there was a good man named paul revere/ i feel much better, baby, when you're near

what a week. and desculpe, i lied again. the weekend just did not afford me the time to go to a net cafe.

this week in brief:

the good
+ nighttime beach swims. we went again to the restuarant and beach on friday. it was wonderful beautiful and i felt like the newlY born horse that knows nothing and feels everything. all together wonderful great in the ocean in the dark.
+ the second reggae club. we went to this reggae thing on saturday night, a few of us americans with kavin and a bunch of brazilians. my family here thinks i'm really into reggae, hah. this club i liked a lot better than the other club. it had a different vibe, less commodification, more gratification (and black people... and pot). it was very chill, just a great night.
+ hanging out in the praça with people who live there, finally.
+ good food with good people
+ i had a few really interesting conversations with jair (my hostbro). we talk about politics and music and all kinds of things. and i do it all in portugues, which he says i am learning well.
+ i did a lot more stuff in general this past week, stayed active and social, etc.
+ less mosquito bites! (i swear, we looked like we had chicken pox for a while.)

the bad
-my cell phone got stolen, on that beautiful perigroso beach, after our wonderful swim. it was weird. (i ended up knowing everything and feeling nothing.) there were so many of us, i don't know how the guy didn't take more / get stopped. i'm unfazed by it, it was just a cell phone. we're really lucky he didn't do or take more. what's more difficult is the awkward conversations about it i have to have with my family here -- a cell phone is really a lot to lose for them, but for me it's an inconvenience. i didn't even want to tell them and reveal how irresponsible with valuables i can be or whatever, although i know it happens all the time here (jair's phone was stolen, kavin's phone was stolen). the situation all around sucks.
-i've spent more time with americans in the past week than with brasilians. which is bad for learning portuguese and making new friends. yuck.
-i put a lot of interal pressure on myself to hang out with certain people or feel bad about not hanging out with more brasilians and that caused me to stress out too much. there was palpable tension. i like to create what i percieve to be awkward social situations. double yuck.
-that's also related to my hesitant portuguese, although i somehow find it my place to correct my fellow americans' portuguese. wtf.
-i'm not enough of a question asker, politically or socially. this makes me a horrible social justice student and a not friendly enough. yuckyuckyuck.
-i'm a horrible student otherwise -- behind in my journaling for the program, not doing any research, generally spacing out. wheeee. how did i ever get this far?
-there's no gay stuff going down. no one in the program is visibly out (i won't mention that i think someone's closeted...) (and i'm pretty ambiguous myself, as always), although i have talked about it a little with some people. the lgbtq community is hiding from me here, but it's not really a surprise; it can be pretty heterosexist here (just like anyandeverywhere else). overall, i'm feeling (reluctantly) hetero here. not that that's completely a horrible thing. just only kind of. (hahahaha)
-my fucking inbox is stuffed to the gills with shit i don't want to deal with. auuuugh. i hate email, i do, and the uselessness of 85% of my email is pushing me away from the other 15% i actually want (and should) participate in. sigh.

i should have started with the bad to end on the good. whatever. despite all of the negativity, i look very positively on the past week. and today's another week. i've been gone for almost a month, believe it or don't.

one of the last cds i listened to before i left was "totally hits," a compliation of 18 chart-topping hits of 1998. since then, LFO's "summer girls" is the song most likely to be stuck in my head at any given moment. i wake up wanting to tell someone "summertime girls are the kind i like/i stole your honey like i stole your bike." i ride the bus thinking, "when you take a sip you buzz like a hornet/billy shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets." i want to interrumpt conversations with "you love fun dip and cherry coke/i like the way you laugh when i tell a joke/when i met you i said 'my name is rich/ you look like a girl from abercrombie and fitch.'"
but of course, i can't. i doubt most people would understand what i'm saying (in portuguese or english). but i really, really want to.

oh, and i uploaded an album on facebook, but it's mostly of pictures from this summer. one of these days i'll put pictures on here. one of these days... straight to the moon!