Birthday Post

Hi. Today is my birthday. It´s not a great reason to post, but it´s not a horrible one either. I don´t know how my birthday will go. It´s an hour old. So far, it´s involved me eating two bananas and microwaved heart-of-palm pizza while watching a Cowboys-Giants (American) Football Game. Dubbed in Portuguese. Which is interesting, because words like ´´fumble´´ and ´´tight end´´ and ´´Tony Romo´´ are spoken in English, and they´re pronounced with Southern twang . . . just barely detectable in the small time it takes to pronounce them. Were these announcers originally Paulistas (people from São Paulo) who were dragged to the Wild West just after achieving proficiency in their mother tongue? And, more importantly, is this observation gifted just to me, as one of the five people in Brazil who care enough about American Football to watch it? And isn´t this an auspicious way to start my 23rd year of life, or what?

I haven´t really talked to anyone since I turned 23, to be honest. So this is a new experience for both of us. I guess I should tell you about Brazil, about this huge sleek sprawling cosmopolitan city I´ve been sludging in the past few weeks. The most I can say is that São Paulo feels like a City of the World -- a huge throbbing mixture of people from disparate cultures colliding off one another. (It´s home to biggest population of Japanese people of any city outside Japan.) The office buildings are towering, the subways are clean and efficient, museums world-class (I went to one that had a massive exhibit dedicated to Brazil´s resident football god, Pelé, that seemed at times to want to mimic the sanctity of a Hindu temple). Yet behind it all . . . you still see construction workers laughing with each other on the streets as they eat their dust-tainted lunches, you see people in line having casual conversations with one another, you see the chain-store phone company salesman give a high-five to a returning customer. You don´t see strangers meeting and hanging out as they pass each other on the streets -- and my cousin Aldo is quick to say that there are plenty of nasty folk in the city, if you stay here long enough to find them --but São Paulo hasn´t gotten to where New York is, where most people think of the greater public strictly in transactional terms: Can I help you? What can I do for you? Please move along, thank you. No no no, there´s a value for human interaction I´ve found here, it´s valued enough that people seek it out and are open to it in situations that are surprising to me. It´s not something I saw in Buenos Aires, or in Lima, or in Quito . . . so I´m hesitant to say it´s South America. It must be Brazilian, then. Whatever it is, it is lovely to see.

And I can only see it, because I can´t speak Portuguese. I can tell my baby cousin Lucca to come here, and ask if everything is OK, and say the equivalent of ´´cool´´. The rest is me speaking Spanish while trying to fit in some ´´OW`` and ´´AI´´ sounds, with every other vowel going through my nose. The way it sounds, though (when spoken correctly), is beautiful . . . it´s impossible not to speak even a little bit without singing it somewhat, as well as (for me) putting a little bit of swagger behind it. According to a CouchSurfing friend and his companions, my examples of this approximate how people speak in Rio de Janerio (which is where I´m headed later today to tick down my final days in South America). I can fake an awareness of how Spanish differs across the continent, but the truth is that Brazil is a whole different animal . . . and my desire to understand it is strongly undercut by my lack of time.

Do I want to come back here and learn Portuguese and burn off a nice chunk of my youth with these fabulous, gorgeous, open-minded and open-hearted people? Yes. Do I want to go back to a small city and teach English and push my Spanish up to fluency? Totally. Do I want to travel around alone, somewhere else in the world, like I did in Argentina? Have to. I don´t know, I think dreaming of doing something again, while you´re still in the act of doing it, can be poisonous . . . because the dream becomes a reason to ´´take it easy´´, to know that next time around it´ll be just right. And so you sleepwalk through the days, make checklists of what will be different come The Return . . . I think that the more vivid a dreamer is with what he does, the greater of a curse it can be on his physical course. Unless he can dream without attachment, dream independently of pride and gratification, dream for something greater than himself . . . dream so wildly that the possibility of reality actually paralleling it becomes funny, in the same way a baby laughs when he´s tickled without having the words or the experience to know why he´s laughing . . .

You know? Okay. Stories fade for me behind this curtain of feeling I´m twisted up in. I´m about to see my family again, love them intensely, then fall into that mild insanity that I know and love so well. I´ll sweat Jewishly. Then head north to the United Kingdom for a month in the middle of January, to make a close friend for the first time again. And somewhere in there I hope I´ll think upon my time on this continent, smile a bit, and give my experience a little bit of credit . . . before New York City demands my aggressive output of Something.