of any mental or otherwise personal problems that I come across, and that makes me a bit of an odd fellow. So the message of working on myself before seeking out other things is not entirely lost on me, but I can only appreciate it from a distance of knowing what the end result is like, and not of having had to spend lengthy amounts of time in the trenches. I am quite fortunate in this regard.
Yet traveling, for me, is a world entirely outside of my problems, it doesn't change my ups and downs, nor does it cause or affect them in pointed, specific ways. Traveling and moving to a new country has allowed me to simply experience that aspect of being human in different places and allowed me to gain the perspective of other cultural responses to the same nagging questions, the same doubts, the same jubilation, the same loneliness of establishing yourself in new surroundings. Traveling, fundamentally, is just the act of existing in an unfamiliar, or even a familiar but different, place in the world from where you are most comfortable. Everywhere else, whether it be one city or multiple places, is home. Making the decision to travel, whether by necessity, for work, spontaneously, frequently, or infrequently, is a decision to go outside of your personal comfort and accept that you will be thrust into new patterns of thinking, that you will have to deal with all of the frustrating things that accompany the moments that make us marvel and go in the first place. Not everyone is out to have an Eat, Pray, Love experience, but those who do need not, by any means, be shamed for it—much less from others who have exerted their own right and ability to do precisely that. Not all those who get away each weekend to discover somewhere new are doing so because they have problems to confront, and not all those who stay in a static world of a 100 kilometer radius their whole lives have successfully managed to become paragons of mental health.
The travel bug strikes a lot of people. Most people, I would offer, probably have experienced it to some degree. Others, like me, seem to have been born with it. My motivation stems from a curiosity about all things, new or not, and the desire to understand them better. My motivation stems from wanting to see aspects of the human world that are not available in my American, anglo-centric place of origin. My motivation stems from the pursuit of sensory input, for the pure creative aspect of it, be it aesthetic, gastronomic, or otherwise. What is yours?
I read a flippant comment on social media the other day about how people who feel the need to travel all the time and get away are insecure in themselves and maybe if they just calmed down and did something about their problems they would feel fine staying put. That graphic, in nicely-done typography, set in a relatively well-stylized overlay as is common these days, really stuck with me, not the least of which being because it came from someone who spent the better part of a year living abroad, traveling frequently, and professedly enjoys the experience herself. While I don't disagree that traveling to escape from problems is a bad thing, it was such a strong message of needing to stay put and that it was shameful to leave your rightful (in this case, original or current) place. The negativity was biting and the message was less of a call not to pretend like every indebted Eat, Pray, Love excursion is going to solve all of your inner problems and more of a call to make people feel bad about themselves. I don't support that.
My personal story is one of a persistent resilience in the face of any mental or otherwise personal problems that I come across, and that makes me a bit of an odd fellow. So the message of working on myself before seeking out other things is not entirely lost on me, but I can only appreciate it from a distance of knowing what the end result is like, and not of having had to spend lengthy amounts of time in the trenches. I am quite fortunate in this regard.
Yet traveling, for me, is a world entirely outside of my problems, it doesn't change my ups and downs, nor does it cause or affect them in pointed, specific ways. Traveling and moving to a new country has allowed me to simply experience that aspect of being human in different places and allowed me to gain the perspective of other cultural responses to the same nagging questions, the same doubts, the same jubilation, the same loneliness of establishing yourself in new surroundings. Traveling, fundamentally, is just the act of existing in an unfamiliar, or even a familiar but different, place in the world from where you are most comfortable. Everywhere else, whether it be one city or multiple places, is home. Making the decision to travel, whether by necessity, for work, spontaneously, frequently, or infrequently, is a decision to go outside of your personal comfort and accept that you will be thrust into new patterns of thinking, that you will have to deal with all of the frustrating things that accompany the moments that make us marvel and go in the first place. Not everyone is out to have an Eat, Pray, Love experience, but those who do need not, by any means, be shamed for it—much less from others who have exerted their own right and ability to do precisely that. Not all those who get away each weekend to discover somewhere new are doing so because they have problems to confront, and not all those who stay in a static world of a 100 kilometer radius their whole lives have successfully managed to become paragons of mental health.
The travel bug strikes a lot of people. Most people, I would offer, probably have experienced it to some degree. Others, like me, seem to have been born with it. My motivation stems from a curiosity about all things, new or not, and the desire to understand them better. My motivation stems from wanting to see aspects of the human world that are not available in my American, anglo-centric place of origin. My motivation stems from the pursuit of sensory input, for the pure creative aspect of it, be it aesthetic, gastronomic, or otherwise. What is yours?
Getting Away
I've been debating in which form to write this post for a while, since there seem to be an excess of ideas in my head and a lack of cohesion. My posting schedule has been more or less demolished in the last month due to my adventures and life happenings, but I'm here, working on regularizing it, fear ye not.
It's been a slow month creatively, other than running away, last-minute, to travel to London without really telling anyone, and that has been reflected in my reduced activity on Instagram, writing, video-making, and so on. It's not for want of ideas, but for inspiration on the follow-through in putting them out there, and for the first time in the evolution of this journey in self-promotion and working on my oeuvre of creative online work, I've hesitated about some of the content I've had in mind to produce. Two of the videos I've wanted to make have been shelved upon reviewing the footage because I felt that they lacked the liveliness and sense of self that I'm trying to project. I've also been evaluating how to better define that so that I can more effectively put myself out there. I haven't written as much, in English or Portuguese, for similar reasons. Ideas come to mind and then I write a paragraph or so and find it disingenuous. It's what we could call creative block.
On the other hand, however, going to London the way I did and making vlogs and being able to share a different, more dynamic side of myself has allowed me time to work on doing more than talking, which as a semi-biographical writer is always a fine balance. I've felt alive and stoked the flames of a wide source of inspiration for the direction I want to take this site and my social media in general. It helps, too, to have had time to check out other figures who have taken on similar projects, figures on Twitter or Instagram who have unique voices or interesting perspectives, people who are pushing themselves and getting followers to show for it. Shameless Maya has been a particular inspiration of late, she with her Be Shameless mantra and yearlong social media adventure that took her on a journey of professional development, personal growth, and even travel. Her catchphrase (and tagline of late) is itself a cliche, but one that hits the right note for me at the moment. I believe I have a strong enough voice to hold an audience and make something more of this if I get my self-promotion game on more vigorously.
So there will be some continual adjustments and tweaks over the next few months as I figure out how to tweet better, get more followers on Instagram, and see what happens with my videos. I have ideas for all of those things, and I want your feedback and support, my readers and habitual guests on this site. It is invaluable and keeps me going.
The point of this is to say that, yes, I am still here. Sometimes getting away is a way of retuning yourself, adjusting your priorities, and finding a way to make more of the meaning you're creating out of life. That's what we all strive for, wouldn't you say?
It's been a slow month creatively, other than running away, last-minute, to travel to London without really telling anyone, and that has been reflected in my reduced activity on Instagram, writing, video-making, and so on. It's not for want of ideas, but for inspiration on the follow-through in putting them out there, and for the first time in the evolution of this journey in self-promotion and working on my oeuvre of creative online work, I've hesitated about some of the content I've had in mind to produce. Two of the videos I've wanted to make have been shelved upon reviewing the footage because I felt that they lacked the liveliness and sense of self that I'm trying to project. I've also been evaluating how to better define that so that I can more effectively put myself out there. I haven't written as much, in English or Portuguese, for similar reasons. Ideas come to mind and then I write a paragraph or so and find it disingenuous. It's what we could call creative block.
On the other hand, however, going to London the way I did and making vlogs and being able to share a different, more dynamic side of myself has allowed me time to work on doing more than talking, which as a semi-biographical writer is always a fine balance. I've felt alive and stoked the flames of a wide source of inspiration for the direction I want to take this site and my social media in general. It helps, too, to have had time to check out other figures who have taken on similar projects, figures on Twitter or Instagram who have unique voices or interesting perspectives, people who are pushing themselves and getting followers to show for it. Shameless Maya has been a particular inspiration of late, she with her Be Shameless mantra and yearlong social media adventure that took her on a journey of professional development, personal growth, and even travel. Her catchphrase (and tagline of late) is itself a cliche, but one that hits the right note for me at the moment. I believe I have a strong enough voice to hold an audience and make something more of this if I get my self-promotion game on more vigorously.
So there will be some continual adjustments and tweaks over the next few months as I figure out how to tweet better, get more followers on Instagram, and see what happens with my videos. I have ideas for all of those things, and I want your feedback and support, my readers and habitual guests on this site. It is invaluable and keeps me going.
The point of this is to say that, yes, I am still here. Sometimes getting away is a way of retuning yourself, adjusting your priorities, and finding a way to make more of the meaning you're creating out of life. That's what we all strive for, wouldn't you say?
Video: London
Well, I went off traveling again and this time, it was a snap decision. Go check out all of my adventures, this time in London:
Lessons in Paradox, or Being Productively Lazy
I'm a great believer in the idea that becoming more of an adult has nothing to do with the idea of being a "fully formed" person, as it seems when we are children, but of being able to manage more efficiently the natural cycles of energy that we deal with day in and day out. I may mentally feel no different than I did as an underaged university student, accelerating through life with all the praise that comes with a nonstandard academic (and social) upbringing, but as a twenty-something, I can feel the difference in precisely my increased ability to get things done even when I feel unexpectedly shitty out of sync.
I have never been a fast or efficient adapter to change of situation, however temporary, so going to Barcelona for three weeks, albeit a much-needed and welcomed bit of respite, threw me for a loop upon arrival. Even today, as I write this, I don't feel entirely back in my normal rhythm (insofar as that actually exists and I'm not just chasing after some conception of normal that I conceive of but never attain), yet I feel nowhere near as unmotivated as I did for the first week of being back. The difference in stimuli, of coming back to not having excellent company every day and new adventures to be had with no responsibilities, left me in a haze of sleeping twelve hours a day and finding it difficult to get out of my bed even for such basic things as eating real meals. My wallet appreciated the lessened spending at the grocery store, though I think my body probably didn't. I had various exams during that week, which I managed to get through and without great difficulty, but the fact remains that I was for all intents and purposes, out of energy. The tank was on reserve fuel for a week, and I was using it as sparingly as possible.
This might sound like the introduction to a sad tale of spiraling into a morose depressive state, but in fact it is anything but. Where my energies were lacking altogether, I got it together in my head and got to work, recognizing that I need to get things done and be productive. I (literally) can't afford to just do nothing every day, and so it was that in the midst of fusing myself to my bed (comfortable I wouldn't necessarily call it, but it's my bed nonetheless), I propped myself up with my computer and got more work done and let ideas flow for new projects at a consistent pace to which I am not normally accustomed. Some of those things have to do with content for this site, of which I have many ideas, including more videos on YouTube, and others have to do with other projects that will help me sustain myself in general. In each case, there will be a steady flow of updates and information in the coming weeks as I get everything prepared and continue expanding on my ideas, at least those which are meant for public view. To accompany this, I also started making a better effort to connect and reconnect with friends and acquaintances, lacking as I felt my social activity has been. It all seems to be amounting to something.
So the lesson to this is that, somehow, I have learned how to manage being in a down state. I don't take any medications for this, and I have plenty of moments where I'm not productive or buzzing with thoughts. But I have managed to capture the energy necessary to continue moving forward and not stopping myself in my tracks. If this is what it means to grow up, well, I'm getting there.
I have never been a fast or efficient adapter to change of situation, however temporary, so going to Barcelona for three weeks, albeit a much-needed and welcomed bit of respite, threw me for a loop upon arrival. Even today, as I write this, I don't feel entirely back in my normal rhythm (insofar as that actually exists and I'm not just chasing after some conception of normal that I conceive of but never attain), yet I feel nowhere near as unmotivated as I did for the first week of being back. The difference in stimuli, of coming back to not having excellent company every day and new adventures to be had with no responsibilities, left me in a haze of sleeping twelve hours a day and finding it difficult to get out of my bed even for such basic things as eating real meals. My wallet appreciated the lessened spending at the grocery store, though I think my body probably didn't. I had various exams during that week, which I managed to get through and without great difficulty, but the fact remains that I was for all intents and purposes, out of energy. The tank was on reserve fuel for a week, and I was using it as sparingly as possible.
This might sound like the introduction to a sad tale of spiraling into a morose depressive state, but in fact it is anything but. Where my energies were lacking altogether, I got it together in my head and got to work, recognizing that I need to get things done and be productive. I (literally) can't afford to just do nothing every day, and so it was that in the midst of fusing myself to my bed (comfortable I wouldn't necessarily call it, but it's my bed nonetheless), I propped myself up with my computer and got more work done and let ideas flow for new projects at a consistent pace to which I am not normally accustomed. Some of those things have to do with content for this site, of which I have many ideas, including more videos on YouTube, and others have to do with other projects that will help me sustain myself in general. In each case, there will be a steady flow of updates and information in the coming weeks as I get everything prepared and continue expanding on my ideas, at least those which are meant for public view. To accompany this, I also started making a better effort to connect and reconnect with friends and acquaintances, lacking as I felt my social activity has been. It all seems to be amounting to something.
So the lesson to this is that, somehow, I have learned how to manage being in a down state. I don't take any medications for this, and I have plenty of moments where I'm not productive or buzzing with thoughts. But I have managed to capture the energy necessary to continue moving forward and not stopping myself in my tracks. If this is what it means to grow up, well, I'm getting there.
Barcelona Takeaways
While I'm still editing and posting Barcelona vlogs (though I do have other videos coming up after that!), I thought it appropriate that I should give you something a little bit more substantive about my thoughts on traveling to the Catalan capital.
1. I have never been to a city with so many French Bulldogs in my life. Why does everyone have a Frenchie in Barcelona? I don't know, but they're adorable and they are everywhere. Everywhere.
2. Despite (technically, obviously) being a part of Spain and everyone being able to speak Spanish, Catalan is the obvious preference and if you attempt to speak it in favor of Spanish, people brighten up a lot toward you. Capital of Catalonia goes without saying.
3. Without throwing my opinion on the matter into the ring, there's a lot of tacit support for Catalonian independence, whether it be flags or posters on storefronts that support the perhaps-upcoming referendum on precisely that. There is not a single neighborhood that lacks it, nor did I observe any part of town that was visibly toward the other end of the spectrum.
4. Barcelona has something of a reputation for being party central (though pales in comparison to Ibiza), though the atmosphere seems more mixed. The swarms of people around the city on New Year's Eve who didn't count down to midnight, didn't shout at midnight, didn't do much of anything except be present is a good symbolic representation of this. It is certainly no Brazilian city.
5. Tourist attractions are astonishingly expensive when you have to pay for them, but the city as a whole doesn't come close to the astronomical costs of Paris or London or Scandinavia. It's pleasantly accessible if you're not there just for the sake of touristing. Or even if you are, and don't like to just see the same churches and museums that everyone goes to on every pit stop of every famous large city.
6. Catalan is, as a language, not just some peculiar dialect of Spanish. It's different, and it's confusing to the ears just as much as the eyes if you have never encountered it before but otherwise understand Romance languages fairly well.
7. Gaudí was probably a hallucinogenics addict, or so it seems when you look at his buildings popping out of the otherwise conservative urban forms surrounding them.
8. The effects of the crisis are not immediately visible. There are very few shuttered storefronts, the shopping centers are all full of people buying things, and countless different banks are absolutely everywhere. It's quite the opposite of the situation in Lisbon.
9. Legal holidays are taken very seriously, so if you didn't know or forgot that there were three days of holidays in a row and didn't stock up on food, you're going to have a hard time not eating out and spending a fortune. Even the supermarkets in shopping centers close. There are always small immigrant-run convenience stores open to flout that general rule, though.
10. The best part about Barcelona is getting out of Barcelona, because you have accessibility to everything nearby. Mountains, beaches, two other countries, Valencia, it's all within a couple of hours at the very most.
1. I have never been to a city with so many French Bulldogs in my life. Why does everyone have a Frenchie in Barcelona? I don't know, but they're adorable and they are everywhere. Everywhere.
2. Despite (technically, obviously) being a part of Spain and everyone being able to speak Spanish, Catalan is the obvious preference and if you attempt to speak it in favor of Spanish, people brighten up a lot toward you. Capital of Catalonia goes without saying.
3. Without throwing my opinion on the matter into the ring, there's a lot of tacit support for Catalonian independence, whether it be flags or posters on storefronts that support the perhaps-upcoming referendum on precisely that. There is not a single neighborhood that lacks it, nor did I observe any part of town that was visibly toward the other end of the spectrum.
4. Barcelona has something of a reputation for being party central (though pales in comparison to Ibiza), though the atmosphere seems more mixed. The swarms of people around the city on New Year's Eve who didn't count down to midnight, didn't shout at midnight, didn't do much of anything except be present is a good symbolic representation of this. It is certainly no Brazilian city.
5. Tourist attractions are astonishingly expensive when you have to pay for them, but the city as a whole doesn't come close to the astronomical costs of Paris or London or Scandinavia. It's pleasantly accessible if you're not there just for the sake of touristing. Or even if you are, and don't like to just see the same churches and museums that everyone goes to on every pit stop of every famous large city.
6. Catalan is, as a language, not just some peculiar dialect of Spanish. It's different, and it's confusing to the ears just as much as the eyes if you have never encountered it before but otherwise understand Romance languages fairly well.
7. Gaudí was probably a hallucinogenics addict, or so it seems when you look at his buildings popping out of the otherwise conservative urban forms surrounding them.
8. The effects of the crisis are not immediately visible. There are very few shuttered storefronts, the shopping centers are all full of people buying things, and countless different banks are absolutely everywhere. It's quite the opposite of the situation in Lisbon.
9. Legal holidays are taken very seriously, so if you didn't know or forgot that there were three days of holidays in a row and didn't stock up on food, you're going to have a hard time not eating out and spending a fortune. Even the supermarkets in shopping centers close. There are always small immigrant-run convenience stores open to flout that general rule, though.
10. The best part about Barcelona is getting out of Barcelona, because you have accessibility to everything nearby. Mountains, beaches, two other countries, Valencia, it's all within a couple of hours at the very most.
Video: Barcevloga pt 3
The final edition of my Barcelona vlogs is here! Watch me have a sad-trombone New Year's Eve (I had fun despite the lack of fireworks, I swear) and enjoy my final moments in the Catalan capital below:
Video: Barcevloga pt 2
Part 2 of the Barcelona vlog is up. Go watch me take a drive around Catalonia and Andorra:
Video: Barcevloga
Well, here we are again. It's the new year, I've landed in Lisbon, and all of the travel footage I managed to take is being edited. Here's part one: