Bring it On

I just had my weekday night dinner salad and the taste of hot sauce and vinegar still lingers in my mouth. There is a slight breeze moving through the apartment, and I am thanking mother nature, or father time, or something larger than myself that summer hasn’t yet arrived. My next door neighbors have just started clapping en masse and earlier I heard them killing a chicken, so it looks like another night of Candomblé. I sure would love African rituals if I was studying them for field work, or academic enlightenment, or just to get smarter, but as things now stand I am still their cranky ass light sleeping neighbor who thinks he should “dormir” and eat more fiber. Or something.

Click and watch this you so deserve it.

So life into an autumn that is not an autumn moves on. No leaves fall here. No woods in transition. Just calm spring breezes and the coconuts that fall into them. Life has, for the most part, been pretty good of late. My routine most days is something along the lines of 6am, god it’s early, run, run, run down the steps of the hill, eat two eggs, grab van, drink coffee, stare at facebook, play with kids, yell at kids, wish there was someplace quiet to avoid kids, grab van, come home, make salad, go to bed. Some days, a slight detail will change—the color of my lunch lasagna, or the way a student looks at me and smiles.

My body continues to run my slightly-more-thirty-ass-than-twenty-ass self into the ground. It’s been two months now that I have been in a back crisis, looking for ways to avoid my 24 hour pain. I was diagnosed with a degenerative herniated disc last year, after about five years of suffering from intermittent pain. Now, I can’t sit for more than an hour without my body protesting my spine, and have tried solving this problem by getting rid of chairs altogether (my work computer is now on a shelf that I stand and stare at all day long). Physical therapy, stretching, exercise, nothing seems to be working, and I have gone so far as to (ahem, happy hippy territory) read pseudo-scientific medical literature claiming that back pain is an “emotional symptom” and not a “physical abnormality”. What to do, what to do?

In order to break up the routine, Vivi and I joined a boxing gym and are soooo very much in love with doing it. I’ve always had mad respect for boxers because they train REAL, they train HARD, and their abs can put your flabby fat curve of happiness to shame. Our gym is this crowded little room off the beach that smells like sweat and is full of red faced aggressive looking people. When I went into the place for the first time, I became “apaixonado”, in love with the grit and seriousness of the place. Our trainer, Cristiano, is one funny but mean son of a bitch. He’s the kind of guy that will force you to do 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 combinations on the bag, all while smiling and cracking his whip. When he starts to notice that people are getting tired, he screams in his loudest voice, “SOME ONE TIRED IN HERE?!” If you respond “no” it’s back to the mat, and if the answer is “yes”, well, it’s back to the mat. He is such a bastard, I love him.

So that’s it. So much happening. So much not happening. I feel like I am in a time vortex that never really moves on. Salvador has become just that place where I live. Nothing necessarily all together special, but still respectable and fun. My parents arrive in three months (the last time my dad stepped foot in Brazil was 45 some odd years ago), and I’m getting pumped about their visit. Some days, I’m kind of ready to go home, buy a cell phone, buy a car, maybe even get fatter, but then I remember that my home is here and that tomorrow is just another day.

Hey look, it's election day!

We try hard not to be cool. We try and we fail.

Smile.

Bahianas and their hair.

More time gone by.