August 23 delayed blog

I'm at my computer in my room in Brazil. I tried to plug it in to charge, but the electricity is unreliable at best, so I'll have to charge it somewhere else. This also means I'll have to stop writing in an hour or so when the battery dies.

My room is a room. Actually, two rooms: a room room and a bathroom. My employer is paying somewhere around $75 a month for the room, which I think also includes water and electricity. The details of my job compensation are under permanent negotiation, but that's a good thing. I get surprise perks like a borrowed gas stove and TV and flexible hours and frequent cancellations which allow me to stay in my room. Like this morning, when I was supposed to give private lessons at 8:30am and 2:30pm, but both students cancelled and freed up my entire day until 5:30 or 5:45. Back to the room: I've got a double-size matress on the floor where Luana and I sleep, which faces our borrowed TV now hooked up to our new and overpriced PlayStation 2. What's the name of the piece of furniture that hold clothes in drawers?! I always forget. Closet? No. Bookshelf? No. Cabinet? I'm going to check my Microsoft Word thesaurus. It's not a trunk or a chest -- it's just some drawers. Whatever. My books are stacked next to the TV. I'm hoping to read most of them while I'm here, since I have three-day weekends every week. Maybe I should say three-day vacations and four-day vacat-ends. Back to the room ... we have a few things taped to walls, then we have our guitars and violin and mandolin on the floor, Luana's extra clothes in her suitcase, and then a small bathroom. It's got an electric showerhead for hot water, but we're starting to appreciate the wisdom of cold showers. When the electrician came to install the showerhead, he told us that his youthful appearance at age forty was due primarily to his habit of only taking freezing cold showers. He also said that eight minutes should be long enough to wash an elephant, which I thought was funny in light of the fact that I'm used to taking 20-minute showers.

Fuck, I might as well just take pictures and save my thousand words. Enough describing the room.

The important thing is my job, which is teaching English. Now, to be a college-educated native English speaker teaching in a Brazilian language school is like being Leonardo Da Vinci teaching kindergarten. It's a breeze. All the books and materials are of good quality and I just guide students through them. The same few kinds of activities -- games, translations, invidivual readings, whatever -- happen over and over again, which means that I do not have to prepare at all for class. I just walk in, pick up the materials, and go. Of course, I try to do some new and different things that require some extra work, but I don't have to, and nobody would notice or care if I didn't.

I'll probably have more stories to tell about the English classes. It's only been three days (four if you count today, when I walked in only to find my classes cancelled), but I already kind of know the students pretty well. I'm all about conversation, since pretty much everyone learns a language for the sake of communication, unless they're really intellectual and learning Latin, which can be good, too. I have some private students and I already know them quite well: in the course of the first two hours, it's usually possible to cover family, occupation, brief life history, religious views, and a person's conception of her situation in society. Last night, I talked for a solid hour about the details of the eucalyptus industry with a guy who works in the big eucalyptus company here in town. By next week, our conversations are inevitably going to move more directly towards intimate life details, since it's the next easiest thing to talk about. If I were a local, we could talk like locals and gossip, but since I'm not, all we can really talk about is our lives. Then I'll get to play psychologist, which is something I've always wanted to do but never until now felt like I could ever do. My whole new Luana model at least gives me a basis for talking about emotions and minds.

Luana's making lunch now. Our first meal at home! I'm hungry.

I think it'll be good to do a real blog, to actually recount events and my thoughts about them as they happen.