Loitering isn’t a word in Portuguese

As calçadas O inglês tem um verbo curioso, “to loiter”, que quer dizer, mais ou menos, andar devagar ou a esmo, ficar à-toa, zanzar (grande palavra), vagabundear ou simplesmente não transitar. E, nos Estados Unidos (não sei se na Inglaterra também), “loitering” é uma contravenção. Você pode ser preso por “loitering”, ou por estar parado em vez [...]

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People are people; they’ll always be different, similar, precocious, mercurial, outgoing, shy, etc. Above all, differences will sometimes rub against each other, and create a bit of friction.

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The maid made me cry!

First of all, let me just fess up – I have a maid. Well, my mother in law does, and since I live with her… I’m not gonna launch into the sociological underpinnings of Brazilian society to justify just how it is that I can afford this luxury. I’m just gonna lay out the facts. [...]

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Left fork, Right fork

When I was little, I started to use both my hands for things. Like every kid, I was figuring out if I was right handed or left handed. My grandmother, on the other hand, thought this was the mark of the devil. She was also in the practice of spitting on twins and detesting albinos [...]

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Alleluja

Walking around tonight. The purpose – train the overly fat labrador to walk obediently upon the sleepy streets of small town Brazil. It was a task that led us through winding streets and surprising bends, and yet not very far from each place the dog chose to pee, there was a church. Or a big [...]

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What if feels like to be far from home

Living abroad, it’s easy to feel disconnected from what’s going on in your place back home. I feel like my umbillical chord is somewhere, tethered to an empty womb that’s fallen ill with abandonment. I have waking dreams of my hometown and of Brooklyn, the last place I lived. Little tumbleweeds of melancholy memory roll [...]

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Sushi Wooshi

I’m a sushi popper and I need to admit it. There are things that one ought to keep quiet. Things like multiple sock days and missed flossings, and of course, should you be a 1970′s era suburban mom with a pill problem, you know where your skeletons ought to be stored. But sushi. I can’t [...]

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Calling the Lord in a Pickup with Rims

Yesterday was the kind of day I imagine a Southern Baptist mixed with a Texan cowboy would enjoy. Though these two incarnations couldn’t possible exist in one living human body permanently, I felt, with quite a bit of conviction, that they existed in me for the day. They intermingled and had themselves a cathartic rubbing [...]

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Why did you close your blog there for a while?

I closed my blog because I didn’t like that the majority of visitors typed the word “cameltoe” to get here. But now, I’m over that, especially ’cause I took that word out of my tags.

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Lost Pluto

I was lying in bed tonight, thinking about how everything’s turned topsy turvy since I came back from my 7 week vacation back in the US. It’s literally as if the world unzipped itself, like a great big monkey suit, and flipped its innards outward, with all the messy internal bits now constituting the surface, and [...]

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