The Power of Now

To begin, a word (I'm really into words) on the nature of recording personal commentary within a public domain such as Al Gore's interweb (a.k.a. a series of tubes). In starting this blog, my intended audience were my close friends and family. Naively, I didn't stop to think that there was no way to limit said audience short of password-protection, which never even crossed my mind. What I'm trying to get at is this: in my last blog post, I referenced a longstanding, exaggerated joke (who, me?) without realizing I was making it at the expense of specific people whom I never thought would read my blog. I have removed the insulting passage and I regret any offense taken--it was thoughtless and unkind and I really didn't mean anything by it My worst self seems to come out when I'm in a summer camp-like environment, so forgive me if I revert to 12-year-old behavior.

Now, on to more important things! The last few days have been very quiet: a lot of lectures, field exercises, reading (I found a recent issue of The New Yorker on Josie's floor, so I've put Lolita aside for a bit), so-bad-they're-great movies (fan favorites include Pretty Woman and the timeless Now and Then--guess who's Chrissy?), strolls around the neighborhood, sunsets, and steadily fantastic meals (though I've just about sworn off dessert because I can't handle the sugar).

I decided to change the focus of my individual project, because I looked deep within myself and determined that I do not have the patience (or particular interest) to collect and sort so many insect specimens. I am now going to compare several abiotic (that is, non-living) factors at three, instead of two, different types of forest edges: forest-pasture edge, forest-reservoir edge, and forest-road edge. I will look at whether the soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and amount of light differ across these slightly different, man-made landscapes.

This afternoon was my first official day of project field work and it was a lot less fun than I thought it would be. Tromping through raw forest is...difficult. There are vines and spider webs EVERYWHERE and I forgot my machete (just kidding)! Plus, it's been raining for a few days so I kept stepping in gross piles of mud and slippery leaves. That said, I'm slowly getting the hang of it and tomorrow I'm going out with a field assistant, so it should be a bit easier.

The most exciting--and tragic--event to occur since I last posted was the death of Leopoldinha (so dubbed by Olivia), a Glittering-bellied Emerald (we think) hummingbird who flew into our dining room and then exhausted herself into shock. We know she was a female because of her size and coloring--very small, and while gorgeously iridescent, much less colorful than a male would have been. When she finally fell, Ze brought her outside and a few of us gathered around, monitoring her breathing and watching hopefully to see if she would recover. Things were looking good for awhile. Tim held and stroked her to warm her little body, and dripped a little water onto her beak and she appeared to be rallying, but late that night, she croaked (I was about to type "passed away" but then got nervous I was losing my cynicism after only 10 days away from the tristate area!). We buried her in a flowerbed. Heartbreaking, yes, but it was really, really cool to see her up close and touch her. I tried to post a video I took but it was taking forever to load, so here're some pictures instead.

I am at the point where my distance from home--both geographically and temporally--is starting to really sink in. This isn't a negative realization, but it is a little disconcerting. For the past few days, I have had the feeling that my life is going on without me. Not true, of course, because my life conveniently follows me around and right now I'm very clearly in Brazil, but also disconcerting. I'm hoping this will fade with time, and though I love blogging and keeping in touch with friends and family via G-mail (my virtual home) and Skype, I think that spending a little--just a little--less time on the internet will help. It's great to be connected, but the more connected I am to another, sort of plane of existence, the less I am connected to my current reality, and who doesn't want to live in the moment?

Enough with the philosophizing. Today is Thursday, which means...another social! Spirits are high again, and Darcy has taken it upon herself to instate a "formal" dress code for tonight's festivities, whatever they may be. This is mostly because laundry day was Monday and most of us are completely out of clothes save our dressiest garments, the only ones we don't wear in the field. One of us even brought wigs with her! As my buddy Ethan put it, "Does everyone have tickets for the shit show?" Weee'll see-ee....

P.S. How 'bout that presidential race? Just read this great article, published in (on?) Slate, everyone's favorite online magazine, by Meghan O'Rourke, a[n excellent] staff writer who happens to also be one of the poetry editors of The Paris Review (but doesn't work in the office; I never met her). Interesting that the picture at right is the first one to come up on a Google image search, nao?

P.P.S. I tried mangosteen! It was bizarre but pretty delicious--a hard, dark shell enclosing soft, white, juicy, vaguely citrus-like flesh that comes in cloves a la garlic. The only taste comparison I could draw was...lemon sorbet? Except not cold. I bought two but unfortunately didn't cut open the second one fast enough; it went bad and grew some kind of weird, yellow mold inside. I'll save it for you, Dad, so you can scrape it off and eat it anyway.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Sorry for the hiatus--I've been caught up in the first weekend's social affairs, of which there were many. I will get to that in a minute, but first: a weather update. Apparently it does rain in the rain forest, hard and abundantly. It's been raining since Friday and that wouldn't be at all bothersome--I've always like a good hard rain once in awhile--except for the fact that rain means no sun and no sun means it's COLD. Really cold. Thank god, once again (it came in handy in frigid San Francisco last summer), for the stylish Eddie Bauer vest that Uncle Eugene scavenged while thrift shopping--environmentally conscious to boot!

I finally understand why they call this season winter. Unfortunately, I don't have too much other clothing with me, a fact that I was immensely proud of when I left--I only brought one, relatively small bag--but that now plagues me. The Institute staff does our laundry for us but there is a five day turnaround, which means that there may be several days in which I am wearing nothing but that lovely down vest, my phenomenal hiking boots, which were so comfortable from the get-go that I didn't even have to break them in, and my single pair of Smartwool socks.

Luckily, the rhythms of Brazil kept us warm (bada ching!) all weekend long, beginning on Thursday night. This was the date of the aforementioned "samba social." Turns out the "samba band" was made up primarily of Institute staff, including Professor Tim, who shakes a mean maraca. Ze Carlos, who is a local resident/grad student/field assistant, double-timed it on the tambourine and at the bar, mixing up some potent caipirinhas, which are the Brazilian national drink and helped significantly in dancing the night away. A little samba, a little salsa, a little forro--good times had by all. Perhaps the best time was had by a girl named Amanda, who was the lucky dance partner of a local guy (pictured above) whose connection to the Institute is unclear. At one point he asked her to come home with him via the line, "Mi casa, vroom, vroom?" and some very illustrative motorcycle-implying gestures. Then he licked her face. She declined his invitation, politely.

After rising later than usual--some us had quite a few caipirinhas to sleep off--we devoted the following two days to working on our individual projects (plus eating, of course). Mine, in sum: a comparison of insect biodiversity in two different types of forest-edges--forest-reservoir edge and forest-pasture edge. I am basically trying to discern if there is a difference between the effects of two different kinds of deforestation on insect biodiversity in this area. To determine this, I have to collect a LOT of insect specimens. This involves: whacking trees with a stick. Whatever bugs were on the tree fall onto what's called a beating sheet, which is a piece of fabric held taut by a plastic frame, which I will be holding at about waist-height beneath the branches.

Here comes the fun part: acting fast, I will use a special insect-aspirator to suck the creepy crawlies into a vial, being careful to separate predators and prey--I learned this the hard way during my trial run when an innocent looking spider gobbled up about half the other specimens. Back at the lab, I will freeze the vials (to kill the insects) and then sort and identify my collection. Should be...interesting. I'm not exactly sure how I ended up with this project but hopefully it will go as swimmingly as the rest of the trip has so far.

By the time Saturday night rolled around we were all good and ready for some more socializing, and Gabriel, our "social coordinator," (I'm going to continue to type that in quotes because it's such a ridiculous title) did not disappoint with his second itinerary. After a detailed Introduction to Portuguese lesson including what to say to "cheeky" men (see picture), we hopped into some super-cool 15-person vans and headed to Atibaia, a small city about 45 minutes away from Nazare Paulista, home of the Insitute. Our destination was an artsy, semi-outdoor bar/club called "Busca Vida," (which in both Spanish and Portuguese means "Search for Life"), where a band called what else but "Mahnimal" was scheduled to play.

Our group stood out like a sore thumb in tank tops and flip-flops--apparently everyone else in Brazil got the memo that it's winter and had on boots and jackets--but this fact did not deter us from downing caipirinhas (fruit added this time--I ordered mango) with the best of them and dancing as enthusiastically as we had the night before. We also snacked on some pizza, which tastes wildly different from pizza in the US (to my seasoned pizza-palate, at least). Though baked in a brick-oven (visible from the dance floor), it was much thinner than even New Haven-style, almost as flaky as phyllo and topped with chopped tomatoes that had a kind of tangy flavor and a cheese that I'm pretty sure wasn't mozzarella. It was good nonetheless and later we tried a dessert pizza with a sweeter cheese and guava spread--also tasty. I had a mug of mulled wine as well, which was nice and warm but insanely sweet. It seems that Brazilians have a serious sweet tooth--everything falling under the dessert category tastes like it was made with pounds of sugar.

Mahnimal took the stage stylishly late at 1 AM and put on a pretty good show--their music is a mix of rock, samba, reggae, etc. and they seem to have a big following, so the crowd was lively. We got home at 5 AM and for SOME people this was too much--dozens (OK, one dozen) dropped out of our plan to head to Sao Paulo later that morning. I was not one of them and happily hopped into the van again. Sao Paulo was GREAT. I'd been skeptical of vehement warnings about how treacherous it is, so I was pleased to see for myself that it is just like any other city--a mixed bag with good and bad neighborhoods, but certainly not a place to be fearfully avoided. I am tentatively planning to meet Tamar there for the first days of July.

We started off at a big indoor market--markets being second only to Chinese bakeries on my list of preferred eating establishments. Speaking of Chinese bakeries, the first stand I stopped at was a Chinese one, where I snagged some subpar prepackaged red bean cakes. Luckily this did not start a trend; everything I ate thereafter was delicious. My snacks included: a few bites from Olivia's bowl of melted chocolate with strawberries and bananas, a sample chunk of a delicious but unidentified green-skinned, white-fleshed fruit (wish I brought my favorite book/gift from Kathy McKenna, Ingredients, with me), half of a pastel de bacalhau, which is a basically a deep-fried-until-it-blisters pocket of dough filled with salted cod, parsley, and green olives.
We walked around as we ate and I couldn't resist taking close-up photos of all the fruits I had never seen before--see "More Photos" for the rest. I bought a couple mangosteens, which I've wanted to try ever since I saw this video on The New York Times website during one of my procrastination rampages. Haven't cut them open yet but I'll be sure to report back as soon as I do--they better be good because they were ex-pen-sive.

Destination Two was Parque Villa Lobos for an outdoor concert--Brazilians might not wear flip-flops during the winter but they do have concerts outside--featuring Herbie Hancock and Macy Gray. The sky was one of the grayest (ha) I have ever seen and the rain was steadily intermittent (is that an oxymoron?) but they passed out free hats and ponchos and Herbie rocked it out (funked it up?) on his electric piano and put on a great show nonetheless. Macy Gray was a slightly different story...she has an interesting singing voice (though when she's talking she sounds like a baby on crack) but really only ever produced one hit, so other than it ("I Try," which I was a HUGE fan of in 1998) she sang mostly covers, including a few songs from Joni Mitchell's Blue and an obscure Radiohead song called "Creep."

After the concert, we decided to grab dinner in Sao Paulo. Unfortunately, restaurant-finding is not "social coordinator" Gabriel's strong point and his suggestions were: a Churrascaria (Brazilian steakhouse) that would set us back each about 30USD, a Japanese restaurant with similar prices, or a mall food court. Nobody wanted to spend $30 on one meal so we settled on the food court. This would have been a stab in my little heart but for the fact that the mall also housed a pharmacy, for which I'd been dying, and a store called Hanny, pictured. Plus, it turns out that mall food courts in Brazil are slightly different than those in America and I had a boring but healthy and affordable meal from the salad bar of a chain churrascaria. After an uneventful drive home, I went to bed far too late and am now sitting in class (shhh), exhausted but satisfied.

A word on social interactions: I have settled into a nice little clique (a la Mean Girls, I'm Regina George) and have decided that cardio exercise is unnecessary in light of all the laughing I am doing every day. Perhaps the funniest crayon in the box is Darcy Kaplan, of West Hartford/Farmington, CT (her dad referred to me as a "fellow nutmegger"), pictured at right in a precarious position during our pasture exercise. Her Brazil blog--"Brazil Happened"--is linked on the left column of this page. She is followed closely on my Top Hits list by Josie Duffy and my dear roommate Olivia Frazao. Here is a picture of them if you want to check out their pretty faces (well, profiles).

Just finished a looooong day of class, which ended with a ridiculous conversation about global destruction in which people pretended like they knew what they were talking about ad nauseum. All I want to do is lie in bed and read Lolita, which I just started, but those six credits are calling to me like sirens and so I'm off to read about Atlantic Forest biodiversity hotspots instead.... Tchau!