Ritual and Guilt, Got Little Time for Either

 

Guilt is a bothersome thing, especially guilt over something that is neither mandatory or required.  Setting out on this move for Portugal I was cocksure that I would be able to set a routine incorporating writing every single day.  There was to be coffee, a bit of breakfast, (whatever I might conceive that to be), a brisk walk and then my ass in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.  Nope, it has not worked out that way.

 

When you retire, you don’t want to do the things that you “had” to do during your “productive” years.  Alarm clocks become anathema.  Rituals are disdained.  Feeling obligated is distasteful. So, the whole get up and walk, drink some joe and pound away at the keyboard thing isn’t quite as attractive as it sounded in the abstract.  Yes, to some degree writing is fun, but doing writing of any worth is also work. Work, blech!!! 

 

Oh, and the time just slips away so easily. My own time gets frittered away with trips to the hardware store mostly.  When you rent an apartment in Lisbon you get a plain vanilla box as we used to say in the construction attorney trade.  There are no major appliances, no furniture and no light fixtures.  Do the list in your head, beds, fridge, washing machine those are the lowest tier on the expat’s hierarchy of need.  Then comes scouting.  Where are the grocery stores, the markets, the laundries and the cheap places for a quick bite when you are exhausted from runs up and down the metro to get the perfect whatzit to do that thing you gotta do?

 

Once you get that stuff done then there is the language acquisition.  At night I listen to podcasts on words you need to know at the store, the restaurant and the doctor’s office.  These are matched up with simple verb forms.  Rolling one’s Rs is hard to do correctly. Hard?  It is really hard.

 

Occasionally there is the social outing.  On Sunday we went to the carnival parade in Loures. It started late, so what else is new here in Portugal?  And then it just kept going and going and ….  Men in drag, people dressed up consumes that ranged from cheerleaders to sailors to spools of thread marched around in a big square for hours.  Each blasting on a whistle or singing along to pop songs blasted through the whole town on ginormous speakers that would have given the Grateful Dead’s wall of sound a run for the money. 

 

Carnival is a big thing here. So big that Shrove Tuesday in Portugal was declared a holiday.  I don’t know whether it has been an annual tradition to declare Shrove Tuesday a holiday or if after multiple years of limiting the partying of carnival due to Covid-19 the country just wanted to let it loose.  

 

Finally, there are the disruptions from America.  Never would I have dreamed that East

 Lansing, MI, the land of beer bongs, football games, good basketball and higher learning would be the site of an active shooter killing three people for no decent reason whatsoever. Never would I have expected my middle of the night would be spent calming my adult children who are still in East Lansing. When people see our MSU garb they comfort us and tell us those things don’t happen here.

 

Today is to be low key.  We have a chandelier to be installed.  We might visit a framing store for a recently purchased painting.  There is a purple flowering plant that is calling out to me from a garden center a little way up the metro.  Oh, and the blue wall needs a second coat.

 

Who can write with all that going on?

 

The song below is from a compilation record from years ago that I believe raised money for AIDS research. The tag line is truer for me today than it ever was before.

 

 

Thursday Afternoon Report from Lisboa

 

 Not my cars, Not my monkeys.

 

23 February 2023

 

Air got cool and windy today.  No rain though.  If you stayed on the sunlit side of the major avenues, you were warm enough with a sweatshirt and a light jacket.  At least that was enough to keep me warm. Again, people here were wearing parkas.

 

I didn’t range too far afield today.  Picked up a new monitor and as I was installing it a cable tipped over my coffee cup.  Dirty brown water everywhere on the desk top.  Grabbed a bathroom towel, it was nearby and the situation was dire, set out sopping up.  Having wiped all this decaf coffee up with a super fluffy absorbent towel I felt inclined to wash it and whatever other laundry was about. Given the coolness of the air I had not planned to wash today but there really wasn’t any other choice.

 

Luckily the monitor nor the guts of the computer got wet.  Mostly there were a few drops here and there on the equipment and I got to the big puddle on the desk quick enough with the towel to prevent real disaster.  

 

Why a new monitor?  Hmmh. Well, old eyes suffer using a small laptop screen, they just do.  Now I have the monitor hooked up and it is so much better for the blind as a bat geezer that I am. I also have a wireless keyboard and it makes the experience just so much easier. Maybe I will write more.  Maybe, it could happen.

 

So, after I got everything set up and posted some of my black and white photos on Mastodon, I took the wet load of laundry to the self-serve lavandaria. Like most people in Portugal, we have a washing machine that takes 3 hours to do a load of laundry. But, also like the majority of the population here we don’t have a dryer except for the cloths lines attached to the back of the apartment and the drying rack we put out on the deck.  When it is too cold to dry things off, I go to the self-serve.

 

Anyway, I dropped my two euros in the machine, the machine gave me two euros and change back and started to run.  Maybe the universe has started to balance out.  This serendipitous turn of events makes up for about four two-euro coins of mine this machine simply ate.  What’s next?  Are long missing socks just going to appear in dried loads of laundry? I will keep you posted as I await the next miracle.

 

Sorry about the bad weather back there.  Hope it clears up quickly.

MSU We Love Thy Shadows

With incredible sadness I have changed my portrait and background pictures on Facebook to the Spartan block S and a view of my favorite place on the northside of campus of Michigan State University. MSU was my other mother as I transitioned from a gangly confused teen to a young adult.  For my generation Michigan State was a place of safety and nurturing.  For my generation it was an island separated from the outside world where we lived in freedom.

 

But there are no places of safety left in American schools at any level.  There is no freedom left from gun violence, from active shooter alerts, from mourning the dying left bleeding out in ivy covered buildings and on the green campus lawns of college and universities. 

 

Despite America’s ongoing and seemingly growing cycles of violence and regret, there is still what seems to be the ultimate freedom of American culture, the unfettered right to buy, possess and use guns and ammunition. From kindergarten children to young adults at college, we see the deaths daily. As Americans our vision of this horror grows quickly hazy and we just move on without trying to make it stop.

 

The Second Amendment was never intended to take a position higher than all the Ten Commandments by our founding statespersons. But we have let the meaning of this “right” be warped over the years to an anything goes stance with regard to more powerful and more deadly weapons. A powder horn and a muzzle loader owned by a family on a farm are not the same thing as large capacity magazine and an AR-15 owned by an urban dweller.

 

It is time for change.  Maybe we need to redraft the Second Amendment to reflect the reality on the ground in American to allow rational restrictions on gun ownership and use. We can’t keep doing nothing.  Offering thoughts and prayers my friends after the fact, well that is doing nothing with a capital N.

 

I did not receive a call last night telling me something horrible had happened to either of my sons.  No parent should ever have to get that call. Ever.   I did however spend almost all of last night talking to my sons in East Lansing from five time zones away counseling them on how to make their home as safe as possible. I stayed on the phone with them trying to keep them calm as the world around them was turned into the chaotic madness gun violence generates.

 

My Spartan heart is broken and my eyes are filled with tears over the horror in East Lansing.  Things have to change. We have to make them change.

Grumble, Grumble Damn Google Maps, Grumble, Grumble

The Street Google Wanted Me to Climb.

So as a relative newcomer to Lisbon there are times when I am searching out a new business, restaurant, or museum and I am not exactly sure how to get there.  Over the years I have come to so distrust Apple’s Maps program that I invariably use Google Maps.  Google maps is not without its limitations.

Google Maps has an annoying habit of giving directions based on as the crow flies.  It also dislikes things that aren’t designed for mass conveyance.  Yesterday when I headed off to the barbershop it had me take one subway line, transfer to another and then take what it claimed was a five-minute walk to the shop’s location.  

 

The five-minute part was BS.  Well, it the world were as flat as a map it would have been five minutes.  Lisbon is a city of hills.  Real Hills that get the old heart pumping and the lungs working overtime. The street that damn application wanted me to take was steep enough to have a funicular to transport people up its incline.  The funicular runs from an area called Restauradores up to Principe Real. The funicular don't make no stops on the way up. The street I wanted was Traversa-da-Fala-So. The traversa was about dead center between the two streets.

 

My momma didn't raise a complete idiot.  Thus, I made the tactical decision having come as far as I had on the Google supplied route to take the funicular to the top and then walk back down.  If I had been looking at a topographical map, and with Google maps you do have that option but who ever really looks at it, I would have seen the hill I would not walk.  Sigh.

 

Had I thought about it I would have taken the first subway to its conclusion at Rato. Then I would have taken the 24 street car to just before the location of the funicular and getting off would have  walked down a very nicely paved and sidewalked street to just about the front door of the barbershop.  It would have taken way less time and incredibly less effort.  Also, I could have stopped and had a decaf expresso and a pastry at the Pastelaria 1800 on my way. For my friends in Michigan, this shop has a light flaky pastry akin to a Magic Basketball like they used to sell at Quality Dairy except it is way, way better.

 

I guess my point is this think before you blindly follow a computer-generated route.  What AI says works ain’t necessarily the best way to get where you are going.

The song below really has nothing to do with this post except it has the word hill in the title.  However, this is a top twenty favorite song for me by one of the most unappreciated artists in folk music today.  I urge you to give it a listen even if you normally ignore my musical links

Way Back in "68 I Learned a Word

 

1967 or 1968, that was when I first learned the word serendipity. Came upon the term when my teacher Mr. Quirk, with his mysterious eye patch and those whispered stories about his possible prior life in the CIA, assigned me to read a short story to read.  I stumbled upon the word in said story, and as I often did back then, I looked it up.  

 

Somebody just on a wild hare (hair?) had created the word. The fact that serendipity was a made-up word created for a seventeenth or early eighteenth-century novelist just amazed me.  I mean who gets to do that, just create a word to fit what they want to say?  Well, these days I guess TV sitcom writers because I really don’t think boink meant boink before Friends. But now in 2023 we all know what boink means, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

 

I digress, as I often do.  But serendipity well it was such a lovely word and delightful concept.  In the old days I would crack open my blue leather-bound pocket OED and typed out the definition and etymology of the word for you.  Today I will use first the built-in smart lookup in Microsoft Word for the definition, “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way” and a search engine for the etymology.  Per a search used the Google search engine, (I probably should have used Duck, Duck, Go), the word was created in 1754,  Serendipity was, and I quote the great God Goggle here, “… coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.”

 

“Always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of,” is an apt description of my life currently. On a warm day walking about Lisbon in any direction is a form of an accident.  I am retired. Absent seeking out food I have no place I really have to go. As to making discoveries, well every single day offers me discoveries I was not in search of.  Who knew there was a store here that sold carnival masks? Who knew there was a garden center with a tree in the center of it filled with parrots?  Who knew that sipping an espresso, decaf in my case, at a kiosk in a park was as good as taking any happy drug?

 

There is no heaven here on earth.  But for a time, now and again, there are places where joyful moments come more frequently than they by any right ought to. And good morning to you all.