33 days in the US of A
or on how I still feel like a teenager on the verge of turning 30!
day 2
party, semi-inebriated, go to a bar, meet ex, glad to see him after 5 months, quite a bit indeed, chat, smoke a cigarette, ex invites me and entourage to his new place, ex says is happy to see me, cheerful mood at his place, laughter, chit-chat, some friends, go to the restroom on first floor, get out, wander around checking out new place, ex shows up, ex kisses me, WHAT?
days 3 through 6
send ex text for dinner or something. questioning many things, why the kiss, why did it feel good, was I not over it all, I was! ex does not reply, ex does not return calls, doesn’t ex want to talk or figure this out? feel pretty shitty! hate unresolved business, just want to get things sorted out, move forward, can’t seem to make it! feel disappointed. feel I deserved more after somewhat long time together. feel like something I would not do to anyone, especially someone I once cared for.
day 6
get a hold of ex in online chat, seems to be the only way to talk, hate it, but do it as it seems to be the only way to get things sorted out and move ahead. utterly annoying and disappointing chat. unfortunately it seems clear that friendship is no longer a possibility because respect is part of friendship. sad about it.
day 6, part 2
meet a new guy, go out for drinks, hit it off in the first minutes, chat for two hours over two jacks on the rocks, kiss in his car, go to his place, sex.
days 7 through 9
continue to go out with new guy, start developing infatuation, feels good, discovering a new person is my favorite part of life.
days 10 through 12
go down to DC, capitol hill, conference, drinks with friends in a really cool lounge, conference, conference, rain, calls to new guy, miss new guy! wow, how did this end up happening.
day 12
back to Pittsburgh, movie with new guy, interesting documentary, making out in car.
days 13 and 14
work, CMU, no meeting with new guy, strong need to be with him, for chat, for embrace, for sex, for comfort.
day 15
meet with new guy at cafe at the end of the afternoon and do some work together. sleep over. new guy reads me poetry in bed, Sylvia Plath and others. love it, really do, feels like sharing more than a bed. can’t really sleep much but I don’t care, same old problem when not sleeping alone. morning after walk home in the cold and somehow get the feeling that the previous night will not be repeated.
days 16 through 20
busy schedules and other reasons prevent meetings with new guy. activities go on with friends, good times.
day 21
movies with friends and new guy, nice intelligent comedy. kiss good night and go home. feels colder. well, what to expect from something that is bound to last at most three weeks?
days 22 through 28
continue busy drinking and dancing schedule with friends. new guy shows up a couple of times. one day in the end of the night we discuss why we should be friends (well, I’d say acquaintances, because friendship takes more time to build). arguments go against my personal point of view, according to which all pleasant moments should be fully enjoyed, event if the end is on the horizon. I accept the arguments, or better, it hurts to accept the arguments, but my principles dictate that I respect his desire. we see each other a couple more times, go see another movie, go out to a really nice dinner, enjoy time together as friends, but not without me feeling desire, will to embrace, kiss, or just touch. funny how I crave for physical contact, not necessarily sexual!!!! countless nights of drinking with friends culminate in an amazing last night.
day 29
fly to Philadelphia, meet with old friend, rainy weather, cold. end the afternoon at a dive bar, consuming 5 pitchers of beer. one of my friend’s current best friend shows up, nice chat, nice guy. the three of us have dinner, drink some more, end up heading to a drag show in some old bar, where we enjoy my friend’s permanent attempts to meet girls, even when drunk as a lord. head back to my friend’s place, he falls asleep on top of the couch. due to alcohol, for lack of better things to do, and certainly due to physical attraction, me and his other friend end up making out, heading to his house, having sex… next morning I take a cab back, and go wake my hungover friend up with a nice double latte!
day 30
enjoying philly. meet up with two friends driving from Pittsburgh, go out to a house party, then to a bar, then meet up with more friends, and end up at my friend’s place playing some old drinking game until no-one can actually walk anywhere and six people end up sleeping in a one-bedroom apartment!!
day 31
wandering around philly, countless coffees and countless interesting conversations about ethics, religion, politics, what is wrong with Portugal, European and American subjects, boobs, girls, etc. head down to south street for dinner at another of my friend’s friends with a really nice crowd, then head to a bar with a pop divas night party going on. 4 portuguese guys getting drunk and dancing and laughing, two of which unsuccessfully trying to pick up girls. GREAT time. 2am, bar closes, head back to another friend of a friend’s place, smoking pot, heading home, laughing, getting the munchies, laughing, getting pizza, laughing, eating at home, laughing. falling asleep among tears of laughter. another amazing drunken night.
day 32
4 hungover portuguese have lunch! then coffee, then two of them head back to Pittsburgh and the other two go home and chat randomly till they decide to cook dinner for a couple of friends. dinner is served and we head out to a MIKA concert. fun event, even thought the age average was 20yo. head back home, not without stopping for yet a couple more beers. bed
day 33
prepping to leave, lunch with my friend, cab to the airport, 8-hour flight to Frankfurt, 2 hour layover, 3-hour flight to Lisbon… where I am writing this. my sister will hopefully be waiting for me at the airport.
epilogue
time, new people, friends, physical attraction, reflection, redemption, disillusion, infatuation, excitement, hurt, sexual arousal, drunkenness, music, movies, trips, new places, loss
a great deal of new, a fair share of exciting, condensed in one month, just what I needed after what was likely the worst summer of my life!
granted, I haven’t worked much in the last 33 days, perhaps the equivalent of 15 days, but then again I haven’t had vacation in over 1 year, and, quoting a great tv miniseries “It was an emotional emergency”
back to lisbon quite tired physically, fatter, stinking from close to 15 hours on planes and airports, but feeling like working and evolving, and more convinced than ever before that Europe is where I belong!
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and I fell
again, though I haven’t many times in the past
I fell in love, I guess,
I care for someone, I care for him a lot
I was not expecting to, I actually feel like a teenager
in the limited time I have to concede to meeting someone new
out of chance, and out of being lonelier than I had ever been in my life
I opened to meeting someone who, against each and every odd, touched me deep
I don’t know if we’d break up in two weeks, or two days
I just know I would love to find out, I really would
Throughout the almost thirty years of my life, I never really let myself go
afraid of what others might think at first
afraid that on the other side there was no more than a mere one-night infatuation
I think I never really opened to anyone
I am so full of myself
always thinking I know what’s good for me
always thinking I can make it alone throughout life
always thinking I can compensate for never having felt like making someone the center of my life
Well, deep down I am just like a child
I guess
longing for someone to devote to
to fight for
to reciprocate
to put down the mask and stop being cynical
to allow myself to be weak
to allow myself to depend on
to return to
the warmth of an end-of-day embrace
And I realize I don’t know this person
really!
and at the same time his warm caring voice makes me feel like confiding him with the darkest corners of my soul
letting him in, showing him my nightly face, or what’s concealed behind the “mr. sure I know it all” mask
but I cannot
I could live the next five days not caring for the remaining days in my unholy existence
but it is not only about me
I cannot go around shattering other people’s feelings
especially those I care for, or start to care for
I fall hard, but I know I can recover, I know what it takes
and in retrospect I know this will be another episode I will remember as having been alive, among the general numbness of my life
but it does hurt
how good is it to suffer today only to avoid suffering more tomorrow?
I don’t know, but rationally I do, yet, as much as I trust reason, I cannot help being in the realm of emotions
and deep down
loosing all filters
I just want to be in his arms for as long as I can before I have to go
I just want to feel his rough hands holding mine really tight
I just want to embrace him and feel his skin next to mine
feel his beard touching mine
hear his warm voice
and tell him that
here and now
there is nothing else I would rather do
than be here, now
but life happens!
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unfinished sympathy
or love
for a new body
a new mind or newly imagined figure
when desire makes all else fade
to the blurred background
and craving for a kiss makes the day go by
so slowly
twists and turns over imagined outcomes
none of which can ever be bright
and never would in any case
picturing what life would be if it weren’t what it is
keeps imagination alive
and a comfortably painful warmth
in the heart of those who love
or at least think they do
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clash
some people don’t realise their power
others don’t realise their weakness
and then one’s unsuspected power meets the other’s veiled weakness
…
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again
Butterflies up and down push words out of the mouth. Later a rush of blood due to an unexpected kiss. All come back again, perhaps stronger than before. Moments when reason fails to eclipse the turmoil of feelings, but prevents feeling without reservation. For memories of hurts past, of pleasures past, of happiness, sadness, or just life lived. For the fear of letting go and falling, for the uncertainty of knowing only that you can’t know. For imagining moments ahead. For craving the warmth of your lips, the touch of your skin, or the shine of happiness in your eyes. For selfishness but also for selflessness. Last time, at seventeen, with curiosity, expectation, and an insatiable thirst for l’avenir. And now, again.
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Long time no see
Amidst summer heat, excessive work, diminishing motivation and perhaps a latent need for love exchange, I find myself thinking of paths and possibilities. Both those that have been – or never have – as well as those who may come to be.
I think I need routine! As opposed to change. But change has been a routine in my life, so what I crave for is change. Unlike most people who develop a fear of change, I actually like it, seek it, and feel empty when it does not come by. It’s like thinking whether the grass will be greener on the other side, not resting while I don’t actually go there and find out.
This is probably all due to the fact that I will soon turn 30. While undertaking the required retrospect, I came to realize that I consider myself a pretty happy person. Nevertheless, more often than not I find myself thinking I could have been happier. Actually, more like thinking that I could’ve done more, met more, seen more, felt more, loved more. And while embedded in such delirium, I actually come to the conclusion that I cannot do, meet, see, and especially feel or love as intensely as I was able to in the past.
I am growing. I still think of myself as a 20-something well-behaved, yet somewhat reckless, guy. I guess I am not anymore. I am growing, but I am not sure I am becoming what I dreamt of myself. Perhaps irreversibly, I am growing… numb!
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On a plane
Over the last couple of years that I’ve been living in Pittsburgh, several people have asked me what is it that I find special about Lisbon, or Portugal. Conversely, whenever I go back to Portugal, people ask me whether I like where I live in the US.
Well, the answer to the first question has never been easy. Not because Lisbon, or Portugal lacks likeable things, but because I try to part from the typical clichés of saying that the weather is the best thing, or the beach. Indeed the sun is wonderful and so is the beach. For me, the weather is warm enough without getting unbearable during summer, and cold enough for a couple of fashionable jackets or raincoats without making you freeze after five minutes outside during winter. As for the beaches… well, they have sand, and salt water! I mean, the weather and the beach are just geographic conditions, which certainly influence the whole attire of the city/country, but that are not determinants of what there is to like about it.
I usually try to elaborate my answer a little more. Search for what makes me like Lisbon/Portugal so much. I mean, Portugal is where I was born and where I grew up, Lisbon is where I became a man, where I formed most of my personality and where I lived the most remarkable years of my life until now. When I first moved to Lisbon at the age of 17 I profoundly loathed the city: I was alone, did not know anyone around, was in the first year of college, had an apartment in a very (VERY) bad area a little outside the city, and most of all, had left my parents’ place and all of my friends. It was so, that in the second semester that year I decided to move back into my parents’ place and do the daily 1:30h trip to/from college. It was not until my second year in Lisbon that I fell for the city. That year I decided to rent a room in an apartment with 3 other guys, in an area of the city that would later become one of my favorites, at walking distance from college and from pretty much everything else you may want in life in your final teenagehood years. I lived there for three years, and those were three very good years of my life. Probably the period in which I changed the most in the shortest amount of time until now. Then, in my last year of college, I moved in with my sister and a couple of (then) friends to a rather interesting house in the historical part of the city, overseeing the river, and right next to the main nightlife area in Lisbon. Stayed for almost two years and had a blast, among other things, being able to literally drag myself drunk back home down the cobblestone sidewalks at 5 am. This was also a very important period of development at personal, social, sexual and intellectual levels, and when I finally started dating Lisbon: the initial infatuation had started to become more consistent and less childish, we would go out once in a while, already knowing much about each other, but still discovering a great deal in every date!
Well, then college was over and then came work and some months later another house and another part of town. Nice apartment, backyard, calm area of the city, central and relaxed. Work was interesting, I finally had money and I travelled a lot, Scandinavia, Canada, tour of Eastern Europe… The networks of friends and acquaintances were getting quite big, and with that the city was getting more interesting by the day. New projects, new ideas, decisions to make, I decided to go back to school for a masters, one year later decided to apply for a PhD, decided that I wanted to do research, quit my job, got my income cut down to one third and lived, the last year I was in Lisbon, the happiest year of my life. I was helplessly broke, I worked like crazy, I partied like crazy, I fell in love, I fell out of love, had unreachable peaks of happiness but also dark moments of profound sadness, had much sex, was never alone, could summon 20 people to go out with a couple of phone calls, knew the most interesting restaurants in town, knew where to go out at night, where to go out during the day, and how to truly enjoy the city of seven hills. Then I moved to Pittsburgh!
The little detour in the last couple of paragraphs serves three purposes. It shows how my relationship with the city evolved over the course of almost 10 years, it demonstrates the state of affairs that I talk about and that I mentally go back to when I talk about Lisbon to foreigners, and, mostly for myself, it invites the hypothesis that I left at the peak and that if I had stayed I would reach a plateau in the discovery and enjoyment of the city, possibly followed by a descent into the zone of familiarity and comfort (read: boredom) which I have always tried to avoid. All this to bring me back to my initial question “what is it that I find special about Lisbon?” and to why I have been giving the wrong answer to that question. I typically say that Lisbon is a great city because it has everything a minimally cosmopolitan/urbane person (my definition of this is rather peculiar, but I will leave it for a latter discussion) can wish for, while keeping its personality and traditions, but most of all, because it is a very easy city to live in. Depending on the interest of the interlocutor I then go through a bunch of small things that I fondly recall doing and enjoying in the city. Well, this answer is wrong, or better, it is not wrong per se, but it falls short in investigating the real causes of why I like Lisbon so much. The correct answer for now (which will likely change sometime in the future) is that I like Lisbon for two reasons: because it has likable aspects, but most of all because I learned to like those aspects. Being a little bolder in the judgment, I can perhaps say that I like Lisbon because it taught me to like it, and at the same time it taught me to like cities and to define the criteria according to which I evaluate all cities. Having come to this realization quite recently, I now wonder if this is a curse, and if it will prevent me from ever liking another city unless it is similar enough to Lisbon.
And thus we get to the second issue in this exposure: “do I like where I live in the US?”. And once again I have not been giving the most accurate answer. I answer the question with a very blatant and definite “NO”. After reading the above paragraphs, it is easy to put it all together and figure out why I don’t like Pittsburgh – very simply because it is not Lisbon! In fact, it could not be farther from Lisbon. This does not actually mean that the “NO” answer is wrong, it only means that more explanation is necessary.
The reason why I decided to write about this issue is because I am at this moment in a plane going back to Pittsburgh after a period of two and a half months in Lisbon. My dislike of Pittsburgh made me take active steps towards being able to finish the PhD somewhere else, and I made it and will be back in Lisbon from next January on until the end of the degree. But over the last two months I have found a Lisbon that is not what I remembered, either because the city changed or because I changed, it is now not as appealing to me as it once was. I still find it to be 100 times better than Pittsburgh, but an idea has been developing in my mind in the last times: that I should not go back and give up on the U.S. just because I had the misfortune of ending up in a small midwestern city!
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Tags: alex, lisbon, me, past, pittsburgh
Starting posts in english
Well, I guess I have a couple of people I may want to reach through this mean and that are only english speakers. I know, not everybody can be as versatile as the Portuguese, most of which speak at least two languages… unfortunately some of my english-speaking friends do not understand anything but their own native language (not to mention that very few people who were not born in an portuguese speaking country actually speak portuguese).
Having said (written) that, I justify my posting in english from now on (well, sporadically I may post in other languages) with the argument of accessibility to friends who are not fluent in portuguese.
BTW, out of curiosity, I went and checked (briefly = wikipedia) the ranking of languages with most native speakers. Portuguese comes in sixth, ahead of most other european languages and followed closely by Bengali and Russian.
While doing that I remembered a related matter, which is a couple of weeks old. I do question whether the portuguese speakers and writers from Portugal need to bring their orthography closer to that of their brazilian counterparts as now voted into law by the portuguese government. I have spoken and written portuguese all my life, even before the orthographic agreement of 1991, and honestly, I don’t see the need for a change of spelling. We do have mute consonants, and we often write stuff not quite the way we say them (come on, english speakers do too… “gauge”?), but that is the way it has always been and it is somewhat strange to introduce changes to a language by decree. I do believe sooner or later we would change the spelling naturally. I mean, no-one writes “pharmácia” anymore, and in 20 years probably no one would write “óptimo” anymore.
That said, I do believe languages should evolve naturally, and if portuguese from Portugal and portuguese from Brazil take distinct paths, then they will eventually become two distinct languages. By all means, nowadays Brazilians trying to understand a Portuguese speaking Portuguese are better off if the Portuguese writes it down; and the converse doesn’t happen only because Portuguese TV imports tens, or maybe hundreds of Brazilian shows and Portuguese people listen to even more Brazilian songs. Therefore, in its most natural expression, the spoken word, Portuguese from Portugal and from Brazil are close to being two distinct languages.
Maybe one day people from Portugal and from Brazil will communicate like chinese who speak cantonese and those who speak mandarin – in written.
Meanwhile, I have decided to start posting in english, now I need to decide whether I should send an email “publicizing” it to my american friends, or “publicising” it to my british friends!
Filed under: english/inglês, opinion | 2 Comments
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Dancing
A friend of mine sent me an email with a link to this video on the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
It made me feel a myriad of different things. And in the end, as suggested in the NASA comment, I had a smile in my lips. I could not help feeling a little jealous of all the traveling, feeling moved by the fact that people are dancing even in places where the political and socioeconomic situation is not one that would give me an urge to dance, and feeling amazed by the whole idea of someone making a movie with dorky dancing around the world.
At some point in the beginning of the video, I was wondering why it was posted in NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website, which traditionally displays pictures of outer space, or taken from outer space. This was after all a very earthly video, filmed on earth and with little technology (apart from the movie-making gear). However, as the film advanced, I started to get a feeling I recurrently have when I look at space pictures, or pictures taken from space: I started to feel small, even insignificant. This due to the beauty and grandeur of some places, or the sheer simplicity of others, and mostly to the diversity of the human species.
In seldom occasions throughout my days, I wonder whether I would be happier just packing a couple of stuff and parting on a no destination / no commitment / no money trip to nowhere in particular, only to discover the most I could and experience all, in all possible ways.
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Tags: dance, earth, people, pessoa, travel