"Drug dealers are against decriminalisation of marijuana. What about you?"

    -- Question on a billboard in Rio de Janeiro.

More tips

"There's a subway station inside the airport, you can get to the city center very quickly! There are a lot of things you can do in 10 hours there, including drinking some German beer and even fucking a Frankfurter ;)"

It doesn't matter the city you are going to, if you ask a man tips will always converge to the same point.

"Éramos duas metades iguais"

Some verses of Perfeita Simetria (by Engenheiros do Hawaii) and The Pass (by Rush) still suddenly appear in my thoughts sometimes.

What is more sad: these words still occupying my mind or the fact that they make less sense for me every day?

"What a pity..."

Bits & Bytes

Watched 12 Angry Men yesterday: an astonishing movie!, would get five green diamonds at my old blog!

The orgasmatron, the constelations on the ceiling, the coloured lights: things already incorporated into the 2004/2005 version of my bedroom.

You don't have to have an account at blogger.com to post comments here. Just click on the post anonymously link under the "Sign In" button.

Quote of the day: "What if you were one of these possible friends??"

I finally received some not-sex-related (and extremely useful) tips about Thailand: what to look for in Bangkok, what printed guide to buy and how to deal with the 10 hour jetlag.

My brother's band's CD is on sale in many stores in Brazil. This is one of them.

This blog is alive. So am I.

"An aphorism by a Jamaican composer..."

"Don't let them change you or even rearrange you."
  -- Bob Marley, Could You Be Loved

July 28th, 2004

Plans I shouldn't make

- Get her on Sunday and spend the rest of the day with her.
- Stay with her on Monday after the analysis session.
- Stay with her on Tuesday after leaving the office.
- Stay with her on Wednesday after the analysis session.
- Stay with her on Thursday for the whole day.
- Stay with her on Friday till the time to go.
- Come back and stay with her till September 7th night. To travel, maybe.
- Go to her sister's Bat-Mitzvah and dance with her for the whole party.
- Spend New Year's Day with her.
- ...

I think I'm going too far away. I'm afraid of these plans never to happen. Really afraid.

28/07/2004, Du!!

Premature Optimization

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
  -- CarHoare

Chatima Tova!

No food and no drink for 25 consecutive hours, starting today at about 6p. This is the most important day in the Jewish calendar and this rule of the Jewish tradition is for sure one of the only concrete ones I follow.

Every year there's somebody who asks me what is this fast for and why do an absolutely non-orthodox Jew as myself should respect it. Here's my answer:

"The fast is not to cause pain, but for us not to forget that reason must be stronger than impulses."
  -- Albert Einstein Hospital's Rabbi, 2003.

Shana Tova! Happy 5765!

(In next year's Yom Kippur I hope for some things to be different from the preceding three ones.)

2 minutes ago

  "Eduardo?"
  "Yes?"
  "Your passenger ticket to Bangkok."

Comments fixed

Now you're talking! =)

Tips I received on Thailand so far

  "You cannot miss the pompoarismo* show! It's something like a 50-year-old lady doing incredible things with her vagina, such as throwing a table tennis ball meters away!"
  "You have to get a real Thai massage!"
  "HIV rates are high there."
  "Don't take drugs or you might be condemned to death."
  "Try to fuck a real Thai girl!"

Do you have tips for me too??

*I don't know how to say this word it in English

Mystic River

  "I loved her so much. I'm never gonna feel that again. It doesn't happen twice."
  "Doesn't happen once most times."

Meanwhile, on a given Sunday...

  "Mom, I'm leaving. Is there anything I should not forget?"
  "Who you are."

Chimarrão

Hmmm... I almost forgot how good the winter-taste of chimarrão is! Just had some sips at the gaucho's one now in the office.

I sold all my chimarrão stuff to a Japanese friend in Toronto and this was the first chimas I drunk since then. Last Saturday I bought new equipment (gourd and straw) but I haven't used them yet.

Chimarrão's quick definition: "unsugared enriched maté-tea prepared in a gourd and sucked through a metallic tube with a strainer at the bottom end, called bomba (straw)"

For those who want to learn more about it, here's an excellent illustrated tutorial: http://www.das.ufsc.br/~emerson/chimarrao/ (it's in Portuguese but for the pictures it's worth having a look).

update
in English: http://www.promate.com.br/chima2.htm

Soulless

I'd rather be sad. (Would I?)

Who are YOU trying to fool?!

Just watched Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. If my memory is not playing a trick on me, this is by far the most amazing movie I've watched this year. Sorry, no vocabulary is enough to explain my feelings now. See ya...

"You gotta play chinese chess, man!"

Just discovered a good web site to play Xiangqi (or Chinese Chess) online: www.clubxiangqi.com.

The quote above is from Adrian, the 73-year-old man from Netherlands who taught me how to play it a couple weeks ago in Toronto. He is also the author of the oddest advice I've ever received in my whole life:

"You have to start right now, boy!"
(no more explanations...)


This is the man...

...and this is the game: Xiangqi: Chinese Chess.

Intro!!

Yes, today was a good day, mainly after I left the office. I went jogging for the second time in the last days, had some guava juice, wrote something, got something to eat, finished reading a good book (The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho), listened to some Rush songs... productive things, alone, for me, for my mental and physical health, just like I used to do in Toronto. At this time I'm ready to welcome you to my new web space, just where you are now. Whoever your are, wherever you can physically be, I introduce you My Peace!

Saudade

It's a pity that the language I chose to write this site in doesn't contain one of the most important words to be used in my texts: saudade. Because non-Portuguese-speakers might not understand the aphorism I'm about to blog, I'll give some information about the word in question before.

Well, I don't want to write too much, so what you have to know about saudade is that it is like missing but much more intense and deep. You can miss your family when they are traveling so as you can feel saudade of them. However, you can also miss a bus or a pencil without any deeper sadness involved. Saudade is a very deep feeling, always sad but, in many times, this sadness come together with a gigantic feeling of hope to kill this saudade, the moment in which you and your saudade's object will meet again.

This year I felt saudade in a couple of situations. I still feel saudade of close people who are not alive anymore. I feel saudade of friends and relatives who I haven't seen for weeks or months because they are abroad. I also feel saudade of the last New Year's Day travel to the beach.

I'd just like to say it dawned on me that the more painful saudade that exists is the one that is never killed, but put aside against one's will and fades away. I've already experienced this too.

"Oh please Annette!

You spend all your time preaching to wait for love. Well, there it is, right there in front of you and you're gonna turn your back on it! I'll move on, but you, you're gonna spend the rest of your life knowing that you turned your back on love."
  -- Sebastian, Cruel Intentions

"All of us get lost in the darkness

Dreamers learn to steer by the stars"
  -- Rush, "The Pass"

I recommend you listening to this song and, maybe, spending a couple minutes thinking about its words.
Not only one of the their own favourites but also one of mine now.

(And no, I won't tell you what are the words in the lyrics I'm looking at now. Perhaps you could guess; perhaps not.)

Like a chocolate box

Molson Amphitheatre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Sunday, August 22nd, 2004; 19:20 PM

Rush concert: I got to the climax of the travel, a little bit more than two weeks after my departure, a little bit less than 2 weeks before my return.

I'm laying on the lawn waiting for the concert to begin. The sky is incredibly blue and the sun shines enough to keep me wearing sunglasses. I can see the CN Tower from here.

The audience seems tranquil, very different from the concerts in Brazil. The closest to it I've seen there were the people on the back part of Parque do Ibirapuera's Praça da Paz. From orthodox jews to canadian-pot smokers or Canadian Beer drunks. From Canadians from distant cities to people who has English as second language; I've already heard even words in Portuguese.

Just phoned home for 1 hour, ate a slice of vegetarian pizza and had a small-sized (700mL) Lypton's iced tea glass full of ice cubes.

I'm alone here and I miss home. Nothing unbearable, however had I had a safe harbour now and I wouldn't be back home soon. A girlfriend. "The" Girlfriend... a perfect fellow traveller; there's a lot in this world I wanna know! People, places; alone, together...

I'm not the same person anymore; everything here is very intense, very different, very active...

The show is about to start. Every minute of my life is part of a a much bigger show I'm the only who can see, listen to, feel. Life is an infinite show we're always trying to keep watching.

São Paulo; Sunday, August 1st, 2004; 12:49 PM

Can we be as pure as we'd like to? Is it possible to completely unplug from external world, even for a moment, feeling we are alive, or maybe, realizing we've never really been before?

There are two moments, two situations in which I feel unplugged from all the things that disturb my mental well-being: the first one, when alone, nobody around to ask me questions, building my own world, entering a reality that's only mine. The second one, perhaps easier to explain, simpler to understand: in the lover's arms, laying down on her exposed breasts or putting her forehead on my neck, eyes on eyes, or closed, feeling we are part of a much stronger and bigger whole we couldn't even wonder existed.

The second moment is the one I miss.

!!

(coming soon)