I knew that this would happen, because it always does. I’m living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in one of the most fascinating and diverse countries I’ve been to. But at some point, it becomes less about the place and more about the living. And when that happens, I start having trouble writing.
Not because there’s nothing to say. But because it takes a different kind of writing to write about somewhere as a resident rather than a visitor, and I’m better at the latter than the former. And also because I don’t find my daily life as intriguing as other people seem to. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a lot going on, just that it doesn’t jump out at me anymore like it used to. The things I remember about my day are stuff like getting up early to go for a walk on the beach, eating lunch with people from the office, taking the bus to the Catholic University (PUC) for a discussion group, waiting for the internet guy to come fix the router (again! argh), getting on that gross air-conditioned bus to Rocinha to teach my twice-a-week English class, then racing home to watch Paraiso Tropical. I forget, sometimes, to notice that Sugarloaf was sparkling in the early-morning sun now that the smog is finally gone, that I got off the bus to PUC with marks from where my nails dug into my palms as the bus careened around the curves, that the 15-year-old I walked past at the drug point in Rocinha was carrying an exceptionally large semiautomatic rifle, and that Paraiso Tropical… actually, scratch that. I never stop being amazed by Paraiso Tropical, especially since the storyline has pretty much fallen apart and now somehow 4 murders and several marriages and pregnancies will have to be resolved in the very last episode on Friday. But the point is, this is my life. It’s amazing at times and amazingly mundane at others, and I guess there was a point — I’m still not sure exactly where — when I started to feel less like I was living in Rio, and more like I was just living.
My Portuguese has also passed an invisible landmark: the one where I stop being able to tune out random conversations on the bus and am forced to listen to daily life in all its inanity. In a way, it’s nice, but there are times when I miss being able to space out in the supermarket checkout instead of having to listen to a man having a one-sided cellphone conversation or the girls behind me complaining that their boyfriends don’t pay enough attention to them. I remember that this happened during my year in Argentina also — I only realized it while on a cross-country bus trying to sleep through whatever awful movie was playing and realizing that for better or worse I could no longer switch to my English brain and tune out the screams of the serial killer’s victims.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that I’m perfectly adjusted and totally understand how things work here. A lot of things still leave me mystified, like the fact that rather than promoting mosquito bednets and screens against dengue fever, the Department of Public Health apparently prefers to go from house to house doing supremely pointless surveys about whether we live near an elevator (the mosquitos travel in elevators!) and telling us to put more soil in our potted plants so that puddles won’t form after we water them. And then there’s the Pan-American Health Organization, which for some reason decided that it would be an excellent use of ad dollars to run spots on CNN — IN ENGLISH — telling us not to dig through the trash.
I don’t even know what to say about that last one.
