How Many Ways to Say I Love You

Love is how you slice it. Photo courtesy of Claudia Midori.

The meat was sizzling on the grill. The men huddled round puffing at the flames and performing arcane rituals to minimize the smoke and maximize the heat. The women were in our kitchen pulling together some side dishes. Carrots were being grated. Collard greens were being chopped. Community news (i.e., gossip) was being shared.

I watched my friends slice the collard greens. It was a slow process—roll the greens into a tight bundle and shave off a tiny slice, then another—and for this many people it was going to take a while. After half an hour of slicing they still weren’t halfway through all the greens. Clearly this was a task in need of some modern improvements so I whipped out our chopping board (rare in the interior, purchased in Belo Horizonte) and chef’s knife and began to make a demonstration of my quick knife skills. The women shrieked. “NOOOO, Malvina!! It’s too thick!” What? Here I was doing some tidy julienne strips and it was too thick? I watched their technique again. Sure enough, their way reduced the collards to angel-hair fine shreds. It also took two women 45 minutes to prepare just that one dish. “Our men won’t eat it if it’s thicker,” they explained.

I surrendered to their technique and sat back to contemplate. Now, really, if their men had to prepare that meal I’m pretty sure that the thickness of the slices would rapidly become irrelevant. So what we had here was love at its finest. The women prepared this dish in all its back-breaking tedium because that’s the way their loved ones preferred it. No matter what. I thought about it, and decided that while I loved my husband he was going to have to settle for thicker collard greens from his American wife.

There’s a lot of love in Brazilian women’s work. Really, if it weren’t for love how would you stand ironing every last piece of clothing off the line? Preparing a meal for hours? Scrubbing and mopping floors almost daily? For a large family each of these undertakings is monumental. Only love will get you through.

There’s love in the flip-side as well. The husband whose hands ache with the weight of every market purchase—including the yucca, winter squash, and bundle of pineapples—so that she doesn’t have to. The care that men place in washing their car by hand twice a week so that their family can always step out in pride. Quietly, steadily working 60 hours per week to make ends meet. The treats brought home—avocados from a cousin, the watermelon from the street vendor, oranges from a friend’s orchard—for the delight of the children.

This is a land that barely knows greeting cards or wrapping paper. I am from a culture where present-giving is raised to a fine art, extending from the lovingly hand-made to the laboriously investigated and purchased. Where tradition suggests that when you return from a trip you bring a present of your adventures. Where children make endless drawings as gifts for their mothers. Where birthdays are celebrations of an individual, with a shower of trinkets and adulations. Here birthdays often pass nearly unnoticed, gifts are rare (that’s economics speaking), cards are sold on one rack in one store in town and are mostly for Valentine’s Day and weddings. Here love speaks another language.

My Portuguese is approaching passable. It’s this other language that is now tripping me up. I’m sure that my in-laws have done things to show they care that sailed through my radar; I just don’t know where to look. They are puzzled by my gestures, like bringing pie to a holiday dinner (c’mon, it’s homemade PIE, people!), because it doesn’t fit into theirs. It’s all unspoken. Where is the guidebook that will teach me this language?

How many ways can you count to say “I LOVE YOU”?

Pick Your Direction

photo courtesy of Phill Davy under a Creative Commons license.

“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” – The Dalai Lama

Did the Dalai Lama really say this?  Who cares.  Wise words, no matter who said them.

I love to travel. At the same time I put down deep, deep roots everywhere I live.  Every so often I’ve also got to GO, GET OUT, EXPLORE. GO SOMEPLACE NEW.  It’s an odd tension–stay and go–and I like to think it balances me out.

Travel is marvelous. It opens the mind and blows away the cobwebs. It helps you to see the familiar–including yourself–in an all new light.

Here’s the thing. I find that you don’t have to go far to travel. As much as I love to wander, my life hasn’t always been set up in such a way that just running off to Australia is a workable option.  But there’s lots of things you can do right at home.  Maybe it’s discovering new route home. You could visit your local soup kitchen to share a cup of coffee with a stranger. Or go to an event that takes you outside your usual social circle. I once went to an outdoor adventure film festival; here I had I thought I was the outdooring type but I discovered an entire auditorium of people in our small town all interested in the same thing, not a single one of whom I had ever met! I was astounded and it taught me an important lesson about taking your surroundings for granted.

Maybe the travel is to a different place in your mind. Maybe you make the decision for one day–just one day–assume that the reason that everyone is cranky is because they ran out of coffee that morning or because their shoes are too tight, not because of anything you did. Or that for one day–just one day–you withhold all judgment whatsoever. Let whatever Greater That Be figure it all out later.

Once a year, go someplace new. Let it stretch your mind. I like this resolution; since reading this I’m working on my list of a physical and mental place to try.  So where will you go?

Fotocrônica: Pattern Mixing

I don’t know about you, but I love me the occasional fashion blog.  It’s the girly-girl in me.  I like them even more than fashion magazines because they’re the voices of normal women, not style editors.  In any case, they’ve all–fashion blogs and magazines–been in a tizzy for the last year or two about the lastest fashion must-do: pattern mixing.  It’s bold, it’s daring.  It’s adventurous and trend-setting.  Do you have the courage to try, they all ask?

Maybe it’s just me but every time I look at a pattern-mixed outfit I can’t help but think that it’s nothing new at all.  Every latin-american grandmother I have ever met has been doing it for decades.  Your shirt and skirt have two colors in common?  Voila–you’ve got an outfit.  Here’s a classic specimen (right), just to prove my point.

I tried to find a few more examples to round out a whole Brazilian street fashion shoot for you, but of course when you’re looking for something it’s nowhere to be found. Definitely the week after I post this the Grandmas will all be back in full force, of that I’m sure.

Something New Every Day

You learn something new every day.  In particular I love how life often decides to give you a crash course in one subject or another.  I love it even more when the lessons fly hard and fast one after another.

My latest lesson in humility: Over the past weeks I offered up a few of my outside observations on the Belo Horizonte graffiti scene. In retrospect, I think Life wanted to show me that I’m in no way an expert on all this.  When I was wandering Belo Horizonte I was floored in particular by the number of tags, the crazy high-up locations and a new hieroglyphic type of writing that my untrained eyes couldn’t decipher. I was so surprised last week when I logged into Netflix (which came to Brazil last year–yay!) and stumbled across this movie Pixo.  Even if you don’t speak Portuguese, I really recommend watching it for a little bit because the risks those kids take to tag the way they do is absolutely jaw-dropping.

My questions were answered.  It seems that in Brazil “tagging”–and in particular that new (actually just new to me–see? mmm…tasty humble pie; it has actually existed in Brazil since the 1960′s) type of hieroglyphic lettering–is called pixação (tag=pixo).

And more questions grew in their place.  All the resources I read on the internet in Portuguese–and even this movie–insist that  pixação is somehow different from grafite, which in Brazilian Portuguese it seems is the word for the works done by graffiti artists. Even though they say that the two are different, it’s interesting to me that it seems the dynamic and tensions are the same as in the United States.  Taggers/pixadores tend to work in gangs or “crews” and their works are more aggressive and territorial. They seem to have the same motivation: tag as high and as often as possible so that the rich cannot ignore the presence of the poor.  Graffiti artists, many of them once taggers/pixadores themselves, focus more on the aesthetic image and artistic expression.

So what I find fascinating–and a little sad–is that Brazilian graffiti culture itself seems to support this division, even though both forms lend themselves to righteous discussions of identity, fine art, free expression, class politics, and public/private space.  In contrast, I think that most artists and taggers in the United States would tell you that the two expressions and subcultures are part of the same whole.  Wouldn’t it be great if Brazilian artists also joined forces this way?

Why the difference between the two countries? I don’t know.  Is it because the Brazilian government has in many ways sanctioned grafite as an urban art form, providing legal places to do the art and even in some cases commissioning artists?  Is it the intense aggression that seems to be within the pixação culture that causes it to reject its more pacific brother? Or maybe (humble pie) I just haven’t read the right stuff yet and they really are working together?

My mind leaps to comparisons between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960′s.  Two men with the same goals: the elevation and independence of the African-American community in the United States.  One was viewed as intense, violent, and threatening, the other lauded as a prophet and saint.  Two faces of the same coin.  Two ways of fighting to be heard.  Two, equally legitimate reactions to generations of oppression and hardship.  Both were right.

Hygge-Happiness

Have you heard of the Danish idea of hygge (hue-gah)?  Alex Beauchamp explains it this way:

The Danish word hygge (hue-gah) is a feeling or mood that comes from taking genuine pleasure in making ordinary everyday things simply extraordinary; whether it’s using real lights on a Christmas tree or breaking out the good wine when friends come over. It’s about owning things you only truly love or that inspire, being present in yourself and your life, putting effort into your home without being Martha Stewart or buying a bed in a bag. It’s also about being conscious and authentic from home to work to friends to celebrations and making all events {no matter how big or small, mundane or exciting} matter.

My husband and I spend a lot of time kvetching about all the things we can’t get our hands on in our rural town. How expensive all those things are that we can buy, how frustrating it is to have limited resources.  But as I wandered the downtown streets of Belo Horizonte, a shopper’s paradise, I realized that for the most part I don’t miss it. Sure, I´ll went home with a few key items (like a rural phone with a modem so that hopefully it will be easier to talk/write to you all), but for the most part I don’t want all the stuff. Moreover, I don’t want the temptation.

It’s so easy to wander into a store and get caught up in the “if I just have X, I´ll be so much happier” bug. Even if that store is just Goodwill. I like that our house has just the furniture that we need, and not much else. For starters, it makes cleaning house that much easier (which is good, because Brazilians are a little crazy about clean–for a great discussions read the comments in this Eat Rio post).  Simple is easier on the eyes.  It´s much gentler on the pocket-book.  Simple makes space for other things.

I resolved a while ago–long before I ever decided to travel overseas–that I would be more deliberate with my purchases, buy things that were meant to last, invest in quality over quantity. Easier said than done in the United States, the consumer heartland.  Then I had to pack all those “carefully selected” items into a shipping box and I realized that I still had missed the mark somewhat. Carefully selected needed to be narrowed down even further.

Now that I´m here and that most everything needs to be replaced, hygge seems like a good idea. We could use a new sofa, and we have the cash for it but we´ll wait until we can select the hygge one, the one that matches our personal style and will last us (hopefully) through a few kids. There’s tons of pillows and a beautiful afghan on that current, patched couch because it’s not worth having a piece of furniture if it’s not welcoming and comfortable. Hygge for now. Our doormats are handmade durable cotton crochet, because with our Brazilian mud it’s gotta be washable and because utilitarian doesn’t have to be ugly.  Hygge. We’ll build some TV shelving from plaster moulding (my husband’s business) to make it look like the artsy design ones in the magazines that always inspired us. Hygge. We could have bought some new Christmas tree decorations, probably much lovelier than what I had but I hand-carried on the plane a selection of the ones my family has used for decades. To me they’re home and they’re beautifully hygge. Those same precious Christmas tree lights get pulled out to light the yard for parties, any party. Our friends are worth the celebration. Hygge. We say grace at dinner for the food from the garden and rains that makes the roads impassable and the cows fat. Hygge.

On the other hand, who has time to be deliberately celebratory about everything?  I think that someone could easily take the whole thing too far.  It’s exhausting to be present all the time, sometimes we just gotta check out and play Wii or watch Maru on the internet, but this: “taking genuine pleasure in making ordinary everyday things simply extraordinary”, THAT I adore and always hope to achieve.

What do you think of hygge and where does it show itself in your life?

5 Sweet Little Brazilian Lies

An important thing to know is that Brazilians have a flexible definition of the truth. White lies are social necessities; everyone knows that’s not true, everyone says it anyhow. This extends from the street corner all the way up to the highest levels of government.  So it’s got all sorts of implications, both good and bad.

I still don’t completely understand Brazilian politics, so I’ll leave that powder-keg alone.  But socially-speaking, it’s kinda like living in a louder, rowdier version of the Southern United States. White lies are used to smooth social interactions in this small town–after all you gotta live with these people for decades–and grease the wheels of society.  If you’re new to the culture (like me, from my tell-me-the-truth-until-it-hurts Northeastern United States upbringing), these little babies will trip you up. Once you settle in, you’ll be surprised to see them rolling off your tongue as well (I’m getting there).

So, click on the video below and let it play as a soundtrack as you read this short list of little social white lies.  Sing along everyone: “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies…”

1. “Eu passou lá a semana que vem.” (I´ll stop by your house next week.)
   Scenario: You meet a friend or casual acquaintance on the street. You chat. The conversation drags on. Oops! Turns out you suddenly have to be somewhere! But you’re not neglecting them, you´re going to stop by their house next week to visit. No one ever does, but everyone promises. Don’t feel bad, if they didn’t no one would ever be able to end a conversation.
   
2. “Sumiou!” (You disappeared!)
   Scenario: You see a good friend for the first time in a while. They exclaim: “You disappeared! Where have you been! Why haven’t you come to visit??” Odds are, they have busy lives too and they didn’t really notice that you were missing. I’ve had complete strangers accuse me of disappearing. And so maybe you haven’t been around to visit in a while.  Fact is, while maybe you’ve been out of touch so were they. The guilt is totally mutual, but it´s the Catholic way to pass that guilt along.  The important thing is that they want you to feel that you were missed; even if you weren’t.
3. “Está sedo!” (It´s still early!)
   Scenario: You are starting to leave. Your host will exclaim: “Don’t go! It´s still early!” Brazilians will say this at 10pm at night after you’ve been there for three hours and eaten every scrap of food in the house. It’s a culturally ingrained reflex (being a good host is very, very important to Brazilians), not an sign of whether they really want you to stay.
4. “Depois eu comprou de sua mão.” (I’ll buy [exclusively] from you later on.”)
   Scenario:  You know someone who owns a store or provides a service.  They hear from João who heard from Maria that you just got that same service/product from someone else, and begin to pressure you to shop at their store and/or grill you on why you didn’t buy from them.  Shop loyalty is hugely important in this small town.  It can make or break a business.  Quick!–give a vague excuse about why you didn’t buy from them and then say, “But next time I’ll buy from you, my friend, don’t worry.” Funny thing is as a market vendor I’ve witnessed people reflexively offer this excuse to me with absolutely no pressure at all.  I say “Hi,” and they reply that they’ll be back later to buy something.  I think it just slips out.  They’ve said it so many times they can’t help themselves.
5. “Onde está aquele café forte e gustoso?” (Where is that tasty, strong coffee that you serve?)
   Scenario: Someone comes to visit. You politely offer them coffee. It´s the best coffee they’ve ever had. So is the next household. It’s not personal, Brazilian coffee really is that universally good.

Fotocrônica: Political Graffiti

Recently I described my observations on Belo Horizonte’s graffiti scene.  I saved two photos for later because there is another sub-genre of graffiti that doesn’t fit into the general definitions I described in my first post.  Political graffiti is a category of its own, and is often done for different reasons than why someone would tag or create an artistic graffiti mural.

I didn’t see much political graffiti in most sections of Belo Horizonte that I visited.  However, in the favela next to the neighborhood where I was staying–Estrela d’Alva–these two graffiti stencils were everywhere.

Translation: “They are buying VOTES!” It is common for politicians seeking election to promise specific reforms to help people or in some cases even hand out small amounts of money to curry favor.

Translation: “Smile! You are being manipulated.” Brazil has three main television stations: Globo, SBT, and Rede Record. The dominant station is Globo (their trademark appears above). Most of the nation tunes in nightly for their news broadcast and nightly telenovelas; in many cases what appears on the Globo news is what people believe to be the truth–for better or worse.