I know I’m supposed to be reassuring and all, but this is too good.

I leave today at 6pm on a riverboat up the Amazon. I’ll hang up my hammock, surrounded by other hammocks, and watch the forest float by. There is no wireless on the boat, even if I thought it was safe to take out my computer. So I will be totally out of contact for the next week (until next Thursday)!

I started taking Daraprim two days ago to prevent Malaria, and it’s killing me. It’s known for its strong side-effects– like getting just a touch of Malaria– everything from dizziness to losing red blood cells to seeing things. My muscles hurt, my throat is dry and scratchy, I’m just a bit out of it, and I woke up three times last night from vivid dreams.

Also last night I had a fantastic going-away/birthday party (more like three…), at a cool bar I’d never been to with great music and many fond “you’ll always have a home here”‘s. A friend asked how I was going to Manaus– there being either boats or planes. I told him I was taking the boat. A look of fear pass over his face and he said, “Good luck,” in a voice that said, “Man, I hope you make it.”

It sounds like a great adventure to me! I’ll talk to you again when it’s over!

27! Woot! It feels good to be alive!

The rest of this post I wrote Sunday, but I’d been too busy to finish and post it.

Today was Pará Pride! Belém hides its alternative side pretty well, but not for the parade. We took over two of the biggest streets and filled them for over a mile. People overflowed the street and climbed up the fences on either side to dance to four huge sound trucks. The parade ended at a large square which we packed with music, club lights, and discarded beer cups. The designated bathroom was a dark red wall with the words “proibida urina nesta lugar”. It was an absolute blast– but not the subject of this post– and one of those parties that most people who come alone leave together– which is.

Sexual Difficulties

Here’s what I’ve been working on, the last few nights. It’s going to go on my wall, because it fits with my floor. It’s made only of kissing circles (but multiple fractal systems of said-circles with complex color patterns, so maybe it’s not really circles).

The whole thing, shrunk down:

One little part, full-resolution:

I think it’s pretty.

Everything is a little different here. Chocolate tastes different (at least the grocery store impulse-buy stuff). Tomato sauce tastes different. Bananas are big and savage, avocados are smooth, round, and light-green, and limes are sweet. Pot is totally different– it comes brown and packed in chunks. Trash is a little container you have on the counter, and there are three trash days a week, but people still throw it in big piles on the street. Doing laundry usually involves a basin and a sponge.

And then there are paradigmatic differences. People here (at least in Pará) understand the world differently. Some viewpoints are enlightening, some curious, some based on claims I have no basis for judging, and some are simply different. But there are some that seem flat wrong. Certainly in this point in our relationship, I have hugely more to learn from Brazil than it does from me… but sometimes I can’t help soapboxing. It may be just cultural differences, but these are big enough differences for me to see beyond. I’ve heard from quite different sources, so I suspect they’re widespread.

“Brazil (and particularly the north) has the greatest share of natural resources in the world, so it’s eventual success is natural.”

This belief holds that Brazil’s poverty is to be alleviated by cutting down the rainforest, and the resulting success ought to topple the unnatural economic rule of more urbanized south. Maybe in theory, but in practice, exploitable resources, especially poorly managed ones (and only Norway, to my knowledge, manages theirs well) are the surest path to a corrupt government and an impoverished populace. Resources are like shit to capitalist flies. Besides, exploiting resources is the worst way to make wealth today: its ineffective, damaging, and out-dated.

“Our combination of black, yellow, and white didn’t work out in many ways, particularly for modern democracy and consideration for others.”

Brazil has a vibrant culture, which draws remarkably well on its integrated European, Africa, and Indigenous backgrounds. But people look at the rampant two-faced populism in politics and the large-scale effects of each-for-his-own-clanism and blame their genes. It’s time to wake up from history. Even if our culture and our genes make us, so do our choices, and I’ve seen every seed of a more enlightened deep-democracy growing here, in some of the most fertile soil in the world. Creating our culture is our full-time job, and sometimes its hard work, but it may be our sole god-given right and duty.

“The poor people here are very simple.”

In my experience, no lack of education, wealth, or social status makes you less cognoscente of the complexities of being. Interestingly, it’s easier to recognize an uneducated person in portuguese, because for every right way to do something, there are two wrong but colloquially conventional ways. Like substituting “a gente” (the people) in for “us”, and then just using the third-person form. Or dropping the future tense, except by saying somebody “is going to do” something. But colloquialism doesn’t beget simplicity, it’s just the counterpart of elitism.

“Brazil might be moving in the right direction, but it will take a hundred years to cleanse the country of corruption and raise its populace out of abject poverty.”

Says who? Whistle-blowing is approaching a tipping point here.
Brazil went from a military dictatorship to one of the most vibrant democracies in the world in 30 years. In another 30, its GDP will pass the US’s. At the rate life-changing technology is being developed, and the rate at which Brazil is adopting it, I give it 20 years to rival Europe in mean standard of living.

“Jealousy is an important part of love.”

I could write a book on the problems in Brazilian relationships. A classic Brazilian couple does everything together; the real couple does most, but the guy can hang out with his friends but will get mad if the girl does the same. Guys in Brazilian typically don’t know how to cook; their mother cooks for them until their girlfriend takes over. Love is, apparently, wanting your partner to not have any fun without you there, and intentionally crippling yourself to ensure it. But Jealousy is just Fear’s child from her first marriage to Desire. If Desire could dump her, why can’t Love?

The Travelers Network is website that integrates travel blogging, yelp-style reviewing of travel-spots, and a social network for travelers to meet and keep friends on the road.

Try it out! http://www.travelersnetwork.org/
Firefox is best– I only recently started supporting IE.

I want your feedback to know how to improve the site! Any comments you have are extremely useful to me. Give me suggestions, bug reports, impressions, whatever.

Please play around with the site. I don’t mean you should try to break it or hack it– you can if you want, but I’m already aware of a bunch of security holes. I mean, make an account, post a couple entries, upload some photos, add a restaurant you like to eat at.

Consider giving it a real test– you can use it to blog a trip you’re planning to take or already took, and feel free to pass the url around.

If you find something that’s broken, just tell me about it. The site is big and inter-connected, so it’s easy for something essential to be broken and for me not to know.

There’s plenty more to do. The fully-integrated map, blog, reviews vision is far from done; the permissions system is still in its infancy; and there’s huge potential for a smoother experience through more ajax.

But the site is hugely functional, and ready to be used!

There’s an About page, a FAQ, and a few tutorials integrated into the pages. But if you need any help, just ask!

Want updates as I make fixes and improvements?
Want to be an official alpha tester (there may be prizes involved)?
Want to help in other ways? Talk to me!

I curled up into a hole in my computer on Monday, when I decided to launch an alpha of my travelers site September 1, and I’ve been working non-stop since. Which is to say that I’ve only had beers at one social event most nights this week– I’m practically a hermit by Brazilian standards.

On Wednesday, I saw O Procurado (Wanted– Brief-Spoilers Alert, but you shouldn’t see it anyway). It’s the English movie, but they change the title screen. It’s about a group of assassins who induct a normal who then, with the help of the sole female in the group, kill them all. It’s horrible– do not watch it– all the moreso because storyline had some potential for punches, in around the bad magic that set it up. But it revved me up in a way that’s difficult to describe.

My body was pissed at me for not giving it free time or sunlight for a week. It accepted my motivations, but also extracted some rebalancing justice, one of which the realization that I can only improve my mind by improving my body.

We are our bodies. A body has just as much personality, intention, and intelligence, as a mind– and they’re the same personality, intention, and intelligence as the mind has, on a deep enough level. How my body gets sick, or feels tickles, or balances, mirrors how my mind resolves dissonance, and gets amused, and juggles tasks. And how it hears Portuguese is how I understand it.

My Portuguese is coming along, rather like a wino, making progress in stumbles and hiccups. But finally it’s within grasping distance of providing the ears and mouth of appropriate to my 26 years, and that’s what I need to make it. So my body asked me to live more like a Procurado– I was built to be a wolf, and I cannot treat my body like a sheep.

In many ways, I live like a child by choice. I never want to give up wonder and unplanned play-time, or transition from Amateur to Expert at the cost of my right to struggle and trip and make a fool of myself, or take responsibility that doesn’t allow for me to be erratic.

In particular, in Brazil, I’ve done little things to play-up my childishness. I can’t speak the language and I’m ignorant of the customs, so I want all the help I can get and don’t want people to expect too much. And in particular, I don’t want to inadvertently set up women to be disappointed by a person who can’t approach life in Brazil according to his years, although that’s another post.

A friend here asked if I wanted children. No way, said I, the world has too many people already. But yesterday I wasn’t so sure. What greater wolf-requiring project or world-changing gift can one give the world than another human being, capable of anything? Ultimately, I still don’t want children, and a 20+ year project is far outside my attention span… but maybe it’s time I started dating women with them.

I’m looking for people to join me in making a sustainable-living coop in Belém.

The house I’m renting in Belém’s Cidade Velha will have space for two to four more residents by the end of this month. I want to make it an experimental, cooperative home, based on sustainability, healthy living, and fair-trade! We would combine our rent to buy organic, fair-trade food to share, practice reuse and recycling, improve the house with sustainable technology, and more.

If you want to hear more, or know someone who might be interested, tell me!

Agora, em português…

Estou procurando pessoas para montar uma república de vida sustentável em Belém.

A casa que alugo está localizada no bairro da Cidade Velha e terá lugares para duas ou até mais quatro pessoas antes do fim do mês. Quero fazer uma casa experimental e cooperativa, fundamentada em idéias sustentáveis, vida saudável e equilíbrio econômico. Combinaremos o aluguel para comprar comida orgânica, comércio-justo, practicaremos reutilização e reciclagem, melhoraremos a casa com tecnologia sustentável e coisas do tipo.

Se quiser saber mais ou se você conhece alguém que esteja interessado na idéia, diga-me!

I found out yesterday that one of my grandparents (the one through my mother’s second marriage) was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. He refuses to take medication. And his birthday is Thursday. What do you say to a terminally and painfully ill birthday boy?

Last night, I had dream that was told in a thoroughly narrative voice, and since I plan to be a writer some day (I haven’t decided which one, but one of them), here it is.
Cut for Length

Apparently, my whole extended family secretly reads this journal, and I’ve been told that I am now expected to write a “life update”-style post at least once a week. While it’s not what I made my blog for, I suppose it’s not such a bad goal. Little do they know that I’d be happy to have them as friends on LJ and then they wouldn’t have to keep checking this page to see if anything’s changed. Not to mention that they would also get to read the friends-only posts that are likely to become more frequent.

I’ve made five half-written posts in the intervening time, but it’s too much! So here’s the whirlwind tour. Mostly, I’ve been doing a lot of work. I love my new AI job, and I’m getting to build just-about whatever I want. But that leaves half a day, and I seem to end up using it.

I may stay in Belém longer and make my house into a green coop, if I can figure out how to do it. The whole two-story, 4 bedroom, 2 bath, plus side-cottage with b&bath, rents for $550 a month. The resources for sustainable/organic/local/fair living aren’t as well-organized as in the US, but I’ve been meeting lots of people who know where to go. For now, I have a new apartment-mate: a nice Californian who finishes her research on the Amazon in three weeks. I need to decide what to do afterwords, which probably all depends on getting my bag from the other side of the country.

Portuguese goes well. I’ve had my first classes with a real-live Portuguese teacher, where I learned for the twelfth time that I’m saying it all wrong. But people are understanding me evermore, and I them: I had my first real-live extended conversation in Portuguese at a bar (not without some help, but still). And by now, my sixth.

I’ve also had a few close-calls with sickness, but nothing that some water and extra rest didn’t solve. I get almost-sick here pretty frequently, but I haven’t had to take antibiotics yet.

Every time I think I’ve seen the best of Belém, it surprises me. I saw UFPA, the beautiful federal university, which Belém’s brightest struggle through Herculean tests to enter. I went to Mangal das Graças, a nature-preserve/museum, the perfect sunset, and spent a night dancing next door at the Marmaço reggae club for their 10th birthday, my second event you could imagine that everyone in Belém was at. Or third, to include recently Super Night Shot, a cinema/art-performance project briefly imported from Germany (you must see, next time you’re in Germany!).

Today, I went to Ilha de Carmapijó with a two-hour music-and-dance-filled boat ride the nicest Amazon river beaches I’ve experience so far. I wish I could show it to you! My camera charger, more than anything else, is making me want to go down south. And maybe my new-found sunburn.

Brief rave report

I was bummed recently. Love may be only the second-most-important thing to me, but that’s still pretty important. And so far, I seemed to have caught the attention of a sweet Brazilian guy, and a cool Californian girl– neither of which is quite what I was hoping for when I moved to Brazil.

But last night, I met a gorgeous Brazilian woman– a poet, my age, with enough spark in her to burn down a house. And I’m pretty sure she likes me. But she won’t put up with my language problems much longer…