Just spent a week in Brazil. Let’s briefly hit the “Will Kevin write about this” checklist:

✔ Newly Industrialized Country ^{1 2}
✔ Have at least one “unstructured” night
✔ Traveling with nobody who knows that this blog exists

Looks like we’re good to go. As a quick disclaimer, it’s worth noting that much of what follows will be observations (and generalizations) based on a grand total of four days and three nights spent entirely in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in São Paulo. This is loosely equivalent of getting the lowdown on NYC from someone who spent a few hours in boutiques on the Upper East Side.

About São Paulo

The largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, São Paulo’s one of those cities where an alien could reasonably conclude that cars are the dominant life form. Conveniently, this means that you never have to wait more than twenty or so seconds to hail a cab — they are actually just everywhere, all the time — but by the same token, once you hail one, you don’t tend to do a tremendous amount of moving. For instance, my last ride in the country was a quick 19-mile trip to the airport on a Friday afternoon, which wound up taking two hours.³

The way that drivers handle São Paulo traffic is in my experience unique, and incorporates both Paris’s total disregard for lane lines and Beijing’s idea that right-of-way is determined entirely by the size of one’s vehicle.⁴ The latter principle is happily extended to pedestrians in São Paulo, which basically means that cars won’t stop for you. The only reason that people aren’t dying in droves is that the cars rarely break 10 or 15 mph, so they can generally be dodged.

Of course, Portuguese is the main language in Brazil, because colonizing a landmass 92 times the size of your country seemed like a reasonable thing to do back then. Just for the record, the US is only 75x bigger than England.⁵

When it came to dealing with Portuguese, good ol’ highschool Spanish let me read most of what I needed to, but speaking was an absolute mess. This proved frustrating because I kept thinking that I would be able to communicate in Spanish, and that WORKED about half the time — both for me, and for one of the Mexican guys who I was working with. Basically the routine was to first try English, if that fails try Spanish and hope that the Portuguese version of that word was roughly equivalent, and if that still fails pantomime or give up. You know how, in trials with rats, the absolute best way to get them to keep pressing a lever is to make that lever give them food SOME (instead of all) of the time? Same deal with Spanish communication.  Maybe, maybe this time “cena” will mean “dinner” in Portuguese. Still no? Shit.

Why I was there

I work at Sephora now, and the Brazilian arm of the company is looking for some inspiration from their American product and technology counterparts.

This was all well and good, and like any business trip this meant that the vast majority of my time was spent either in conference rooms or bars. I feel like if I were an entrepreneur in a wealthy São Paulo neighborhood, I would open a bar offering local specialties, and then install a large conference room — perhaps with movable walls — in one corner. For bonus points, I’d put a hotel on the second floor, so that a ‘business trip’ could easily be conducted entirely in a single building.⁶

To their credit, the bars in São Paulo are wonderful (aside from the occasional awful pour). In most cases, a large section of the bar is open to the outside throughout the evening, and is only canvassed shut when the bar closes for the night. They all broadcast soccer games at all times, unless rowdy Americans demand to watch the NBA finals, go Warriors woo. Sitting in one reminded me strongly of watching the 2010 World Cup in similarly-open-air bars around Houhai, a neighborhood in Beijing built around a lake. That said, I’ll take a caipirinha over baijiu any day.

A year or so back, my friend Jeff introduced me to some of his friends from Argentina, who were doing a tour of the United States at the time. Their trip, as far as I could tell, consisted of nothing but going to Walgreens for makeup, Ross for clothes, then to Target for more makeup. Seriously they went to like ten of each. I remember making fun of them for how silly it was to go to a new country and spend the whole time just buying makeup. Karma’s a bitch. Three times in three days, I found myself spending my non-bar-or-conference-room time in makeup stores. Not that I would be jumping to buy anything anyway, but Brazil’s crazy tariff policy also made nearly everything that Sephora carried substantially more expensive than it was in the U.S. The Brazilian Sephoras that I was checking out were all in some of the most opulent malls I’ve ever seen, like the JK Mall and the “Shopping Iguatemi,” which Google helpfully informs me is the oldest mall in Brazil. Now, going to said malls was a big part of why Sephora had paid for me to be in Brazil in the first place, and I get that, but part of me was just dying to get away from the friggen Louis Vuitton stores and actually see the country that I was in.

Which is why Thursday and Friday were so fun!

Exploring the Jardins

The VP who served as the main social nexus for the group left midway through Thursday, and nobody had stepped up to fill his shoes by that evening, so we were left to our own devices as of around 6pm. I spent about ten minutes on the hotel’s roof (São Paulo can be quite pretty), ten minutes on Google to find somewhere to go, and then I sprinted over to the Museum of Image and Sound a little over a kilometer away.⁷

Selfie with Vivian Maier / Museum of Image and Sound

The museum was cool enough. I got to learn about some Brazilian photographers and asked a guide what should be next on my list. She told me there was another museum next door (closed), and helpfully neglected to mention that short of the two museums, the street I was on had nothing but car dealership after car dealership in both directions. Since I had no mobile data, I didn’t really have a way to figure out what I was in for, and returning to the hotel just to get on WiFi seemed like a waste of time. Fast forward 40 minutes of wandering, still seeing nothing but car dealerships, and I decide to hop a cab. The guy getting out of the cab that I’m about to commandeer tells me that if I’m looking for food as well as a place where people hang out, I should really check out this great area a “few blocks”⁸ away. I say that sounds perfect, decline the cab, and redouble the wandering efforts.

On my way to this supposed mecca of food and human interest, I pass the first non-dealership establishment I’ve seen in like an hour. It is of course none other than a “Budweiser Mansion.” I immediately abandon all efforts to find food and spend the next seven hours pounding Bud Light Limes with São Paulo’s legendary population of bros continue on my merry way. Another mile of walking brings me to a fucking swanky Red Lobster of all places, where I succumb to my hunger and spend the next seven hours pounding Cheddar Bay Biscuits with São Paulo’s legendary population of midwestern housewives or whoever the hell eats at Red Lobster aside from my girlfriend. which although was technically a restaurant, would have almost certainly constituted a personal failure. I maintain my resolve and soldier on. Finally, at long last I arrive at the destination that the cab guy told me about. It turns out to be another fucking luxury shopping mall, boasting a Tiffany & Co and Louis Vuitton right up front, but I’m exhausted and incredibly hungry so I give up and go in and have some sort of weird indian curry with grapes in it for some reason wait whoops that’s exactly what happened and I hate myself for it.

At that point I got a text from the tech lead on my project, a nice guy named Wit who is bored and wants to grab dinner. I told him to meet me near this mall I’m in, but apparently the directions that I gave him to get to the mall send him down an incredibly sketchy street and he fears for his safety so he goes back to the hotel. Queue more running on my end. I met up with him, wandered around some more, and eventually ate dinner #2.

That’s about when I got a text to go meet up with my boss, since he’s somehow wound up at an open bar with the Australian Consul General in Brazil and his entourage. Apparently my boss’s ex-coworker, who is also in São Paulo, knows the Aussies somehow. Not one to refuse that kind of invitation I hurriedly head to the bar in question, just in time for the ”open bar” bit to expire. So I buy a pint and introduce myself to the consul, who says it’s nice to meet me but that the whole group is about to go to another bar to close out the night, and that they really have to get moving if they’re going to make it before the kitchen closes. It is a gentle-but-completely-unsubtle invitation to slam the pint immediately so that I don’t hold up the party. I comply, because Australians. They seem happy about it.

We bar hop, order dinner #3, order a tower of beer, and shoot the shit for the rest of the evening.

Turns out after his stint making satellites with Boeing, the consul (before he was consul) did a lot of exporting to China in the 90s, and he had plenty of crazy stories about doing business with moguls in the Shenzhen special economic zone. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the guy who would order multiple shipping crates of wine at a time, with his only two requests being that a) the invoice gets sent to him in a word document instead of PDF, and b) that 2/3rds of each shipment should be the cheapest possible wine, and the rest should be the most expensive wine he could find. Now I don’t know much about much but I can sure as hell swap silly China stories all day long,⁹ so we had a great night.

Friday was nice too — after meetings ended early for the day, and we had yet again visited another Brazilian Sephora, we were able to check out one of the big parks in São Paulo that one of the girls from Thursday night had recommended that we see before we left town. As a happy surprise, the park was home to the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, which was great in its own right, and also critically afforded us the opportunity to get one last round of caipirinhas for the road.

Can’t wait to go back! Think I’ll get the chance in a few months. Photos from the museum below the footnotes.

Footnotes

1: I just learned about this! But I’m looking at the blue ones on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newly_industrialized_country and they’re almost all countries that I either have visited or would love to visit. Considering an Indonesia trip this October, for instance.
2: I realize that having footnotes in a blog is more than a little obnoxious. Especially footnotes about footnotes. But hey, that’s never stopped me before.
3: We were thoroughly warned about so we knew what we were in for, but good god. This is the route.
4: Or governmental status, I suppose. My Chinese teacher told me a story once about how he lived above some sort of major government building in Beijing at one point, and there were constantly, constantly traffic accidents outside since all the government officials were used to running red lights all the time, so when there were several at the same intersection accidents were simply inevitable.
5: Special thanks to Mapfight.Appspot.Com!
6: Drop the whole shebang right next to the airport, and baby you’ve got a stew going.
7: A quick aside about sprinting around: it’s the best. You should try it, especially if you’re a) in a place where you’ll never see any of the onlookers again, b) drunk, c) late. Combining the above just enhances the experience.

Pros:
Free
Substantially faster than São Paulo cabs
Probably more trouble than it’s worth to pickpocket someone who is sprinting around
Walking is for scrubs
Museums close early

Cons:
You look like an idiot
Brazilian pickpocketers probably much faster than you
São Paulo is really humid

In all honesty, to this day I actually am constantly weighing running vs not running in my head whenever I go anywhere. Convenience vs ridicule, man. It’s rough. Anyway I was by myself in Brazil so it was full speed ahead to the Museu da Imagem e do Som.
8: 1.5 miles
9: See: basically anything else on this blog

Pictures from the Museum of Modern Art:

Pantyhose and ball bearings

Seuss table

It’s art, okay? I can’t caption all these.

Floor made of bathroom scales, accompanied by terrifying video. #art

Pretty hangy thing

Giant newspaper balloons + aforementioned tech lead

So right now I’m in week six. That’s fine. Six is actually a pretty chill week, a down week. One of the most consistent, actually. It’s what comes next that scares me.

Here’s the thing: since at least as far back of September of 2008, my life can be pretty cleanly divided into 10-week chunks of experiences. This isn’t really anything special: for the most part, plus or minus a little noise, this is going to hold true for anybody on the quarter system. The core of the school experience was these little ten-week loops of four classes at a time: two and a half month batches of Chinese and Economics or whatever that stand out to me as discrete. Sure there was usually an empty week, part of a finals week and some break time at the end of each batch, but they don’t count. Honestly I’ve always thought that under my utterly arbitrary mental grouping of experiences, these types of breaks – all eleven “reading weeks” of my college career, for instance – fit much better with each other than they did with the quarter to which they were nominally attached.

And that cycling of the academic quarter forced plenty of other things into these nice ten-week patterns. This was literally true in, say, the case of my internship in China, which had to be basically ten weeks long to the day so that I could make it back in time for Spring quarter. And it was directly responsible for plenty of extracurricular stuff, which would shut down during reading and finals week – so I’d have ten weeks between switching roles at the magazine, or between switching schedules and committees for Special Olympics.

But then, gradually, I realized that a lot more about me was starting to synch to this pacing. I’d get sick of music after ten weeks. I’d find new shows to watch. I’d stop writing, or start it again. I’d get bored of what I was doing. I heard somewhere that kids in my generation have an average attention span of about seven minutes, because that’s roughly how long a standard TV show will go between showing you commercials. So you get used to that timing and you eventually come to expect it. Maybe what’s happening to me is the same basic premise on a bigger scale.

I think somewhere along the way I started adjusting myself to the ten-week system even when I didn’t need to. My first trip to China was supposed to last seven weeks and change, but I wound up staying two weeks extra. There was no pressure on the length in either direction, but having the whole thing wrap up at about ten weeks just seemed like the right way to go. After graduating, my stint with the investment bank earlier this summer lasted ten weeks exactly, and I couldn’t have stood staying any longer.

After the bank, I took seven weeks to find a new job. A little short of the ten, sure, but it still represented a radical departure from what I’d been doing. Ten weeks where I had never been home became seven where I never left. I got used to living without internet for the most part, which was a big adjustment which I am not eager to ever repeat. I had to deal with my drugged-up landlady on the regular and spend my afternoons hassling people to give me their time in exchange for exactly nothing. I was ashamed for weeks of my own perceived failure, a mindset which did me no favors.

But the nice part of this experiential chunking is that it naturally allows for big jarring turnarounds. If I was having a bad quarter, or a crappy internship, or a lonely stint in a foreign country, it was all cool because everything was going to be different in ten weeks and I could sorta start over. Hell, even as far back as high school, debate topics would only last for two months.

Moving to Mountain View has been one of these big turnarounds. I’m living in a better place, have a better job, have more free time and a better social circle.  I’m playing Starcraft again, which matters for reasons that I’ll be explaining in the next blog or two. Long story short, things are really good for me right now, but I’m nervous because all signs indicate that the cycling that’s been my norm for years has finally stopped.

My job at PayByGroup, my new company, isn’t an internship. There’s no deadline at the other side. It’s not like I want to leave – I’m actually really enjoying my work and I’m not actively looking for a way to get out. Pending the company failing or me getting fired, though, I’ll be here for a long time. I’m sure this is a good thing, a big part of growing up or whathaveyou. But still, there’s a departure in the framework here and I’m not sure that’s really hit me yet.

Because like I said, I’m still only in week six. The week after midterms, or the week that I got off from the Qunar job, or the calm before the storm of Pacific Crest’s Vail conference. A really nice and comfortable part of the arc that is – as far as I can see – no longer an arc.  The idea of a “next” still obviously exists because it has to, but for the first time in a while I have no clue what that means or when it happens.

The issue with not writing for a few days is that it all just builds up in my head anyway, and now I have four posts that I want to throw together into one huge mess, and I think that’s probably a bad idea.

So we’ll start simple. We’ll start, as all good things should, with Nicolas Cage.

Around 10 days ago this story started spreading on the internet that some poor, genius girl had accidentally sent a potential employer a picture of ol’ NC instead of her resume. This story is only sad because I was not said employer.
Here’s what’s particularly cool about it, aside from the obvious:

I don’t even know if that’s readable at the size I compressed it down to, but honestly I don’t care.

The point is that eight people, including two in conversations that I sadly couldn’t screenshot because they were in person, saw this goofy little post that’s tangentially related to Nicolas cage, and all of them presumably had the same thought: “this has to be brought to Kevin’s attention.”

…Which is fucking awesome.
Because to me, and I think to a large extent this applies to everyone, the notion of “who I am” is mainly just a function of my friends and my interests: I’m hugely defined by the things that I like or do, and the people with whom I choose to surround myself. The screengrab-amalgam up there is a perfect example of those two things intersecting — like it or not, (the former), I have found myself in a position where liking Cage films is just one of my Things, where my friends associate those films and that actor with me and in that way it reflexively is going to impact my relationships with people and (by albeit loose extension) my interactions with the rest of the world. Other Things of mine that come to mind include, what, Starcraft, Homestuck, Daft Punk, blogging in this style, all sorts of these little hobbies and interests that I like to spend time on. Any single one of them could get a huge blog about why it’s awesome, and probably will at some point.

And I was going to write a hell of a lot more about this sort of theory of personality and external self-definition but I’m going to have to skip ahead to the part where I’m being utterly robbed of all of these things and I’m starting to feel deeply, deeply lost.
The reason I have to skip ahead is because I just got a call telling me that I’ll be needing to work a 15-hour Friday — that starts an hour early, so I need to be at the office by 7:30 — and then put in at least 24 hours of work this weekend. Which is to say, in the next three days, days normally associated with relaxation, I am going to ostensibly need to cram in a regular human being’s work week. So if this post comes across as disjointed, that’s because it is. There was originally going to be another hour’s worth of writing between the cage part and the work part, but now there isn’t.

At every time in my life before, when I’ve mentioned or even thought about “not having time” for something, I’ve always perceived that phrase as largely being bullshit. I’ve always, always been able to make time when I need it. I was always good at school and could always get my work done quickly, which meant that for about four or five hours a day at least, usually more, my entire life I’ve been able to devote, as one Aesop Rock would put it, to hobbies I have harbored based solely on the fact that they make me smile if they sound dope.
Here’s the full verse, which kills me mainly because an 8-hour day has been such a pipedream these last four weeks:

Now we the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us
And we may not hate our jobs
But we hate jobs in general
That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes
We the American working population
Hate the nine-to-five day-in day-out
When we’d rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pasttimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope

The short of it is: not having time is a real thing, work-life balance is a real thing. In college, if something comes up like, oh, a final exam, then hey i’ll only gchat for half an hour tonight instead of an hour and a half, or I’ll only watch three games of starcraft instead of ten, or I’ll read one chapter of whatever fucking book I’m caught up in instead of two.
But now, counting commutes, from 7:30am to generally 10 or 11 pm I am literally tied up in something that requires my full focus and energy and not only is there a very literal zero TIME for anything else, I am starting to think that because of that I’m starting to run into some real and hitherto unseen issues with focus and stability and life satisfaction or whatever; complete deprivation (due to shortness of time) of the things that I like doing combines with a new and friendless city to have some pretty fucked up impacts on my attitude and behavior. I’ve lost my context. And I can’t even talk to my friends about it, because god knows I don’t have time for them and that fucking kills me because honestly that’s the only thing I really have in the first place. So I’ll spend an hour writing this and just hope they all find it and that they all understand, that you all understand, that I will be out of touch for a little while and that is not because I want to be it’s because I don’t have that that much of a choice.

I could write till 3am tonight, and I’d love to do so, but there is work to be done.
I’d quit but I want to prove to myself I can do this, and there is a very definite end in sight.

I think things will be better after this coming Wednesday. Bear with me.

At an undisclosed private location, Zandalee begins. We just finished Vampire’s Kiss. Current standings:
1 death
1 murder
3 sex scenes
8 freak outs
1 cry
1 drunk scene

I’ve seen Zandalee before. It’s a foreign film not available in the states. You know why? Because it’s basically an hour and a half of cage having sex.
~~
That one was kinda a workout. Four sex scenes, three flip outs, one cocaine useage later we’re through it. Entering the 90s with Red Rock West starting now. Time is 11.16 pm. Morale remains high. The room is really hot, but that’s how it’s always been. Two people have tried to come in so far.
4 sex
3 flip out
1 cocaine
~~~
Red Rock West was AWESOME. It’s 12.57; we are exactly 3 minutes ahead of schedule. Like last year we’re keeping this shit locked down to a tee.
1 freakout
1 assist
1 sex
no but seriously, rrw was my favorite so far of the night, easy
Deadfall now, courtesy of burkeman. opening credits playing. apparently charlie sheen is in. WE WE WE SO EXCITED
~~~~
2:37 now. deadfall just ended
spoilers:
1 murder
1 death
7 flipouts
1 drunk
2 drugs
cage died like halfway through and the movie went significantly downhill from there. hopefully we can recover with trapped in paradise. wish us luck!
~~
4.27am
trapped in paradise is over. kinda reminiscent of rrw, in that it’s just a ton of going in and out of a small town. first ‘comedy’ of the night. but really, everything’s a comedy when you’re with cage.
2 flipouts
how tame.
and one of the flipouts was mediocre
~~
6.05 am
passed the first hurdle, i think. not even a full 24 hours left! snake eyes was solid. very solid.
1 flipout in snake eyes. pretty tame in that respect
we are all collectively dreading ‘city of angels,’ up next. we really aren’t sure we’ve got the stamina for a romance about cage returning to life in order to bone someone that he stalked as an angel, which is the plot of this one so far as i know.
~~
7.57am
…. that was precisely what it was.
goddamn.
1 sex scene. 0 flipouts. i hath wasted mine time
bringing out the dead next
~~~
10:00am
We’re running ten minutes ahead of schedule! BOTD was super fucking long and had almost no direction whatsoever. I am deeply ashamed to admit that i fell asleep for about ten minutes; it forced me to open up my coke so now i’ve had about a third of a bottle. should be wired for a while
2 drug uses
1 kill
1 freakout
~~~
Family Man time
nothing interesting happened during this movie
but it was touching
so hey
12.04 pm
windtalkers up next
~~~
2.45 pm windtalkers
92.2 kills
4 freakouts
2 drugs
this movie…err… dragged, a smidge. also it didn’t end when it was supposed to for whatever reason so we’re like fifteen minutes behind schedule now. sad days
~~
4.45pm matchstick men (review)
6 freakouts
semi-continuous drug use
PLOT TWISTS OH GOD THE PLOT TWISTS
THEY TWIST LIKE FIRE
Nah, seriously one of the better ones. And i feel way less bad about thinking that the ’14-year-old’ was cute when it turned out that she was actually like 25, so that’s a plus.
Mckenna and vanessa both came to visit!
Lord of war @ now
~~
6.41pm
we’re not quite to 24 hours, but we’re getting damn close. one more movie should do it. Lord of war was solid.
1 assisted kill
2 drugs
3 sex scenes
pretty interesting plot. good acting, obviously. long. very long.
only four more movies now, though! Cage toxicity has long since set in for everybody but morale remains relatively high. We will keep on keepin’ on. We have a strong finish lined up.
NeXt is next
~~
8:18pm
next was bad
~~~
… but it’s cool because we followed it with national treasure two, right?
oh wait.
10.20pm
so we’d all seen the movie before, consequently to make it all entertaining we deemed the entire duration of the movie shirtless time. of course several people then came in and stared at us and i dont even want to know what they were thinking but…yeah
TWO TO GO
~~~