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.
Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts
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.