What am I Doing Here?

Curso e Tal

2012-01-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

Here I am, home again on a Saturday night once again. It's my own fault - I left a party as soon as I could this evening. I just wasn't feeling it - I wasn't drinking, so the drunk people were starting to really annoy me, I hardly knew anyone, and I couldn't stop ogling this lovely college student which made me feel aged and lecherous. I fled the scene.

Dejected I may be, a tad, but I've had a busy day. It started early, as I signed myself up for a free art course that is offered at the MAM - the modern art museum that is just down the hill from our house. Silly me - I've lived in this house seven years now and I only just discovered that they offer free courses there. Well, actually, I've known they have courses there for a long time, but I only found out they were free and became interested a couple months ago. As luck would have it, this was right after I opened my store, which had been opening on Saturday mornings but now will *not* at least until June. I didn't bother to ask my lovely wife if she'd open the store for me on Saturdays - she's made it pretty clear just how interested she is in participating with the business enterprise and I've decided not to push it. If I miss any sales, so be it. I really wanted to take a class.

As luck would also have it, the only course available on Saturdays was gravura em metal, or etching, which was exactly the course I wanted to take. I've done a bit of etching- my dad had a fully equipped print shop in his studio. In fact, he had a beautiful brand new etching press that would have been the envy of most college printmaking programs. He did some beautiful etchings and taught us how it was done. He liked the little etchings I did quite a bit, always being very supportive of my artistic endeavors. And now I'm going to do some more. It's going to be fun. We're going to do a couple months of monoprinting, and then get into the acid and do the real deal etchings. I only have to pay for a few materials - a liter of kerosene, some paper, some disposable gloves, and all the rest is taken care of. Pretty good deal if you ask me.

The instructor, who is named Evandro, seems like a very nice and mellow guy. The first two classes have dragged a bit, mostly watching videos and listening to lectures. Today's lecture was particularly agonizing as I had a snot snorter sitting next to me and honking away every minute or two for an hour and a half. Never should have written that post- it's made me hyper-sensitive to the phenomenon and I'm just gonna have to deal with it.

I did get to do a couple monoprints at the end of the time today, and I would have done more if I hadn't received a call from a distraught customer with a clogged paint can- I left early to set him straight.

So looks to be fun and I'll post some pics of my work at some point, also of the space - it's right on the water and a pretty cool spot for an art class. And I'm up past my bedtime and must be sleeping now, goodnight!

Busy busy

2012-01-20T16:39:00.001-08:00

Man, if I had one day a week like the day I had today at the store the business would be doing great. If every day were like today, I'd need employees and would be thinking about finding a new location already.

Leaving the house, I got a call from a customer asking if I was already at the store, then assuring me he would drop by shortly. Then, I had people waiting for me when I got to the store. I had about half an hour to myself after they left, but not enough time to complete, or even start, my typical morning routine.

Then the day started in earnest.

I had one customer after another, all day long. I didn't even get a decent meal in, just a couple bread/cheese rolls and an orange juice. I sold a lot of paint. Finally there was a lull and I went to the bank to pay some bills, hanging up my 'back in ten minutes' sign. Unfortunately, there were about fifteen people in line at the bank, which generally means a twenty minute wait or longer. When I got back to the store, I had two customers waiting for me, who proceeded to buy even more paint. Two more customers came in at about 4:30, and spent well over an hour picking out two dozen cans of paint. I've discovered some customers can be excruciatingly slow, which I guess makes sense- there are a lot of options and the material is relatively expensive so they don't want to get the wrong paint and end up regretting it.

Next thing I knew it was 6:00 and I was exhausted. A couple American friends who are visiting showed up so we could walk down to this little neighborhood and see some of the paint I sold that day getting applied to a wall. That's another story, one of several I must needs recount, if I ever find the time.

Phlegm

2012-01-16T06:39:00.000-08:00

This is a complaining post, and kinda gross, so if you're not in the mood please skip to the next item in your reader. And my apologies in advance to my Brazilian readers (all one of you) for making broad generalizations.

I was leaving an event on Saturday, and noticing the girl seated at the door was kinda cute, when suddenly she said "Snort." She didn't look quite so cute after that.

Actually she didn't say snort, as that implies the use of vocal cords, rather, she was actually making the sound via her nasal passages - presumably snorting mucus back up them.

I've started to notice that this is extremely common here, and apparently not a social faux pas. I've had people, presumably moneyed, educated people, on airplanes snorting away repeatedly, and on my street snorting and hawking is nearly constant. Lucas had a classmate whose mother must have some kind of allergies or something, as she is constantly snorting as she converses with me. Use a kleenex, I think, please.

It's not universal, however, I've discussed it with my wife and she thinks it's as gross as I do. I do wonder what's going on - I know Americans (um, 'Unitedstatesians') are considered crass, so we must do things that other people find offensive and are completely oblivious... is that what's happening here as well?

As I write this the woman who works in the store next to mine has snorted at least three times. That's what got me thinking about it.

The worst thing about this, much like with littering, is trying to get Lucas not to do it. He sees everyone else snorting away, without shame or repercussions, so he doesn't see a problem with himself doing it as well. I am trying to disabuse him of this, with very little effect. So far.

The Race

2012-01-12T16:38:00.000-08:00

Welp, I did it. I ran the Corrida Sagrada- all 6.8 kilometers or 4.2 miles of it, and it took me just under 36 minutes to do so. This was actually faster than I expected, so that was a pleasant surprise. I got myself a medal for participating, plus a bag with a banana, an apple, and an energy bar in it.

What I didn't get was any photos of my moment of glory, although I've heard reports that I was sighted on television- not sure I believe them. The race was a trip, but more about that in a minute. First I'd like to reflect upon the time I walked to Bonfim in 2009, with dubious results. I developed a severe cramp and in my post about it I whined about my impending old age. Well I'll tell you friend, you can be old and you can run fast- there were folks 10 or 20 years older than me running today who came in with better times than my own.

This post isn't turning out the way I had anticipated. I'm tired and should just go to bed. But let me choke out a couple more paragraphs before I do.

The race was strange for a lot of reasons. First and most obviously because I'd never participated in anything like that before, and had no idea what I was supposed to do. Unfortunately, that's when I was apparently caught on camera, when I was standing around like a dork with no clue. As I looked around, everyone looked in better shape than me, so I opted to start at the back of the pack. Once we started running things improved. I quickly discovered I was in better shape than many of the participants, so I got to pass a whole bunch of people which is always fun. I hit my stride and enjoyed having the road, normally a nightmare of traffic and pedestrians, pretty much all to ourselves.

Probably the weirdest thing about the race is that we were not the main attraction - we were barely an appetizer. All around us, for the entire distance, people were setting up coolers and stocking them with beer - preparing for the crush of thousands that were to come several hours later. Many people looked surprised to see us, and there was a fair bit of half-teasing, half-mocking encouragement shouted at us. "Vai Coroa!" was quite popular, a coroa being someone getting on into middle age (it also means 'crown'), but whether this was being shouted at me or another coroa I couldn't say.

Starting the race at 7:30, I arrived at the finish line at a little past eight, which is insanely early for me to be out of the house, let alone finished with my main task for the day. It was extremely pleasant to be at the Igreja de Bonfim so early, as it was mellow and not crowded - I was able to catch my breath, eat my fruit, and tie some ribbons onto the gates of the church before I started back. One of the only things I brought with me was a little bag filled with suntan lotion that I pinned into my waistband, so I slathered up and started for home. It took me over two hours to get there. I got to see the whole procession in reverse, and it devolved from anticipation to debauchery in a hurry. I ran into several people I knew, including my wife. I was back home at just after noon.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the whole day is that I didn't have so much as a sip of beer. Better yet- I didn't miss it.

The Store

2012-01-08T05:38:00.000-08:00

I'm going to make good on my one New Year's resolution and write a post about my store, Mil Muros Graffiti. Not because I'm feeling particularly virtuous (I'm drowning in virtue after signing up for the road race), but because I got an email from a family member curious to know more about the shop I'd been scheming to put together for months and is now finally a reality. So as promised, here we go!

I've been planning this opening for some time:

My life is very different from what it was a few months ago.

No more going to bed at 3 AM, no more starting work at 10 PM, no more getting up at 12 or 1. I wouldn't say I get up early, but I open the store at 10 AM every day and I'm there until 6, which means I can get things done- I'm trapped there for the most part, which is a good thing. I'm usually a yawning shambles by about 11 PM, which for me is ridiculously early. I am also out of the house for most of the day for the first time in a couple years, which feels great. The store is only a couple minutes walk from the house (which is also good), but that quarter mile or so makes a huge difference. The store is generally much quieter than our street.

I've started to establish a routine, which is still in need of refinement. The most rewarding bit for me has been the daily drawing: every day I spend about 15 minutes drawing something from life, something I haven't done for years. I really wanted to get my drawing chops back together, and although the results are still pretty middling at this point, I figure I'll get there eventually. I've also discovered you really can't draw much in fifteen minutes, but that's what I've allotted myself for now.

As for customers, they are sporadic at best. I sometimes get only one a day, occasionally none. Sometimes a customer shows up and buys 300 reais worth of paint, sometimes more. There have been a couple days where I've made several of these sales. But that's okay - eventually I want to focus more on the advertising and building up the customer base, but one of my main objectives was to have big blocks of uninterrupted time to work on the computer, and I am getting those.

There has been a large amount of set-up involved, from building counters and shelving to purchasing inventory. This is winding down now. I actually enjoy the building part immensely, I don't consider myself a carpenter by any means but I like cutting wood and nailing it together, particularly if I can wrangle square corners and level surfaces.

But enough boring text, let's look at some pictures!

This is pretty much what you see when you walk in to the store. The paint rack on the left holds about 700 cans of paint when full. The table with the computer is generally where you'll find me, although I plan to build a nicer work station which will be at the far right of this image. The big green painting was done by my friend Sins, who was the owner of the Salvador graffiti shop Bomb Bahia back in the day. All the boxes are from a big order of fancy Spanish paint that just arrived on Saturday. The guy with the crazy tie in the back is actually a vinyl sticker, done by Naara Nascimento.

The store is split in two by this counter, which separates the customers from the merchandise, very much intentionally. I built the counter around the glass display case that I bought from a store that was going out of business in our neighborhood. A fresh coat of paint and it's like new! The counter tops are also re-purposed - they are the doors to a wardrobe that had been tossed out on my street.

The same counter, from the merchandise side. I ended up with lots of shelves, but wish more of them were glass fronted for display purposes.

Possibly my greatest triumph in building the counter, that the two halves are flush with each other, and level! Customers are welcome to doodle or write their tags on the counter top - I figure I'll re-paint it from time to time.

Here's a better view of my work station and the paint rack. As much paint as the dern thing will hold, I needed more space for this latest shipment of paint, so I had to build some more shelving. Actually, if I had all the paint available from the three brands I am stocking, I would need probably three of these paint racks!

Here's the new shelving I built this past week. Plywood and ripão, which is a standard measurement of wood here - no 2 x 4's in Salvador. Very sturdy providing no termites get at it. The stencil in the back is of some famous TV personality from back in the 90's. I was sorry to cover him up, but I'm afraid I'll need to cover up more paintings if the store continues to grow.

I bought this magazine rack from the same store as the display case. Magazine sales are sluggish at best, but without them I wouldn't look like a very serious graffiti shop. I also hope to have more books available eventually.

I invited some of my graffiteiro friends to paint up the store. These were done by Core and his girlfriend Rebeca Silva.

Painting on the left by Dimak and on the right by Marcos Costa. Hey, almost all of these guys have blogs! Dimak is actually co-owner of one of my competitors, but we get along well. I used to sell their paint on my website back when I was just starting out. The site, by the way, is generating almost zero sales these days.

Finally, I have a whole other back room that is almost empty at this point. It does have these lovely shelves for my back-stock. The view out the window is of some air conditioners- worse than the view from my house.

Well, there you have it. Mission accomplished - I can now say I fulfilled all my New Year's resolutions. And for all of you clamoring for news of the store, you are now informed!

Corrida Sagrada

2012-01-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

Hmm - looks like my first race might happen sooner than I thought. As soon as I finished my post last night, I got curious and googled 'race salvador 2012' (in Portuguese of course, which means only one word was different from the English, but I digress) and lo and behold, I found a site called 'Portal Bahia Run,' which sounded promising.

And it was. The site informed me that there is a race next Thursday, which is a city holiday here called the Lavagem do Bonfim (about a 3rd of the way down this page), and better yet, it's shorter than what I ran yesterday. I don't need to train for it- I'm already trained. It's only 6.8 kilometers, or about five miles.

There are 600 spots for runners in the race, and the site warned me that they would probably go quickly. I called this morning, and the guy I talked to confirmed that. He said I'd better get down there as soon as possible, so I did. I waited until 5:00 and then closed the store to walk down and sign up, which was easy, painless, and quick.

I'm kind of surprised how excited I am about this, but I think it will be very fun, and veeeery different from the other times I've walked this route. The most memorable of those was seven years ago, when I walked it with my father and my brothers, along with a sizable group of Brazilians. I got quite wasted that time, this time I'll be riding a natural high.

2012

2012-01-01T17:05:00.000-08:00

Here it is- another New Year's day, and I wanted to write a short post before I go down and watch the rest of the Transformers movie that I have to return tomorrow.

Rather than summing things up or making resolutions, I just wanted to mark some milestones in my life. Any resolutions I might have come up with (I was never big on resolutions anyways) I enacted a couple months ago when I opened my store. Which reminds me - I resolve to write about my store! In the next year!

So - I like doing a New Year's day post mostly because I started this silly blog on a New Year's day, four years ago. Kinda hard to believe, but then again, it's been a sporadic endeavor at best so it's not like I spend a chunk of time working on it every day.

Another big milestone: it has now been ten years since my first trip to Brazil. If I'd had any idea how much that trip would change my life, would I have made the trip? I don't honestly know, but looking back at the 10-years-ago me, I think I was pretty ready to do something crazy, which I did.

Other milestones: seven years in our house, seven years of marriage (feeling itchy?), my kid is coming up on his seventh birthday. I was pretty busy seven years ago. Wouldn't have planned to do all three of those at the same time, but that's how it worked out. It has also been thirteen years since I stopped visiting a certain sticky green friend, and I really don't miss him very much.

Oh yeah - this too: Christmas day is my half birthday, so now I'm 42.5.

And finally, a new personal record, set this evening: I ran three times around the Dique de Tororó (btw if you visit the page I linked to, I saw the boat in the picture today- half sunk at its mooring). There are nice brass plaques every 100 meters around the Dique, so I can tell you that I ran precisely 7.8 kilometers, and it took me almost exactly 45 minutes. I think I'm ready for a 10K race.

Happy New Year's everyone, and all the best from Bahia.

Cloning Plastic

2011-12-24T06:12:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I received an email receipt for a PayPal purchase, in this case an ATM withdrawal. Only problem? I didn't make the withdrawal.

I immediately called and reported unauthorized use of my card, PayPal cancelled said card, and I was issued a provisional reimbursement while a chargeback case was opened. I filled out the online form asking where I had lost my card, etc, and I explained that my card must have been cloned as it was in my possession at the time of the withdrawal.

PayPal wrote this back to me:

We're sorry, but after careful consideration, we're unable to honor your
claim for $___ USD.

Our review of your PayPal debit card claim shows that the merchant properly
authorized this transaction for $___ USD on $___ and this transaction
appears to be valid. You have significant history of making withdrawals at
this ATM. In addition, your PIN number was successfully entered to
complete this charge. As your PIN number is a security code that should
only be known by you, this appears to be a valid charge.

If you have additional information to support your claim, please contact us.

Well that sucked. 'Careful consideration' took at most an hour. I did intend to follow up, as I have the transaction number and I believe that the withdrawal was made at the same ATM that I do indeed, or did indeed, use with frequency. The culprit must have been filmed making the withdrawal. The problem is that I've been crazy busy ever since I opened my store and I don't like to close the store during business hours if I can avoid it, so basically I never followed up except to fill out a stupid online survey re: my chargeback experience, which only led to a request to fill out another online survey, which was more than I was willing to do.

Occam's Razor suggests that PayPal did the right thing. I do use that ATM with frequency, whoever made the withdrawal must have had my PIN, etcetera. But from my point of view it didn't wrap up so neatly. A friend who had stayed with us claimed that his card had been cloned at the very same ATM a couple years earlier, something I must confess I didn't take very seriously at the time. About a week later my wife told me there was a story on the news about a ring of card-cloners in a different bank. And when I googled 'credit card cloned' one of the first results I got showed how the scam works, using, no less, a Brazilian ATM for demonstration. Different bank, but same country, same scam. I don't go into that bank anymore to make withdrawals because the machines are visible from the street, and it is possible that someone could have spied me entering my PIN. Or not - apparently from within the bank PIN numbers can be captured as well.

Anyhow, I've been busy and didn't end up posting about this, kinda like how I don't post about much at all anymore, but yesterday the exact same thing happened to a guest at our house. Same PayPal debit card. Different situation - he thinks his info got stolen when he bought a coffee with the card. Also different result - in his case, someone went on a shopping spree in São Paulo and charged a lot more than they did on my card.

So what's funny about this? Actually, it's not funny at all, because PayPal gave the same response to this guy. Well, whoever had the card also has your PIN, and since you're the only one who knows the PIN it must have been you! Our guest has been trying to explain that there are hundreds of miles between where he and the card were, and where the purchases were made. So far they don't want to reimburse him either.

The thing that is really amazing about this is that it took them a maximum of five hours to clone his card and start spending his money.

Brazilian banks know all about this kind of shit. Brazilian cards have additional layers of encryption, which can vary from using access letters in addition to your PIN, or entering a 3-digit code from a card you carry around with the card. Some ATMs even have a palm scanner to verify your identity. Most cards issued here have an embedded microchip to encrypt your data and make cloning... more difficult.

So what now? Maybe PayPal will read this post and ask me to fill out an online survey.

Curitiba, Part II

2011-12-15T14:49:00.000-08:00

I had wanted to write a follow-up to my previous post, but I'm so slammed with work that it's just not going to happen- except briefly.

To sum up the rest of the trip, I thought Curitiba was awesome. It was a nifty blend of elements from back home, things I saw in Europe, and at times I even felt I was wandering around the UMass campus as I did when I was a teenager. I also flashed back to my backpacking days with my time in the hostel and also wandering around the city. The Oscar Niemeyer museum is awesome. Lots of parks and green areas that are clean and don't smell like other people's feces. I think it would be a more pleasant place for me to live than Salvador. However, the women are much cuter here in Bahia, in my humble opinion.

Here's something I wrote while still at the hostel:

This hostel is strange, and I'll tell you why.

I managed to escape the dorm, thank goodness, and got myself a 'simple room,' which I figured would be a closet with a bed where I at least wouldn't have to deal with snoring and lights on in the middle of the night. I bought a pair of earplugs yesterday on a hunch and it was the best investment I ever made. I could hear Drunk Dude snoring even with the plugs in, but at least it didn't keep me up. However, Upper Bunk Guy woke me up every time he turned over, making the steel bunk bed rock like a tree in a typhoon.

I made sure I was up before check-out and requested a simple room, which is what I had wanted in the first place when I checked in. Luckily I got one. When I opened the door however, I figured there must have been a mistake. There were three beds in the room, and no lockers for my bags, so I figured I really didn't want a simple room after all if I had to share it with two strangers and no way to lock up my stuff.

My confusion arose from the fact that at this hostel the dorm bed and the simple room are the same price. Doesn't that seem odd? I thought so. When I saw the three beds I figured that explained it - you pay the same because it's still kind of a dormitory. But no - they told me that I would have the room, with all three beds, all to myself. Now that's very odd. Wouldn't it make sense to charge just a wee bit more for a private room? I know I'd pay it. Not only that, but my room overlooks the little park in the front of the building, which is nice. A bit of road noise, but I've still got the earplugs.

So I looked at a globe and Curitiba is just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, which means I have just sneaked out of the tropics. It is indeed almost at the same latitude as Brisbane, and Miami is in a pretty similar location in the Northern hemisphere. And let me tell you - I am not in Salvador anymore. Still definitely Brazil, but soooo different.

Finally, I just discovered the finished video of the graffiti event I went down there for. I appear toward the end, and even got time-lapsed for a little bit, which I hadn't realized.

Enjoy!

Ironlak Barbecue Burners Brasil 2011 - Curitiba. from NumeroF on Vimeo.

Now I need to get back to work.

Curitiba

2011-12-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

I am in the city of Curitba, which is part of the southern end of Brazil. I haven't been this far south since I was in Australia some 15 or more years ago. Looking at the map, it appears that I am at about the latitude of the city of Brisbane, Australia, where I spent a month waiting for some ribs to knit back together.

This is actually an apt analogy- not because of the ribs, but rather because of Brisbane. Brisbane is the home of Ironlak, a brand of spray paint that has gone global over the past couple years and recently arrived in Brazil. I sell it in my shop, and I was invited to come down for an event they held here yesterday.

The invitation came a couple months ago, and up until a few days ago I wasn't even sure I was going to go at all. But it came through- I got a free trip and a room to myself paid for by the company. I was supposed to return home today, but I had asked a favor that they let me stay the weekend and go home on Monday, seeing as how I have never been to this end of Brazil and I wanted to see a bit of the city. So now I find myself in a hostel, checked into a dorm, having left my cozy little euro-style room in the hotel. Haven't stayed in a hostel in quite some time.

The event was very interesting. A van picked us up and drove us from the city center to the middle of nowhere in the suburbs of Curitiba, to a warehouse where the event was held. We picked up a bunch of local graffiti artists en route, who were all very friendly and welcoming. The first thing we saw was a Gaucho style barbecue going on - a side of beef surrounded by a fire. The warehouse itself was quite bizarre - filled with all sorts of strange things including a formula 1 race car made entirely of wood (two actually), a climbing wall, and a large number of bicycles hooked up to generators. A large steel structure, recently painted, dominated the center of the space. Of more interest to us were the walls, which were all free game.

The reason for the warehouse soon became clear - it turns out that Curitiba is nicknamed Crueltiba due to the frequent rains, and we were treated to plenty of that. The weather is much more temperate than in Salvador, and I'm thankful that I had the foresight to pack a fleece sweatshirt, which I have worn almost continuously since I arrived here. I didn't much like the idea of a dozen or more graffiterios painting in an enclosed space, seeing as I hadn't packed my respirator, but I got over it. I also didn't have the foresight to pack any painting clothes, which I am now regretting.

There were four of us shop owners flown in for the event. They quickly formed a little clique of their own, or rather three of them did, I didn't really click with the clique although I liked them well enough. None of them seemed inclined to paint anything, and I figured I wouldn't paint either, but at the encouragement of the other writers I finally decided to jump in. It was hard to resist - there were hundreds and hundreds of cans of paint made available to us to paint the space. We could have painted five or six warehouses with all that paint. I've never had the opportunity to just grab as much paint as I wanted and go nuts (although I could, any day of the week, considering I run a store of my own- although that would probably not be a wise business decision). As a result my left index finger, the spraying one, is quite sore today. I could barely move it yesterday.

As the event wound down and people started packing up, they really started packing up. Everyone had a backpack, or two, and suddenly these packs were getting filled up with cans. Everybody took as much as they could, and there was still a huge mountain of cans when all was said and done. I myself have a box of 12 cans that I need to use up before I go home. Apparently there is another event tomorrow, I plan to attend and use up as much as I can.

Enough words. And I have other things to do. Have a look at some pictures.

The churrasco gaucho. 'Churrasco' being 'barbecue', and 'Gaucho' being a term for folks in Southern Brazil and Argentina, sometimes used to refer to South American cowboys.

The wooden car. They take their formula 1 very seriously here in Brazil.

The bank of power-generating bicycles, which can drive a projector, and a dvd, and some other stuff. The owner of the space told me a single bike can generate about 100 watts. These can all be folded up and towed around, it is set up on a trailer.

The paint! Ah, I think I've died and gone to heaven.

The artists at work. This was the best wall.

Two Aussies representing Ironlak. Nice guys, as most Australians are. They arrived, painted their pieces, had some food, and split. They are now in Argentina.

A view of the same wall, completed.

An excellent multi-layered stencil

My wall, in collaboration with Japem, a local graffiteiro and all around nice guy. I am a graffiti hack!

If I though I was in heaven, imagine these kids. I was torn between thinking how much Lucas would have loved to have been there, and also how I would have not wanted him there with all the nasty chemicals in the air. The masks they are wearing do not provide adequate protection.

The van to take us back was very late, so some of us went out and bombed an empty lot. This was one of my contributions.

Run

2011-11-26T17:04:00.000-08:00

I went for a run today.

A nice run. I was thinking it may have been, in fact, the best run of my life- and quite possibly the longest since I was sixteen, which was... a while ago.

I'd been building up to this run for some time - I tried to pull it off a week or so ago, but I twisted my ankle and had to abort the mission, with horrible visions of prolonged physical therapy and abandoned mid-life running careers dancing in my head. Luckily, I really hadn't twisted it that badly and after a couple mellow runs this week I decided I could handle something more serious today. I didn't set out to break any personal records, but I ended up doing just that.

So what was the big deal about this run? Well, first of all, it's kind of remarkable that I've been running at all, and I should know better than to even write about it at this point as I could stop again next week for another ten years or so. But, in fits and starts over the last couple years, I have been running with a teeny bit more regularity and it feels really good. And the big deal about today? I ran for a full forty minutes.

I was very busy patting myself on the back about this, much like when I ran 35 minutes a couple months ago, until I plotted my course in some Google Maps application thingie and discovered that I'd only run four miles. That took some of the wind out of my sails. But I run for time, not distance, so who cares if I'm running fairly slowly? I'm forty-two and mostly sedentary for crying out loud. More importantly it's a milestone, a benchmark, working up to bigger and better things, like 10 kilometers, which I believe is the minimum distance for any type of race. I'm only a couple miles off that goal, which puts it in striking distance.

I never even considered running a race until a few months ago, when I read In the Long Run by Jim Axelrod. Honestly, I wouldn't have read this book if Jim wasn't married to my cousin, but he is, which is a good thing because it's an enjoyable book and it's given me a goal for my exercise. Not necessarily to run a marathon, which was his goal in the book (and one he achieves) but at least to run a 10k before I turn 50. That should be doable. And then who knows? A half marathon? Perhaps a bit ambitious for this couch potato.

The great thing about my run today was that it was mostly along the ocean, which is something I tend to forget is just a stone's throw away from where I live. Unfortunately, I did something I hate to do to enjoy this nice ocean run- I drove my car. I hate the idea of burning fossil fuels in order to get my exercise, especially if the exercise involves moving myself from one place to another. It was a great point of pride with me when I lived in New England and could cross-country ski right out my back door and vanish into the wilderness.

Of course, I could run to the ocean from my house, which was exactly what I was doing when I twisted my ankle the other day. The problem is, since my runs are relatively short, it would take most of the run just to get to the good part. The other problem is that there is no pleasant and safe route between here and there; the best one I've come up with has lots of traffic and nasty bombed-out sections of sidewalk. Not to mention the feces.

I hate to say it but one of the predominant smells on these runs has been of human shit. In most of the places I run. Then again, I am subjected to the smell of other people's leavings pretty much on a daily basis, and it seems to have gotten worse lately. A large homeless population and virtually no public access to toilets- what do you expect? There is another route I can run that takes me to the ocean much more quickly, with a paved footpath separated from the traffic by a tall cement barrier, and a beautiful view of the water. Sounds great, right? Only problem - a pile of poop every couple of feet. Some of these are fresh and stinky, but I think even worse are the dessicated ones, which turn to dust, and blow around, and... you get the idea. It also runs along the top of a nasty little favela, populated with sketchy looking types who wanted to talk to the gringo. I ran that way once, and never again.

This time I decided to skip the hassle, and the stench, and the bombed out sidewalks, and drove my car down to Barra, which is a much fancier neighborhood than my own. From there I ran along the coast with throngs of others and if there was dung nearby I couldn't smell it for the sea breeze. I ran through Ondina, another fancy bairro, and up to the beginning of Rio Vermelho, right near where I used to train Capoeira. Twenty minutes. At my stately pace of 10 minutes/mile, I figured I could have gotten there from my house in about 40 minutes, which wasn't much longer than it took me in my car a couple times. From there I doubled back, intending to run only 10 more minutes and walk the rest of the way. But at about the 28 minute mark, I changed my mind. I felt fine, my ankle wasn't bothering me, why not try for that forty-minute-run I had been shooting for previously? So I did. I ran all the way back to the lighthouse in Barra- 41.5 minutes. I was a happy man with a runner's high- it was awesome.

My life has actually changed quite a bit in the last two months, and I've been meaning to write about it but just haven't been able to carve out the time. I feel much more like a normal person these days, which is a good thing. More details at a later date.

Big Wall, Finished

2011-11-06T17:21:00.001-08:00

It's done.

Finally.

Well, as done as it's going to get anyways.

I can't even remember quite how long I've been working on it, but I noticed today that it's already starting to fade in places so I think it's best I just wind it up or I'll keep futzing with it for another couple months, and you know what? I'd rather paint something else for a while. If I ever get bored I can go back and paint it again some time- he he!

The thing is I would keep futzing with it if I didn't force myself to stop - it's far from perfect and never will be, so why torture myself? The reality is I stopped because it's become something of an embarrassment that I'm still working on it. It's one thing to have a painting or something at home you never quite get around to finishing, but when it's seen by hundreds of people every day then... wrap it up.

And here it is my friends:

Telephone Hell - Again

2011-10-19T17:11:00.001-07:00

I'm tired.

So tired.

Some years back I wrote a furious post about the nightmare I was having trying to get telephone and internet service hooked up at my new office. Unfortunately, history is repeating itself- I've been in a waiting, calling, and threatening game for three weeks now trying to get internet in my new office/store so I can actually do some work there. Hookup was supposed to be scheduled (no, it was scheduled) for today but the company (GVT) fucked it up again.

I'm not going to get into the details. I'm too worn out by the whole thing and I've already done two rants on the phone today with the phone company.

Just waiting for this to be over with so I can get on with my life.

Time Change, part III

2011-10-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

Wow, three posts in three days! Amazing!

Only because I'm an idiot.

I got to thinking and in addition to the extra hour of daylight I will be getting, I will indeed be getting the three hour jump on deadlines that I thought I'd get originally. That is, once the time change happens in the northern hemisphere. For now I'll have only two hours. Except for my clients in California, in which case I get a five hour lead, or my client in Colorado, I'll have a four hour lead- increasing to six and five hours respectively after the 6th of November!

If I had any clients in Greenland I would have no lead time at all.

Isn't that all just fascinating? I think I actually got it right this time.

All work and no play makes Mark a dull boy

Speaking of which, I went back to my big wall today for the first time in over a month. See if you can figure out what I painted.

Time Change, part II

2011-10-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

He writes again, and so soon!

He writes a correction. I got my addition mixed up with my subtraction, and it turns out it will soon be three hours later here than in New England, not three hours earlier. Blast! So much for my extra three hours to meet deadlines.

There was another thing I wanted to mention on the subject, which is that much, or most, of the country changes their clocks every year, but Bahia had been choosing not to. This meant that television programming (a big deal here) was pushed up an hour, and also some banking transactions were pushed up as well. Apparently they decided to make the change more to get the state in line with the rest of the country, more than in the interests of maximizing daylight.

And speaking of daylight, we will now get an extra hour, which will be great! I've gotten pretty used to having it get dark at about 6:00 all year round, but an extra hour of sunlight will be most welcome.

Time Change

2011-10-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

Hello there.

It's been a while- no apologies, the blog stumbles but it does not fall. There are many things I could write about, my whirlwind, stress-filled trip to the States, my brand-new semi-opened store, phone company incompetence and tomfoolery, etc.

But I won't write about any of those, I'm going to write a quick note about the time change. The Brazilian, southern-hemisphere, in-the-tropics time change. It's happening tonight, and I didn't even know about it. That wouldn't be anything special, if I still lived in New England, where I was prone to forget that kind of thing, but we haven't had a time change here in Bahia for eight years. I remember them, vaguely, from my first couple years here (my I've lived here for some time now). Mostly I remember them because when the time is changed here and also in New England, the time difference jumps from one to three hours- going from a minor consideration to suddenly even though my son's just getting home from school my mom is now going to bed.

The biggest advantage for me, doing lots of work for clients in the northern hemisphere? Three extra hours to meet a deadline.

I just looked at our local paper's website to read up a bit on the topic, and found out something rather amusing. Like so many things here in Bahia, the period of the time change will be dictated by... you guessed it- a party. Admittedly, it is the biggest street party in the world and a huge source of revenue for the city and presumably the state as well. I guess they don't want to confuse the revelers by changing the clocks in the middle of Carnaval, because they'll all be too drunk to figure it out... on the other hand, I'd think they'd all be too distracted to care very much.

Mark out. Here's hoping my next post doesn't take this long to get published. I really do have my very own store now, and I'd like to share it with you. Another time.

Papai I'm Sorry...

2011-09-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Lucas wrote me this note after I got mad at him:

It was all I could do to keep myself in stern parent mode, and prevent myself from smiling. Allow me to translate:

Papai I'm sorry please I want to go back.

The thing that's so funny about it for me is that even though he only spelled one word correctly, it's pretty close using the Portuguese pronunciation of the letters. He's got this idea that sentences need to start with as well as end with a period, and I've been trying to dissuade him of this misconception, but he says that's what the teacher told him so I'm not sure why I waste my breath on the subject.

In case you're curious, yesterday was Brazilian independence day, and I got mad because Lucas was misbehaving on the trampoline, so I dragged him away from the parade and told him we wouldn't go back. We eventually did go back, but the parade was over by then.

Father's Day, Brazil

2011-08-14T17:16:00.001-07:00

Today is Father's Day in Brazil. A big day for some, an absolutely non-event in my family as I was growing up, although I did start calling my dad on the U.S. version a few years back, to his eternal amazement.

All I really wanted for Father's Day was to go out and work on my big wall, and so that's what I did. The weather cooperated and I made painstakingly slow progress across the top of the wall, completing (I think) the part that requires a ladder on top of my car.

I did get a present from my wife - a... what do you call it? Men's beauty kit? Perfume package a-la-Man? It was a box with a bottle of perfume, a scented soap, scented shaving cream, and a little tool kit with a multi-tip screwdriver, a teeny-tiny tape measure, and a bunch of zip ties. Thanks Evani!

The only problem is I'm really not a perfume guy. This runs in the family, like not celebrating Father's day, or watching sports on TV, or any number of other things. My brother told me that he wore deodorant at my wedding for the first and presumably only time in his life. I think it's not just a family thing, but a regional cultural thing as well- a town I lived in made the News of the Weird because of a decision to section off those who wore cologne at Town Meeting so as not to offend the non-wearers. When I attempted to razz some fellow Western Massachusettsers about this, two of them vigorously defended this decision!

Whatever. Brazil, perhaps because it is less enclosed and stuffy due to its more agreeable climate, abounds in artificial scents of all kinds. Unscented products are pretty much unheard of here, at least in Bahia. When I used to take my clothes to the laundromat, I had to specifically request that they not put fabric softener (cheirinho, or little smell as it is called) in my clothing. Now I've gotten used to it and pretty much ignore it. My wife loves perfume and smells and all that, and I've tried to indulge her. I bought myself a bottle of perfume but I used it so little that it has passed the expiration date. Which is why she got me another bottle. And implored me to start using it.

Sigh. I'm sorry, but this present is really for her, not for me. I really could care less if I smell nice, as long as I don't smell badly. I don't want to use perfume every day. I'll put it on to go out somewhere, but we so rarely go out that I basically never use it at all. And that suits me just fine.

However, I'm sure I'll use the little tool kit. And that has no expiration date.

"Ladder Jacks"

2011-08-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

"I cut this board three times and it's still too short."

...which is apropos to nothing, except that I was trying to think of a clever way to say my ladder is too short and that was the only thing I came up with. How about this:

"Hey Kuza, we'll put the ladder on your car to reach the top of the wall!"

That was a joke made by a fellow graffiteiro at an event I attended in Serrinha. I laughed it off, and then this weekend I found myself doing just that.

I used to paint houses during the summers when I was in college. I have found certain things that I learned then to be useful as I paint murals now. My first painter boss was a dipshit who went out of his way to break as many rules as possible- including underpaying his employees. At one really big house, he told the crew foreman to put a ladder up on a picnic table to reach the peak, as the 30 foot ladders we had wouldn't reach. The foreman refused, and dipshit had to spend a lot of money on a 40 foot rental.

When I found myself painting a wall that was taller than my ladder, my first inclination was to only paint as high as the ladder would go, which makes sense. But then, the project got more involved, I decided that the background had to be painted, and suddenly I had to paint those last few feet of wall at the top.

That's when I came up with my 'ladder jacks' solution.

This is a total mis-nomer, as ladder jacks are actually these things you put on a pair of ladders in order to make scaffolding out of them. I think I call this my ladder jack solution because of another insane boss that I had, who wanted us to power wash the paint off of a house rather than scrape it as most sane people do. On top of that, he wanted us to do it from a scaffolding made from ladder jacks. The power washer he rented was so powerful that you needed to brace yourself to keep from getting knocked down by the recoil caused by turning it on, so we refused to use it on the ladder jacks.

So what's your point? you ask, with reason. Well, I figure I'm equating one foolish solution with another. Even though I did think this one out pretty thoroughly and in theory it should work. And in fact, it did work, just fine. So far.

I figured I could put my ladder on top of my car, but not on top of the car itself, which would crush it like a soda can. I could put it on my ladder jacks- I mean, roof racks, providing I had a board adequately secured to them on which to place the ladder. Enter the indispensable c-clamp, times four.

Here it is:

My little ladder works great to get me to the top of the car, and the big ladder works great to get me to the top of the wall.

Ain't I just a genius?

I figured I've carried much heavier payloads on those racks than just my body weight plus the ladder, so as long as I remember to keep the parking brake on I should be good.

So far so good:

Previously the highest point I could reach was the top edge of the red arrow, but now I can get all the way to the top of the wall.

It's slow going, but I'm getting there. And I think it will ultimately make a world of difference in the quality of the mural.

Finally, I've decided to say the hell with it and paint the whole damn wall, top to bottom. No more preserving the stupid political propaganda at the bottom, I'm gonna paint over that as well. They may well paint over me once again, but I'm going whole hog.

One of these years I might actually finish the thing.

And now I need to go scrape the drips of paint off my car.

Never Cry Wolf

2011-07-31T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had reason to ask Lucas if he remembered the story about the boy who cried wolf. After an enthusiastic request for me to tell the story once more, he proved that he knows it by heart by reciting the whole thing for me. So he knows the story. But has he learned the lesson?

We had our 'cry wolf' moment yesterday because Lucas had a Capoeira event at his school. It is one of two events that he will attend this year, and I remembered that the event was happening at 1:30 in the afternoon. Lucas informed me on Thursday, and again on Friday, that he was supposed to be there at 10:00 in the morning.

I didn't believe him.

Lucas has gotten in the habit of 'making up stories' as I like to say, usually in order to get or do something he wants. This is why he is so familiar with the story of the boy who cried wolf. One of the ways that I have tried to convince him not to make stuff up is by telling him that we will just stop believing anything he says. Since he had been so extremely enthusiastic about the Capoeira event, we figured he just wanted to get there super early and start enjoying it hours before it was to actually start.

I am not a morning person. Never have been. 'Morning' is mostly just an abstract concept for me, as I am usually up until the wee hours working on the computer and I am almost never out of bed before 10. I hope this will change sometime soon, but for now, that's how it is and how it has been for years. So I was fast asleep at 9:30 when Lucas showed up with the paper listing the starting time of the event, which was, you guessed it- 10 o'clock. We didn't make it to the event quite on time, but we did get there before his class did their part, thank goodness. I would have felt terrible if I'd shown up there at 1:30 and it was long over.

I sure hope my 'I told you so' moment has some impact, but maybe missing the thing completely would have served that purpose more effectively.

Big Wall

2011-07-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to write about this until it was finished, but it's taking forever... that, and my friend Jon took some great pictures of me working on it yesterday.

This is by far my most ambitious wall, and therefore my most ambitious painting, and probably my most ambitious artwork, ever. It wasn't supposed to be as involved as it has become, that's why I'm painting the background now, instead of at first, like any sane person would do. I had tagged this wall for later painting several times, and the stoopid political/propaganda sign painters kept painting over it. So I decided to paint over them (vertically). I may also paint over them (coat-of-paintwise) if the ambition continues to creep.

Note the police traffic stop (blitz) in the background. They were completely disinterested in me, which is why Salvador is a graffiteiro's paradise. At least for this kind of work.

The painting is taking forever because I'm only working on it on the weekends, and only if:

a. I don't have any other work that needs to get done
b. It's not raining
c. I'm not with Lucas

Plus it is clearly not a one-session wall. More like a ten session wall at this point. But I've enjoyed the chance to reflect upon what I've been working on, and the composition has built over time. I take pictures, print them out, draw on the printouts, and go back to the wall. I realized the thing was not going to jump off the background if I didn't just paint the dern thing, which is what I am doing now. I'll do the top part my next session- only problem, my ladder doesn't reach that high! But I have a solution in mind.

The location is really fantastic - poking up in the middle of the above photo are the Elevador Lacerda and the Basílica de Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, two of the most famous landmarks in Salvador. Unfortunately, it's pretty run down, and there are some nasty streets nearby - lots of crackheads, glue-sniffers, prostitutes, and alcoholics in the neighborhood. On the weekends they are often the only folks around. Generally they are enthusiastic about my work, which is nice. The best thing about street art is that it's for everybody.

Generally when I'm done I like to pick up some garbage in the area, do my civic duty to clean up some. Didn't happen yesterday, because as it was getting dark a very sketchy dude, either a crackhead or mentally ill, perhaps both but certainly homeless and not in a good way, started pacing around my car- looking at me and mumbling and causing every mental alarm I have to go off loudly. I got off the ladder and picked up a stout stick I was using as an extension for my paint roller, and kept it near me as I packed up the rest of my stuff and split. It was unfortunate, because I wanted to spend another 15/20 minutes getting the wall to a place that I'm happier to leave it at for the next week or two, and that didn't happen.

Cabeçada

2011-07-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight Lucas asked me to fix up an old berimbau for him, and since I had all the various pieces lying around the house I obliged him. For those of you who don't know, a berimbau is a one-stringed instrument of African origin that is played in Capoeira rodas around the world.

As I was working on it, Lucas started singing one of the songs his capoeira group sings at school. Since he trains a different style than I used to, I often don't recognize the songs. This one was a new one. It was about different characters from Brazilian folklore doing different capoeira moves. One line in particular caught my ear:

A mula sem cabeça deu a cabeçada...

I thought that was pretty funny. Those of you who speak Portuguese will probably get the joke. For those of you who don't, let me explain.

A mula sem cabeça is literally a 'headless mule.' In Brazilian folklore, these monsters happen when a woman does something naughty with a priest, and then is cursed, transforming into a mule spouting flames from its neck, where its head is supposed to be.

In Portuguese, you can create a word for getting hit by something just by adding the suffix 'ada' to it. For instance, if I elbow you I'm giving you a cotovelada (since cotovelo is elbow) and if I whack you with my flip-flop I'm giving you a chinelada (because a flip-flop is a chinelo). In the popular comic strip Monica she is known to give her friends/rivals coelhadas, which are whacks with her stuffed blue bunny (coelho).

So what is a cabeçada? It's a head butt. Cabeça (head) + ada.

Therefore,

A mula sem cabeça

by definition

cannot give

a cabeçada

because it doesn't

have

a

head.

I told Lucas I'd ask his capoeira teacher about this silly song - it's also possible Lucas misremembered the words.

Then I asked him what Saci Pererê did. Lucas told me a rasteria, which is a leg sweep. I thought that would be a pretty good trick, because Saci has only one leg. But I guess it's possible, particularly if you are a magical creature.

Birthday

2011-07-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

Today would have been my Dad's 82nd birthday, except that he left us this past year.

I've been thinking about him a lot, and missing him - it has now been a full year since I last spoke with him. Lately I've been reading a book he recommended to me, 'Seven Days in the Art World,' enjoying it thoroughly, and thinking of him even more as a result.

Miss you Dad, wish I could pick up the phone and call you.

The Jungle in the City

2011-06-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

Well, well. It's been a while since my last post.

Again.

Since I last wrote anything, I added a year onto my age and... other things... can't think of any of them right now... just as well. I'm not here to play catch-up.

So it's been just over a year since I bought myself a bicycle, and about two years since Lucas got his, and I'm pleased to say that we are finally starting to take nice rides together. In fact, we went for a nice long one yesterday, about 10 kilometers all told. In fact, that's what this post is about.

Please observe the map below:

This, in case you couldn't tell, was taken from Google Maps, but I hope they won't mind that I borrowed their image seeing as how they also host this blog and my email and half the other things I do online. I'm not just a freeloader, I pay them for listing ads for me too, so there.

Anyhow, this is a map of the biggest park in the city- the Parque Metropolitano de Pituaçu, and the big lake in the middle was made by damming up one end if I'm not mistaken. I hate to say this but I'd never been there before a few months ago, when I delivered some paint to a project located deep within the park. It blew my mind, as it was as if I'd driven hours out of the city when in fact the city was only a couple kilometers away. I thought I actually wrote about it on this blog, but I couldn't find the post. Currently the city's only big soccer stadium is located at the top of the image, although they are busy building another one for the World Cup.

When I got home after my first visit to the park I ran to my computer, as I am wont to do, and brought up the map that you observed above. And I observed something very interesting on this map- a squiggly line that traces the border of the big old lake, labeled 'ciclovia.' That, boys and girls, means 'bike path.' I decided that day that I would ride this bike path, and Lucas would ride by my side.

Salvador has a number of bike paths of varying length and quality- Lucas learned to ride on one of them, and we've been visiting a number of them over the past couple months. It's been fun. Unfortunately we have to drive to get to any of them, but insane traffic being what it is here in the city, that's a reality I just have to deal with. The fact that I don't have a bike rack makes the whole process somewhat involved, but I hope to remedy that someday as well.

We finally got out on the Pituaçu bike path this week- in fact, we went twice. We went out for a shortish ride on Saturday, and I discovered that the path is 15 kilometers long, or just over 9 miles for those of you who don't speak metric. It was awesome. As soon as you get away from the 'park' area, you are suddenly in the jungle with the reservoir to one side. The trail itself got pretty rough at times, but we both have knobby tires on our bikes so we could handle it. It was, in fact, the most challenging terrain that Lucas has yet experienced. He did great, although he did fall a couple times and skin his knees, and a few tears were shed. We didn't see much wildlife, but that's to be expected. That first ride we went in 2 1/2 kilometers, and back out for a total of five K.

What we didn't have time for that first day were the swan boats. You can rent a boat in increments of 15 minutes and ride around the 'park' area of the park, and of course Lucas wanted to do so, but we got there too late and they were just closing up shop. I promised we would go back, and since Lucas is on vacation this week, I wanted to take advantage and get back for a longer and better ride. So we returned on Wednesday, in spite of some dubious weather that had blown in. The rain was intermittent and not the pounding, torrential, tropical rain I have gotten used to, which is why I decided to go for it.

On this second trip, we got there earlier, and I promised we would ride on the boats first so we wouldn't miss them. Unfortunately, they were all beached, maybe because of the rain, so it didn't happen. Once again, I promised we'd go back another time to ride them. Boats out of the way, we started on the bike ride. I figured since we started on the right side of the reservoir the first time, this time we'd start on the left side. We were only just getting started when we met a man coming out, and he asked us what where we were going. I told him we planned to ride the bike path, and he warned us that 'some kids' were robbing people on the path, and he didn't think it was a good idea.

At this point I started to get annoyed. For years I've had to listen to this kind of advice, and I'm sick of it. It really bothers me that I live in a place where I can't even go for a bike ride in a city park, or a walk in the woods, without fear of being mugged. I decided to take my camera and my expensive sunglasses and hide them in the bushes and take a chance. I was determined to get in my bike ride. Unfortunately, or not, the guy succeeded in freaking Lucas out completely and he didn't want to continue. I expressed my aforementioned frustrations in a loud and colorful manner. I told Lucas, who had been asking previously why I always talk about the U.S., that we wouldn't have to worry about riding our bikes there, and blah de blah. You get the idea. I reclaimed my hidden valuables and we rode back out- even so, we did a couple kilometers in and back.

As we were riding out I stopped to talk to one of the workers at the park, and asked him if in fact there were muggings going on. He said yes, there were, and it was safer on the weekends when there is more traffic and more of a police presence. We saw the police presence on our first trip, a motorcycle cop riding through with siren blaring. It seems to me that if you really want to deter muggers, you would send out bike cops, who don't announce their approach from a half-mile off. Then again, maybe the cops would just as soon not confront armed youth in the jungle.

On the plus side, the park worker told us that riding in from the other side was much safer, and that we should be fine if we went in about 5K or so. So that's what we did. Once again, I opted to stash my camera and glasses, and we rode in to the 3K marker. At about 2.5K I heard a lot of banging and wondered what was going on. Suddenly, rearing out of the trees, we came upon a huge construction site just off the path. Three multi-story condos were going up in what appeared to be very rapid fashion. It was completely bizarre after the silence of the woods, and I felt a little bit like something out of one of those films where Babylon encroaches on the primordial forest. We had a look and then we turned back, in spite of the fact that Lucas was doing great and wanted to keep going. We got rained on, but we had rain coats. We saw some micos (little monkeys) in the trees. When we got back to my camera, I took this picture:

All told Lucas rode about 10 kilometers and this time he didn't fall down once. He only complained once that his feet hurt. I think, given enough time for a couple breaks along the way, on our next trip he could probably make it all the way around. We'll do it on the weekend and I won't bring my fancy sunglasses next time.

May 2, Day of Rodents

2011-05-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as we were arriving at Lucas' school, we heard girls shrieking in the entryway. Not an uncommon occurrence, but there was a particular urgency to these shrieks. As we came in the door, we discovered why. There was a large rat loose in the large room just inside the door, and two of the school's employees were trying to catch and squish it with trash cans. I told Lucas to run and we escaped the scene; I think the rat did too- probably darting back into the storm drain it came out of.

Rats are all too common here in Salvador. Here in the center of the city many of the storm drains are covered with wood or whatever else to prevent rats from coming up and running around. So I'm not too worried about the school and don't blame it for a lack of sanitary conditions. I don't think that's the issue. The school is almost 300 years old, fer cryin' out loud.

So I figured that was the end of that, but then the theme got continued when Lucas got home. No rats in the house, no rats in the backpack. Well, kinda rats in the backpack. Rats in the homework. Lucas gets homework every day now, which seems a bit crazy to me, seeing as he's only six. Every other parent in the city thinks it's about time and he should be getting much more.

Mostly his homework consists of reading some simple sentences and then illustrating them. The sentences have been getting a tad more difficult as they go along, and it's been neat watching as Lucas' reading skills improve. But I must say his homework yesterday was a bit surprising for a six year old. Here's the finished product:

I love the hair. All the women Lucas draws have hair like that now, he even drew a female dragon yesterday that had the same crazy spirals.

So in case it's not clear what's going on in the pictures, and you don't happen to read Portuguese, let me translate:

Paloma sees a rat in the living room. The rat jumps on the sofa.

Paloma gets a hammer to kill the rat.

The rat jumps on Paloma's foot and runs into the woods.

I guess if I had been a different person, someone without a somewhat twisted, pseudo-punk-rocker bent to his personality, who used to like black comedies and still has a warped sense of humor, I might have been shocked and alarmed by this. Twenty years ago I would have found it incredibly amusing. I guess I'm getting older, and hey, having kids changes everything, but I must confess I found it somewhat unsuitable for a six year old.

What do you think?

Easter

2011-04-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

Easter, and Holy Week, are a big deal here in Brazil- I celebrated them by locking myself up in the house and ignoring all invitations for Good Friday meals and the like. On Saturday I let myself out and painted something, and on Sunday I went and got Lucas at his aunt's house.

Lucas had been counting the days on the calendar until he would get his big, chocolate Easter egg which are the big thing for kids here in Brazil. They are usually big enough to contain a toy, and this year he got a Cars egg with a little Lightning McQueen car inside. He devoured half the egg and got covered in melted chocolate as a result, so I pulled the car over to wash his hands. The spot where I stopped was at one of these automobile graveyards that build up around the Police waystations they build along major roads- for some reason they bring the smashed up cars there and leave them. I had my camera so I took some pictures:

The vast majority of the wrecks were head-on collisions. I know this road well and I've seen dozens of people do crazy high-speed passes of multiple vehicles around curves so I'm guessing this is the sometimes result of that kind of dangerous driving. One time we came upon a recent accident with multiple fatalities on this road - it's a horrible story and I don't want to get into it.

When I was in college and took my photography more seriously, I wanted to do a body of work of smashed up cars like these- now that I'm older and presumably wiser I'm not sure I'd have the stomach for it.

ANYHOW then I took Lucas to the 'new park' to ride his bike. They built a bike path and put in a playground and grass and such underneath the Metro that never seems to get finished. This is the first time we went there, and Lucas rode a couple miles at least on his bike.

I heard on TV that this will be, when they finally 'finish' it, the shortest Metro in the world at 6 kilometers. I don't know what the hold-up is, apparently they've done test-runs on it and everything. 'The Metro from nowhere to nowhere' was how I heard it described - they lopped off the other 11 kilometers in order to get something finished.

Lucas got tired of riding (and I got tired of running along behind him), so we stopped at the playground so he could use the slide and see-saws and such. I will now take the opportunity to complain about a piece of playground equipment:

These have got to be the stoopidest see-saws I have ever seen in my life. I'm no engineer, but I know enough about levers to understand that these see-saws are either a) too tall or b) too short (lengthwise). They are almost impossible for kids to use due to the brutal angle. I might not be complaining about this, but for some reason this is the padrão (standard) for all the see-saws in all the parks here in Salvador.

And I'm done complaining. These are the funny things that bother me now that I'm a parent. Moving on to the next item, I finally got a close look at one of these:

These towers have been appearing all over the city over the last year or so. They tell the temperature and measure UV radiation, and are rumored to provide wireless internet although I have never tested them. I was mystified by the displays until I finally had this chance to see one up close:

The scale on the left I presume is the relative UV risk, the numbers on the right are much more interesting. They are a suggestion of the SPF you need based on your skin color. They read, from top to bottom:

Redheads and Blondes
Light Morenos (roughly 'brown people')
Dark Morenos
Mulatos (this gets confusing) and Negros (literally 'blacks').

I can already feel myself entering dangerous territory as I prepare to talk about skin color. It is well known that Brazilians recognize a wider range of skin tones than we generally do in the US. One of the frequent ones I see is pardo, a brown that is not on this list. Moreno can be confusing because it can refer to a dark-haired as well as a dark-skinned person. Maybe that's why there are both light and dark morenos listed. Mulato is a term I've never really understood. The dictionary in my computer defines it as 'a person of mixed white and black ancestry, esp. a person with one white and one black parent.' By this definition Lucas would be mulato. But here in Brazil I believe it refers more to a rather dark-skinned person, but not quite 'black.' Very confusing. Also not listed on the scale is the colloquial (and possibly pejorative) azulão, which refers to someone who is so dark they have a blue cast to their skin. I wonder if there is an equivalent to this in English.

And that's all I have to say about skin color for today. I hope I didn't offend anyone, it was not my intention to do so.

After our time in the park Lucas enjoyed chicken nuggets, french-fries, and Spongebob Squarepants.

And that was Easter.

Pinte Aki Véio

2011-04-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

(Note: this post was started a couple weeks ago and I never published it. I have a bad habit of doing that)

That title translates as 'Paint over here dude,' and it was the name of a graffiti event that I attended this weekend in the city of Serrinha, which is about a three hour drive from Salvador. I almost didn't go, and it's only thanks to my wife that I ended up going, and escaping a weekend of rain in the city.

I'm very glad I went. Not only was it fun to get out of the city, but we were treated very well by the people organizing the event, and they provided plenty of yummy food. Apparently the accommodations weren't too great (in a school with no showers) but we avoided that by staying in a hotel in the middle of the city, which was nice and cheap by Salvador standards.

On the first day, I painted this:

And then, at the request of all the children in the neighborhood, I painted this:

I finally had to tell them that I would only paint the names of kids who were present, no brothers, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. Otherwise I would have been at it all night.

That night I went back to the hotel and had a beer in the square by myself. It was almost deserted except for a group of youths playing guitar and a pair of peripatetic teenage girls. The main source of activity was going on in the adjoining square, where a large group of teenage boys were gathered, all of them with small motorcycles. They would zoom out of the square, passing me on one side, and then come back on the other, invariably pulling wheelies which they would hold for 50 to 100 yards. I've never seen so many wheelies pulled in my entire life. It made me glad I'd picked a room off the street as they made quite a racket.

The next day I painted this:

I did not paint the scantily clad lady. That was Monica. I did the 19 'things,' one observer said they were whales, I guess they could be whales. This wall was about 10 feet tall.

I was happy with both of these paintings because they are my first attempts at some ideas I've wanted to work with- first, to do more comic-type paintings in frames, and second, to work with groups of repetitive images. I would like to move away from the flat colors and get back to doing more modeled forms, but for now this will have to do due to budget restraints and the paint I have at my disposal.

One guy came to the event from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, I liked his stuff very much. He calls himself Hyper, here's an example of an unfinished piece:

To see more of his work, check this out. To see more of my photos from this event, check this.

Facebook Scam

2011-04-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

If you use Facebook, you may have noticed that the number of scams is on the rise. A friend of mine had her account hacked, so I learned about a new one today. This was in the form of a chat, with some crook pretending to be her and fabricating an emergency. Here's the transcript. See if you can figure out at what point I realized what was going on:

[K_______]
Hi Mark
how you doing?

[Me]
hey - on the phone!

[K_______]
i need your help?

[Me]
give me 10 mins.

[K_______]
ok

[Me]
What's up K_______?

[K_______]
Mark we need your help down here
we stuck at the moment

[Me]
what's going on?

[K_______]
we stuck in the UK at the moment

[Me]
stuck in the UK??

[K_______]
all cash,credit card and cell Phones were stolen off us but luckily we still have our passports with us

[Me]
oh shit
what can I do to help?

[K_______]
G_______ was beaten up while trying to protect us but his doing well now

[Me]
is he in the hospital?

[K_______]
please we need you help to get things sorted out donw here so we don't miss our flight back home

[Me]
what do you need

[K_______]
yea,but doing fine now

[Me]
thank goodness
do you have a # where I can call you?

[K_______]
don't have access to phone since the muggers went away with my phone and the hotel manangement stop me from making call because of my out standing bills

[Me]
can I call in to the hotel?

[K_______]
we just need to get the bills sorted out and get a cab to the airport
I'm at a local library trying to get help back and there is no phone in the library
please let know if you can help us out
we promise to pay back once we home??

[Me]
tell me G_______'s parent's number and I'll call them

[K_______]
don't have any# here with me

[Me]
you need money?

[K_______]
yes so we can have the bills sorted out
please we promise to have it refunded once we back home

[Me]
how do I send you money

[K_______]
you can have it wired to us down here vis western union

[Me]
ok

[K_______]
you need the info to have it done?

[Me]
yes

[K_______]
hold on let me get you the info

[Me]
you do that

[K_______]
Name-K_______
Location-1 Whitchurch Road Cardiff, CF14 3IL

[Me]
ok

[K_______]
how soon can you have it done?

[Me]
I already sent it
will 10,000 dollars be enough?

[K_______]
that is much

[Me]
I can send more if you like

[K_______]
all we need is just $1,550

[Me]
I think you need more than that

[K_______]
not at all

Then I signed off. As I was chatting with my "Friend," I called the school where her husband works, and they confirmed that he was definitely not on vacation this week. Since this conversation took place, I have been unfriended by my "Friend." Maybe she realized I didn't actually send the money?

Whoever hacked her account changed her place of residence to London, England, but left her workplace as Western Massachusetts. Wonder how that's supposed to work?

My friend wrote me back and confirmed that he is at home with the family, and they are indeed fine.

Birthday #6 - the Robin Birthday

2011-03-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

Lucas' birthday was yesterday, and we are all recovering now. Like last year, we had the party at his school, which meant it was a 45 minute ordeal that was neatly wrapped up when the teacher whisked him and his classmates away for other activities. It didn't seem like much to me, but he enjoyed it and is satisfied, so if he's satisfied, I'm satisfied, and we've got that out of the way for another year.

As I wrote last year, kid's birthdays are all about the themes, and in previous years Lucas has had Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man as themes. We're still waiting for the Ben 10 birthday, it's possible that that will finally happen next year. This year things got a little complicated because he wanted to do a Robin birthday. Robin was hard because Robin is not in vogue, which means nobody has the ready-made paraphernalia for sale: the hats, napkins, plates, invites, etcetera. That was fine with me, as I'm a DIY kinda guy and I like a challenge. That is, I like this kind of challenge.

I should clarify something at this point. There are a couple different incarnations of Robin, the best known being Sidekick Robin, ala Batman. There is another Robin, member of the Teen Titans, who is not a sidekick. He's the leader of the group. That's the one that Lucas likes.

First thing to prepare were the invites. I felt like I was back in elementary school, making Valentine's Day cards for my classmates. I photoshopped a couple images of Robin and the Teen Titans, with the pertinent info regarding the birthday, and Lucas and I glued the images onto folded pieces of blue paper. They were somewhat haphazard, mostly the ones that Lucas glued. Evani thought they were terrible, but we had fun making them and who cares what anyone thinks.

Another quintessential item was the costume. There were no Robin costumes to be had, and I was kicking myself for not ordering one online while I was in the States, where I could have gotten one for cheap. The only online options here in Brazil were way more than I wanted to pay. Luckily for me, I found a lady who makes costumes to order, and it cost me half of what I was expecting to shell out.

Plates, cups, and gift bags for the other kids all had to be generic. I made some stickers with Robin's head and Lucas' name on them and these went on the gift bags. Another photoshop session and I had an image of Lucas in his new costume next to all the rest of the Teen Titans- this was then printed on edible rice paper and went on top of the cake.

It was while I was getting the rice paper that the light bulb went on over my head. If I couldn't get all the kids Robin/Teen Titans party hats, then why not make Robin masks for everyone? I bought two sheets of this plastic foamy stuff (I'm sure it has a real name) and after a couple hours of work I had 29 masks for all the kids. I haven't watched many episodes of the Teen Titans (it is a cartoon btw), but one of my favorites is when all the other Titans get dressed up as Robin when he is away doing something else. Robin comes back and catches them in his extra costumes, and he says: "You know what Robins? The mask makes me feel cool too." I was hoping all these Robin masks w0uld make everyone feel cool.

I think I was fairly successful. Judge for yourself:

One last thing: Lucas always gets a bunch of presents from his classmates, one of which this year was a game called Futebol de Botão, aka 'Table Soccer,' a game I had never heard of before. After watching a YouTube video about it, it appears it's kind of a big deal. It's got a bit of Tiddlywinks in it, and a bit of Shuffleboard as well. And I hate to say it, but it's the kind of game I could actually see myself getting enthusiastic about. I hate to say this because I'm not a soccer fan and it seems a bit dorky, which by extension, would make me... a bit... dorky. Lucas likes it too, let's see if it lasts.

Lanced Digit

2011-03-24T20:36:00.001-07:00

My son managed to get his sucking thumb infected. Back in my thumb-sucking days, I'd switch off from one to the other but Lucas will only suck his left thumb, unless the situation is dire, as it was last night, and nobody slept much as a result.

Today the swollen digit and the child carting it around had to be taken to the doctor. Lucas had asked me about 100 times if the doctor was going to 'poke' it, and I tried to be equivocal, but I knew the truth. I tried a nausea analogy, telling him how much I hate to vomit, and will do almost anything to avoid it, but when I finally get around to barfing I always feel better. Same thing with the thumb- a brief poke, and almost instant relief. No more howling pain just brushing it against something.

When the Zero Hour arrived, Lucas began to freak out. The doctor asked him if he was a man or a rat, and without hesitation he said the latter. I realized I'd have to force him down and restrain him, and he started to howl. He howled long and loud, through the whole procedure, and everyone in the hospital heard him, probably thinking he was being tortured. This in spite of the anesthetic. He howled right through the bandaging, and didn't stop until he was off the table, when he started grinning. The doctor said she thought he was indeed a rat.

No thumb-sucking tonight, not on the big swaddled thumb at least. I told Lucas not to get the bandage wet. "Why?" he asked, a nearly constant question these days. I asked him if he wanted his thumb to get worse, if he wanted to go back to the doctor and have her poke it again. "Yes" was the instant reply.

Nuclear Accident

2011-03-17T12:14:00.001-07:00

I've been following the story of Japan's developing nuclear disaster with mounting horror and, I have to admit it, a sick fascination as well. Then I start thinking about what it really means to have bits of plutonium floating around in the atmosphere and I start freaking out.

This may seem flip and foolish, but one thing that has been bothering me is why there aren't any robots on the scene. I just googled 'japan nuclear robot' and apparently I'm not the only one who's wondering- my guess is there are plenty of people in Japan asking the same question. Not only do we see the most advanced robot technology coming out of Japan, but they also created a whole mythology around giant robots (see this article on Wikipedia). I know it's naive and simplistic, and typical of a sci-fi fan like myself to say so, but a giant robot would be the perfect thing to dump seawater on those reactors, and it would only take one to get the job done.

Fantasies aside, there are robots searching the rubble in the aftermath of the quake - I saw a video about one that looks like a snake with cilia - and apparently robots were used after both Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island for cleanup (read this). Certainly they will be used in the aftermath of Fukushima as well. But unfortunately it looks like Japan, and the rest of the world, hasn't yet developed a robot with the skills needed to address this particular situation. But I bet you that we're going to see a whole new generation of 'disaster responder' robots in the wake of this disaster- watch for one that can carry a fire hose over all kinds of terrain, or robotic helicopters big enough to carry heavy payloads, like seawater, or cement, or boric acid.

Although I was raised to believe that nuclear power is a great evil, as an adult I've largely come to believe that it is merely in its infancy - that in most respects, it is actually a much cleaner fuel than the ones we use generally. But that's in most respects - if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a big way. Or in a small way: the Vermont Yankee power plant that is located within a minimum evacuation radius of the city of Brattleboro, Vermont where I used to live was recently discovered to be leaking radiation.

I'm no longer sure, not that I was ever completely sure, that nuclear power is worth this risk. Especially with enough sunlight falling on this freakin' country to probably power the entire world forever. Brazil is hot, and as I learned in 7th grade science class, heat is power. Hell, all those nuke plants do in the end is boil water. Lots of good ways to do that.

One last thing on this topic, getting back to the 'nuclear infancy' idea: you've heard of plutonium, you've heard of uranium, but have you ever heard of thorium? I hadn't either until last year, but read this, which I clipped from Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know, it's Wikipedia...):

Key Benefits

According to Australian science writer Tim Dean, "thorium promises what uranium never delivered: abundant, safe and clean energy - and a way to burn up old radioactive waste."^[16] With a thorium nuclear reactor, Dean stresses a number of added benefits: there is no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles.^[16] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."^[14]

Does that sound too good to be true? Yes, it does. But it does make me curious. Then again, these miracle stories about cheap, abundant energy pop up from time to time and nothing ever seems to come of them, for whatever reason. And I didn't say conspiracy, thank you.

My thoughts are with the people of Japan in the midst of these horrible events. I don't know what else to say without sounding sappy. Strength, fortitude, a speedy recovery. And I hope Fukushima is not nearly the disaster it sounds like from half way across the world.

Carnaval 2011

2011-03-11T19:58:00.000-08:00

... is over. Most of our guests have left, although we still have a couple stragglers. I can honestly say we had the best houseful of people yet, although it wasn't without some drama.

Carnaval for me is not as exciting as it used to be. I ended up spending most of my time with Lucas, both on and off the street, and that gets pretty tiring pretty fast. It's stressful to navigate the Carnaval on one's own, and it's stressful to navigate the streets with Lucas in tow, so add the two together and you get major stress. Plus I get to feeling like a walking wallet as I buy popcorn, spray foam in a can, hot dogs, cotton candy, soda, and plastic swords that light up - not to mention the trampoline and face-painting. In spite of this, I feel that the only word that comes out of my mouth is 'No' because there is oh so much more to buy- something our kids learn from a very early age. Don't get the wrong idea, I like spending Carnaval with Lucas- Evani tries to send him off every year to an aunt's house and I howl in protest. One of the high points of Carnaval was taking him to see the Blue Man Group on top of a trio eletrico. They mostly just threw freebies into the crowd, but Lucas enjoyed it.

We had a full house this year, eleven people from eight countries (plus various friends and family) although they weren't all here at the same time. They all got along well almost from the start, and it turns out that two of the couples actually knew each other from previously- they'd met in Peru or some spot and had run into one another somewhere else as well, that happens with some frequency when you are traveling a particular route (it's happened to me) but still it must have been a surprise to see familiar faces in the same house with you.

Only one couple seemed a bit off - an American dude and his Spanish-speaking South-American girlfriend, who was not from Brazil. We weren't even sure if they were a couple at first- it seemed like things weren't going too well between them. To make a long story short, it went from bad to worse, she was giving him the silent treatment and pretty obviously flirting with another guest in the house, and eventually the guy decided to get a room in a hotel and get out of the house. I spent some time trying to mediate the situation as the dude was threatening to go back home and leave her there and she was saying fine, let him go. I thought I was making headway until he left the country and left her at our house. I got pretty annoyed at that point, at both of them - her for biting the hand that was feeding her and him for... abandoning someone who didn't even speak the language and had never traveled internationally and was completely broke at our house. That lasted a day or so until the guy got back in contact with me, and asked if his 'ex' needed anything for "food or cigarettes or anything." I wrote him back saying she needed money for a ticket back to Rio so she could get her flight back to her family and two young kids.

He ended up sending three times what I suggested.

That pretty much changed the dynamic- a ticket was purchased, she waited out the rest of Carnaval and I think even enjoyed herself some, and in about forty minutes the cab is coming to take her to the airport.

This year's crime included a lost camera and a brazen pick-pocketing in a restaurant that resulted in the victim's shorts being torn from top to bottom and way too much money being absconded with- the guy really should have left that money at the house. In a separate incident, some Brazilian dude pulled the wrong gringa's hair and ended up on the ground under a rain of fists from her boyfriend- but only after he sucker-punched that same boyfriend from behind and then tried to run away. Opinion seems to be unanimous that this was a righteous move on the boyfriend's part- there is an attitude amongst some of the locals that all estrangeiros are idiots and you can push them around with no consequences... at least one deluded troublemaker has had his attitude adjusted.

Actually, I think the aforementioned South-American girlfriend had pretty much the same attitude toward her American ex-boyfriend. Problem is- I'm not sure she's been disabused of that notion.

This last item is the most horrible.

Lucas was jumping on the trampoline with his cousin, and I was standing there waiting for them to finish; it was not yet late on the last night of Carnaval. Suddenly, there was that electric confusion that erupts whenever there is a fight- people were running in the street in front of me, where the parade route was only a block away. I panicked a bit, as Lucas and his cousin were behind the protective netting on the trampoline- protected in some situations, more exposed in others, and not easy to get to. Suddenly a man is sitting in the entryway of the restaurant just in front of me, and he's bleeding. A lot. He's been stabbed, and his shirt is soaked with blood, and he also has blood coming out of his mouth. A crowd quickly gathered, but not fast enough- I turned around and there were Lucas and his cousin standing and watching. I immediately said "Keep jumping!" which they did, but they definitely saw the guy. I debated whether I should get them out of there but the cops showed up quickly and it seemed unlikely there would be any more fighting. It took what seemed like a long time for paramedics to show up and haul the guy out of there. The floor was washed and it was back to business as usual, albeit with a new batch of customers- nobody sat nonchalantly finishing their meal through the ordeal. If that had happened in Amherst, MA or Brattleboro, VT they probably would have cordoned off the area and closed the restaurant for a couple days.

I checked the internet the next day but couldn't find any news about a death in my neighborhood, so I guess he pulled through. I found out later that it was a guy from the area, a local bad boy who apparently 'had it coming to him.' This lends marginal credence to a cynical theory I've developed this year during Carnaval- that of all the thousands of people who flood my neighborhood for this one week a year, from all parts of Salvador and Brazil and even the rest of the world, the most obnoxious ones all live here. In my neighborhood. And guess what? When everyone else packs up and leaves, they stick around.

Of course, that's just a broad generalization by a grumpy gringo.

Miscellaney

2011-02-27T16:25:00.001-08:00

Today is the first day I can remember when I have not eaten any meat, at all. I did have a large cheese omelet, so a vegan I am not. Although I would like to reduce my meat consumption, I don't expect this feat to be repeated anytime soon.

Today I did not leave my house. This is not the first time this has occurred in recent history, and I expect it will be repeated relatively soon.

Carnaval starts this week, so I expect I will be leaving the house with some frequency over the next few days. We also have guests arriving starting tomorrow, which is always kinda fun. I'm a little nervous about Evani's slightly bizarre cougar friend who is supposed to spend the week here helping out- she may drive me insane. At least she means well. And she will help out.

In more important news, Lucas' new teacher has suddenly decided to resign, for 'personal / health' reasons. They called us parents in to a meeting to tell us. Lucas is bummed, he likes her. He's liked almost all his teachers, so I hope he likes her replacement as well. The meeting, after we got over the teacher-leaving part, quickly degenerated into a group of frustrated mothers complaining that their kids can't read yet, even though their public-school friends are all reading and writing already. I'm not worried. Lucas will be reading soon enough. I only hope he becomes a real reader, like me, and enjoys it.

Finally, be careful what you put on Facebook, because your old acquaintances might figure out things about you. I often wonder what happened to old friends and roomies and so forth, and until this social networking thing came along I did just that- wondered. Sometimes Google helped, but now all I have to do is search a name in Facebook and it comes up, more often than not. Then, the next time I wonder about that person, I can go and see if they've done anything interesting, like gotten married or had a kid. I enjoy seeing old friends with their kids that I've never met, and probably will never meet. Well, I got wondering about this guy I shared an apartment with about twenty years ago, so I went and had a look at his profile. We'd friended one another, but as so often happens, never really made contact beyond that. This guy was super nice, and an excellent roommate, but one thing has bothered me about that time in my life- and I discovered it needn't bother me any more.

You see, I had just turned 21 and was just getting used to the idea that I could walk into any store that sold booze and buy myself some. I liked beer, so that's what I bought. Six packs of Red, White, and Blue if I remember correctly. I'd hang out in the living room and watch TV, drinking the beer, and not thinking much of it. My roommate would almost never share the living room with me, instead, he would stay in his room, reading the Bible.

I discovered he was religious as soon as I moved in, but didn't think it was going to be a problem. Lucky for him (or for me) I wasn't smoking anything at that time, so that was never an issue. I was 21 and oblivious, and it wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that it might have bothered him that I was drinking in the house. This became more and more of a concern of mine, to the point that I remembered myself as this nasty punk-rock drunk trying to lead his virtuous roommate to temptation. I kinda wanted to apologize for my insensitive behavior.

Well, all that changed when I looked at his profile and saw him with what looked like a mixed drink in his hand. A bunch of his status updates mentioned meeting various people at different bars. And there was more than one reference to 'partying hard.'

No more guilt. I don't believe he started drinking because of me- my guess is it happened long after we shared the place. So he probably doesn't remember me poorly- after all, he did friend me.

None of this would be a big deal except that I know, because of the faith he was a part of, his drinking is a very big deal. He is almost certainly no longer part of the church. This was probably as radical a life change for him as my moving to Brazil was for me.

I'm not a religious person, but I try to respect all religions, even when I don't agree with a lot of the doctrine. I must confess I was a little saddened to see him with that drink in his hand. Or maybe just a little shocked.

So now what? Do I write him something on Facebook, put something on his wall: "See you like to PARTY now dude, rock on!!!"

Nah. Too awkward. I won't do anything. Or rather, anything beyond writing this post. I still have fond memories of the guy- he was one of the first people I met that was interested in electronic music and he was waiting for electronic beats to get mixed up with Jazz, something he was also an avid fan of. When I first discovered Acid Jazz, a couple years later, he was the first guy I thought of.

Sunday is Graffiti Day, vol. XVIII

2011-02-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

Today I took advantage of a painting opportunity I could not pass up.

Carlos Gomez is a main thoroughfare through the center of the city, it is also very close to my house. Painting spots on this street are highly sought after, and there is graffiti in every available spot. But occasionally, new spots appear- and if you're quick, you can grab them. That's what I did today.

In this case, it wasn't that an old painting got painted over by the city, or the owner of a building, but rather that a new wall was created where before there hadn't been one. This was at a spot that used to be a deposito, where one could buy sand and cement and ceramic blocks for construction. They had a big gate that a truck could be backed up into. I used to buy lots of sand and cement from them when I was working on my house. A couple years ago they closed up. And a couple weeks ago, they took out the big gate and built a wall in its place. That's what I painted.

And this is what I painted:

Four dancing monsters, just in time for Carnaval. This is on one of the main Carnaval routes, and they are headed in the same direction as the parade will be going. This was not by accident. If this looks like it was done from a 30-second sketch, that's because it was. That's how I roll.

The surface I had to work on was very rough, the kind of rough-finished cement that is done by flinging the cement through a screen if I'm not mistaken. Not the easiest surface to work on, but in some ways ideal for spray paint. Why? First off, because this is what spray paint was made for. Spray paint doesn't care about nooks and crannies, it just sprays on. What ended taking me forever was not the sprayed part, but the background, which I first tried to roll on and then finished with a brush. Brushes don't like nooks and crannies. Another advantage is that spray paint almost never drips on a surface like this. And the final advantage? It's way too rough to glue a poster over- something us graffiteiros have been suffering from lately. Other artists won't paint over us, even the pichadores (taggers) generally leave us alone. But these bastards who glue up big posters for events don't give a shit, here's an example:

This painting was practically brand new when it got pasted over the first time. Kinda sucks to spend a whole afternoon and R$100 or more in paint to have some dildo come along and advertise right over the top of it. I'm wanting to do more wheat paste stuff to go over these guys.

When I was done the people who own the restaurant across the street wanted to know why I didn't paint the whole wall, going over the old and beat up paintings next to mine. I explained that we don't go over each other, and I didn't explain that the paintings next to mine are by the bad-boy of Salvador Graffiti and his wife- despite his seemingly innocent cartoon-like paintings of silly robots he's known to be happy to resolve disputes with his fists, or other weapons - he's also about the only guy who will go over other people's graffiti. He's done it to me. You can't really see his piece, it's hidden behind the wood in this picture:

Finally, boys and girls, use your mask when you paint! You can't see it all that well in this picture, but this is a plastic cup I was testing my paint on:

The paint melted it on contact. Imagine what that it do to your alveoli. Which is why I must protest the spray paint manufacturers who put the nice vanilla smell in their paint- that paint should smell bad, because it's not good for you.

First Day of School Addendum

2011-02-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

I guess Lucas had a good first day of school. He drew this picture of himself writing at a desk:

Note the huge smile.

Back to Normaltude

2011-02-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

After a week in the house by myself, bouncing off the walls and staying up until dawn, the family returned this morning and things begin to return to normal. The TV and radio are on, Evani is chatting on the phone as she does for at least a couple hours a day. Normal.

Summer vacation ended for Lucas today, and he is at school. He was so cute, so excited- he woke me up and the first thing that came out of his mouth was about the Spider Man notebook he has convinced himself he needs... I talked him down, more or less, but I'm sure he'll be back on it soon enough. He's a determined little guy. He went through and organized all his new school material, took a shower and dressed himself without any encouragement, even rolled his new backpack all the way to school. Ah to be five again! Well, maybe twenty. Twenty-one, so I could buy booze in the States.

In other news, my not-yet-14-year-old stepson sold his cellphone and got a tattoo. This is not permitted by law here in Brazil, but if I've learned one thing during my time here it is that a law is only as good as its enforcement, which leads to a high degree of chaos. I'm not saying lawlessness doesn't exist in places outside of Brazil, just that I've learned a lot about it here. Neither Evani nor myself have actually seen this tattoo, but rumor has it it's the initials, or initial, of some girl- which is precisely why it is against the law for minors to get tattoos here. I doubt that was very thoroughly thought through. At least it wasn't the 50 Cent tattoo he wanted to get last year. Oh well- to be young and stupid- that's what cover-ups are for. I'm sure if I had been born five years later I would have at least one tattoo- I came pretty close a couple times as it was.

Blackout

2011-02-04T18:02:00.000-08:00

Here they call it a 'Bleckautch'... Portuguese can sound odd to the unaccustomed ear, but if you hear a word that sounds truly bizarre, it's probably an English one getting the Brazilian vowel treatment. You wouldn't recognize 'check in' (as in a flight) or 'outdoor' (what a billboard is called) unless you saw them written down.

When the power went out last night, I could tell by the exclamations outside on the street that it wasn't just my house this time. I went to the window, and it didn't appear to be just our street, or as has happened before, just our side of the street. In fact, it looked like the whole neighborhood was out. I looked up at the sky and was astonished to see more stars than I've ever seen within the city limits. That was impressive.

Today I found out why. It wasn't just my neighborhood, it wasn't just the city. It was the entire state of Bahia that was without power. Couldn't tell you why. It did screw up a fine Friday evening of billable hours however. It was tempting to go out and wander around, but I value my life more than that. Turns out some friends of mine went on a mad tagging binge in the dark...

For billable hours, there's always Saturday and Sunday. I did have a normal life once, didn't I?

More Recurring Themes

2011-02-02T21:55:00.000-08:00

I just had a car battery die - the third one in six years.

I also had another wireless router die - the fourth in six years?

I know the climate here is rough on electronics, but this is ridiculous.

Recurring Themes

2011-01-23T15:18:00.001-08:00

Don't leave your laptop on the floor overnight, at least not at my house.

One of my big motivations in starting, and maintaining (insofar as it is maintained) this blog was a desire to write about the challenges I experience living here in this culture so different from my own. I know I get whiny with frequency but hey folks, this is therapy for me, and let's face it I'm most amusing when I'm whining.

One of the themes I did not expect to come up so much are the ants. I wrote about them once showing up in my keyboard and then I wrote about the refrigerator killing ants... and now, ladies and gentlemen, ants have once again reappeared to pertubar minha vida (drive me nuts, loosely translated).

A dude I met in New Zealand told me that if you add up all the ants in the world, and stick them on one side of a balance, and then add up all the humans in the world, and stick them on the other side of the balance, they will balance each other out. That's as much ant-mass on the planet as human-mass. Tangentially, a science teacher of mine once told me that if you add up all the humans in the world you could fit them into a single cubic mile and 'drop them in the Grand Canyon.' At the time I believe the global population was about four billion, but last time I bothered with the calculations you could still fit all the humans in a single cubic mile, which kind of boggles the mind when you think how much damage we are managing to wreak on this poor planet of ours. Apropos to nothing, by adding the first neato science factoid to the second one, it follows that you could also pack all the ants in the world into a cubic mile- wouldn't that be horrible?

I've learned more about ants than I care to admit living in this house- you can pave paradise and the monkeys and parrots will go away, but the ants aren't going to budge. Anyone who thinks that we'll live in a post-apocalyptic world without a blade of grass or a single bug but still have mobs of humans wandering around has obviously not spent much time in the tropics - humans may be tough, and we certainly are destructive, but we ain't gonna outlast nature- we're gonna make a mess of things, already have, but ants will be dancing on our powdered remains long after we've gone extinct.

Anyhow, ants have been on my mind today- very much on my mind, because when I woke up this morning and sat down with my morning coffee as I always do to read my email and such, one crawled out of the keyboard. No big deal, happens- ants get into everything around here... and I didn't worry about it until about ten more crawled out. Then I worried about it, a lot.

I think the main reason I was so concerned about ants in my computer, unlike the last time this happened, is that last time I had three working computers and now I have just one. Not only that, but I have no money to buy another one, and I am utterly reliant on this machine to make my livelihood. Here comes another fun science factoid: do you know why they call them 'bugs' in software? Because back in the day before microchips if you got a real bug in your computer it could raise Cain in there. Or, as I learned with my charming refrigerator, it can kill the thing. I can't let that happen to my computer.

One of the charming things I've learned about ants is that they periodically migrate en masse from one spot to another- I'm not sure if it's because the colony gets too big, or if the old home becomes inhospitable, but I've often seen ant migrations in their little ant files from one spot to another in the house. Turns out this time they decided to migrate to the computer. I, not realizing the ultimate consequences of my actions, had left my laptop on the floor last night when I went to bed. The ants moved in overnight.

I guess it makes sense from an ant's point of view to move into a dormant computer- lots of nice little ant-sized spaces in there, presumably protected from the violent and deranged humans who also inhabit the house. Problem is that once the computer got turned on, it got hot in there, so they decided to leave. Their exodus caused me to freak out and shut the computer down, lest it short out with them in there, which made them less excited about leaving. So I spent most of the afternoon whacking on the laptop's case, moving it from place to place, sweeping migrant ants away from it so they couldn't find their way back in. And occasionally turning the thing on to speed up the process.

Deprived of my laptop for diversion and unable to get any work done on it, I naturally turned to the next best thing- my iPod. That's when I discovered, much to my shock and alarm, that ants had invaded that too. I guess it shouldn't have been that big of a surprise- it had been sitting on top of my computer all night.

Now it appears that all the ants have finally gone. I've been at the keyboard for most of an hour now and no ants have wandered up out of it, nor crawled out of the USB port, or out of the CD slot. Once again it appears I'm out of the woods.

But then again, this is a recurring theme.

2011

2011-01-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

Time passes and no posts. It's not that I've lost interest in this blog, which is now in its fourth year, but rather that it's found its way onto the long list of back-burnered projects that I maintain in my head. I suppose that means I have lost interest to some degree. Or maybe that I'm not feeling the need for the cathartic release I used to get from my posts, or maybe things have just gotten too serious in my life to publish them for the world to read.

I leave it to you, dear reader, to wonder what the hell I'm talking about because that's all the explanation you're gonna get.

The real problem, as it has always been, is a life that doesn't slow down combined with a self that has less than enough energy to deal with the events thrown at it. Since my last post, I made another trip back to the States with Lucas, and we got back over two weeks ago. It was great- for the first time Lucas spent Christmas with his Grammy, which was a big deal for her and I expect for him as well. I reckon he's at the age where he should remember these trips into adulthood, I know I remember all kinds of stuff from when I was five.

The big thing I mention to anyone who asks about the trip is how Lucas got to experience snow for the first time. We got lucky in that regard, there was snow on the ground for the entire time we were there, and it wasn't nasty, melted-then-frozen, snowed-then-rained type crusty stuff, it was nice powdery white stuff perfect for sledding and tobogganing - not so great for snowballs and snowmen (ok, snowpeople) although we got a forty-degree day right at the end which made up for it. Here's some pics:

Let me tell you it was freakin' cold but for the most part we dealt with it well- especially Lucas. I also learned something about mattresses that had never occurred to me, which is that for every nice warm blanket you toss over yourself there is a nice warm mattress underneath you, making a nice warm human sandwich. However, the formula breaks down if the mattress underneath you happens to be filled with two feet of air, which won't stay warm on a cold night. I discovered this the hard way, with a toasty warm top part of the sandwich, and a heat sink down below. It reminded me of the time I slept on the deck of the ferry from Italy to Greece, when despite being wrapped up in every item of clothing I had with me, the steel of the deck sucked all the warmth out of my body and I woke profoundly chilled. Luckily I didn't let it get to that point - a simple remaking of the bed with blankets both on top of and below the human part of the sandwich was adequate to remedy the problem.

We had a great trip and spent a lot of time with my family which was great. Only three grumbles, which for me is pretty good:

Not long enough
I didn't see any of my friends
I miss my dad

In other much more recent news I did something yesterday I've been planning for some time- I packed up a bunch of cans of paint, pumped up the tires on my poor neglected bicycle, and hit the road. In two hours I did four little paintings, plus a couple that didn't amount to more than doodles. If I could do that another ten times I'd be a formidable presence on the streets of Salvador. Here's a couple of the pieces:

Actually I've been painting a fair bit over the last few months, at least for me. I've done some much bigger pieces, but I'm not going to post them here. In fact, I'm done for now. Happy 2011 to everyone and thanks for reading.

Superhero Bonanza

2010-12-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

In the interest of writing something absolutely silly, and shocking the world with two posts in two days, I will recount the following.

We went to the supermarket this evening. My son, who is big on his superheros, got dressed for the occasion. This involved putting on not one, but two costumes under his street clothes, grabbed a bag for the clothing (notably lacking in the real superhero stories), and announced his intentions. His mother said no way, his somewhat more indulgent father said let him have his fun.

So Lucas arrived at the supermarket as Lucas, in short order he doffed the street clothes and became Spider Man. After about twenty minutes or so he ducked behind a rack of clothing and became Batman, complete with mask. Ironically, it just occurred to me that I purchased that Batman costume at the same supermarket. Along with about half the other stuff I own.

It was pretty funny. Lucas generally gets a lot of attention when he goes out dressed as a superhero, particularly Batman. But to be honest I don't think anyone in the place batted an eye. Brazilians love kids and tend to be quite tolerant of them.

And now an update on my last post: the video I put on YouTube of the two women fighting has now been viewed 168 times, in about 24 hours. I presume this is because I tagged it with 'Mulher' (woman) and 'Briga' (fight). At this rate it will overtake my second most watched video, which is of my wife playing a berimbau while pregnant, in a little over a month. That video has been online for three and a half years.

Sigh...

I should just take it down. It's foolish and crass. Not that I've ever watched videos of fights on YouTube before- not me. I would never do that.

I Heart My Neighbors

2010-12-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

I know, you haven't heard from me in a while. Lots of reasons for that, none of which I will get into just now.

I couldn't resist the opportunity to repeat my oft-expressed love for my charming neighbors. So sweet and polite, considerate and engaging. Here's a couple women engaging in a debate over their relative virtues, right outside my window, just this afternoon:

Isn't that wonderful? I could probably get this played on a daytime TV program here in the city if I wanted- and they'd play it about twenty times in a row while making disapproving commentary about how pathetic it is.

But ya know, I'm not gonna send it in. It is, my dear readers, for your eyes only.

Batizado and Reading

2010-11-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

Note to self, and any of you who might be as dunderheaded as Yours Truly: Don't watch The Road, by yourself, if you're already kinda bummed out, even if you've been waiting months to see it. Some are born fools and some seek out a higher realm of foolishness by re-watching parts of the movie and re-reading the end of the book the next day.

And that's all I'm going to say about that. Instead, and in an effort to cheer myself up, I'm going to do a Proud Papa Post.

First up, and I should have posted this a while ago, Lucas had his Capoeira Batizado two weeks ago. Even though I no longer train Capoeira, I still think it's great that it is taught in so many of the schools here, and even though I wish Lucas trained the other style (like I did) I'm very pleased that he had his Batizado and enjoyed it so much.

For those of you not in the know, Batizado means baptism and everyone who trains the Regional style long enough participates in one, and receives their first colored cord, and often a nickname. Lucas' mestre had already given him and his other classmates nicknames, so that wasn't part of the deal for his group. Actually, I think the nickname bit is more formalized in the exterior rather than here in Brazil, or at least here in Bahia, where nicknames are an integral part of life. But I don't really know. My own first Capoeira teacher started us in Regional but he switched to the other style, Angola, before we had our Batizado, so I never took part in one myself.

Woah! Enough with the italics already.

As for the event itself, it was a bunch of proud parents in an auditorium watching kids be cute up on the stage and feeling bad for the ones that got scared and started crying. Well, I did anyways. Luckily only a couple kids freaked out. Myself, I hated getting on stage in front of people as a kid and I still remember when I was in kindergarten we put on a school play and at the last minute I refused to go on. My poor teacher had to cover for me. I think I was supposed to be an ant.

Anyhow, here's his game:

Traditionally the student is supposed to be taken down by the person playing him or her, but they don't do that at Lucas' school.

Bravo Lucas! Congratulations! Now he's after me to get a frame for the certificate that he got with the cord. Soon enough, my son.

In other news, I discovered that Lucas has started reading. Four years of private school finally starting to pay off. Despite all the grumbling I hear from other parents that his school is 'weak' and that 'they aren't learning anything' it appears my faith and patience with their method has not been unwarranted. This all came about because he has been bringing home some 'homework' every week with a simple phrase across the bottom that he is then supposed to draw a picture from. Last week the phrase was 'the caterpillar sees the monkey in the coconut palm.' He always rattles off the phrase, but I wasn't sure if he was actually reading it or just parroting it, and when I tried to pin him down on what the words were he would get confused and not recite them properly. This made me discouraged so I went and talked to the teacher. She responded by pulling out a big stack of flash cards, each with a simple word on it, and then tossing them out for Lucas to read. Lo and behold he knew a bunch of those words. Not all of them, but a lot. I was thrilled. Beside myself.

I couldn't help remembering my own experience with flash cards, which were an integral part of my learning Portuguese. Back in New York City, about ten years ago now, I realized that a big part of learning the language was just going to be rote memorization and what better way to do so than by making lots and lots of flash cards that I could then study on the subway. So I did. I made hundreds of the things, which I'd carry around in little packets and flip through whenever I got a chance. English on one side, Portuguese on the other, and I would go over and over them until the word sprung instantly into my brain in both languages. It worked pretty well.

When Lucas came home that night I told him how happy I was about his reading, and the next thing I know we are making a game of it, writing up our own cards and having his action figures read them out to one another, kinda like a game show. In the process of doing this I discovered that he can indeed sound out words (for the most part), so my approach must have been unfamiliar and confusing to him.

This weekend I decided to experiment with taking it to the next level, combining his experience with my own. I took some of the cards we made and wrote the English equivalents on the back to see how he'd handle it. So far, so good. I don't want to push him too hard, and I don't want to get him confused, but if it seems to be working I'm gonna go for it. I'm really not clear on how much I should be stressing the fact that an h or an r in English sounds nothing like it does in Portuguese, but since he seems to have the two spoken languages so clearly separated in his brain I figure it couldn't hurt to try it out with the written versions. Let's hope he continues to enjoy our word game show.

Trash

2010-10-23T18:36:00.001-07:00

I went to put out the trash just now, 10:30 on a Saturday night, and as I go to drop a bundle of cardboard on the sidewalk I hear "No no no no!" I turn around and this guy, socializing with the neighbors, reaches for the bundle, saying "What, you're just going to throw it away?"

I give him the cardboard, thinking, but not pointing out to him, that I have neatly separated my trash into a) a bag of plastic bottles, b) a bag of food scraps and other non-recyclables, and c) the aforementioned bundle of cardboard. You'd think we have curb-side recycling here in Salvador, but we do not.

The reason I do this is because we do have recycling here, even though it is essentially unsupported by the city government. It is market driven. Cardboard, plastic bottles, and especially aluminum are collected by 'entrepreneurs' because they can be resold. These entrepreneurs tend to be folks who don't have other work, including a lot of homeless folks, although lots of people will casually collect empty cans to make a few extra reis.

There's a reason why I separate my trash, and also a reason why I put it out at this hour, when I think the dump truck is likely to pass by. Actually there's two reasons. One is to be a nice guy, and help out the people who might want the stuff. The other reason is so that my trash bag doesn't get ripped open by people after the recyclables inside. I've put out bags of trash and had four or more people go through them over the course of a few hours; I've also had the remaining trash strewn across the sidewalk and street in front of my house. Putting out trash cans is out of the question- they'd vanish in an instant.

There's something that appeals to me about the organic nature of the recycling here, things are recycled because they really have value, not just because it's 'the right thing to do,' although I agree with that sentiment. Personally, I think that trash is going to have a lot more real value in the years to come, even in wealthy countries where people are known to throw out working TVs and such. I think that will be a good thing too.

I titled this post 'trash' but I really should have called it 'recycling.' I could write a lot about trash in this city, this dirty, stinky, trash-filled, rodent-infested city, but I won't. Except to say that I think the trash problem has gotten worse in recent years. Brazilians I know tell me it's the fault of the current city government- I woldn't know about that. I've also heard it will probably get cleaned up before the 2014 FIFA World Cup. I'm getting a feeling about this World Cup thing. I think it may be a convergence, a wave of good things that will crest here in Salvador and other host cities in Brazil. It may be the perfect wave to catch, and use the resulting momentum to fling me the hell out of here.

Getting Famous

2010-10-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

Yeah Right.

I had been told that a painting of mine had gotten into a TV commercial, but I hadn't seen it until just now, as it's on YouTube as well:

My little red monster can be glimpsed at 4 seconds in and again at 50 seconds, you can even read the 'Kuza' under it if you are really paying attention, or if you put it on pause.

Also in the video is work by my friend Limpo who now lives in Sweden (I found the link on his Facebook page) and many many beautiful women. And lots of other typically Bahian stuff.

Bravo!

PS Here's a photo of it right after I drew it, with Lucas' contribution as well, which I discovered also appears in the video, if you really pay attention and pause the the thing:

Bombs and Free Canvases

2010-10-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

I had fun today.

Today was Brazilian election day, and I went out scavenging with a couple friends of mine. They are a Chilean couple who, unfortunately, are planning to leave Salvador in a couple months. Since none of us was obliged to vote (like that would have stopped us) we went out with my car and grabbed a whole bunch of these big political advertisements that have been lining all the boulevards- wooden framed portraits of cheats and hypocrites, grinning all the way to the bank, with big names and numbers so you'll be sure to vote for the right one. The ones we took home range in size from about 3 square feet to 3 by 6 feet, with one huge one that must be nine feet long. We strapped them on the car and carted them back to our house, where they are now clogging the hallway and causing my wife distress.

I plan to paint these monsters with spray paint. I've always been ambivalent about the use of spray paint on canvas, but these seem like the perfect thing to paint on- probably because they were free and will be re-purposed, which I like. Plus they're big, which is how I figure spray paint should be used.

The other thing we did was paint a bunch of 'bombs,' better known as 'throw-ups' in the English speaking world - big, quick pieces on top of the political ads that are painted or pasted on almost all the free wall space in the city. Now that the election is over, it's going to be a free-for-all to grab all the best spots and repaint the city with graffiti. That was also fun- it's always a rush to paint your name in huge letters for thousands to see- but my pleasure has been tempered by the fact that there is to be a runoff election, which means that in all probability the bombs we painted will all get covered up again. Which sucks. Spray paint is expensive.

I plan to take some pictures tomorrow, I will post them here after I do.

Jerry Pfohl, my Dad

2010-09-26T11:13:00.001-07:00

Several weeks ago, at about midnight on a Saturday, I got a phone call, and Monday morning at 6 AM I was at the airport. That same evening I was in the United States, and the next day I was in a state of the art medical facility in the middle of the woods in New Hampshire. It was one of the most bizarre transitions of my entire life.

I went because my father had a heart attack, and sadly he died some days later. As I write this, a memorial service in his honor is being held on the property that was so dear to him, and to all of us in his family, the first home I ever knew, and the only place that has been constant for me over these forty one years. Standing in the field where they landed the helicopter to airlift him to the hospital, I had the strange realization that the last time he left his beloved property it was by air.

I've tried writing some things about this whole experience and it hasn't gone very well. I'm back in Brazil and wishing I was at the memorial. Something has changed and I'm not used to it yet. I think I probably won't write about this whole thing, beyond these few words, at least not here. One thing I keep coming back to is that this has always been, and continues to be, the hardest thing about living so far away from my family and friends; the fear, which is now the reality that something could and will happen. I am grateful I live in an age where I can get on a plane and be home the following day. I am more grateful that I have the means to do so.

Anyhow enough about me and just a few words about my Dad. He was a dear man and a great artist, he made many friends and few enemies. Even though we never spoke enough on the phone I never doubted that he loved me very much, and he knew I loved him too. He lived to 81 and he went out the way he wanted to- still physically strong and mentally sharp. No walker, no nursing home. He spent the last thirty years of his life with the woman who could only be described as his soul mate, and I don't use that term lightly.

I wrote a post about my dad on this blog a while back, really more about his artwork than him. The last thing I did before I left that weird hospital in the woods the day my father died was to finally register jerrypfohl.com, and last night I launched his website, albeit with some rough edges. My family tells me it looks great, but really all I did was assemble a bunch of slideshows and put them online, it looks great because my dad was a great artist. Have a look and you'll have much more of an appreciation of who he was and what he did than I could possibly express in words.

Dentists and Demolition

2010-08-26T20:19:00.000-07:00

I went to the dentist today- which is only news because I haven't been in almost twenty years. The infamous Pfohl enamel came through for the most part- the dentist remarked that I have surprisingly little tartar as she dove in with a drill (and no Novocaine) to prepare a filling. No yankings, no admonishments, no shrieks of agony, only a brief fifteen minutes in the chair and another appointment for more drillings and cleanings. All covered by my health plan, and I didn't even know!

In other news they are blowing up the Fonte Nova on Sunday; our big, condemned stadium. It made international news (my mom clipped an article from her local paper about it) when one of the rows gave way and a number of people plunged to their deaths. Thousands of people are to be evacuated from their also possibly-condemnable homes on Sunday just in case of collateral seismic damage, then kaboom, and then they start on the new stadium they have planned for the 2014 World Cup. I'm starting to wonder if Salvador will really get a face-lift after all. Here's hoping!

Handy Andy Strikes Again

2010-08-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

My last couple posts have left a bitter taste in my mouth, so I thought I'd do a silly little Mr. Fix-It post to act as an after-dinner mint.

My mom used to call me Handy Andy, because I used to like to fix things as a kid, and... my middle name is Andrew. Still like to fix things, yes I do!

I suppose this could be another grumpy post except I'm not grumpy about what happened anymore, which was that the dump truck trashed the side mirror on my car. The poor car, and particularly that side of it, has had bad luck with dump trucks. I rubbed up against one in traffic one time and the whole door got caved in by the tire on the truck, and then for a long time the mirror just sort of hung off the right side of the car. I finally came up with a decent fix some months ago, and it hasn't given me any problems until now. The problem with my fix is that the mirror no longer popped out of place like a dislocated shoulder on contact with another object, like, say, a dump truck. It was wired and glued into place, so when the truck smacked into it, the entire housing was shattered.

Luckily for me, the mirror didn't get broken. I had a look and decided that I would kludge a fix and be done with it. I scouted for materials and found the perfect thing: an empty bottle of fabric softener.

The rest of this story is best told in images:

I love my new workshop.

Looking good!

Ready for paint.

Good thing I have plenty of spray paint on hand!

And it's attached! Pretty convincing from this angle- at least at a distance.

Less so on this side. My wife saw these pictures and sighed, commenting 'what poverty.' Oh well! I think it's fun. I keep thinking of this thing I saw on TV one time when I was a kid, when some doctors gave this guy a 'Thoe' - making him a new thumb out of one of his big toes. On the upside, this should help to convince my neighbors that I'm not rolling in cash.

Hope you enjoyed that!

Flamed

2010-08-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Man did I make a mistake.

I received a question, via my graffiti supply site, about spray paint caps. For those of you who aren't involved in this particular subculture, there are several dozens of different types of spray caps- all with different properties and that work better or worse on different brands of paint. One thing most of them have in common is a little stylized triangular logo stamped into the top, and someone asked me who the manufacturer is with this logo. This is something I've sometimes wondered about, but not very seriously- I am much less concerned about who makes caps rather than whether I have them and what they actually do. But, trying to be helpful and ending up being naive, I tried to find out. Google couldn't help, at least not in the time I allotted for the project, and since it wasn't worth spending hours trying to figure it out, I went to the 'experts' at an online forum associated with a graffiti goods supplier that I am quite fond of called Art Primo. The result of my exchange on the forum has left me less fond of the company, although it's not really their fault.

In the process of building my graffiti site I have been extremely relieved and grateful by the level of support that people are willing to provide for a product such as an open-source shopping cart like the one I use as the foundation of the site. The selfless assistance of total strangers has helped me fix busted parts of the site and the like, it's been great.

I built this same graffiti site using an open-source shopping cart called Open Cart, which is a wonderful thing. I love open source. Not only can you get software for free (let it be known that I do make donations for the open source software that I use) but on an active project there is a whole community building add-ons, writing translations, and generally helping out people who get stuck trying to get things to work properly. I have participated in a couple forums related to this cart, one in English and the other in Portuguese, and have received all kinds of friendly assistance from total strangers, and as a result my site works. I am extremely grateful.

Turns out that same selflessness does not extend to the world of graffiti paraphernalia. I made the grave mistake of not only asking the question posed by my potential customer, but actually starting a new thread on the subject when I couldn't find the answer (easily) by searching the forum. I got flamed. Ridiculed. Humiliated! Well, not that badly- they didn't make any personal attacks on my family or my receding hairline. But I have been informed that I am a lazy slob and my laziness in not pursuing the answer on my own is unacceptable- apparently I don't deserve an answer. You can read the thread here if you are curious.

Now maybe I really am stupid and lazy but I was under the impression that the internet was initially created to facilitate the exchange of information. Of course, it didn't take long for cynics to invade the works and realize it was the ideal platform for insulting and belittling total strangers. What the hell? One of the moderators of the forum writes that he's 'kinda tired of watching kids coming to the internet for answers from other people' - dude, that's what the internet is for. And when I pointed out that at 41 I'm not exactly a kid anymore, that statement for some reason 'sickens' the same moderator. Sickens! Moderator, you have a weak stomach. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the role of a moderator was to keep the discussion civil. Silly, old-fashioned me.

This is absurd. I never did get the answer I was after, and I'm not willing to waste any more time on trying to figure it out. As I mentioned previously, it's just not that important to me. But a bunch of inane fools that I don't even know have annoyed me so thoroughly that I have now wasted even more time writing this post. I wrote back to my potential customer and informed her that I couldn't get an answer; for my trouble, I only got insults.

I suppose that if I continue selling graffiti goods for ten years I may look back on this post and sagely shake my head at my naivete for not knowing the name of the manufacturer of spray paint caps, as the name rolls effortlessly off my tongue. I find this scenario unlikely. And I must say I'm a bit surprised to discover this guild-like quality of the inner graffiti circle, where information is selfishly guarded so as not to be exploited by others. Or maybe it's just that none of these fools actually knows the answer. Experts my ass! Inane dolts is more like it. I'm glad they aren't running the Open Cart forums.

I'm the kind of guy that when treated poorly by a business establishment, I cease to be a customer. Forever. So now I have to decide whether this stupid forum is going to end my business relationship with Art Primo, a company that has been nothing but helpful and friendly in my relations with them. I cannot believe that if I called them up and asked the same question I posted on the forum, that they would tell me that they are 'kinda tired' of people calling up and asking about stuff, and that I should 'stop being lazy' and figure it out for myself. If they did tell me that, I'd hang up the phone and never buy jack shit from them again. I'm actually tempted to call them up and do just that, and then ask them just how closely the forums are related to the online store- I suspect not very closely at all. I doubt that any of these boneheaded moderators are employed by Art Primo, but if they are...

In all likelihood I won't make that phone call, unless they start insulting my family or my receding hairline. I really don't want to seem like a whiny thin-skinned loser who can't take having virtual rotten eggs thrown at him. As I now know: 'the sooner you realize you are more likely to receive bullsh*t answers on a toilet seat before anything helpful, the better off you'll be.' Thanks, I'll bear that in mind. I may ultimately prove to be too whiny and thin-skinned to participate in the global graffiti community, but I've survived nearly ten years in Salvador, which is no mean feat.

When the snide comments started, I jumped ship. It's tempting to continue to respond to these fools, but it would only get worse and uglier so I'm not going to do that. My second, distinctly annoyed post already fanned the flames. One of these charming participants told me to 'tell my friends' about my experience, so that's what I'm doing, friends. I found a wonderfully appropriate quote in Moby Dick last night (which I'm still reading, only 10% to go!!) where Ahab states "The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser." I think this would be a marvelous coda for the thread, if I could only be sure it was in fact the coda. In reality it would only unleash a fresh stream of juvenile invective, so I've posted it here instead.

I wish I'd never asked the question in the first place.

And that I'd ignored the email from the curious potential customer.

Probably the most astute post on the thread is this one: 'I guess lecturing a first-time poster about being lazy is easier that naming a f*cking company.' Thanks man, I appreciate that. Honestly. I may not have gotten my answer, but I did learn something, even if it wasn't what those dudes were trying to teach me.

Stepson Does Not Use Brain - Deliberately

2010-08-07T21:03:00.001-07:00

What do you do when you discover that your 13 year old stepson has missed 59 classes in the last month, effectively blowing off an entire month of school?

I must confess that my first reaction was to do a Homer Simpson, and throttle the fool child, except we aren't neanderthals around here and plus, he's taller than me, and his arms are longer than mine, and he could just as easily throttle me right back. And I suspect he wouldn't mind doing so. I'm not a fan of corporal punishment, although it appears to be quite popular here in Bahia- for adults as well as children. Along with all the obvious good reasons not to physically abuse a child, I think it is a lazy and ineffective way to discipline. It's much easier to smack a kid because they did something wrong and then forget about it rather than actually deal with the issue and try to teach the kid not to do that same thing again.

So I did all the things I normally do: cut off the TV watching and the computer using. I locked the PlayStation in a filing cabinet. The TV bit is particularly effective because my stepson has a serious TV dependency, he really doesn't know what to do with himself when he can't watch TV. Actually, one of the things he does is read- which makes me want to discipline him more. I'm working on a plan that will couple his computer use, once he gets it back, to reading books, something he's never done. Up until now he's only read comic books. The other thing he does is play with Lucas- loud, rowdy games that often end with Lucas in tears. Again, he really only plays with Lucas anymore when he's not allowed to watch TV.

In addition to these steps, I cut his allowance and his weekly film rental and pretty much everything else. I don't think he really realizes it yet, but he has put a severe and permanent bruise on our relationship- I'm not the kind of guy who forgets this kind of thing. Ever. I don't understand what he possibly could have been thinking: apart from the fact that he was getting away with exponentially increasing truancy at the school, did he really think he'd be able to get away with it forever? Did he think we wouldn't notice if he didn't pass fifth grade, if he didn't bring home a single report card? And once we did find out, what did he think was going to happen to him? And why the fuck didn't he care??

The other thing he doesn't realize yet is that he has permanently changed his daily routine here at our house. Evani stopped trusting him a long time ago, and I have been his lone defender in many things for quite some time, but now that is over. I'm fucking furious. This latest phenomenal deception is but the most extreme in a long series of deceptions, and I've had it. He will not flunk fifth grade because he opted not to try, because he opted not to go, because he decided, as he told a guard at the school that school 'was not for him.' He's thirteen years old, he's going to school. Period. And he's not getting any more slack here at home. If he only chooses to read when I don't let him watch TV, then he will be allowed to watch very little TV, and he will learn something in spite of himself. And I already told him that if he misses one more class, he watches no TV. And if he flunks fifth grade, like he flunked (spectacularly) third grade, then the shit will really hit the fan.

He's not a dumb kid, so that's not the problem. And I've had the professional assessment that he has no learning disabilities, although I'm still skeptical. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. Then again, his cousin is repeating fifth grade for the fourth time, and he seems to think that's okay. I obviously do not.

There's a couple other pieces in this very messed up puzzle. One is the school, and one is us. We were told when we finally showed up at the school last week to see how he was doing that they almost called in the Juiz de Menores, which is like children's social services here in Brazil, but since he had attended some classes, they didn't do so. Well, why didn't they pick up the fucking phone and give us a call? That would have put an end to the systematic lies and deceptions we'd been getting from Ruan. I've written before about how completely dysfunctional the public schools are here, so that's probably the only explanation I need or will get. I would have preferred it if they had called social services.

And the other piece was us. It should not have taken us so long to figure this out. The school is only two blocks away- we transferred him just so we could keep a closer eye on him, which we clearly did not. Trying to educate Ruan has been such an incredibly difficult and exasperating task- he resists all efforts to the utmost of his abilities- that I've completely given up, and so has my wife. I resent having to do anything related to his school- I already have to deal with everything relating to Lucas' school, and, let's face it- Ruan is not my kid. I'd like to see his mother showing a little more interest in his education. Then again, finishing school was never a big priority in her family, it wasn't practical. I'm not sure why it's a priority for me- the quality of a public school education for a kid who is completely unmotivated to learn is pretty much zip. At least he knows how to read- he has numerous relatives who cannot. And I really can't shovel too much blame on my wife- she has been suspicious that Ruan was not attending school for some time. I have been completely oblivious.

So now Ruan's life will change, and ours along with it. Maybe it will be a good thing. Maybe it won't. One thing's for sure- he's not missing any more school.

Lights Out Again

2010-07-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

(Note: I wrote this last night, but am publishing it today. I couldn't publish it for obvious reasons.)

I'm sitting here in the dark - again.

The power is out, but I can't tell you just how relieved I was when I went to the window and discovered that, this time, it's not just us. It's the whole freakin' street.

Luckily my laptop had a full charge- that's keeping me occupied, and the iPod was likewise prepared for disaster- that's keeping Lucas occupied and out of my hair. Kid won't sleep, that's for sure. Problem is I have a client who at this moment is wondering why the hell I didn't make our 10PM call. Well, I have an excellent excuse. Gotta say I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for a dial-up connection... at least that way I could send him an email. Oh well.

Some of you may have read my previous post about my frustrations with the electric company, frustrations that were ongoing for a couple weeks as our electricity fluttered and failed at unpredictable moments... The voltage regulators snapping angrily when the washing machine and/or iron and/or microwave were running. We put that all behind us a few days ago, or at least I thought we did until tonight. Hence my immense relief to discover that we are not the only dark house on the street.

One thing I didn't describe on this blog was the heated argument I had with the repair crew that finally showed up after one of my calls. At the time they arrived here, the electricity was normal, and despite my insistence that the problem came and went like the wind and the rain, the sun and the moon and the tides they said that if the voltage was normal there was nothing I could do. I decided, against my better judgement, to argue that they were taking the word of a stupid little machine over the word of a customer who knew very well that he had a problem, a capricious problem that wouldn't wait 3 hours for a repair crew to show up to prove that it existed.

So I decided to call the electric company every time the lights got funky- what other choice did I have? As it turned out, I got very lucky after only a couple calls- a very excellent repairman and one of a disappearing breed of 'good people' on the planet showed up here and although he couldn't help me, he didn't tick me off and better yet- he gave me his phone number. The next time the lights went out I called him, and even though he was off duty, he hopped on his motorcycle and came right over. Unfortunately, the lights were back on again when he arrived, and although he fixed a couple possible causes the problem continued.

A couple days ago- was it Thursday? the lights blinked out once more. By this time I had convinced myself that the problem was the wiring in my house, and therefore not the responsibility of the electric company (I even suspected ants at one point) so I went looking for another electrician who lives across the street. Turns out he was in the hospital with dengue fever. So once again I called Dênis, the Good Guy. He was at home, but he hopped on his bike and rode over.

This time, the lights were still out when he arrived. This was good! And better yet? The problem was on the power pole out in front of the house, and not in our internal wiring! Only problem? Dude was on his motorcycle, and my extension ladder is shortish, and aluminum. The nearest repair truck would take hours to arrive. Dênis said he'd give the ladder a try, so I went to get it. You're going to hold it for him, right? asked Evani, to which I stated in no uncertain terms that no fucking way was I holding an aluminum ladder for an electrician as he worked on our electric lines. I was more polite than that.

Dênis climbed to the top of the ladder but was still almost ten feet below where he needed to get to. Amazingly, he didn't stop- he just kept climbing- putting his feet on those old-school bulbous ceramic insulators and all the rest until he got to where the real electricity happens, at the very top of the pole. He started grabbing wires and stripping them and sparks were flying and I was praying that he didn't light up like a christmas tree up there; one of the good guys turned crisped electrician. I'm not kidding about the sparks. There were lots of sparks. They scared me. But he knew what he was doing and he fixed it and he came down safe and I put my ladder away and thanked my lucky stars, and his, too. I also thanked him, profusely, and tried to press money into his hand which he refused with vehemence.

And we've had no problems with our electricity since.

Until now.

But now my relief has dissipated, much as the charge of my laptop battery dwindles, my patience begins to wear once more, although I must say the relative quiet brought on by a lack of electricity is quite marvelous.

Here's hoping they fix the lights soon.

All of a sudden...

2010-07-26T06:29:00.000-07:00

Not five minutes ago I was sitting here with Lucas watching a video on YouTube produced by a friend of mine here in Salvador, when all of a sudden, Lucas appeared in the video! A very pleasant and unexpected surprise.

If you've got nine minutes to kill, this video 'paints a nice picture' of the graffiti scene here in Salvador, and includes the filmmaker's arrest for painting on the street- a rare occurrence but great for street cred. If you want to jump to where Lucas makes his appearance, go to 7:16. Oh yeah, and I make a super brief appearance as well- you might recognize me if you know what the back of my head looks like. Both Lucas and I made the credits too!

Thanks to Eder Muniz and his crew Calangos de Rua for producing the video- um abraço!

My Event

2010-07-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

I'm tired... but I wanted to write this real quick.

Today I not only attended a graffiti event, but I actually put one on for the first time. That basically meant buying a five gallon can of latex paint and making a big pot of feijoada for the graffiteiros, but it was good fun. And a lot of work. That's why I'm tired.

I ended up doing the event because this guy Does, who is a very well known graffiti artist from São Paulo is doing a tour of Northeastern Brazil promoting a line of Brazilian spray paint called WORX. Well, it just so happens that I am now the 'official' reseller of WORX in Salvador, so it kinda fell to me to make an event happen, or not. I decided to do so, basically at the last minute.

The trickiest thing about putting on this event was trying to find a wall to paint, preferably one that wouldn't get rained on. Problem is that it is now full-on election season here, which means most or all walls are fair game for big, ugly political campaign paintings. In some ways, it's a good thing, because it means all the old graffiti gets painted over and then once the election is done with we can go and paint everything all over again. However, it's daunting in that if you want to paint something you run the risk of it getting trashed the next day by an over-zealous sign painter.

I tried to find a good wall here in the center of the city, and had a couple good options, but they fell through. So essentially I handed off the task to another more experienced graffiterio and he worked out the spot. Not a highly visible location, it is in a bairro popular which means it will get seen by the folks that live there and probably not by much of anyone else. That's cool, generally people love it here when you go into their neighborhood and start making a big production of painting a wall with hundreds of dollars of spray paint. One woman in her fifties actually asked us if we weren't going to paint the remainder of the wall (it was a really big wall, the side of a garage for buses) because the 'pretty part' ended before it got to her house.

In case you're wondering, I didn't provide the hundreds of dollars in spray paint. Everyone brought their own paint. We had marvelous luck with the weather, a single cloud spat a few drops of rain on us at one point and I was glad I remembered my sunscreen. As for my painting, it was probably the most ambitious one I've done to date, and I was pretty happy with it, which is about as good a result as I can expect at this point. I should probably work from sketches more often, or spend more time evaluating what I'm painting. Or both.

Anyhow, that's all I'm gonna say. I'm pleased and I pulled it off. Here's a few pics, you can see more here if you like.

Does - the main attraction.

Bigod- which means 'mustache' - Salvador's finest

Iel - pronounced like the letters 'E' + 'L'

My contribution. The feet are doing a kind of Magritte illusory thingie - completely unintentional on my part.

Another Dad Post

2010-07-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

I love my son. I really do. Even when he's driving me to distraction with his constant requests to draw Batman and Robin (which he then informs me that I'm not drawing properly), sharpen pencils, show him how to play games on the computer, etc. He's getting to the age where he's doing really neat as well as cute things- starting to make little projects of his own and do more imaginative stuff as well.

This week he made beds for Max Steel and his archnemesis the Extroyer. In my day the analagous toy would have been G.I. Joe, but he didn't have a mutant enemy with a wolf's head where his right hand should be. When we play together, I am always the Extroyer and he is Max Steel, and they are actually pretty good friends most of the time. Lately they've been planting magic beans, then climbing the beanstalk and hiding from the giant before they steal the hen who lays the golden eggs.

Here's a pic of the little beds Lucas made for the toys and himself. He didn't sleep there, although he has been known to fall asleep on the floor. The picture quality is not great, but hey, it's not fine art.

And now, perhaps against my better judgment, is another super cute item. This would be the following video of Lucas and myself doing Sun Salutations. Please note that the rapidly-approaching-middle-age-guy is not the super cute part. And you gotta love the look on the little guy's face at the end of the clip.

Fourth of July, Shmorth of Fuly

2010-07-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was not a good day.

It started off promisingly enough, except for one detail- I woke up with a torcicolo, known in English as a 'stiff neck', an unpleasant and not entirely uncommon occurrence for me. It was supposed to be a good day because for one thing, the rain that has fallen continuously and in great abundance over the last week had finally stopped, or at least slacked off, and for another my wife and son were out of the house.

This is a terrible thing to say but I absolutely cherish the days that the family splits and leaves me at the house. I love it because like pretty much everyone in my family I am essentially a loner and have long lists of projects that I want to accomplish, that I can only get to when I don't have a five year old boy dogging my heels all of his waking hours. Currently the most important of my lists is the work related one, which has been getting longer as I have found it nearly impossible to get any work done at home, which unfortunately is now my only option. No bringing the laptop to Starbucks here in Brazil!

I had another item on my agenda for this weekend: shift my sleeping schedule by about three hours to the left. My response to the dilemma of the five year old (who I adore and would much rather spend time with than do something tedious like earn money) has been to do the bulk of my work after he goes to bed. Since he has no bedtime, and goes to school in the afternoon, this has meant that he goes to sleep later and later until now he is usually awake past midnight. This has meant that I have been up until four and five in the morning working, which was fine when I was single and lived in New York, but it's not cutting it anymore so I have to make a change.

In spite of my nearly immobilized neck, my morning and early afternoon went well and I took advantage of the lack of rain to take a bunch of pictures for my website. I was busy running around, taking care of business, when at three o'clock disaster struck.

I didn't realize disaster had struck at first. What happened was the power went out. This happens with relative frequency, about as often as I get the torcicolos (maybe every six months?) Usually it's off for a couple hours and then it comes back on and no big deal. I figured that was what had happened so I didn't worry too much about it; my laptop was fully charged, so I continued with what I was working on and waited for the power to come back on.

When it started to get dark at around six o'clock and the lights still hadn't come on I decided I'd better figure out what was going on. I went out (something I almost never do on the days I have to myself) and much to my dismay I discovered that I was the only one on the street without power. Which meant the electric company had not been notified. Which meant I'd been waiting three hours in vain, and now my laptop battery was dead, and it was dark, and I was screwed.

I called the electric company and was subjected to what was possibly the most obnoxious loop of promotional garbage I have ever listened to while I was on hold. This went on for about fifteen minutes, at which time my call was attended- sort of. I heard a woman talking to a coworker in the background before the line went dead. Well, at least I wasn't on hold anymore. Only problem? I'd been dropped from the queue and had to call back and do it all over again.

When I finally spoke to a representative, I was informed that a team would arrive to fix my lights within three hours. Hmm- nine o'clock. I can handle that. The question now becomes whether I will continue with my plan to go to bed earlier, or catch up on my work and work late into the night as has been my habit- the habit I'm trying to change. As it turns out it wasn't an issue.

Nine o'clock rolled around and still no lights. I called back, this time armed with my iPod to counteract the obnoxious loop of PR as I waited on hold. Thank goodness I'd charged the iPod the day before, it ended up being one of the only bright spots in an otherwise miserable day. This time I was informed that the repair crew was on its way- hooray! So much for the three hour time limit, but at least I'd be rescued soon.

I should mention that I already knew what the problem was. When the lights went out, they flickered a few times as they tried to come back on, and when I went to check the circuit breaker that lives in the metal box on the front of the house along with the meter, I got a shock. This happened to us once before when there was a bad connection: wire comes loose, no ground, human becomes ground, shock. This meant that in all probability it was simply a problem between my house and the pole out front.

By ten o'clock nobody had shown up. On a Sunday in Salvador, unless it is raining very very heavily, there is no point in the city that cannot be reached in an hour of driving from any other, so I called back. This time the news was worse. The team was no longer on its way and they had no idea when it might arrive. No more three hour time limit. No other information, other than that the teams 'work 24 hours a day' and they were aware of the problem and have a nice night with your candles in the dark.

I did the typical futile charade of pitching a fit on the phone. I pay a lot of money for my electricity, unlike a large percentage of this city who steal it. I didn't believe I was going to be helped any longer. 24 hour service? Bullshit. Only if I was rich or connected. These guys were in all probability having a beer somewhere and blowing me off, and the electric company couldn't inform me of this for obvious reasons.

Resigned to the fact that I would get nothing done work-wise I resorted to an improvised backup plan which was to go through some piles of papers that have been propagating in the house in a valiant effort to reduce or eliminate them. I've been working on a site for a guy who goes by the moniker VirgoMan, a professional organizer who has even written a book on the subject. I've picked up some tidbits of his method working on the site and I decided to apply them. I'm not totally disorganized but I do have some packrat-like tendencies which from time to time I beat back much to my wife's pleasant surprise. I sorted through old receipts by candlelight, and then I attacked the huge stack of Lucas' school artwork.

Lucas comes home every Friday with a stapled booklet of his work for the week. I have never been able to throw these booklets away. Our fridge is non-magnetic on the front, so unfortunately I can't post them there. His artwork has been getting more interesting in the last year or so and has even been featured on this blog. However, the stuff from when he was two is, let's face it, just scribbles. And little squares of colored foam glued to paper. There is no reason for me to save these, at least not more than a tiny sample of them. They mean no more to me now than they will in ten or twenty years so why hold on to them? I still have watercolor paintings from my own year in Kindergarten when I attended a Waldorf school, a book of mysterious colored stains on paper. I should throw those away too.

I ended up going to bed earlier than I would have with the lights on, but still later than I'd intended to. I was just drifting off to sleep when at 2:30 AM I heard the distinctive sound of the microwave beep downstairs, so I sat up and the standby lights were on on both the TV and DVD player. It was raining again. I went to the window to see if there were guys with ladders and tools hard at work in front of my house but of course there weren't. The rain or the wind had closed the connection once again.

As I write this, I have just received a call from the repair man, a full seventeen hours after I made my initial complaint. He asked if the problem had resolved itself, and I admitted it had (fool that I am), but also that I was convinced it would come back and I told him why. I told him that the lights had gone out for just a second this morning- which was actually true. He claims he's on his way.

*******************

(time passes)

*******************

Now it's almost one in the morning and the lights are still on, although they did threaten to fail a couple times... good thing I'm not waiting for the repair dude because he never showed up. Here's a picture I took of the wires where they enter my house. Can anyone say 'up to code?' Can someone else please say 'a disaster waiting to happen?'

I Like To Ride My Bicycle

2010-06-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is my birthday, and this week I bought myself a present- a new bicycle. Well, a new/used bicycle. This is the sixth bicycle I have owned, although it would have been bike number seven if my brother Ben had let me buy his old one. More about him in a minute. Today is also the big mid-winter holiday here in the northeast known as São João, but I won't be writing about that today.

But first an apology. Judging from a comment left by my brother Ben (more about him later) it appears that I suddenly have the attention of the better part of my family on these pages. I had a feeling this might happen when my nephew Brian wrote a comment in response to my bitter and whiny post about no one in the family reading my blog. Now I'm feeling sheepish. I suppose I got what I wanted, which is for them to revel in the pure genius that is this glorious blog, but I didn't want it to happen this way. I didn't want them to be guilted into reading it. I also regret being such a passive aggressive fool that would write a stupid post like that. My apologies family!!

Another item to add to the sheepishness was discovering that a different brother of mine has a blog that I wasn't reading! In my own meager defense, I did know about this blog, but as it was getting almost no updates I had figured it was not an active concern and eventually forgot about it. Then the brother in question mentioned it on the phone and I, guilted like the aforementioned family, hurried over to catch up and subscribe to the RSS feed. That's the great thing about RSS feeds and news readers - you never miss another update, even if you can't remember all the things you want to be updated on. Sign up all ye uninitiated!

Anyhow, the bicycle. In spite of my somewhat desperate financial situation (which is actually showing some glimmers of improvement) I decided to get myself a present this year for my birthday. I buy almost nothing for myself, although I have a rather lengthy wish list. Having the Mil Muros site has been good as it has allowed me to get my retail therapy fix vicariously. In fact, tomorrow I'm scheduled to receive almost the entire line of Worx paint, which is the best that Brazil has to offer in terms of domestic spray paint for graffiteiros. On my birthday no less! Very exciting. Hundreds of cans of paint, and I won't be able to use any of them. At least I can fondle and gaze at them, and arrange them on shelves and take pictures of them.

Having decided to get myself something nice, I was wavering between a new bicycle and a new cell phone. Either of these items would have cost me about 300 reis, or $170 US. I really wanted the cell phone because mine doesn't have a camera, and I want to be able to take pictures of graffiti and such that I spot on the street. A built in MP3 player wouldn't hurt either. I count on my cell phone to keep me entertained when I have to stand in line anywhere, and my current one doesn't perform this function adequately. The bike I had my eye on was nothing terribly fancy, but it was new and shiny and had twist-shifters in the grips, something I'd tried just once and really enjoyed. As it turned out, I didn't buy either of these things- I 'settled' for a second-hand bike I spotted in the same shop. I don't regret my decision.

I've been reading Moby Dick lately... and have been for some time. My Kindle tells me I've only read 52% of the book so far. My theory is that if you have better things to do than read, which I do, then read a slow book- an un-page-turner as it were. Not reading anything is not an option for me, I always like to have a book going, but reading something that I can only get through three or four pages at a time before my eyelids droop is at times a good thing. Moby Dick has surprised me- I thought it was about a white whale. If you haven't yet noticed Melville's effect on my writing style, you will now, as I diverge from my primary narrative to present a lengthy aside, and as he would have done, it will rate its own chapter.

My Other Bikes

As I mentioned previously, this is bike number five for me, almost bike six. Let's take a look back the others.

Bike Number One was a kiddie bike complete with training wheels. In fact, it was only used by me as a training wheel bike because I never learned to ride it without them, although I came close. My best friend Jesse lost one of the training wheels when he went on an unexpectedly fast ride down a steep hill in front of our house- it had no brakes, you see.

Bike Number Two was the one I learned to ride on when I was about seven or eight. It was second-hand, having belonged to a classmate who moved away. It had that seventies chopper-type styling, with a banana seat and crazy curved handlebars. The spokes were tricked out with bits of drinking straw. My father and the aforementioned brother Ben taught me to ride this bike in my dad's driveway. The bike lived under a piece of plastic along with my brother's, which was also second hand, and had belonged to the sister of my former classmate. Having belonged to a girl, his was a girl's bike (eeeewwww!)

When all my friends got to the fifth or sixth grade, they all got 'ten-speeds' with racing handle bars and derailleurs and such. This was some years before the advent of mountain bikes, which would have been the natural choice of transport for a bunch of hippie kids growing up in the woods. Naturally, I too wanted a similar ride but for some reason my parents bought me a three-speed, which was Bike Number Three.

I don't know why they bought me the three-speed. I figure it must have been cheaper. I don't remember being terribly upset at the time- it at least looked like a ten-speed, even if it wasn't. I don't want to beat up on my parents too much, they were very good parents, but they did develop a strange (but not oft-repeated) habit of getting me these 'transitional' gifts instead of the real thing, and then subsequently buying the genuine article for my younger brother a year or two later. Jason didn't get a three-speed (actually, nobody I knew had a three speed except me), he went straight to the twelve-speed which at the time was the latest thing.

I remember protesting Jason's acquisition of the 'real' bicycle, so in relatively short order I received Bike Number Four, which had the prerequisite derailleur and ten gears. Both of our bikes were made by Fuji, and I distinctly remember that mine wasn't as nice as his was (we never forget these things, do we?) My mom bought his with this rather extravagant friend of hers who chipped in on the purchase price. I had no such luck. At least, at age sixteen or so, I had my proper ten-speed at last. I sold this bike many years later, lightly used, to a friend of mine in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Bike Number Five was also a hand-me-down and my first mountain bike. This bike had belonged to my dad, who loved mountain bikes because they reminded him of the old steel clunkers he grew up with. Indeed, mountain bikes are descended from those solid bicycles of his youth, and he determinedly un-mountain-biked it as much as he could, putting on a nice wide saddle, handle bars that allowed him to ride upright, and (shudder) a kick-stand. He handed this bike off to me when he decided he wanted to go riding with his wife and then bought a pair of matching red bikes for them to ride, better for him to keep up with those 'long legs of hers' (us Pfohls are a stumpy-legged bunch). When I got my hands on the bike, I promptly re-mountain-biked it, putting on some low, wide handlebars, knobby tires, and a teeny tiny granny gear so I could actually ride uphill in the woods on it. I took off the kick-stand and all those enormously weighty and un-cool reflectors. I did take this bike off-road from time to time, but never as much as I had intended to. This bike accompanied me all the way to Alaska and back on the back of my Honda Civic. I still own it, I think, although it has been moldering in the basement of my sister's barn for many years. I hope somebody rides it now and again.

Then there was The Bike that Might Have Been. This one belonged to the oft-mentioned brother Ben, a Specialized Rockhopper that he was selling to help pay for a much nicer full-suspension bike he had just purchased. In spite of my offer to pay his full asking price for this bike, which would have become the crown jewel of my series, he refused to sell it to me. His reasoning was that, as my brother, he wanted to give me a good deal on the thing, but since he needed to sell it to help pay for the new bike, he couldn't give me a deal on it and therefore wouldn't sell it to me. I insisted I was willing to pay his asking price but he likewise insisted he would not not not sell it to me. And that was that. In retrospect this was probably just as well, as I pretty much stopped riding at that point and this would now be the bike that is moldering in my sister's basement today.

I figured my next bike would be something more like the Rockhopper, with a front suspension at the very least, but it was not to be. I was actually leaning more toward the new cell phone, figuring it would get a lot more use than any bicycle when I went back into the shop with Lucas to see if they still had the bike I was interested in. They did, but it didn't look quite so glamorous to me anymore. I looked at some of the other bikes they had, and tried not to look at the really nice ones.

And then I saw it. A kind of maroon color, used, but lightly. Like one of my own old bikes. I'll call it the Batman Bike. Why? Because of the numerous faded stickers it is festooned with that read Batman Forever. Lucas took one look at this bike and insisted I had to buy it. I draw pictures of Batman and have to role-play him cast in plastic miniature on a daily basis. Of course I had to buy the Batman Bike! When the owner of the bike shop told me the price was half that of the other bike, it was as good as sold. I took Lucas for a walk, thought about it, and returned and bought the Batman Bike just before the shop closed.

It's a cheesy beast, this Batman Bike. Clearly targeted for the teenage market, it is a frill-less mountain style bicycle, with lots of plastic parts. No aluminum or alloys anywhere on the frame. It does have 21 speeds, which is more than twice what Bike Number Four had, and seven times that of Bike Number Three. There's no kick-stand on it, and it has brand new knobby tires. The beauty of it is that it is adequate, and, truth be told, adequate is ten times better than exciting.

Why, says you, is adequate better than exciting? Well, I'll tell you. It's not a fancy new toy, which means it doesn't have any fancy new toy baggage. This means that I can ride it and chain it up in public places without worrying about it getting stolen, or worse, scratched. It means I can lend it to my oversized stepson without worrying about it getting stolen, or worse, scratched. Even more importantly and realistically it means I can not ride it and not suffer the guilt and shame of having my expensive toy sitting unused and gathering dust. Clearly this poor bicycle has already suffered that fate- the movie it is themed after came out five years ago and it shows about two months of wear. If I ride it a lot, and wear it out, then I'll be fully justified in buying a fancier model. I'm also really into this urban-camouflage idea that owning something kind of ugly and unappealing is a good idea- it is much less likely that someone else will want to take it away from me. Another bonus? I can start upgrading it immediately. The saddle on the thing is horrid, and it has no luggage rack. I could put a new stem and handlebars on it which would drop me into a lower, more aggressive riding position. Add some bar ends, toe clips, a front suspension, water bottle...

Hold on a second. Slow down there, tough guy. You bought the cheap bike because you are friggin' broke, so don't go souping the thing up and spending a fortune on it. No sense spoiling the satisfaction of getting a good deal by blowing two hundred reis in accessories. I'll settle for the toe clips and the new saddle. And the luggage rack. And I really should get a helmet. And maybe some gloves. And... never mind.

The truth is I find it hard to believe I'll ride it very much. The thought of riding a bicycle on the streets of Salvador is enough to give me heart palpitations, which is why I've gone eight years without one. I mostly bought it so I could ride around with Lucas, who is still on his first bicycle, complete with training wheels. We did just that yesterday, by performing the humiliating ritual of climbing into the car and strapping the bike on top in order to go for a ride on the pretty bike path in Barra. The irony of this is not lost on me, but the reality is that if I'm going out to ride with my son, we are definitely not riding the streets of hell on flimsy two-wheeled contraptions to get to a nice safe place to ride. At least not for a long time. And despite the absurdity of burning fossil fuels to go for a bike ride, we had a great time. Lucas rode his bike longer and farther than I've ever seen him ride previously, and he wanted more when we were done. And wanted to go out again today. This could turn out to be a great thing- there are a number of bike paths in the city. I just hope my car doesn't die or need to be sold so we can get to them. And if it does? Well, at least I'll have a bike to ride around on.

It is impossible for me to imagine a Salvador that is bike-friendly. Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, is supposed to be a great city to ride a bike in, but I don't see it happening here in Salvador. You could never set up bike lanes on the main streets- they would be dominated by motorcycles. The motorcycles are like flies here- they get into everything. Don't stick your arm out your car window or a motorcycle might take it off. I remember growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts and being bewildered by all the asian folks who would ride their bikes on the sidewalks. Why didn't they ride in the street like everyone else? Now I think I know. I think I'll be riding on sidewalks just as much as I possibly can- and I'll keep my eyes peeled for motorcycles.

Addendum

Mom requested a photo of the bike, here's a couple:

What I'm Up Against

2010-06-09T15:12:00.001-07:00

Sigh... I wonder where all the time goes, and then I remember that I live in Bahia.

Well, that, and then I remember who I am. If I had to pick an animal to describe me, and I had only two choices, and those choices were 'Tortoise' and 'Hare,' I'd have to pick... the... tortoise.

Anyhow. I've noted in the past that my grumble posts, and my Mr. Dad posts, seem to be a lot more popular than my art related posts, and whoa did I get a lot of response about my new website! (Insert dose of lighthearted sarcasm here) . So here you go, a grumble post for the masses.

My stepson Ruan changed schools this year, and today I went to pick up the transfer at his old school. When I requested it, they told me it would be ready in ninety days. That was over four months ago, so last week I called the school and asked if it was ready and I could go pick it up. Well, I was told they couldn't give me that information over the phone, so I had to go down there and find out. Don't ask why they couldn't just mail me the document, I sure didn't. The mail does not seem to garner a lot of confidence here in Brazil.

So I go to the school, and on the way I spot a big new store that sells tools. I'm not calling it a hardware store per se, it looks more like a specialty machinery store. I like stores like that, so I make a mental note of it. I get to the school, and ask about the transfer. My stepson's name is not entered into the computer, because there are no computers in the central office, if indeed anywhere at the school. This same school couldn't even inform me last year that they'd found a teacher so Ruan could start his classes- he missed a week of school that way. Par for the course. A secretary goes through a stack of folders and finds one with Ruan's name on it. Bingo!

Of course, it's not ready. I'm told by the secretary to call and check in a week to see if it's done. I tell her that I'd tried calling the previous week and was informed they couldn't give that kind of information over the phone. She told me no, just call, and they'll let me know.

Ya right. You know I'm going back there next week regardless. It may be the second of many trips to get this thing taken care of.

In an attempt to salvage some value from my fruitless trip, I stop at the store I had spotted on the way there. Now, like a lot of guys, including all the guys in my family, I really like tools and I get kind of silly when I'm in a store full of brand-new shiny ones, especially here in Brazil where it's much harder to get a tool-showroom-fix. The biggest hardware stores here, the vague analogs to the Home Depots and Lowses in the states, sell very little in the way of actual tools, and particularly power tools. Generally they have drills, 'Makitas' (which is what they call tile cutting saws here), sometimes circular saws, sometimes sanders, and that's about it. I've been idly looking around for a router, not because I actually plan to buy one, but just because I want to see if I can find one. I have never seen a drill press or table saw for sale here.

This new store was great. Lots and lots of power tools. Mostly related to masonry, but that makes sense. They had hand tools I hadn't seen anywhere else in Brazil, including squeeze clamps, something I had my mom bring down for me because I couldn't find them here. A whole wall of Makitas- Makita the brand that is, not just the tile cutters, although they had those too- a whole big stack of them. I actually gasped when I spotted a lovely little jigsaw, and I even looked for a price tag- my enthusiasm dimmed when I saw it was for 220 volt current.

No table saws.

No drill presses.

And, of course, no routers. Now, I didn't spend a lot of time in the place so I may have overlooked one, but I doubt it.

But all that was gravy. I was actually looking for something when I went into the store, and it was a product without a plug- I wanted to buy a respirator to resell on my site. Ideally something like this:

I have one almost exactly like this one, I bought it in the mom and pop hardware store in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont. You'd think the demand for these things would be relatively high here, particularly considering the amount of asbestos laced roof tiles that get cut up with the aforementioned tile saws, and the bold warnings printed on those tiles to use respiratory protection when cutting them.

Apparently not. I had given up hope of finding one of these, or a less expensive domestic version, anywhere in Bahia. Those big box 'hardware' stores? They either don't have them or never did. I'd resigned myself to buying them online.

I'm looking around the store... looking, looking... I find the section of safety equipment... hard-hats, boots, gloves... disposable dust masks... Paydirt!!! I find some respirators!! Not just one, but two kinds! In quantity! I could buy two dozen if I want!!

This is great. I'm very excited. Only one hitch: all these respirators use disposable filter cartridges, and the ones in the store are sold without them. I look around for the boxes of cartridges, there are none to be found. I finally consult an employee, and he says he's pretty sure there aren't any, but sends me over to a guy sitting at a computer to confirm this. He confirms that no, there are no filters anywhere in the store, and in fact, no request has been made for any, so they can't tell me when they might arrive, seeing as how nobody has actually ordered them. So why stock the things if you can't even use them I am tempted to ask, but of course I don't.

I leave the store, resigned but not upset, and certainly not surprised. I know there are respirators here in Brazil, I see pictures of graffiteiros with them on; many of the graffiteiros I know own one. I haven't found them because of my lack of initiative in tracking them down!! There's a district here that sells material to contractors, with dozens of stores- if I was to take an afternoon and go into all of them I would probably find a respirator in one of them.

But that's my whole point, see? I bought my respirator in a mom and pop hardware store in Brattleboro, and I live in a city of three million people where I can't find a single freakin' respirator without a concerted effort. Everything... takes... forever... and is like pulling teeth to get it done. But it's not just me. The fire department can't put out fires because they don't have the proper respirators either.

This is why the Brazilian World Cup team had to charter an entire airplane to bring back all the stuff they bought, last time the World Cup was in the States. This is why if you, who lives in the States, ever comes to Brazil, everyone you know here will ask you to bring something down for them. This is why every time I go home, I spend at least two days shopping for stuff I can't buy here. The USA may have its problems, but it is truly a shopper's paradise.

Markuza's Folly?

2010-05-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Weighing the options between another depressing post (and I have one) and something different...

Depressing post...

Something different...

I'm going to write something different.

I don't write much about what I do, how I make money, what fills (or empties) the coffers. And I'm probably not going to do so tonight, because at this point the topic in question is merely a concept of wealth, a figment of income, doing more emptying than filling of coffers.

I recently built a website called www.milmuros.com, or if you prefer, www.milmuros.com.br, as I registered both names. I'm trying to fill a gap I discovered here in the virtual Brazil, that being the absence of a fully functional online store to buy graffiti supplies. There are several websites for graffiti stores here in Brazil, but none of them offer a shopping cart and online payment except for one, and they don't even have spray paint. I'm trying to change that by building an attractive, easy to use store with everything a graffiteiro might want, from spray paint, to big fat markers, to respirators, etc.

So why is this a folly? Well, mostly because I don't think there's a lot of money in it, at least not yet. There appears to be demand, this country is filthy with graffiteiros and the stores to buy decent supplies are few and far between, so interest in theory should be substantial. Problem is that profit margins are low, material is difficult and expensive to obtain, and the stuff (spray paint at least) is allegedly spontaneously explosive.

Not to worry! My first ill-fated attempt at e-commerce, which never actually made it to the 'e' part, involved exporting material related to Capoeira. Although there's lots of stuff you can buy related to Capoeira, shirts, bells, stretchy pants, the principal item of interest is the berimbau, which is nearly impossible to ship internationally because it is just a tad too long. Since this new project is not an international endeavor, shipping little pressurized paint bombs around the country is a relative cake walk.

I got into this whole thing when I agreed to create an online store for my friend and ex-owner of the only graffiti shop in town, Bomb Bahia. Like a fool, I agreed to do this for nothing, an agreement that in retrospect I would have had to back out of. Not because I've shelled out a lot of cash- building and maintaining my site will be quite inexpensive for me, and I have very little in the way of operating costs at this point. The program which manages the whole store for me I downloaded and installed for free, and I'm almost smart enough to know how to use it. The real problem is the time involved in putting everything together, which is substantial. And filling orders so far has been quite time consuming, all three of them.

What makes this project so great is that I'm enjoying it. Thoroughly. Mostly because it's a change of pace for me, and ties in to my other interests. The problem is that it robs me of the time to pursue those other interests, and, as my wife keeps reminding me, it distracts me from making real money. Which is true. It does distract me. But the other reality is that my other work has dropped off substantially in recent months so I need to be pursuing other avenues. And what about my previous observation that there's probably not much money in this? Well, my mentor at college was fond of telling us that we could never see the end from the beginning- that by working on something for countless hours ultimately we would arrive at a conclusion that was far more interesting than that which we had conceived at the outset. Perhaps that will be the case here as well, with the hopeful addition of the word 'lucrative' right next to 'interesting.'

After Bomb Bahia closed its doors, I decided, after much internal debate, to proceed with the project on my own. Truth be told, I'd spent a lot of time with the owner thinking about how I would run his business differently, sometimes making suggestions to that effect, some of which he followed. I briefly considered opening my own retail store, but that plan was upended by two things: first, I didn't have the money to invest in inventory or the means to take on a lot of operating expenses, and second, two stores opened in the city while I was mulling it over. I was ready to call it quits when I had an epiphany of sorts- why not put their inventory on my site? That, my friends, is what I did and what MilMuros.com.br is today. Their stuff (mostly), my site (entirely), and a small commission on each item sold.

So far, so good. As I mentioned previously, there have only been three sales so far but the last one was a biggie- over thirty cans of paint. It was a ridiculous amount of running around and phone calls and emails but I learned a lot even if I didn't make much money. I have people checking out the site from all over Brazil, and some inquiries, and an active social-networking component on Orkut, by far the most popular social networking site in Brazil. People aren't buying, yet, but at least they're having a look. And they appear to be interested.

Before I wrap this up I have to give a shout-out to Fabio, frequent contributor to this blog, who has been an immense help in proofreading and straightening out my sometimes strangled Portuguese. I can speak Portuguese fluently, even if I still screw up the gender of nouns and misuse prepositions from time to time- I doubt I'll ever stop doing that 100%. But writing it is another beast entirely, and I don't want to come off as an uneducated fool. I doubt I could learn to write Portuguese properly without a serious effort that would probably involve taking classes. Very frustrating! But then it occurred to me that Fabio might be the perfect person to help out, as he is also bilingual, and his primary language is Portuguese. He proofread the whole site and made numerous corrections. Thanks Fabio! You rock.

To conclude, this is the plan for the future of the project. I'm going to pursue this for a year. If it's too much of a hassle, or it doesn't make me any money, or I decide to move back to the States, I'll ditch the thing and move on. I doubt I'll lose much money as anything I invest in merchandise will be relatively easy to recoup, as it's in high demand. Maybe I'll end up selling the whole system to one of the stores I buy paint from.

But maybe, just maybe, it will be a success.

I think I'd enjoy that.

Sticks and Stones, the Response

2010-05-09T22:54:00.001-07:00

I tried to post my replies to the comments on my previous post, but what I ended up writing was so long that Blogger wouldn't accept it, so I'm publishing it as a separate post. I'm overdue for one anyways.

I want to say thank you to everyone who left a comment on this post- it was a tough one for me to write, and I guess that's why I haven't responded to the comments until now. I'm impressed by the thoughtfulness and breadth of opinions that went into these comments, and you all deserve more of a response than I'm going to give you, but here goes!

Claudia- I agree with you that there is no translation for culture, but I also think that it's worth trying to explain and to understand. I would certainly want to know if a word I was using was offensive or not to someone of another culture. What I found most interesting was your comment about 'the forced Afro-Americanism.' This isn't something I have thought all that much about, but I believe there are lots of minorities that assume these definitions, even if they are clumsy, as better than the alternatives. And to be fair I should probably start calling myself a 'European American.'

Daniel- my friend used another example, the word 'rapariga' which is little girl in Portugal, and a prostitute in Brazil. I don't think that's really what's going on here, as the n-word has no meanings outside of the US (that I know of), and I really hope nobody tries to create one.

Stephanie- I understand what you mean about feeling uncomfortable with the 'color talk' as it were, I actually find it kind of nice most of the time because it's so much easier to refer to these things- I used to find myself at times trying to describe someone in the United States (to another American) and not wanting to say that they were black so as not to come off as racist, which is just silly. Plus my wife is 'Negona' to many of her friends so I'm pretty thoroughly desensitized.

Elena- you summed up a couple issues better than I did. Regarding the conversation I hope to have with my friend, I don't know how much I'm going to get into it. It might just be me telling her that I'll never be able to hear that word without a strong visceral reaction and hope that she understands that.

TLC- laughter, as I learned from Reader's Digest, is the best medicine. I know a guy who everyone calls 'Capenga,' which means 'cripple,' and another called 'Mario Gago' which is 'Mario with the stutter.' Gasp!! To be honest, those nicknames bother me too, but that's what everyone calls them, so what am I going to do? On the other hand, 'politically correct' shouldn't mean 'sweep it under the rug.'

Fabio- good point, and something I've considered asking my friend, how she would feel if the tables were turned in terms of an offensive word used as a name. In Capoeira it's common to give Portuguese nicknames to the players, even in the 'Exterior' where most people just take the mestre's translation on faith. Lots of these words can't be found in a dictionary although you can find most of them online now. Wouldn't it be crazy if a mestre gave all his students really inappropriate names like Safada and Tarada and they had no idea? I wonder if it's happened. Regarding the pronunciation: she isn't off the hook if she can't pronounce the word, the intent is the same.

Mae- I was struck that you have actually had conversations about this subject with white Brazilians, I never have. I realize that I'm not actually friends with any white Brazilians, which is a bit odd, at least not good friends. Now that I think of it, I do have a couple white Brazilian friends, but they all live in New York- now that's ironic! The things I've learned from my friends and especially my wife about their experiences have made me realize just how much I don't (or didn't) know about the minority experience, either here or there, if you can refer to a single 'minority experience' which of course you can't. I often find myself wondering how far the similarities go between the Afro-Brazilian and African-American experiences. That came out totally jumbled, it's 2:40 in the morning. Got... to... finish!!! My friend does not fall into the category you described- privilege has not left her blind to these things. Regarding the conversations you refer to, you're absolutely right, they don't happen, or they don't happen often enough. I find myself desperately wanting to give a shout out to Michel Martin and her NPR program Tell Me More, which has given me more insight into more angles on more minority experiences than anything else in my life, with the obvious exception of my marriage.

Sticks and Stones...

2010-05-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

First it was Chinese babykillers, now it's a cat named Nigger. Sometimes I think my excursions into the world of social networking aren't quite what they might be in an ideal world.

The cat belongs to some friends of mine here in Salvador. I was browsing pictures of their pets (clearly a valuable use of my time) when I found a photo that made reference to the aforementioned cat. I was shocked, and I made a comment to the effect that in English you wouldn't be able to use that name.

Here in Brazil, or at least in Bahia, Negão is a common name for animals, and also a nickname (for humans), and even a term of endearment. Negão does not have the same connotations as the n-word, although I've heard that it can be considered hate speech in certain contexts. Then again, I've also known people to call one another Preto (black, male) and Pretinha (little black female) affectionately here, mostly by blacks but also by whites. These words, which would be super-charged and almost impossible to use comfortably in English, at least in the United States, at least by a white guy like me, don't have the same bite here. Although I'm sure they could under the right (I mean 'wrong') circumstances. I thought that might be what my friends' were thinking when they gave the cat this name- trying to translate the n-word as something more like Negão.

My friend replied to my comment, directing me to another photo of the cat, where a discussion had already played out about the dubious moniker. She had explained to someone else that she knew the word was offensive in the United States, but she lives in Brazil, and has both blacks and whites in her family, and they were using the word 'without negative connotations'.

Okay, I have to admit I was upset. Growing up in the States, with huge helpings of racial guilt, this word was, and still is, strictly verboten. But it's complicated. I remember when nigga started its rise in the hip hop community, and although it hasn't de-stigmatized the word, it has created a new context for it, even an affectionate one, for some in the African American community. I've even been called nigga in Brooklyn (but I assure you there was nothing affectionate about it). I also read a bit of the history of the word online, and apparently it was not originally an offensive term, back in the 17th century.

So how much of this is my problem, my hang-up? If she was African-American and named her cat 'nigga' would I be as bothered by it?

I've had some bad experiences writing down stuff related to strong emotions, so I either avoid doing so, or write very carefully and deliberately when I do. I thought a lot about what I wanted to say about this name, and then I replied to the effect that yes, she's in Brazil, so she can do what she wants, but "essa palavra eh palavrão mesmo para gente de meu pais, não se traduz como 'negão' mas significa odeio e racismo, mesmo com os B-boys falando 'nigga' estes 20 anos" or, to translate, "the word is a swear word for people from my country, you can't translate it like negão, and it signifies hate and racism, even with the B-boys saying 'nigga' for twenty years."

I don't think my friend has the same compunction as I do regarding choosing her words carefully, but then again, I don't know if she found the subject as uncomfortable as I did. She wrote me a fairly lengthy comment back, the kind of thing that makes me want to take my Portuguese to the next level, because my vocabulary and comprehension hit the wall pretty quickly when the subject matter gets more abstract and complicated.

I'm not going to quote her, but eventually I puzzled out that she was saying that no, she doesn't take the attitude that she can do what she wants because she lives in Brazil, she told me that hate and racism are not in the translation for the word nigger, and that I as an American know that if I translate the word nigger I won't find the words 'I hate' in there, and that it's all in the 'attitude' you bring to the word, and the negative attitude implicit in the word only exists in my country (the U.S), and here it doesn't have that because most people don't know what it means.

Well, maybe she did feel strongly about the subject. And I did pretty much quote her after all.

I had to disengage. I knew that the conversation was going to go downhill, and really we should talk about the subject face to face and not on Facebook. So I didn't reply, but I really wanted to. Mostly I wanted to tell her that my computer's dictionary (the iDictionary?) tells me that nigger "remains one of the most racially offensive words in the language." I also wanted to tell her that I hope she doesn't try to create a Brazilian usage for the word, one free from negative attitude.

But basically I don't agree with her. I think she is trying to do what she wants because she's in Brazil, and I don't think you should try to redefine hate speech if it suits you, or if it's even possible. I like to think that if I found out 'Kuza' meant 'genocide' in... Hindi or something, I'd stop using it. As it is, it's already uncomfortably close to 'Yakuza' which I find troubling.

I really have to stop doing this. I get into these sticky conversations on Facebook, which I bail out on, and then I go and write about it on my blog. I think it's some weird manifestation of passive-aggression. The first time it was about someone I didn't know, this time it's about a friend of mine. Well, sort of a friend. I happen to know that very few of my friends, and almost nobody in my family, reads this blog, so I could probably write a lot more about them and nobody would be the wiser. But I don't think I will. And I should stop writing posts like these. And I should continue the conversation with my friend the next time I see her.

But let me just make this absolutely clear, in case I've been vague or equivocal, that I think Nigger is a really stupid name for a cat.

RealCheckers

2010-04-17T21:29:00.000-07:00

Lucas comes up to me the other day and he says:

"Papai, I wanna play RealCheckers."

RealCheckers is the kind of word that gets invented when suddenly there is a need for it- for instance, there was no term 'acoustic guitar' until there were electric guitars. So RealCheckers is named such, at least by my son, to differentiate from Virtual Checkers.

I guess it's not really so strange that Lucas first learned to play checkers on a computer- there's probably been millions more hands of Solitaire played onscreen than with a deck of cards since Microsoft stuck it into Windows. It was a little weird to be playing checkers on two adjacent computer screens, the 'game' being hosted in some unknown location somewhere online. This being kinda weird, and the game being kinda buggy, I suggested we play Real Checkers one day.

I didn't realize just how much this idea would appeal to him. He started bugging me constantly to play RealCheckers. Only problem- we didn't have a game of checkers. Checkers, which is called Damas (ladies) here in Brazil, is a popular game, and there's even a square near here where people play and other people watch. The boards are stenciled onto benches, and caps from plastic soda bottles are used for pieces.

I looked around the mall for a cheapo game but the only one I found cost more than I was willing to spend, so I decided to go the improvised route as well. I have a panel I use for drawing and crafts projects so I measured out and drew a checkerboard on it. Not having a large quantity of bottle caps lying around, I finally realized I had the perfect substitute- spray paint caps. Not only did I have ample quantities in both black and white, but I even had different shapes in both colors that could be swapped out for kings, or damas as the case may be.

Then we played RealCheckers. Lucas is just getting to the age where he can grasp the rules, although they need fairly consistent reinforcement and his desire to win the game often overcomes his willingness to follow the rules. It had been so long since I'd played that I actually had to look up the rules online, and some of them I don't think I'd ever known.

Lucas is fascinated with the game. When I wouldn't play with him anymore the other day he got his mother to play, and they had a grand old time. The next morning, we played again, and things were going fine for the most part. I must confess I was getting a little frustrated telling him he couldn't jump this way or that way or move twice in a row. Evani came in and decided to help him play. That's when I got my real surprise.

Evani didn't know how to play at all. She was letting normal pieces jump backwards, and her damas had superpowers, sliding the length of the board to capture pieces, much like a queen in chess.

I was shocked. Scandalized. Horrified! "No no no," I said, and Evani explained that that was how she'd been playing Lucas the day before. I went as far as to ask her when the last time was that she'd played checkers, remembering some of the dubious rules we used to employ in our own games back in my distant youth. "Jump your own man" comes to mind.

I put my foot down and said that we were not going to play that way, we were going to play by the proper American rules that I had so recently gotten a firm grasp on.

Not being a totally self-righteous know-it-all, I decided to check online, once again, to see if the rules for damas differs from checkers. Whoops, I mean RealCheckers. Sure enough, they do. Not only are there rules for damas, but there's a Portuguese version and a Brazilian version. There's also an Italian, English, Russian, and Turkish version. This all according to Wikipedia, from their Portuguese language page on the subject. And those crazy rules that Evani was using? They were all in there.

Further research brought me to an article titled Draughts, which states (and I quote):

Draughts or checkers (American English) is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemy's pieces.

Who knew? A whole group of games! I hadn't even realized that captures were mandatory until I started playing Lucas on the computer.

Okay, I was wrong. I told Evani that I'd looked up the rules and she was right. Of course, she already knew this. Then I thought about poor Lucas playing one kind of checkers with his dad, and another with his mom. I quickly realized it wasn't going to happen. Not worth it, at least not until he's older. And considering that the American version (or should I say 'United-Statesian'? ) is positively stodgy in comparison to this hyper-dynamic Brazilian uber-checkers I realized quickly which set of rules we would be using from now on.

Now I essentially have to learn to play all over again. Since normal pieces can jump backwards and kings (damas) can zoom across the board at will, the dynamic is completely different. When I suddenly realized the possibilities these rules presented, games that looked only half finished were suddenly practically terminated by a one-piece romp across the board. Sigh. I'll get used to it. Or maybe Lucas will get bored with the game and I won't have to.

I decided since checkers was such a hit that maybe I should teach him a card game too, so I taught him 'Go Fish.' He loves it, but again it's not the game I grew up with. I taught him to play 'open hand' Go Fish, with our cards face up on the table. This was intended to be temporary, just for him to get the hang of it. Now it's the only way he wants to play. I'm pretty sure showing your cards is not in the Brazilian rules.

Bits and Pieces

2010-04-13T20:33:00.001-07:00

All my fellow expat bloggers are writing about the rain, so I won't write about that.

Instead I'll write about street art glory.

I may not have gotten on the TV program, and I didn't win an expat writing contest, but I did get written up in someone's blog:

http://graffitinasruas.blogspot.com/2010/04/news.html

He starts out the post writing I think the work of Mark Pfohl is incredible... and goes on to say that I'm one of his favorite graffiti artists... and I appear to be the only artist that got his very own post on the blog! At least so far.

What's that strange sound? Oh, don't worry, it's just my ego expanding to fill the available space in the room. Nothing to be frightened of.

Which reminds me- I've noticed my graffiti posts get much less attention than my Mr. Dad posts or my Rant-And-Rave specials. What does that mean??

In other news, I just did most of my taxes using a wonderful online filing tool (www.taxactonline.com if you must know). A bit odd, me filing a 1040 every year, but if I ever move back to the States (which I will do someday, somehow) I'd be kinda screwed if I didn't. The bad news: I made dramatically less than I did last year, the good news: I don't owe anything, which almost never happens because I'm self-employed.

And I really shouldn't be writing this but I just gotta tell you about the chicken coop. Not some chicken coop out in the periphery of the city somewhere, not even a chicken coop on some empty lot here in the Center, but a chicken coop right on Rua Carlos Gomes.

You'll need a little background to understand the significance of this. Rua Carlos Gomes is one of the principal streets here in the center of the city, it's part of the original Carnaval parade route, it's unavoidable and everyone here in Salvador knows it. It's not pretty, and doesn't get half the traffic as it's sister street Avenida Sete, and has some closed businesses and strip clubs and gay clubs as well (I once saw someone compare it to the Castro of Salvador, which is a biiig stretch, at least these days). It's also where the old graffiti shop was. And it's one route from the house to Lucas' school, which is how I spotted the chickens, living in the entryway to a defunct store or something similar.

It's kind of like finding a chicken coop on... Houston Street in New York? I'm trying to think of a good comparison but it's hard to make one, since the cities have almost nothing in common. I often think that Salvador is a little like a cross between Boston and New Orleans, but that comparison breaks down pretty fast too. And of course now I have to explain that. New Orleans because culturally and demographically N.O. is the most like Salvador of any major city in the US, plus what is 'south' in the US is equivalent to what is 'north' in Brazil, us being in the southern hemisphere and all. And the Boston bit? I put Boston in there because Salvador is so freakin' old, and has so much history, and was once the capital. Salvador ain't no snooty college town, that's for sure, we have no Harvards or MIT's here, and we aren't situated in a river delta which is a good thing considering all this rain that I'm not going to talk about.

Did I sell you on my comparison? No? Well, I tried.

So there I am walking back from Lucas' school and I see this chicken coop set up on one of the principal streets of this ancient and storied city. And I have to tell you, my first reaction, after the disbelief, was come on folks, this is ridiculous. It plays into all the stupid stereotypes you hear about Brazilians and particularly Nordestinos, or those from the Northeast of Brazil. My wife has very strong words which I will not repeat here for people who think small, and putting those chickens there was thinking very small.

Am I making any sense? Have I been here too long? Say No to chickens. At least on what should be valuable real estate. Even if it's not.

The Spider-Man Birthday Follow-Up

2010-04-06T21:49:00.001-07:00

I promised a follow-up post about Lucas' birthday, and then didn't write it. Here's a couple pictures. It went great- you know why? We set up, the kids came in, they made a lot of noise and ate a lot of food, and then they left. And we went home. Whew!

Arembepe

2010-04-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

After months of failed attempts, we finally got away for the weekend. All four of us, which never happens. We went to Arembepe, a small city about an hour's drive north of here that has something of a storied history because of its origins as a hippie colony. Or maybe it just attracted a lot of hippies during the sixties. At any rate Janis Joplin visited back in the day and there are still hippies to be found in the neighborhood.

This trip actually happened as a byproduct of another event- a big festival that they had there a couple weeks ago, a kind of mini-Carnaval that they put on, complete with trios electricos and big famous acts from the booming metropolis that is Salvador. Evani and her good friend Silvia split the price on an apartment rental so they could go. The bonus for us was that the rental was for an entire month.

As we got out of the city, I felt the usual sense of wonder I experience when I realize that there is more to the world than downtown Salvador and then the usual sense of bewilderment that I almost never manage to get out of the city. Especially considering I have a car. Then I remember that the car is dying and I have no money for vacations, which is why I am generally confined to the aforementioned downtown. The less I move around, the less it costs me. I was very much enjoying the idea that this was a trip that I wasn't footing the bill for, outside of the gas in the car and some groceries.

When we got there it was after dark on Thursday. Brazil being a Catholic country, we had a four day weekend because of the Easter holiday. The apartment was in a great location, just off of downtown, with a view of the ocean off one side of the building. Arembepe's downtown is much more low-key than our own downtown, and it was quiet and mellow, and cool with a sea breeze, no bugs. The apartment has two bedrooms and a big balcony where we could all sit. All of this for R$500 for the whole month, or about $280 US. Not bad, I thought, already fantasizing about trying to stay there for a whole month next year. But, I also thought, let's wait and see what tomorrow looks like.

I've either gotten smarter or more cynical in the years I've spent here in Brazil. The Portuguese term for this is esperto, and in the judgement of many if not most Bahians (possibly Brazilians in general), foreigners are not esperto. On the contrary, they are presumed to be idiots, which means by extension that I am generally presumed to be an idiot, which contributes to my tendencies towards bitterness and misanthropy. I pride myself on possessing a tiny grain of esperteza, something I've cultivated the hard way over the years as you may know if you follow this blog regularly.

Things started going south before we hit the sack that first night. We'd brought an inflatable mattress to sleep on, because the mattresses in the apartment were quite horrible to look at, and presumably worse to sleep on. I inflated the mattress, and we put some sheets on it, and about a half hour later it had significantly deflated. It clearly had a hole in it. I went instantly from tranquil to furious, because although the mattress had been fine the last time we'd slept on it, it had passed through the hands of some other people, who were obviously the ones responsible for popping the thing. This unfortunately was not my first experience along these lines. The predecessor to this mattress had been hung out to dry by someone who didn't know better on a strand of barbed wire. This works fine for clothing, which is usually made from cloth, which generally doesn't pop, but is a really bad and stupid idea for something made of thin plastic that relies on the integrity and non-perforation of its surfaces in order to function properly. And they think foreigners are bozos! Nevertheless, here I was with another popped mattress. Maybe I'm not as esperto as I thought. Well, you can be sure I won't be buying a third.

Then Evani asked me if I'd brought an extension cord for the fans I'd brought with us. I said I hadn't, as she hadn't mentioned we might be needing one. Turns out we did, as neither of the bedrooms had any sockets in them. Not a single one. In fact, the whole place had only two electrical sockets- one in the kitchen, and one in the living room. Hold on, that's not true- there was another strange tiled room just off the other bedroom, like a big walk-in closet without a door, that had about six. We figured this must have been a kitchen at one time in a different incarnation of the house.

Evani and I ended up curled up on a single mattress, which didn't look so bad once it was covered with a sheet, and was definitely preferable to sleeping on the floor. It wasn't too bad, and I was actually sleeping pretty well until it started to rain.

While all you North-American types are gearing up for the nicer part of the year, we are turning the corner into the nastier part. That means wet. And wet here can mean an inch of rain in ten minutes, or multiples thereof in thirty or forty. With that much rain, you need serious roofing or you and everything you own gets wet too. Here in Bahia roofing materials usually consist of asbestos-laced panels, occasional metal roofing, and the classic and lovely clay tiles. These are wonderful to look at, but often rather porous, as they consist of cupped sections that are generally fitted without mortar with lots of ensuing gaps. Add this to the fact that they can slide around in high winds, or cracked, or installed poorly, and a serious rainstorm outside means a gentle shower inside. This can be countered by putting a ceiling between your roof and living space to catch the drips and spray, but our rental didn't have one. So we got wet.

In addition to the roof, our wonderful ocean-facing window suddenly started spouting water all around the edges. This was due to the strong wind that was blowing the rain into that side of the house, and right though the gaps around the pane.

Luckily it didn't rain too hard that first night.

The next morning two of Evani's sisters arrived, with a daughter and her middle-aged cousin, who is known as the Muda, which means mute, even though she's actually deaf. She's also known as Belisco which means 'pinch' but I don't know the story behind that. We spent the day on the beach, which was not even a two minute walk from the house, and is a perfect for kids because it is sheltered from the open ocean by a big chunk of dead coral. There was some question as to whether Belisco had ever been to the beach before, a question that couldn't be satisfactorily resolved as her language is her own. She has her own sign language that she developed in collaboration with the rest of the family, and she cannot read or write. This makes conversation pretty limited, although I give it my best. This time I didn't bother to try, I had no idea of how to gesticulate 'have you ever been' or 'your first time.'

I've often wondered what kind of conversations Belisco has with herself in her head. What her 'words' for things are like. It is also apparent that Belisco is not entirely deaf; if something is sufficiently thunderous, like one of the larger homemade M80's, she can hear it. I figure that means that if she had a hearing aid she could hear a lot more. I can't imagine what that would be like for her.

We played in the water all day and drank wine and ate fish- traditional Good Friday fare here in Brazil. I spent way too long trying to patch up our inflatable mattress, which was imperative as the other mattresses would now be in use by the other family members. I also improvised an extension cord by pirating the wiring for an outdoor light. Then we ran out of water.

Here in Bahia, water doesn't always comes out of the tap when you turn it on. Actually, if you have means, you don't have that problem because anyone who can afford it puts big water reservoirs in the attic or on the roof so if the water stops flowing for a day or so, you won't have an interruption. We have 1500 liters of water in our attic and we've only run out a couple times. Our rental had two tanques with a combined capacity somewhat less than than our own. In case the others ran dry, which is what happened, there was a third one on the ground which we filled with a hose. This allowed us to flush toilets and take baths with buckets if necessary, but it wasn't as nice as turning on the tap and having water come out.

Although a pain, this wasn't as big a deal as it sounds like. Evani's family does not have tanques on the roof, so they are used to running out of water and washing from buckets, and I did it when necessary for the year that I lived with them. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that there was also no hot water in the apartment, something that would stop the hearts of many a thin-blooded foreigner, but didn't merit a second thought for us. We have hot water at our house, but we actually turn it off all summer long as we don't feel we really need it. The water isn't that cold- it sits in the hot attic all day. Then again, in the winter the heater gets turned back on, a testament to my thin-blooded youth.

We spent a pleasant evening hanging out in the square, which means everyone else hung out in the square drinking beer and talking, while I sat around watching Lucas as he jumped on the trampoline and rode around on the battery powered tricycles available for rent.

The storm clouds were gathering, and I mean that quite literally.

That night, it rained like crazy. Usually, when it rains here, it rains for an hour or so and then stops, then maybe it rains again a while later or it doesn't. Friday night it rained all night. And it rained hard. We abandoned our room, which ultimately was a quarter inch deep in water in places, and slept in the living room. I couldn't sleep on the still leaking mattress, so I curled up on the short lumpy couch. I didn't sleep well (nobody did) and we decided we'd leave the next morning.

The morning came and we changed our minds. Although overcast all day, the rain pretty much stopped and we managed to have a pretty good time mopping up the water and hanging out, eating food and drinking beer. The water had come back during the night so we could use the faucets again. It helped a lot that I had a whole season of Yo Gabba Gabba and Teen Titans on my iPod and laptop to keep Lucas entertained. More time was spent working on the mattress, and in the evening more time was spent in the square and on the trampoline and the tricycles.

The tiny church on the square had a mass while we were there, and Lucas wanted to watch. I indulged him. He's been asking more questions and making more comments about God and Jesus and such, which shouldn't come as a great surprise since he goes to a Catholic school. I'm starting to wonder when and how I should tell him that not everyone (specifically me) agrees with everything he is being taught at school. I'm not prepared to make a big deal out of it yet, if ever.

Last night: continuing rain, but much less. Continued leakage, but less. I got up twice in the night to pump up the accursed mattress, but I did manage to sleep on it. Easter morning, no beer. Beach, swimming, sunburn despite the overcast. I did a drawing with my oilsticks on the beach (if it's on the beach, does it still count as street art?) Here's a little video of it:

And here's a drawing of the piece I did the day before:

We had lunch, cleaned up, and went home. Gratefully.

Evani still has the place for one more weekend. I bet you are wondering if we'll go back. Well, actually, we will- or I will, with the kids. Evani's been invited for another outing. Maybe I've lost my grain of esperteza. But I'll tell you what- if the forecast is for rain, we'll make it a day trip, just to get the stuff we left up there. And we won't be sleeping on inflatable mattresses.

Now He Turns Five

2010-03-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Lucas' fifth birthday, and like probably every parent on the planet, I can't believe he's already five.

As I have written in past posts (and my fellow expat bloggers have done as well) Brazilians make a really big deal of kid's birthdays. Thank goodness this is winding down somewhat in Casa Pfohl, as it seems the rule is the smaller the kid the bigger the birthday. This plus the fact that I am suffering from fairly severe underemployment and can't be throwing the big bashes like we used to. This year bashes will be simply bash, as for the past couple years he's had both a party at school and a party at home. This year, just the school party. Last year I noted that Evani and some friends worked for three days to prepare for the party, this year, she started this evening.

This is a good thing. I like this scaled down business very much.

I've pretty much wrapped up my part, which was to go out and buy all the accoutrements. Kid's parties are always themed here, with little girls having Barbie or Disney Princess parties, while little boys do Hulk or The Incredibles or Cars. I must say I think the boys have much better options, and the same thing goes for cheapo presents, like the ones we buy for other kid's parties at school. For most of the past year, Lucas had planned to do a Ben 10 birthday, but at the last minute he changed his mind to Homem Aranha, better know as Spider-Man to all you English speakers.

As I was doing my shopping, I regretted a bit his change of theme. You can buy everything to match your chosen theme, from party hats to cups to napkins, etc. Everything but cutlery. This year, I only got the Spider-Man party hats and Spider-Man gift bags and Spider-Man cardboard cutouts to tape on the wall in the Spider-Man theme. Oh yeah- and a Spider-Man candle for the cake. There are actually several flavors of Spider-Man, and Lucas is getting a blend, although I don't think he cares. He's got the modern red and blue Spider-Man popularized by the blockbuster films mixed in with the younger-kid-targeted Spidey & Friends version. None of the evil alien black suit Spider-Man in the mix. The reason I came to regret Lucas' change in theme is because Spider-Man is much harder to find this year than Ben 10. I had to go in a bunch of stores just to find the hats. And the worst was the costume.

I know, I didn't have to buy Lucas a Spider-Man costume. But you have to understand- of all the toys he will receive (I'll get to those later), none will receive half as much play time as the costume. He was wearing his Batman costume from last year just this morning. He loves his costumes. His Superman costume was forgotten in the States on our last visit and that's a good thing, because it was disintegrating. This year, I looked everywhere for a Spider-Man costume. Actually, I found one fairly early on, but it was eighty reis (about forty bucks) and I just wasn't ready to pay that much for the thing. Luckily for us, we live close to the main kid-party-shopping district, where there are probably two dozen stores that cater to these kid's parties. I went in every single store. One of them had 12 boxes of brand new Ben 10 costumes, several Batmans and Supermen, but no Spider-Men. Another had one for rent, but it looked to be sized for an eight year old, not a five year old. Finally, in the very last store, in a poorly lit aisle in the back on a tiny rack, I found about a half dozen cheesy Spider-Man costumes for a reasonable price. Yeah!!

So about those presents. When I was a kid, I got tons of presents for my birthday. I got so many that my brother used to get presents too so he wouldn't feel bad. I realized as I was finishing up with the present buying this year that the number of presents Lucas will get on his birthday is probably about equal to what my brother used to get on my birthday.

I think this is a good thing. We train our kids to be consumers right out of the gate, and we get a lot of help from a lot of corporations trying to market their goods (or bads) to our little ones. I like me a good bit of consumerism myself on occasion, and I like to get things for the kids, but it's good to have limits, even if they are artificially imposed financial starvation limits. Well, I like to think I'd be sparing anyways. My wife (don't tell her I mentioned this) never got a single toy as she was growing up, for birthdays or Christmas. Ruan, the first year I was here, also didn't get anything for Christmas except a trip to Pelourinho, which was more than his mom got. This might explain why my wife considers toys to be nothing but clutter. I mean, she has a point- most of them don't get much use- but for me toys are sacred. Just like books. But that's a different post.

So Lucas is going to get one overpriced action figure sitting in a car, several Hot Wheels cars (nice and cheap), a DVD of Finding Nemo I found on sale, and a very few other odds and ends. Plus whatever his classmates give him, which will be thirty toys out of which only four or five will survive until next week.

I'll try to post some Happy Five Year Old pics in the next couple days- wish me luck!

What China is Known For

2010-03-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

When you read that title, what pops into your mind?

And how does that make you feeeeeeeeel??

The other day a friend of mine made a joke on Facebook about potty training her 1 year old kid. It was a visual joke, and I'm not going to try to describe it. Let's leave my friend out of this. But someone she knows, who I've never met, left the following comment:

on what planet does a one year old toilet train? i hope you do not mean it

I happen to know that there are places on this planet where they toilet train at that age. So I told my friend I thought it was funny, and then I added the following for the unenlightened other person:

K_________, they toilet train regularly at 1 yr. in China

When I was trying to toilet train my own kid, at an age far beyond when they get started in Asia, I thought that was a pretty neat and remarkable feat and (silly me) thought that maybe she would too.

So today I got up, got my coffee like I always do, sat down with my laptop like I always do, and settled in to bask a bit in the glory of the convoluted victory for 'universal health care' in the States, something that has eluded me up until this point. The glory, that is. And then I read the response from K___________ to my comment:

China is not known for their child development practices, the are know for infantcide (sic)

Well that pretty much ruined my morning. Actually, it pretty much ruined my day. I never fail to be appalled at the utter lack of decorum that people feel free to display on the internet, but I generally associate that kind of idiocy with comments on YouTube videos. I'd never been subjected to it on Facebook, but most of my contact on Facebook is with friends of mine and like I said, I've never met this woman. Don't particularly want to either. And I can't imagine saying something like that out of the blue to anyone.

I get the feeling this same post gets written ten different ways every day across the globe.

Unfortunately, she's half right. China is, tragically, known for infanticide. But she's wrong that it is not known for 'child development practices.' I knew, and I've never been to China. I read about it on the New York Times, see for yourself.

Infanticide does happen in China, which is horrible. I was reading about it online today as a result of this exchange, and it is a truly evil and horrific practice. But saying 'Chinese are baby killers' is the same as saying 'Muslims are suicide bombers' or 'Hispanics beat their wives' or 'Americans are fat racist assholes with guns who eat at McDonald's every day.' It doesn't exactly tell the whole story.

Right?

Am I overreacting?

About an hour ago I asked myself if there is a shred of decorum still in existence between virtual strangers, a line that (almost) no one would cross: would K__________ have left the same comment if my last name had been 'Chen' instead of 'Pfohl'?

The Meeting

2010-03-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who guessed at what 'the object' was, I enjoyed that. If I come up with something suitably absurd which could serve as a follow up, we can do it again.

I thought it was kind of funny that nobody remarked on my impending fame and fortune... well, fame at least... make that possible fame... due to my email from the TV producer. Maybe my downplaying of the whole thing was so successful that nobody took it seriously. Hell, maybe you thought I made it up.

Well, I didn't make it up, and the meeting I had been asked to attend happened today. I was dying of curiosity, re-reading emails for any hints as to what they might be planning. I had imagined all kinds of scenarios, each more fanciful than the last, up to today's scenario du jour in which I envisioned myself lured into a trap where an assault team of journalists would pounce on me and start asking me all kinds of uncomfortable questions about my graffiti.

It didn't turn out like that at all.

They didn't have us sign a non-disclosure agreement, and I specifically asked them if it was okay for us to talk about what they have planned, and they said no problem. So I will. Actually, I won't. I'm not going to say anything about the program they are putting on- hopefully I'll get a chance to do that later. I'll just tell you about the meeting.

I showed up early, early enough to make my momma proud, which is saying something- she has a physical aversion to being late for things and I've partially inherited it. I wasn't even sure if there were going to be other graffiterios there. That was the first mystery solved- I discovered about ten of us had been contacted. Okay, that's cool. I sat down and looked at magazines, of which they had a rich and arty assortment.

A few minutes later three other graffiteiros walked in, all of whom I knew. A couple of them looked surprised to see me. They are all 'Big Guns' in the Salvador graffiti scene, which... isn't saying a lot, but it is saying something. They were probably thinking, as I was, that I wasn't in the same league with them. They were friendly enough and we all sat around and chatted. A bit later a fourth graffiteiro showed up, another very visible and prolific artist here in the city, and someone I've wanted to meet for some time. Then the meeting got started.

There's something I should mention before I proceed. I was nervous when I got there, but after the other guys showed up I started to get self-conscious. This happens to me when I'm surrounded by people who I think are out of my league. I get self-conscious, and I think it must be really obvious, which it probably is. Contributing to this is the fact that I figure one of the reasons they had us all sit down in a room together was to see just how telegenic we all are, and the self-conscious guy looking small in the group probably doesn't come away with high marks for telegenosticy. Plus I don't have dreads or a shaved head or any tattoos, other things that would help in the visual selection process.

This brings me to the next item- the selection process. They told us pretty early on that they were only going to need three of us for their pilot program. I think that caused us all to deflate a bit. They might want more, for a future program, but for now, just three. I surveyed The League (of which I am out of) once more and figured my chances of being selected were quite slim. Especially because they are holding a second meeting tomorrow, with a bunch of other graffiteiros to pick from.

I had been wondering if we would be asked to say anything, any kind of audition/interview section of the meeting. I had thought of all different kinds of things to say- about how my work is different from what everyone else is painting, how I'm older, my experience is different because I'm an estrangeiro, stuff like that. Of course, I promptly forgot all that in the meeting and I sat there desperately trying to remember what it was that made me so special. As it turned out, all they wanted from us was to know if we liked the idea and if we had any questions or previous commitments. There was very little of any of that.

I'll know soon enough if I got selected- I believe they want to start shooting next Tuesday. But even if I don't get picked for the show, they told us something that I liked very much. They told us they'd done a pretty careful pre-selection process to arrive at the group of ten that got invited to the meeting. That means that at least as far as they are concerned, I'm one of the ten best (or perhaps most interesting) graffiteiros in the city. That's pretty cool, especially when you consider I haven't really been at it that long, and I figure I still have a ways to go before I get to be really good at it.

It's a bit strange being a semi-hermit and then going out and doing these large-scale artworks in very public places- I never really know what people think. I'm not tied in to the art community, so I get no feedback from them. Since I know the other graffiteiros, I know that they look at my work, and at least claim to like it, but if the other graffiteiros aren't looking at what you're doing then you aren't trying very hard. It's nice to know that other people are looking too, and that they can find me online if they make an effort.

If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this I believe it can be summed up in two words:

DON'T STOP.

What It Is

2010-03-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's bean spillin' time.

On my last several posts I've asked what this strange object could possibly be:

I gave the following hints, in the posts and in the comments:

It is not my four-year-old's latest carpentry project.
It looks exactly what it's supposed to look like.
It is functional-face-down in this picture.
It is not a kluge.
It is 'secured.'
All the bent nails were hammered into pre-drilled holes.
It is not hollow.
Once properly installed (which it now is) it disappeared.
The black rubber ring around the nail in the center of the image is not essential to its function, nor does it interfere.
The object does not sit on the ground as shown in the photo above.
It could be described as a 'hanger.'

I received the following guesses as to its function:

A boot scraper
A person-repeller (so they can't sit on my doorstep)
My four-year-old's carpentry project
A mailbox
A 'hanger for something'
A key hanger
Something fixed up to handle gatos (a 'gato' in this sense is a way of stealing electricity, not a kitty-cat)

I posted the photo on my Facebook page to see if I'd get any additional guesses, and this is what all my 257 brilliant friends came up with:

A petrified porcupine
A Medieval coat rack
Wood with bent nails
I am getting tired of this game, Mark! How long will it take till we know what it is??

And this final response, which receives a special place: not because he guessed it, but because it's very amusing. This from Chris in Brattleboro:

It's a musical instrument called a Kalurmba. Every one of those nails on the side is hammered in and bent to sound each note of the scale. Two of the nails on top change the octave of the scale. The nail with the black (rubber?) collar on it is the "whammy" nail.
Great find!

So what is it?

Let me tell you.

Aside from the technically accurate 'wood with nails' response, the best guess was from Fabio, who thought it was 'a hanger for something,' which it is, although probably not in the way he intended. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words, so here's a picture of it properly installed:

Where is it? you are asking. Remember my hint that it would disappear once installed? It's embedded in the wall, and the black bracket is bolted to it.

Let me tell you a little story about something that happened shortly after we moved into our house. We had but one television, and it was downstairs in the living room. My wife, who watches a LOT of television, really wanted a TV in the bedroom, so being the indulgent fool that I sometimes am, I got her one. For a while, months I believe, it sat upon the cardboard box it was shipped in, with a couple boards separating the two so the box wouldn't collapse under the considerable weight of the TV. Finally I bought a wall bracket and asked a pedreiro who was working at the house to install it. It had shipped with some lag bolts and some big plastic masonry anchors, so he drilled some holes and screwed it to the wall some six feet off the floor. It seemed pretty strong. We put the TV, which probably weighs between 30 and 40 pounds, on the thing and it looked okay. I was nervous about it however, so I left the cardboard shipping box underneath it, flipped over so the taped bottom side was facing up, and I removed the boards that had previously supported it.

Several hours later, we were downstairs and we heard a whumph or a crumph or something to that effect, fairly loud, but we didn't think much of it. We live in Bahia, we're used to loud noises we can't identify! It wasn't until I went back upstairs a while later that I discovered the television had fallen off the wall, right onto the cardboard box. The masonry anchors had been ripped right out of the wall. There was no shattered glass on the ground, so I picked it up, plugged it back in, and lo and behold- it still worked!

I would like to take credit for my brilliant foresight in placing the box just so under the TV, but the truth is, I have to thank David Blane and his Vertigo stunt for that, an event that happened in New York while I was living there. I didn't go check him out on his teeny tiny platform, 100 feet above the ground, but I did read that he was going to jump off said platform into a pile of cardboard boxes, which he did, and he survived. It made an impression on me- I love stuff like that. Not people standing on tall pillars for days on end, but stuff like using an absolutely pedestrian object in a novel and innovative way. I've stuffed my head full of almost useless things like that, which is probably why I can't remember other, more important things like birthdays and doctor's appointments.

So enter the Mystery Block. As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I'm not much of a builder but I am fascinated by building and how things are built and all that builder stuff. One thing I've learned about how they build things here is that there are ways to wed concrete with other materials, some of which are better than others. I watched my brother-in-law install a door-frame once, and he took a whole bunch of nails and banged them around the edges, about a half inch in, intentionally bending them over in the middle. It looked crazy.

Do you see where this is headed?

Those nails are the perfect thing to embed in wet concrete, and once that concrete dries, the wooden object ain't going anywhere. It's much much stronger than trying to secure something with masonry anchors, especially if the wall in question is old and crumbly like mine are.

So after the TV fell off the wall, the pedreiro carved a hole in the wall, prepared a block very similar to the one in the photo above, and cemented it into the wall. After it was dry and the wall was all fixed up again, he drilled some holes in the face of the block and bolted the TV bracket to it. The TV never fell again, but I never entirely trusted it either- I always kept a dresser or other item of furniture underneath it so no children or other humans would happen to be under it in case it decided to come loose again.

When we moved to our new room, I had to repeat the whole operation with a new block of wood, and that's what the mystery object is. Despite its clumsy appearance, I spent some time preparing it- figuring out where to put the nails so they wouldn't interfere with the lag bolts, and pre-drilling holes for all the nails. This kind of wood is called massaranduba; it's super strong and dense and termites don't like it, but it will split if you nail into it willy nilly.

So Fabio, you were right, it is a kind of hanger, it's for hanging a TV support from so the TV won't fall on the floor.

I hope, dear readers, that that was worth the wait.

Last Chance...

2010-03-13T15:59:00.001-08:00

I've gotten some good guesses as to what this mysterious object is on my last post:

This is it- last chance!

A couple more hints:

Once properly installed (which it now is) it disappeared.
The black rubber ring around the nail in the center of the image is not essential to its function, nor does it interfere.
The object does not sit on the ground as shown in the photo above.

Have at it folks! Isn't this fun? Well, it is for me at least.

What Doth My Blog Bringeth Today?

2010-03-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

I keep waiting to 'get discovered' via this blog, or some other aspect of my robust online presence. This is silly, because I don't do anything to promote myself other than the most basic stuff. Occasionally I do get to meet interesting people, and then I get the odd nibble, like the aforementioned reality show. I was all coy about what this was about, but beans, they spilleth now: it was some house buying show, international version, where they follow people around looking for houses. Since I've been a homeowner for five years I didn't exactly qualify, and they didn't exactly offer to buy me a new house, so ixnay on atthay.

Then a few days ago I got this enticing tidbit in my inbox:

I am trying to get a hold of you to see if you wish to accept the award for winning the 2010 TA Expat writing contest. I am not sure if my emails are falling into your spam folder or if you are not interested in the $500.

Well, sure I'm interested in the five hundred dollars! Unfortunately they wanted to give it to someone else. At least I only had to read the next email in my inbox to have the nascent bubble burst.

Okay. So today I get this, submitted via my website:

Oi, markuza, Sou produtora de TV, e queria conversar com vc sobre a possibilidade de uma participação sua num programa. Vc me manda seu telefone? O meu é xxxx xxxx. Aguardo seu contato, abraço!

I just read how Google robusticized its online translator, so I decided to run it through and see what I got (not that I couldn't read it on my own):

Hi, markuza, I am TV producer, and wanted to talk with you about the possibility of its participation in a program. You let me have your phone? Mine is xxxx xxxx. I await your touch, hug!

Not bad, except for the amusing last sentence. A faithful translation, but somehow the meaning got skewed... As the NY Times article mentioned, human translators need not fear the breadline just yet.

So what? Third time's a charm? I am seriously considering not publishing this yet so I don't jinx myself, but I'm not superstitious, am I? No, of course not! I'm going to publish it anyways, as in all likelihood this is as far as it's gonna go.

So I know I promised to tell you what this is in my last post:

And I will. But it might take a couple more days. Any guesses? Here's another hint: it is functional-face-down in this picture. And it is not a kluge.

The Grand Shuffle

2010-03-06T18:46:00.001-08:00

After weeks of work and moving things from one place to another, I finally have a home office again. Only one problem: I have a zit on my ass so big that I can't sit comfortably in a chair.

I've been trying to write a post for some time- first I took a couple stabs at writing about my new Kindle, but I couldn't get it to come together. I wrote something yesterday but it was way too personal so I won't publish it. This is, after all, the Internet. Instead I've decided to write about something which I can shout from the rooftops, which is the aforementioned ZIT.

Actually, it's not a zit. In Portuguese it would be called a furúnculo, or furunco, and in English it would be called a boil. The doctor I saw at 7 AM this morning, when I couldn't take it anymore and went to the hospital, called it an abcess- a word I don't like very much. He also told me to go home and do exactly what my wife had instructed me until it ripens and is ready to blow.

The really weird thing is I have a second one on my neck, although the size of it pales in comparison. I've never had two of these beasts at the same time- I don't think I've had five in my entire lifetime.

I'll be much happier when they are gone.

So that was fun. Glad I got that off my chest. I didn't actually plan to write about that at all, but I did anyways. I could just stop now, and call it a post, and publish it, and go to bed early, and read from my new Kindle. But then I'd have to change the title and rework the cryptic first paragraph, so I'll proceed.

I moved around a lot as a kid. Every couple of years or so. Not that we generally went very far, for instance we lived in four different places in one small town. One time when I was in high school we moved from the first floor to the second floor of a house. I never considered this to be traumatic, although a couple of the early moves that I don't remember probably were. I used to actually enjoy it- I'd get to pack all my stuff up in boxes so I knew exactly what I had, vacate an old space and then set up a new one with all my junk. From the beginning of college until I moved into our current house I never lived in the same place for more than nine months, with only one exception, and that was for only two years.

I contrast this to my son's experience. He'll be five at the end of the month, and he's lived in the same house his whole life. Had the same room for all that time. And so have I, sleeping in the same bedroom for five whole years. The longest stretch of my entire life. Man did those years go fast.

As 2009 drew to a close, I was began preparing for some moving around. I decided to give up the office space I'd rented for two years, which meant moving out of there. I decided to create a workshop space at the back of our house, which required more in-house shuffling and some construction. I took another office space that was much cheaper, but then the building was sold and I gave it up after only one month, so I moved (very little) in and out of there. At Carnaval time I always vacate my home office so we can turn it into a 'dorm' and fill it up with travelers, and then after Carnaval I move back in, which is always a relief as I hate to be displaced. Evani sometimes complains to me that I shouldn't have a whole room in the house devoted just to my personal pursuits, manias, and oh yeah, work, but I'm not sure she really realizes just how key it is to maintaining my sanity.

Anyhow, this year we decided I wouldn't move back into my home office. Instead, our home office would become our bedroom, and vice-versa.

This turned out to be a much more involved task than I ever could have imagined, and it's a good thing that it coincided with a (hopefully temporary) slowdown in my workload, so I could apply myself properly. Evani wanted the room painted, no problem. I used to paint professionally, so I know how it's done. Only problem is, I'm very much of a perfectionist and it needed a lot of prep, so there was at least a week of extremely dusty conditions in the room. Then I opted to personalize one of the walls with some spray paint, an idea I've been kicking around for the last year or so. That also took some doing, even though I only ended up using two cans of paint. Finally, I opted to mix all my own colors from white paint and little bottles of color called biznagas (a marvelous word) in order to save some cash. This also ended up slowing things down quite a bit.

Along with the actual painting, I did way too much of moving things in and out of this room and that room and into the back where my workshop is mostly finished and in and out of the airshaft where we sometimes stick things until I finally got a wall completed in our new room and I could start moving things into their new 'permanent' positions. Most of what I own is still hopelessly jumbled and I spend a part of every day fuming as I try to track down random errant items.

I must say it was all much more traumatic than it used to be when I was younger. I didn't get any of the thrill I used to from packing things up and moving them around- maybe because I'm older, maybe because it took almost a month to get my desk set up again so I could escape the kitchen table. And I wasn't the only one. Evani told me one evening as I was finally wrapping things up that she had changed her mind, she was too accustomed to our old room and didn't want to move any longer. I wasn't prepared to stop at that point. The person who was most excited about the whole ordeal was Lucas, he enjoyed the whole process and really wanted to hang out and watch me paint, but I wouldn't let him as I only have one respirator and it was protecting my respiratory tract, something I've gotten very paranoid about. Which brings me back to the beginning of the story, remember the furunco? No, not that one- the one on my neck. That was caused by excessive respirator use. The other one, the one that has me sitting sideways on my chair? No idea what caused that one.

So I bet you're curious how the paint job came out- well, I'll show ya. Here's the best shot I could get of the new wall with the spray paint. Flowers and butterflies was what Evani requested, so that's what I did. It's only half finished, but it will have to do for now. Here it is:

After only a couple nights in our new room, I'm already feeling very good about our decision. We have moved from the eternal drama at the front of the house, with our loud and often drunk and fighting neighbors, to the relative quiet at the back of the house. I have also craftily isolated myself from much of the in-house TV racket, but more on that in my next post, when I will answer the question what the hell is this??

I'll give you one hint: it is not Lucas' latest carpentry project. It looks exactly what it's supposed to look like.

And what is this?

That, my friends, is a self-portrait made by an almost five-year-old boy.

Now I'm gonna go read on that Kindle.

Sunday is Street Art Day, Sometimes

2010-02-21T08:43:00.001-08:00

Today I went out and did some street art. I used spray paint, so I guess you could call it graffiti, but any self-respecting graffiti artist from the States would scoff and call it mere street art.

Whatever. It didn't come out that great, as I am woefully out of practice (this is my first painting of the year) and the way I painted it didn't allow for a lot of touch-up, but I was happy about a couple things.. First, it is in an extremely public spot here in the center of the city which is a kind of Mecca for the graffiteiros here- an old building at a major intersection that has been walled off with plywood and particle board for years- periodically the wood disintegrates and is replaced, and it gets painted all over again. The plywood was recently replaced, so I took advantage of one of these cycles. The other redeeming quality was a personal achievement on my part. Graffiti lends itself to working fast, and I've been trying to take advantage of this. I am a poky sloth-like perfectionist by nature, and I'm likely to spend hours noodling with picky details rather than calling it done and getting out of there. This time, I brought a beer along, opened it when I started, and as I was finishing up I still had beer in the can. Better yet, it was still relatively cold, despite the fact that I was in the full blast of the tropical sun. Kudos, Kuza! Too bad it was kinda sloppy.

So, as I have already mentioned (twice) the painting left me less than satisfied, but as always when I go out and paint something I had some interesting encounters as I was doing it. A number of people went by and made comments in the "cool!" "looks good!" vein, which is always gratifying. At one point I heard the chirp of a police siren, which was no big surprise as the spot sits right across the intersection from a large police station. A cop car, or viatura as they are called here, had pulled up with four or five military police in it and I debated stuffing all my cans in my bag and walking away. Then I figured I was already way too obvious to try to slink away at that point and plus, the painting would remain unfinished, so I went about my business. The cops had no interest in me as it turned out and a couple of them stuck by their viatura for much of my remaining time there. They may even have been watching my progress.

Later some young guy came up to me and t0ld me the painting was looking good. He stated that he was an artist himself and I asked him if he also worked on the street. He gave a vague kind of answer, or maybe I just didn't understand him, but it sounded like he was interested in doing so but never had. He asked: "There's no technique involved in doing work like this, is there?" and I, surprised, tried to disabuse him of this notion. In retrospect I can understand why he might have thought this, judging from my simplistic lines. Then he wanted to test out my paint, and I told him that not only was the paint mind bogglingly expensive, but no longer available here in Salvador, so he let it go and then went away.

I finished my painting and then did something I've been trying to get in the habit of when Ipaint stuff like this: step back, wipe my brain clean and look at the thing with fresh eyes to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. I hate getting home and looking at a photo of a piece and immediately noticing that I forgot to clean up a line or something simple. I noticed that the nostrils of one of my monsters looked like they were barely attached, so I decided to beef up the nose a bit. As I was doing this, someone started talking to me. It was a police officer, in a full camouflage uniform that is generally reserved for the Choque police, the badass special forces dudes- the ones who walk around during Carnaval with the oversized nightsticks. He asked me if what I was doing was authorized. He seemed kind of keyed up, like he was expecting trouble. I, learning from past mistakes, stated with glacial, Obama-esque calm, that it was indeed authorized. I told him graffiteiros had been painting there for years, which was true, unlike my previous statement. Whether it was authorized or not, I don't think the owner/owners really care if we go and paint their plywood, which is probably why I was able to summon such certainty. He didn't seem entirely convinced, and he said "Você sabe, né?", which literally means you know, right? but which I took to mean you know you shouldn't be doing that and you know I should be stopping you so don't be doing that if you aren't supposed to. I asked him if the plywood didn't look better with the painting on it, which was a pretty stupid thing to say to a police officer but it's what I believe so I said it. Apparently he was satisfied because he left me alone, so I spent thirty seconds finishing what I was doing and then I got the fuck out out of there.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm not going to post a photo of this latest artwork here. I'm happy that I snagged a sweet spot, but the truth is, there are a lot of sweet spots showing up around the city. The graffiti scene seems to be in a lull, maybe because the graffiti store has closed its doors, maybe because everyone's bored with it. I'm even happier that I broke my own lull, at least for one more Sunday, and left another little something for people to look at.

Carnaval 2010

2010-02-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

The biggest street party is in full swing and I just got finished preparing my BattleShorts™ for another assault on the crowds. Actually, preparing the BattleShorts™ is a purely defensive maneuver- it means I sewed the pockets shut with big Frankenstein stitches so nobody can put their hands in there. When we went out last night, I was almost immediately set upon by a couple of would-be pickpockets but I'm pretty used to it at this point, so nothing was lost. However, I can't stand having someone put their hands in my pockets even if they won't come away with anything, so I sew up the pockets and I don't have to worry about it.

I see my fellow english language bloggers here in Salvador have written some excellent posts on the topic- Akutyger wrote a great post about Abadas, and the ones in her photos are some of the most sought after items available in the huge multi-million dollar production that is Carnaval.

Aside from what I wrote in the first paragraph, I'm not going to say anything else about the down side of Carnaval- it's been written about far too much and ignores the reality that millions of people have an absolutely fantastic time and nothing bad happens to them.

But I'll tell you what I like about Carnaval- I like that we get a bunch of international visitors who I can converse with in my native tongue. I like that our local friends and Evani's family come to stay with us for parts or all of the week. I like being able to walk the short distance to watch as much of Carnaval as I want, and I like that I can walk back to the house and relax whenever I want. I think our guests enjoy this as well. Far from not sleeping for a whole week, I think the people who stay with us get as much sleep as they want.

I also like taking Lucas out with me on the first days of Carnaval, or early in the day, when tons of parents go out with their kids to Pelourinho, painting faces and buying flashing toys and popcorn and soda. Lucas and his little cousin got some flashing fuzzy bunny ears the night before last. Now the two of them are off at her mother's house, giving us a little break and a chance to enjoy ourselves without worrying about him.

Another thing I really like about Carnaval is that it is entirely democratic. Yes, it can be insanely expensive if you have the money to spend, but it also can be enjoyed for next to nothing, as long as you have a place to sleep. For a lot of Brazilians that place is a sidewalk for a few hours at a stretch; not for me, but I'm spoiled rotten. And everyone has a chance to make some money if they are willing to work for it.

And hats off to the performers- I will never cease to be amazed at their stamina, putting on four to six hour non-stop concerts often in the heat of the day.

My wife is being a real trooper with her foot, trying hard not to overdo it, but also getting out there for a while every day to enjoy herself. She's getting ready to go out shortly, and I'll be going with her: her all prettied up and looking good, me in my nasty old Frankenstein BattleShorts™ and a soon-to-be sweaty t-shirt... sigh.

Time to suit up!

The End of Carnaval

2010-02-06T17:19:00.001-08:00

Carnaval begins on Thursday. My wife's birthday falls on the day before Carnaval this year. My wife is one of these Bahianas that lives for Carnaval- it's her favorite time of the year, and she spends every day, and every night, out on the street partying and taking advantage of what is the largest street party in the world. She has every night planned out- where she's going to be, what band, or bands, she wants to hear, who's she going to be with.

These plans were rapidly coming together when this morning they all went to hell. I was just getting out of an ill-planned Saturday morning pre-school-year parent/teacher meeting when I got a call from my stepson- Evani needed to go to the hospital. She'd fallen down on the stairs and cut her foot.

I instantly dropped all my planned back-to-school post-meeting shopping and dashed back to the house. She had a deep cut between her big toe and her... next biggest toe... does that toe have a name? The pointer toe? As well as being concerned I was also confused as to how she'd managed to cut herself in that way on the stairs, and although there was a fair amount of blood on the stairs where she'd stepped after cutting herself I couldn't find any bloody edge where the cutting would have occurred.

A bit confused about where to go as we have a relatively new health plan and haven't used it for emergency room visits, we spent most of an hour in the car trying to get her treated. Luckily she wasn't in much pain. Traffic is bad here at the best of times, but now with Carnaval looming it is worse. This city takes a whole month to get prepared logistically for Carnaval, and all those preparations are now in high gear- parks are getting walled off, huge bleachers are being erected, and temporary structures abound wherever there is an open stretch of pavement. These include police stations complete with little cages to lock drunk violent people into, fire stations, medical stations, etc.

When we finally made it to the hospital we were confronted by a sign reading "Emergency room very full. Expect to wait a long time." Or something to that effect. As I was getting ready to settle in for the long wait, we discovered we were in the wrong place: we needed to go down the hill to the orthopedics department. We climbed back in the car, didn't have to pay for parking as we'd only been there for five minutes, and drove down the hill. Hmm- free parking space out front. Hmm- virtually empty waiting room. Hmmmmm five minute wait and we're already talking to the doctor! He orders an x-ray and Evani is done so quickly I can't believe it. No broken bones, and he takes her off to clean out the wound and stitch it up if necessary, while I wait with Lucas. It was necessary- three stitches. He also solves the mystery of how she got cut- turns out she didn't. When she fell her toe got caught in the railing and was pulled so violently to the side that it actually tore the skin between her toes. We got out of there in less than an hour, and I joked that she was lucky she hurt her foot and not some other part of her body.

When she fell, the first thing Ruan my stepson said was acabou Carnaval, or 'Carnaval is over'. Then he wanted to know why she wasn't crying. Lucas apparently laughed. Evani is not laughing, but neither is she crying. She's had some bad luck at Carnaval time, a couple years ago she got a very nasty stomach thing that pretty much did her in for the whole week. When we got in to talk to the doctor, one of the first things I said was "She wants to know if she can pular Carnaval." Pular means 'to jump' and they do a lot of jumping during Carnaval- the musicians are always exhorting everyone to sair do chão, or 'leave the ground.' Turns out Evani won't be doing much of that this year. She should be able to do a low-key Carnaval, finding a quiet spot to watch where nobody is likely to step on her feet. There are these elaborate platformed structures called Camarotes which put you at the level of the musicians on the sound trucks - some of them even have clubs and internet access and I even heard of one with a pool inside- she can do that. But no six hour slogs behind a trio this year.

I told her think of how much money you'll save! Participating in a bloco, and doing that six hour slog, can cost upwards of a hundred dollars, and if you do it several times during the week, it can get very expensive.

She's taking it surprisingly well.

So that's how my day got turned on its head today. I've been wanting to write a post, or posts, on any of a myriad of topics that have nothing to do with injuries. And I actually did so. But I'm not going to piggy-back it on this post, I'm going to give it its very own post, and I'm going to publish it tomorrow, or the day after, to maintain the illusion that I actually maintain this blog.

Defeat

2010-01-19T18:44:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here stunned and deflated by what just happened in Massachusetts- the upset Republican victory there. For anyone who hasn't been following the health care debate and the grim fiasco that is American politics this post might not make much sense.

To think that this means more of the same bullshit in health care- people losing their homes and their life savings, having their insurance cut off when they most need it- to have reform turned back at the eleventh hour- it makes me sick. The extreme irony of the situation, Ted Kennedy's seat lost to a Republican, feels like a kick in the stomach. I didn't love the health plan, and I hated the way it was crafted, but the American health system is evil and prehistoric and has to change.

Of course, the Brazilian health care system isn't exactly what I would call a model for reform...

And it makes me really sad that this is a big thumbs down for Obama, not so much because of who he is personally but what he means, and what he stands for.

I should also mention that this was an election that I could, and did, participate in as I am a registered voter in Massachusetts. It didn't help.

For anyone who reads this who might be Republican, I don't hate you, I don't even want to argue with you. Let's not talk politics at all. I hate the state that US politics is in, the divisiveness, the bitterness- I hate it. But I see very little hope for change and more arguing isn't going to help.

I may have to rethink the whining I do on this blog about the dysfunction of Brazilian government if the situation in the US continues to be such an ugly mess itself.

Well, I guess it just goes to show... it was assumed by everyone that the senate seat was safe in Democratic hands; and as they say: to "assume" makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me." Especially me.

P.S. vitriolic partisan comments, on either side of the issue, will not be posted. There's about a million other places you can leave them.

Noisy Bars and Disfunctional Agencies

2010-01-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

The bar got loud tonight.

It often gets loud, but today is Monday, and it was pretty freakin' loud at 11 PM. Usually I let them be loud and try to ignore them, at least on weekends, but today I complained.

When I lived in the States and played in bands we used to have the cops show up on a semi-regular basis to make us stop. That's what you do in the states: you call the cops. Kind of like the cops give out parking and speeding tickets, and generally deal with things that go wrong. Unless you have a medical emergency or a fire, you call the cops, right?

Not here in Brazil. First of all there are two 'cops': the military cops and the civilian cops. I'm still not exactly sure what the difference is, except there are a lot more military cops than civilian cops, and if you get in a fight or someone steals your license plates you need to go to the civilian cops.

But you don't bother either of those guys if the issue is traffic related: then you have to rely on a separate agency known as 'SET,' whose fleet of cars will probably never pull you over, although they might write you a parking ticket. And if you have a noise complaint, you call an agency called SUCOM, which presumably stands for 'Quality of Life Assurance Department' or some such nonsense in Portuguese.

So I called these Sucom people at 11:15 and complained about the noise. The last time I did this, someone called me back an hour and a half later and asked me if the noise was still going on, and I told them yes, thanks for calling, could you come by now and tell them to stop? Now it is 1:40 and the noise has stopped, but it wasn't because Sucom showed up. It's because the party's over.

My friend who owned the graffiti store had a grand opening party when he opened his new store, with a sound system and a DJ and all that. At five minutes before 10 PM, which is when everyone is supposed to get quiet, Sucom marched up the stairs and tried to fine him 600 reis and take his equipment away. He managed to talk them down, telling them they hadn't bothered to wait until 10 PM.

And me? I'm waiting over two hours and nothing happens.

You know what the difference is between these two cases? Whoever complained about my friend's party had Clout. Connections. Tied in. And Sucom jumped to it. I don't have Clout, which means either they ignored my complaint or other people with Clout took precedence over me and I fell off the bottom of the list. Same result.

At least the drunk noisy bastards have opted to go to sleep. But if the bar gets noisy on a weeknight I will complain again, be sure of it.

As We Hurtle Into Year Three

2010-01-16T15:16:00.000-08:00

The People have been clamouring for an update... well, one person did, so I figure I better get off my duff and write something. I actually started a New Year's Day post and never published it, here's an excerpt:

Well, here it is, a brand new year, and like so many folks I went and tarnished it right off. Not badly tarnished, but I am feeling slightly less than well and have nobody to blame but myself. We spent the evening on one beach last night where I got surprisingly drunk from drinking a surprisingly small amount of alcohol, which I suppose is better than the alternative. Today we went to a different beach, where I got a bit overexposed but less inebriated. Evani was very happy about that as she usually...

Yeah, yeah, you get the idea. I went on to mention that I started this blog two years ago on New Year's day and if you don't believe me read it yourself.

So much has happened and things have been so chaotic that I think I'll just do short summaries to cover the salient points.

Construction

One thing I managed to complete was the shed roof my even-more-slacker-than-myself brother-in-law started but wasn't man enough to finish. I, apparently, was man enough, even though it took me forever as I did it in staggered bursts of an hour or two every three or four days over a period of several weeks. But it came out great!

This shed roof is part of my current grand scheme to create a most tiny workshop space where we used to hang our clothes to dry, and also to save my plants from their micro-climate hell of extreme heat and rain. Now the clothes can dry under the new roof, and the plants won't be so hot and/or wet anymore. Here's where my mini-workshop will be, it used to be roofed with transparent fiberglass panels, but I swapped them out myself, painted white for climate control:

When we started that project, I realized I really had to get a beam that was holding up an extremely heavy brick wall replaced, as its been cracking and looking dubious for a couple years now, so we got the only brother of Evani's who is worth his salt to do that. He 'finished' today, and I was a bit surprised that he also decided not to do the acabamento, or the finishing work. He said that was up to us. Well, at least he told us, instead of not showing up when he said he would like the other brother.

The Package

My Mom sent us a holiday package on December 5, express mail, which should have arrived in five business days. It got here on Monday, 24 business days later. At least it got here, I'd completely given up hope.

School Vacation

Poor kids. It's their vacation, and I'm broke, as usual, and scattered, also as usual, so they sit around doing nothing all day. Well, Ruan watches TV all day, which is all he does anyways, and Lucas bugs me all day to play with him, which makes me more scattered and more broke since I can't get any work done.

Old Office, New Office

I've traded in the office space I've had since I started this blog for a dusty room in a big, old house a couple of streets over. It doesn't have its own bathroom but it's a lot cheaper, and closer, and not on the 6th (that's 7th for those of you Stateside) floor. In addition to a stripping down of amenities, my internet velocity is reduced tenfold- let's hope that's not a problem. It should also be a more social situation as the neighbors are a non-profit where my Welsh friends work. We will share this internet connection (conceivably reducing my velocity twentyfold) as well as a pair of french doors. Also, the other tenant in the building is a silkscreener, who might finally be able to help me get the kinks worked out of my much stalled screenprinting career.

Tired, So Tired...

I'm always tired. Always have been, since I was a kid. Not just that I like to sleep, which I do, but I never seem to have any energy. I can work hard for a few hours but it decimates me and I'm worthless afterwards. This last week has been particularly bad. Wednesday was the Lavagem de Bonfim, a huge party here in the city and a guaranteed full day under the scorching sun. I don't know why it never rains on this day. I usually go, and usually enjoy it, but the kids weren't home, Evani set out early, and I couldn't get myself out of bed. The thought of spending eight hours walking ten kilometers in the heat of the day without a cloud in the sky just couldn't compare to the pleasures of staying in bed and sleeping as long as I wanted.

I discovered I wrote a post about these two topics two years ago...

Just for the record when I started this blog, I didn't really do it with the intention of anybody reading it. I just thought it would be a good way to keep a record of what I see as a particularly weird chapter of my life. Two years later, I don't have a huge readership, but I've had a lot of interesting contacts and such as a result of maintaining it. Not least of which was...

The Reality Show

I was contacted a week or so ago by a casting agent for a reality show. I'm not really into reality shows, seeing as how I kinda hate television as a rule, but I figured what the hell and inquired for more details. It would have been an interesting experience, but I didn't qualify, which is probably for the best.

And no, I won't tell you what reality show it was, but I assure you you've never heard of it.

Street Art

Ain't happening. The best I've been able to manage are a few drawings with my new big markers, like this one I did on New Year's Day:

My Online Store

Also not yet happening, but close, so close!! I made a big push in December to finish it but I couldn't pull it together and now I'm scattered and distracted again.

And finally...

Egg Hunt

Lucas saw a picture of us painting Easter Eggs last year and announced that he wanted to paint some more. I told him Easter is months away and no, I wasn't going to paint any eggs that evening, in fact we didn't have any eggs to paint. Lucas said no problem let's just draw some eggs and I thought that was an excellent idea. So we drew some eggs on paper and cut them out and then had some Easter Egg hunts in the house. It was kinda fun.

So, looking this over, even though it feels like I never do anything, passing my days in a fog of semi-consciousness, apparently some things do happen in spite of myself. Here's to many more things in 2010!

The Goldman Case

2009-12-30T17:01:00.000-08:00

One thing I wanted to write about before I got sidetracked by the unexpected death of our friend was this whole Sean Goldman case, at least to say thank goodness the guy got his kid back! I don't plan to dwell on it for long as I think most of everything that can possibly be said about the case already has, but I did want to say that my heart goes out to the kid. I mean, he got yanked away from the family he's known for the past five years on Christmas Eve, and unless Sean's stepdad was a real-life Vernon Dursley, that's got to suck. And he's got a tough road ahead getting used to what is essentially a new culture, a new language, a new climate... not that it ever should have gotten to the point where it was a new culture for him, all over again.

My mother asked me how my wife felt about the whole ordeal, as she watches the news religiously and has been following the story. I thought that she was pretty sympathetic to the father's point of view, but it turns out I hadn't asked the right questions because when the subject came up on Christmas Eve I discovered that she wasn't as sympathetic as I thought. I won't go into any more detail than that.

Which brings me to the last point I'm going to make about this, which relates to the differing media coverage of the story. I must confess I get most of my news from U.S. news sources, and (for better or worse) that includes my news about Brazil. I try watching stuff on TV and even though I've been here for eight years now I still only feel like I'm getting half the story. But it was very interesting to watch the two bits of video posted by Rio Gringa- one from MSNBC and one from Globo, the Brazilian super-news-and-entertainment conglomerate. As you might imagine, the one from the U.S. news source makes the Brazilian family look like evil incarnate, running the poor kid through a nightmare of cameras and reporters, despite efforts on the part of the Americans to make the transfer minimally traumatic. The clip from the Brazilian news source, in the form of a commentator's narrative over video of the Goldman's plane taking off, is much more sympathetic to the Brazilian family. It states that it was the Brazilians who wanted to make the hand-off mais suave, and there was no offer from the Americans, that all of their requests were ignored by the Americans. There's also an interesting bit about how Sean had promised to wear the same t-shirt for the whole journey, and if he was to get off the plane wearing a different shirt this was supposed to signal the family back in Brazil that things weren't going well for him.

I have no idea what he was wearing when he got off the plane. I'm not that obsessed with the story.

Obviously someone is lying about one of these versions of events. And I hate to say it, but I think the U.S. version is closer to the truth.

I could go on, but I won't. All I really wanted to say was congrats to David Goldman for persevering, and kudos to Rio Gringa for keeping the story alive and covering it so closely. And now let's hope the two Goldmans will fade into happy obscurity.

Ciro

2009-12-24T04:06:00.000-08:00

Today, December 24th, is the day we celebrate Christmas here. And sadly, the day has started off with a tragedy.

One of our neighbors, who everyone called Ciro even though that wasn't his real name, who we called Deu because he used to walk around yelling 'Celebredeu!' and Lucas could only say "Deu," has died. He was 34. Medics have been trying to resuscitate him for... too long... and have finally just given up.

Deu was one of our best friends here in our neighborhood. We invited him to our parties and we used to keep a bottle of ginger brandy in the house just for him. He was actually the very first person we had contact with here on the street, as he saw us looking at the for sale sign on the house we eventually bought and ran to get the son of the owner to show us the house. He worked in the little store a couple doors down and always brought us our bottled water, which is why we kept the brandy for him. He worked constantly, wheeling cases of beer all over the largo, and he was friends with everyone. He was a devoted Chicleteiro, a fan of the Axé band Chiclete com Banana.

He was loud and boisterous, and kind of a bobo, apparently content to work every day of the week and hardly ever going anywhere. We used to kid him that he was king of the street and he should run for mayor. He used to brag about how tough he was, but he never acted on it as far as we could tell. He loved Pagode, Bahian style, and we'd often hear him playing pandeiro (tambourine) in front of the house. Recently he started a relationship with an older woman who lives down the street who has a young son, who he's been taking around to swimming lessons and such.

His boss, the owner of the mercearia (a store that sells beverages and some food items) worked him ragged. Deu worked seven days a week and would even give up his month's vacation in exchange for an extra month's pay. He would open the store at 7:30 in the morning, close it at 8 PM, and sometimes he'd even open it after hours if someone needed a pack of cigarettes or a couple beers. It was clear that his boss took advantage of him, and he'll never be able to find someone to take his place. Apparently they've worked together for fifteen years. Evani doesn't agree with me that he was content to work this hard, and said that he resented missing out on events and so forth because he had to work, but he felt trapped and didn't know how to leave.

A siren woke Evani up this morning, and she went to the window to see what was happening. A crowd of about one hundred people were standing around, very quiet, and a rapid response vehicle was on the scene. They were trying to defibrillate him. I could see Deu's feet sticking out of the store where he spent all his time- apparently he opened the store, gave a yell, and fell to the ground, never to rise again.

At first we didn't know who it was, and Evani told me to go down and see what was happening. When we found out it was Deu, thanks to a neighbor who called up to us, I decided I didn't want to see him like that, didn't want to remember him like that. Ruan went down to look. Evani went down to look. Lucas wanted to go see too, but I wouldn't let him, something my wife dismissed as silly. She's been looking at dead bodies in the street since she was a little girl, but I don't want Lucas to have the same experience.

Apparently Deu hadn't been feeling well lately, and had been to the doctor and to have some tests run. They apparently didn't turn up anything. He ate an extremely heavy, fatty diet and drank quite a bit, but he wasn't a smoker and he'd given up hard liquor, for what it's worth. His mother also died young of heart failure, so he may have had inherited a bad heart from her. I doubt they'll do an autopsy so we will probably never know exactly what killed him.

There's an attitude here, I'm not sure if I could call it prevailing, that when your time is up you're gone. It's fate, it's the Lord calling you back. I've heard a couple people say that about Deu this morning. I don't agree. They all said the same thing about another friend of Evani's who backed off of a scaffolding: his time has come. My feeling was, if he'd been more careful, if he had used some additional precautions, his time wouldn't have come just then. Similarly if Deu had had access to better health care, if he'd been better informed, and if he'd paid more attention to his potentially genetic health problems, this might not have happened.

Not to mention it took the emergency crew most of an hour to arrive.

Tradition here is to bury the dead as soon as possible, none of this planning a funeral for a convenient weekend a couple weeks down the road. Apparently the funeral will be tomorrow, and we will go. I don't go to many funerals here, there are just too many of them, but I want to go to this one. Deu was a true friend.

Goodbye, Ciro. I'm sorry you left us so soon. We're going to miss you.

Infantil Cinco

2009-12-18T18:02:00.000-08:00

He passed!

Now, of course, I can't believe I ever had any doubt. Here is the pertinent bit of his 'report card':

Lucas has acquired the skills necessary to proceed to Infantil V.

'Infantil V' being preschool for the five year olds. Here's a couple other choice bits written by his teacher:

(Lucas) is a boy who is clever, communicative, and friends with everyone.

And from a list of things he 'always says':

"Teacher, will you sit next to me today?"

I could go on and on- the proud papa. I like how she says he is very creative with the art projects. She does mention that he has trouble with the numbers from one to ten.

Although tired, and with other stuff I should be doing, I roused myself to make the following short film of an absolutely delightful document they assembled for us at the school: it is eleven drawings, glued side-by-side, one from each month of the past year. I love how it shows his progression from simple lines and squiggles to fully colored pages. My apologies for the atrociously bad production, including the shadows and my feet- I did take the time to swap out the soundtrack for one of YouTube's authorized tunes- the first on the list of instrumental cuts. But hey- I kinda like it!