life summary blus a brainstorm

Obviously, this is long, long, long, long overdue. In the past week, I've been getting that sinking feeling that my life will cease to be blog-worthy if I stop blogging about it. The only way to escape from that vicious cycle is to first pretend that my life is blog-worthy, then hope the prophesy fulfills itself. This verbose writing style is already annoying ...

Bloggable items:

1. Trip to Prado
2. Lifestyle -My schedule -Luana's schedule -Food -Video games -Music
3. Neighborhood kids
4. Work updates
5. Book reviews

The book reviews is what I really want to do, so I might have to give the abridged versions of the other items.

1. Trip to Prado

Luana and I went to the beach town of Prado to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the day when Luana attended to me at Ropahrara Exotic Clothing. We wanted to leave on the 6:10am bus on a Friday morning (I don't work on Fridays) but were derailed by a surprise visit from the Student Center owners. The bad news from above was that they didn't seem willing to renew the internet subscription at the school, leaving me permanently consigned to pay-as-you-go internet service. The good was that they had come down with an extra mirror, which they donated to our room.

We ended up leaving on Friday afternoon and arriving in Prado a few hours later. Since it's winter here and winter is low season, there was nobody in town and most of the bed & breakfasts were closed. We finally found a really gorgeous and not too expensive one right on the beach and enjoyed our first moqueca (local fish stew) and our first night of air conditioning since I arrived in Brazil. The next day was partially cloudy and the beach was basically deserted, but of course, that really didn't matter. We amused ourselves by trying to lure these bright red crabs out of the mud with junk food (see pictures). There was a great moment when one crab scurried across the marsh with a Frito in each of his claws, but I failed to capture it on camera.
When I went to pay for the bed & breakfast on Sunday, the credit card reader wasn't working. The owner drove me to the only bank in town to withdraw cash, and sure enough, the only ATM that reads MasterCard at the bank was also not working. This led to a truly awkward moment when I returned to the owner's car:

Me: So, are there any other banks in town by any chance?
Owner: No, just Banco do Brasil.
Me: Because none of the ATMs would read my card.
Owner: Now what?
Me: Um ... what do you think?
[long pause]

We eventually arranged for me to give him all my cash and for him to give me his bank account number so I could wire him the balance of the payment. It turned out that someone he knew was driving all the way back to where we were going, so I didn't even need to hold onto cash for the bus ride home. We went back to the bed & breakfast and settled things at the front desk, and when we were ready to go and I asked the owner about riding shotgun with his friend, the owner said that the guy had already left, which lead to another awkward moment:

Me: So, you were saying something about a guy who could give us a ride?
Owner: Oh yeah, but he just left as we were pulling in.
Me: Uh ... I know this is annoying, but I guess now I need some money back to pay for the bus.[pause as the owner gets annoyed and grumbles]

Then he gave me back 50 reais and I adjusted my debt on our handwritten receipt that included his bank account number. At about that time, Luana realized that her bank card would work at the ATM, which was a relief to everyone. The owner drove us back to the bank, with our bags, and sure enough, Luana was able to take out the balance of what we owed and we officially settled the deal. The owner took us to the bus terminal and we got in just as our bus was pulling out.

The next bus didn't leave for another five hours or something, but it was sunny so we didn't really care. We set up shop at a park nearby and relaxed, Luana practicing juggling a soccer ball and me finishing the Steven Pinker book. Even on a Sunday, the whole town was completely empty without tourists. When we stopped to eat lunch, the restaurant staff served us and then continued to do their off-season chores. So when we went to pay, there was actually nobody around except for an old blind guy who couldn't help us find the staff. I found the hostess doing something else down the street, paid her on the spot, and then we rushed to catch our bus and that was the end of the excursion.

2. Lifestyle

MY SCHEDULE

Today was a more or less typical day:
8:00 iPod alarm sounds with a playlist from a Belltower Stein Club
8:54 I reluctantly get up, get dressed, and grab a piece of bread
8:57 I leave for school
9:04 I arrive at school to find that my 9:00 student has rescheduled for Wednesday. I make an immediate 180-degree turn back home
9:20 I go back to sleep
11:00 I get up and do lazy stuff and then play Luana in PlayStation soccer. A kid from across the street wants to make some money and tells another kid to tell us that he's willing to offer his services to clean our floor and bathroom. Luana semi-seriously jokes that if we paid him, she'd no longer have anything to do.
2:00 We go out for lunch at our favorite restaurant, a pay-by-the-kilo buffet, and eat many barbequed chicken hearts
3:00 I have a beginner class with the 12-year-olds 4
:00 Intermediate class with three women professionals (an agricultural engineer, an architect, and one other job that I forget)
5:45 Beginner class with five girls who just finished or are finishing high school
7:15 Beginner class with mixed adults and adolescents, which turns out to be fruitfully diverse. They're the easiest class by far.
8:30 Advanced class with two middle-aged professional men (a lawyer and a businessman) 9:40 I pack up and buy some eggs for breakfast on the way home. Luana's in bed playing video games already.
11:48 Current moment

LUANA'S SCHEDULE

Luana's schedule is a lot more flexible because she doesn't work. She splits her time between doing random fun stuff (playing guitar and violing, drawing, playing video games), studying English, and doing chores. Washing clothes by hand is a pretty serious time-consumer, and she also cooks a few meals a week, and this is frequently done to the tune of the J-pop music she plays from her iPod. She's also kept busy by the stray kids and animals that drop by. When I asked her what else I should write about her lifestyle, she also wanted me to say that she's studying medicine and alchemy (this is while she plays her goofy alchemy-themed PlayStation RPG). Her lifestyle is undeniably domestic, but it's pretty much mutually agreeable so far.

FOOD

Despite the substantial hindrance of having no refrigerator, we manage to have most meals in our room. We go out for meals probably four or five times a week. Our diet consists of a lot of eggs, a lot of rice, some Ramen, some pasta, and a lot of meats and vegetables sauteed with garlic and onions; all in all, it's completely satisfying. Luana does more cooking than me on average, but I've learned how to chop food and make rice, and I also made one real meal, which was fried fish with rice and fresh tomato sauce. I tend to make eggs in the morning, and Luana tends to make stuff at night. She's got more experience and is a far superior chef, but we're both really learning. I got savvy about using my long guitar fingernails to cut garlic and haven't been able to get the smell off my hands for a week.

VIDEO GAMES

Needless to say, videogames are our way out -- out of our little town, out of our reality, and out of the physical and mental strains of living in a developing country. Perhaps video games seem less indulgent here because everyday life has fewer artifial layers as it is. Anyway, Luana is a master a Star Sweep -- a sophisticated variation on the Tetris theme -- and I'm pretty good at soccer. We're each training in the other's game of specialty but we both have a long way to go until Star Sweep or soccer become competitive.

We've only had the PlayStation up and running for just over a week. When we first arrived, the Student Center had donated a TV for us to use in our room, and I bought a new Playstation within four days of arriving. When we hooked it up, though, it only showed up in black and white, even thought the TV normally displayed colors. We messed around with the settings and nothing fixed the problem, so I gave up and started playing my Final Fantasy in black and white. But when I tried to save, the memory card started acting fucked up and overwrote and deleted some of my saved files. Then Luana tried to play her games, but her games are all pirated and our PlayStation hadn't yet been altered to read pirated games. Requiring the service of a serious game dealer to hack our PlayStation and sell us a new memory card, we went to a local game parlor and got the number of the guy in the nearby big city (Teixeira) who does all the video game pirating.

We eventually arranged to meet up with the guy in Teixeira, who sold us some more pirated games, a pirated controller, some memory cards, and got his buddy to hack our PlayStation. We told him about the black-and-white problem, and he told us that it was a result of our TV being really old and not having any modern video standards installed. Luckily, he dug an ancient electronics piece out of his bag that was designed to remedy the problem. Great success!
I had to stay in Teixeira to observe classes, but Luana went home. Then I missed my bus and got stranded in the bus terminal and had to catch a later bus, which was remarkable only in the presence of an ederly couple across the aisle from me, the male of whom was blasting static from his transistor radio (we were traveling across farmland and dead zones with no radio reception) for the entire ride. When I finally made it back to Itabatan, I ran into Luana in the street. Giddily indignant, she complained that once she had finally hooked up the newly-hacked system and weird electronics converters, the TV actually exploded, smoke and all.

She was on her way to buy a new TV so we could play our PlayStation once and for all. I had to go teach a class, but when I got home, the delivery guys were pulling up with a new 16-inch LG TV. The smoke from the expired TV had cleared, but the acrid smell of the cathode ray tube (or whatever) explosion was still in the air. Since the new TV was installed, our room's energy consumption has spiked, which also hasn't escaped our landlord: he stopped by on Saturday to tell us that we were going to have to pay an extra 20 reais this month to cover unexpected electricity usage.

MUSIC

There's not much live music here, which is a little disappointing since the Bahia state in Brazil is generally known as being at the heart of the African-influenced elements of Brazilian culture. We listen to a lot of different music, thanks to mp3 players and my big external hard drives, and we play our instruments from time to time. Now that I've finished two big books, my next personal task is to spend my free time writing and playing and guitar and take a hiatus from reading.

Finally, I should make it clear that my lifestyle isn't ideal at all. It's bare-bones, and I sincerely miss having a bigger bathroom and a dinner table and refrigerator, not to mention having a movie theater and parks and all the comforts of first-world life. This town is really a dry and lifeless business hub and has no culture or nature to offer, and I'd have no desire to live here for more than a year, especially compared to the many other culturally rich cities in Brazil. I can't wait to get back to the US.

3. Neighborhood kids

It's fun to have six-year-olds who are always in the neighborhood, always playing in the street, and who frequently invite themselves in to chat. Luana gets along with them better than I do, and I'm perceived as something between Mickey Mouse and ET. They're cute, and the way in which they are independent and manage to talk to adults is something I rarely see in the US, though my experience is limited.

4. Work updates

Argh. Teaching is hard and only intermittently gratifying. One problem is attendance. Having to repeat lessons destroys the sense of progress in the classroom. Another problem is the four-year myth: that to learn English, you have to study for four years. You just sign up one day, and as long as you've passed four years of English, you'll end up ready to work in the US. First of all, most adults don't have the stability to study for four consecutive years at the same English school. Also, it tends to lead to the same illusion that college students face: it's finishing and getting the degree (or at Harvard, the worthless foreign language citation) that matters, not the learning that takes place along the way. As a teacher, I'm required to pave through two pages of textbook every class -- one textbook a semester -- to give the illusion of progress. Another problem is that studying for only two hours a week is just too little time to ever build conversational skills. And finally, having 30 hours of teaching a week, with five different private students and seven different classes, means I have to juggle a lot of variables. Only gradually can I settle into a useful rhythm and dynamic with each class. I'm still in the phase of blindly trying lots of things to find what sticks and what ... licks? sucks?

It's telling about how bad the system is that even though this particular school, Student Center, has been around for fifteen years, it only has six intermediate/advanced students who manage to have conversations in English without reverting to Portuguese. And every single one of them learned conversational English somewhere outside of Student Center! Ouch!

The business model of Student Center also leaves a lot of room for creative consulting. In Itabatan, there is a lot of demand for English since there is a lot of international business via the eucalyptus industry. And Student Center and its competitor CCAA, have the market completely cornered, which means they can offer mediocre service and very little accountability without suffering loss of clients. There's a lot of incentive to get new students but very little reason to actually invest in their education, since they'll have to wait four years until they learn English, and by then, they'll all be long gone anyway. To keep new students coming in, Student Center is actually very cheap (under 50 reais a month), but then can't afford internet, and relies on vulnerable American volunteers (I make 400 reais a month) for much of the teaching responsibilities.

Any of you business people out there should make quick work of this case study. Please send suggestions. Here's my current solution.

-Right now, history determines prices and nobody's doing economics, as far as I can tell. All of the school's owners are also English teachers. If the other English school in town is also cheap and bad, then the Student Center has to either be bad and cheaper, or be demonstrably better and a little more expensive. Currently, only a small percentage of the students who enroll even learn conversational English. I wouldn't mind at all if the school raised prices, enrollment thinned out, but the remaining students were more dedicated and the school ended up being able to afford internet access. If even five students a year graduated with English proficiency, this would be a huge boost to the school's reputation and could create more demand and more people would be willing to pay for a good education.
-To solve the scheduling problems, allow students to drop in whenever they want and pay by the hour. Each one can work independently in textbooks, which is helpful for introducing grammar and vocabulary, and then everyone can come together for thirty minutes of every hour to do English-only activities -- listening to music, watching movies, and having conversations. Right now, all the students are stratified by their textbooks. Not only is textbook level a bad indicator of ability, but mixed-ability classrooms could also be mutually beneficial. This way, I could also concentrate my time into more normal nine-to-five blocks instead of having to work really long days with odd gaps in the middle and two-person classes.

5. Book reviews

I really REALLY don't know where to start with doing the book reviews, so I should do some brainstorming.
Pinker's Blank Slate
-work of genius, staggering encyclopedic knowledge and impressive coverage of intellectual landscape-this is the psychology book to end all psychology books. it's every psychologist's dream book. it's covers all the tendrils of psychology with unbelievable eloquence: politics, violence, education, personality, philosophy, child development, and art criticism
-dissects every one of the most controversial topics in social science with such tact that it doesn't seem controversial-view of human nature that is really going to change the way people see themselves
-no utopias, no God, no transcendence, no magical consciousness, no magical free will, no ghost in the machine, just knowing and enjoying our condition as complex animals in the world
-makes all top-down ideology (based on unsupported assumptions about human nature) look ridiculous, wasteful, and unnecessary: Marxism, utopianism, invisible-handism
-strong support for the idea that being moral is just about expanding our natural circle of consideration (which usually is limited to family and friends) to all people
-society's problems are caused by viral ideologies (from above) and misassumptions of human nature and by sociopaths who probably can't be saved (Stalin, Manson, etc.)
-this whole viewpoint is not just correct, it is revolutionarily different from the way almost everyone -- including intellectuals like Friedman and most academics -- sees themselves in the world. while it's right, pinker knows he can't proselytize because he'd come across as a mad scientist. he needs people to stand up and independently support this viewpoint. if they do, politics will never look the same.

My criticisms
-he has a more conservative personality, which means he strongly prefers talking about patterns and mechanisms to enjoying spontaneity. thus he spends more energy making generalizations than pointing out all the rich ways in which people deviate from the norms. there's also the danger of talking about human averages as human truths. he talks about how identical twins are usually very similar, but i'd like to know about cases when they're not at all similar. what would that show us about effects of the environment?
-i originally thought that my luana model would outdo his model, but i seriously misunderestimated the depth of his analysis. he put together the pieces in a more convincing way than I ever could have. i originally was a stronger supporter of connection, but after reading his analysis, a hybrid model makes more sense to me. i'll get into this later...

Thomas Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree

-He does a good job of capturing the tone of discussion among the big power players in globalization today, which are many of the same voices i heard at Harvard: bankers, fund managers, smart people in development organizations, and high-level beaurocrats. the problem is he comes across as incredibly arrogant as he tries to dumb down the economics to a fourth-grade level. are any fourth-graders really reading a book like this? -he also has a pretty weak appreciation of history and an insufficiently nuanced explanation of what "progress" and "rising standards of living" -- which is what the free markets are supposed to provide -- really mean. he worships the free market too much and doesn't offer any serious criticisms of when a free market can go wrong and when any hard sacrifices need to be made to restrain it. his lack of intelligent analysis is pretty apparent at the end of the book when he finally lists his first criticisms of the American economic landscape -- the well-known problems in health care, education, social security funding -- without actually acknowledging that they might be endemic to the system. he constantly bashes the Western European "welfare states" without paying any attention whatsoever to lessons that they've learned in developing so-called security nets that might be useful to the US. i'm a big fan of Germany, and i was pretty insulted that Germany was only referenced on a few scattered places, even though it's the biggest economy in europe, it's engaged in globalization, and it has solved a lot of transportation and environmental issues in ways that should embarrass the US. -

i'm in a town right now that is very much typical of an emerging economy (quick growth, international business, no culture or community) and i think i'll offer stories in the future to put a more realistic face on globalization.