What's Up With Me

Life is pretty satisfactory these days. I have a very well established routine, one that goes a little something like this: go to work, come home, make dinner, play an hour or two of basketball, study Portuguese, cruize the Internet. I generally go to a party or two each week, Thursday being the standard party day in Brazil (Friday mornings are almost always groggy and hangover-y). On the weekends I do more basketball playing and more Portuguese studying with many hours-long marathons of each. The only thing that's really missing is traveling to other cities and Brazilian poontang, but I have faith those things will come later.

One thing that's really been undermining my quality of life in Brazil is my allergies. As some of you know, I have crazy food allergies. Well, my allergies have kicked it up a notch in Brazil. Now, in addition to being allergic to gluten and milk, I am also allergic to refined sugar and I *believe* soy as well. It took me a good 2 weeks of feeling like shit to realize that refined sugar was the culprit and then another 2 weeks to realize that even my drinking coffee without sugar from the coffee machine at work was making me sick (any kind of coffee you get from the machine comes out the same spout so it's probably a cross-contamination thing). Now that I've figured out what was making me feel bad and how to effectively avoid it, the digestive problems, joint pain, bad skin, and fatigue have gone away and I am much happier; incredibly I can actually play sports again and there ain't no better therapy or relaxation than pickup b-ball. Of course, the logistics of finding food when I'm out, buying stuff I can eat, and preparing said stuff are still tricky; it can be incredibly frustrating to go to a restaurant and not be able to order any of the dishes or go to a party and realize they don't have anything I can drink. Because of the allergies nowadays my diet consists solely of: meat, poultry, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruits, potatoes, and rice. This diet is actually very healthy, and most importantly these foods are all Brazilian staples making Brazil a good place for a guy like me to be eating.

So, physically things are looking up. Mentally things are relatively rosy as well -- again, speaking a foreign tongue makes me really, really happy -- though I'm feeling rather awash with ambivalence at the moment. Brazil is sweet, but I'm here smack dab in the middle of a career existential crisis, one of those "what the fuck am I going to do with my life" kind of periods; I desperately need a copy of Chicken Soup for the Undecided Young Professional's Soul to tell me what the hell kind of job/field I should be getting into after school. One thing is for sure: this internship has removed all doubt that IT is not what I'm meant to do and has shown me that I need to be working with foreign language in some way to be happy. If I know anything for sure it's that cubicle jobs rot your soul, or at least the souls of people like me. I feel caged despite the fact that any conventional measure would tell me I have a "good" job.

My latest ambition is to go to graduate school. I've been researching linguistics grad school obsessively as of late in an attempt to figure out what schools I want to apply to in the fall and what my specialization should be. I'm still planning this thing out, but I think I want to do a Master's degree in some sort of applied linguistics like sociolinguistics or second language acquisition. Of course there's also lots of schools abroad to consider, as well as how I'm going to get somebody else to pay for all of this. Decisions, decisions.

All right, that's all I got. I have about 3 or 4 unfinished posts baking in the oven that one day I'll get around to finishing. I'll see you back here in a week or so, gentle readers. Take care.