Chatter and Prattle, or the Part of the Journey Wherein You Stare Idly at Nothing

I sit on my new bed bouncing gently on the flimsy IKEA springs, my eye drawn to the bits of color scattered about among the stark whiteness of the walls, so modern as they are, exhausted in mind, body, and soul, for reasons apparent only as they reside in the puffiness of my eyes and the lines underneath them. A couple of days have passed in anticipation of having plans, inhaling eagerly in anticipation of the numerous things to be done, and then failing to exhale as something unravels each time and the thrill of being among the company I prefer to keep is delayed a day or two or indefinitely further. This is a normal part of life, but it is contributing to my exhaustion as I end up doing plenty of things but none of them as I had planned originally. I am generally too much of an organized person accustomed to planning things out, highly amenable to consistency and put under stress to its alternative, so the lesson is perhaps to chill the fuck out to breathe and allow that life sometimes happens without you holding the levers.

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I don't believe there is any Vietnamese food in all of Lisbon. Certainly there is none that I have come across to speak of. I need my fix of pho! Portuguese readers, all 2.7 of you: fix this. Or at least provide assistance so that I can.

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There is a tangible strain in my interactions and relations with people from home. I kvetch of boredom and draw blanks, struggling to remember my connections to the soil of the other side of the large pool of water separating us, but my antipathy to the university and general disconnect from life at home at this point is such that the process sits at more of an ebb than a flow. I'm not so terribly bored, really (although I am irritated by the boredom forced upon me by virtue of the ongoing scheduling circus), nor do I not want to share or listen to what's going on, I just find myself recounting blankly when the appropriate time actually comes. There are also worse problems to have than claiming a sense of dullness to the inevitable regularity of life as it happens here in meeting new people and living through the daily adventures that come with being in a culture still new and a language still alien, as a certain endearing fellow put it to me recently.

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Having moved, I find myself quite joyous at having all of the creature comforts I expected to be living with upon arrival but instead got used to living without at the old apartment, an almost perverse happiness at living on a baseline standard that is by no means unreasonable. I do, however, like the feeling of being more connected to smaller things in life; the joy of simply being able to make a stovetop espresso is more satisfying than it may appear in writing to be. It is just as well that the apartment itself is stark – both in its blank, undecorated white walls and unvarnished angular design and its grand scale. It is magnificently large, enormous by any standard, and in combination with its cold modernism, we the occupants are left to make of the space that which we desire. This means interacting with each other frequently, in our case, eating and studying happily in the common space, and generally establishing a sense of life as though the apartment were some sort of canvas upon which to do so.

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I have determined the extent to which some of my friendships in this city have begun to run in realizing that I can have heated conversations with noted differences about things highly sensitive without it ruining acquaintance afterward, which is remarkable in and of itself but all the more so given the short period of time. I've also developed friendships with very different sets of people, which is proving to be highly appealing as I am able to have a wide range of people with whom I can exchange ideas and contacts, blather on about anything and nothing, and rely on to be able to get out of my house and go do whatever the hell it is there might be to do at any given time on any given day. I am also not alone in the various nightmarish bureaucratic goings-on left still to do as a result, for which I am completely grateful.

The wheels keep turning and we're moving...somewhere. Think of it as that point of the road trip when you're driving through Kansas and you realize that you've been doing nothing but staring at flat, idle landscape for several hours and all of a sudden you have to use all of your energy to put yours eyes back into focus.

The Travails of Setting an Agenda, or You Are Not a Special Snowflake

As time continues to tick away, days turning into weeks which then turn into months which then turn into the pleasant and sunny weather of the seasons steadily approaching, I've found myself in the trap of dealing with a university that does not seem to function efficiently as an institution, nor that can provide for students at a basic level what should be and is very simple elsewhere in the Western world. With schedules changing constantly at the last minute, professors and secretaries not answering emails, room numbers for classes that are actually happening not assigned, and more, the job of being a student is made a burden much more so than it reasonably should be.

So it is that I find myself each day with with an abundance of time, everyone I know asking me aghast why it is that my schedule is so open and coveting more of the free time I would gladly exchange for their paying jobs and European Union citizenship. As a person accustomed to a normally rigorous schedule, this lapse of professionalism and urgency at the university level is something not typically experienced, leaving me confused and with no small sense of needing to occupy my time doing what would otherwise be a baseline standard of productive academic work. I need to study, otherwise there is no point for anything at all – I am a student, thus it is my job to study. So I've discovered a lesson out of this nominally "studying" abroad trip about which no one informs you, whether for lack of insight or assumption that you'll understand this as part of the general deal and move along with it, which is to say that self-motivation to get up and do important things for the sake of doing them, without any other impetus, is an incredibly difficult task to manage. It is an exercise in self-discipline that we don't get in our cozy university setting, where our schedules may be determined by ourselves, sure, but the system is a well-oiled machine designed to push you along through it without so much as thinking about the task at hand on your own part. We have our majors, they have classes, you take them, you do the work, you graduate, you get a job, you go to work each day, life works out without needing to get up each day and ask yourself why it is exactly that you're doing these things, you simply do them because there is an implicit necessity for doing so.

I am not one to whine about how difficult things are, at least not as a means of delaying their progress or accomplishing them, and so I learned very quickly that not having a schedule means it is necessary to set one for yourself in a realistic way that can maximize the opportunity provided by the situation. Yes, I still get to enjoy the perks of free time, waking up late (which can be attributed in large part to the state of the apartment in which I have been living, for that description see here), seeing friends at any hour I desire, being flexible with where I can go and what I can do, and so on. On the other hand, I spend any time not spent in the company of others or in transit studying, be it Portuguese in various forms, reading literature relevant to what I am supposed to be studying, sifting through sources to rewrite a paper on which I am working with a professor in Boulder, and other things. It is staggering, but whenever progress toward something happens, ultimately I feel less like I'm doing nothing for no reason and more like things have some sort of purpose. It can't replace actual courses, since it is only for those I get credit to transfer back to Boulder, but it does firmly establish a legitimacy to the claim that I am doing work here that is otherwise necessary.

I imagine this is how the grating charity harpies we see on the television in all their dolled-up splendor feel on a daily basis, not really having the constraints of anything but where your energy can take you and produce, except in their case it's always some sort of cosmetic line or charity for premature blind minority children who have one arm and a drug addicted parent, this is a huge problem, think of the children! and I am trying to figure out the best way of using my time so that I can establish European contacts and learn the skills necessary to be able to come back on a more permanent basis. The lesson is mostly a reinforcement of the concept that no, no one really is a unique and special snowflake with a God-given right to everything you want just because you wanted it "really hard!", no matter how brilliant everyone spent your whole life telling you are, how much of a child prodigy you were, or so on. The most important piece of advice that someone told me repeatedly from an early age was not that I was so incredible but that being incredible means nothing if you don't apply some effort to make it that way, which is to say that the concept of intrinsic value is essentially only what we make of it and even the harpies we deride on the television have more merit than you if you're doing absolutely nothing. Genius wasted is no better than determined mediocrity was how it was put to me as a child, with all of the exaggeration of that verbiage, and I try to do things to show that it stuck instead of just thinking that it did and applauding myself for trying so hard! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go finish a book.

Thoughts on the General Strike of March 22

Bullet points to reflect the nature of my immediate reaction coming out of witnessing the general strike on March 22 that swept the country:

• The obvious thing that provoked the strike is that people here are absolutely miserable living in a free-falling economy; with a bloated government cutting pay, reducing benefits, and contributing to the declining economy by reducing its spending to European Union "kosher-certified" levels; corruption, both perceived and real; and the offensive nature of their leaders claiming the need for reductions, liberalization, privatization, and so on, while living extremely lavishly themselves. The mood in the country is one of hope that things can get better but bitter, painful frustration at the situation and, indeed, a desperation to go back to better times.

Variously, "No to Privatization!", "More Social Justice, No Inequalities", "Unemployment is Exclusion, It is Not a Solution!", "No to Forced Work!", "Austerity is Poverty, Work is Progress", "To Fight is to Invest in the Future", "Bigger Salaries, Better Hours". 

•  At the same time, the message emanating from the strike was very abstract and contradictory. On the one hand, they want more work, a better-functioning economy, and the benefits that come from those things. On the other, they are entirely opposed to working more for the same or reduced pay, something common among all public-sector workers across all countries affected by the crisis in order to boost productivity, and they want the government to provide the jobs for them. They oppose private-sector investment in goods and services currently provided by the government for no particularly clear reason except that it would mean the government could afford to reduce the workforce it is directly responsible for, and in turn cut costs, costing them jobs that the government added (in many cases recklessly and excessively) during better times to begin with. They don't want inequality, but they want to maintain their own standard of living, as long as the government is providing for it. We all know how hardline planned economies have turned out in the past half-century (the Soviet Union is gone and faced economic hardship, Cuba is crumbling, and even China embraced the free market so that it too would not collapse), so why is the precedent being ignored? I do not support these messages, in their basic forms, coming from the strike – I do not see any credible reasoning behind the vilification of the free market.

• If the message is "to fight is to invest in the future", why is the message not tuned to the things that will safeguard their future? I did not see a coherence of focus during the strike, instead it appeared to be more of a general forum of complaint. The strike seemed lacking in sensibility, since the energy spent could be better focused on working harder, making better products, investing political capital to hold those necessary accountable and effect real change, and so on.

• I find "fascism of the market!" to be a laughable message at best, when the government cannot afford to pay the salary guaranteed to public sector workers now or before, despite how god-sent and permanent those jobs seemed to be. I do empathize with the message that ordinary people are getting screwed out of robbed of their pensions, because here we have people who thought they were paying into a system to guarantee their future under a system not designed to be able to afford them what the government was selling while its very leaders were profiting from government euros and the private sector. This is much more a matter of political accountability, in my view.

• The violence that erupted by the police at the end of the rally was entirely senseless and unacceptable in a strike that seemed no more sensible in and of itself, except as a barometer of public sentiment.