No, this is not a post about backstabbing friends and how to avoid them/watch out for signs. Although I could talk about that too..let’s say, a friend who is never happy for you when you accomplish something, never compliments you and seems to like you better when you are down.

This is a post about words that sound similar in different languages and have the same roots but have distinct meanings. Hey, distinct is one of them .

Also called Colour Words, these words cause a lot of confusion for Brazilians living in the U.S. and Americans living in Brazil. It’s funny listening to my Brazilian friends when visiting; they are not aware of some different meanings because they haven’t really lived in America or spent significant time here to learn all of them.

Here is a website with False Friends in Portuguese and English: http://tiny.cc/lrC7c

That list is very short though. There are many others, more than I can think of now, and I invite my fellow Brazilians who come across this blog to add some more:

ENGLISH                                    PORTUGUESE

1. Compromise (to setttle)-Compromisso (a date, appointment, commitment)

2. Assist (to help)-Assistir (to watch)

3. Absolutely (totally, yes)-Absolutamente (No!, completely)

4.Office (workplace)-Ofício (profession)

5. Condone (to agree with something someone did)-condenar (to find guilty, to disagree)

6. Academy (Learning Institution)-Academia (gym!)

7. Gymnastics (Olympic sport)-Ginãstica (any kind of exercise)

8. Preservative (chemicals added to foods)-Preservativo (condom!)

9. Push (to push!!)-Puxe (to pull!)-this is a source of great confusion for both Americans and Brazilians

10. Distraction (something that takes your attention)-Distração (also entertainment)

11. Distinct (different)-Distinto (Honorable)

Anyhow, False Friends can add to the stress of living in a different country (Germans, French, etc, all have colour words with English) as well as cause some communication problems for Brazilian-American couples.

One of them is the word sleepy. For us Brazilians, sleepy means wanting to sleep.  Americans say “tired”.  In Portuguese, you can be tired without wanting to sleep. You can be tired after a game of tennis and not want to sleep. And you can feel like sleeping without being tired. In Brazil tired is after some strenuous exercise…it took some time for  my husband and I to understand each other on this

I never became addicted to Facebook or Orkut. I would check it once in a while but I felt that I had to read too much junk from too many people. People called “friends” who I hardly knew.

When I first heard about twitter, I immediately thought: “one more social networking website trying to compete with MySpace”. One day, I was watching “The View” when I heard the women talking about Twitter.  Their enthusiasm caught my attention and I decided to check it out.  In a matter of a few months, Twitter became my number one source of news as well as website I most spend time on. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I look at before I put my phone down at night, much to my husband’s displeasure

I now follow many people, most of them news like CNN, where I get good information, latest news and links to interesting articles right there and then. I suppose my number of poeple I follow will increase to the point I will miss many interesting tweets, since I cannot be fon the site all day. Unfortunately, there is someone or a new interesting organization to follow.

The evening Michael Jackson was pronounced dead, I was at the gym. I was reading my tweets in one hand and checking the news on the gym TV-which was still saying Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital. Looking at my tweets, I read MJ was already dead.  It took more than one whole minute for CNN to mention his death.  I can only imagine how the 9/11 news would have spread if Twitter already existed in 2001. Accounts from witnesses in real time.

It may be a fad, but so far Twitter has affected my Facebook account, which I rarely check now, and this blog-greatly ignored. Let’s see how long will Twitter reign-and how long we will enjoy receiving several short messages one after the other. After all, everything has a cycle. AOL, Yahoo, MySpace…people always want something new.

A certain reality many of us have to endure in big urban areas is a long commute. I traded a 5 minute commute for a 45 minute commute. Yes, shoot me. Sometimes it’s more, depending on traffic conditions/construction/accidents/weather. Why would I switch a wonderful commute for a terrible one, masochism? A desire to live in the country? A much better job with better pay? None of the above. I remarried.

In the old days, people would get married in their early 20’s and build a life together. Whatever their career would be, they would have roots in one place. If the husband was sent to a different city, state or country, the wife would invariably leave her occupation to follow her husband.

Nowadays, with many couples meeting when their career is already consolidated, or when they have children from their first marriage, they are forced to move to an area where both can maintain their jobs-equidistant to each’s work.

That entails long commutes. Long commutes that shorten your life span, create health problems (especially back and hip problems), add to your stress, eat up your free time, prevent you sometimes from exercising and just plain drive you nuts.

Maybe our President should create a mandatory work-from-home-one-day-a-week policy for all office workers? There are so many of them in the Washington DC metro area! Imagine 1/5, or 20% less cars on the road each day.

We already have all the technology to work from home. Only firefighters, nurses, teachers, salespeople, security, doctors, dentists, cleaning crews, handymen, contractors and other in loco professions need to relocate every day. We also have technology for meetings, if that is an excuse for why office workers need to be at their offices.

There has been even a trend for “office” spaces in the suburbs with internet connections where people who work from home can meet.  Places near their homes where they can connect to other people and not feel so isolated. They can pay a small fee for using a workstation each day, or a monthly fee. Some folks have used the local Starbucks for that.

One, two days a week working from home. Seems like a smart idea for me.

Yesterday I visited a “5-minute doctor”. That seems to be more and more common. I have PRIVATE insurance, a PPO, which I pay a lot of money every month for (and barely use), but I am seeing this happen very often: a long wait followed by a 5 minute check up from the doctor.

My last visit was to an orthopedist. I have something called “tennis elbow”, not from playing tennis but from moving heavy objects late last year. My arm has not healed so I went back to the same doctor I had gone early this year to(he knew my history and was walking distance from my office).

The same thing happened: I waited for one hour (with no good magazines in the waiting room ); first in the reception area and later in a small room.

What really peeved me is that I had written in the form that I had actually two problems. Everyone knows the human body is like a machine. One thing affects the other. I had pain in some other area, which he totally disregarded. He probably wants me to pay for another consultation so he can charge to look at my other “pain”.

He spent 5 minutes with me, told me what to do (immobilize the area) and asked me to come back after 6 weeks,  hurriedly answering my questions. What a terrible experience! I think doctors don’t think empathy is necessary anymore in their consultation with patients. All they need is some knowledge. Why not then consult with a robot? A robot who would scan your body, inform you what kind of problem you have (in a robotic voice like Kanye West’s songs ) and than print a list of recomendations?

Are doctors being forced to see a certain number of patients per hour-or may I say, per minute? If that is a private PPO, I prefer that all the money I pay go to an universal healthcare system where I would probably have to wait just the same!

LET”S ALL MAKE HEALTHCARE REFORM HAPPEN. THIS COUNTRY NEEDS IT!

Another difference that comes to mind between the USA and Brazil is the way how mothers and fathers transport their babies.  Brazilian mothers still carry their babies in their arms a lot. American mothers prefer strollers all the time. I could guess that that is a matter of economics: strollers are too expensive for the low income population in Brazil.

I remember when my kids were babies,  I carried them a lot. I also used the “front-pack”, where they could actually listen to my heartbeat and feel the warmth of my body.  Even though I could afford a stroller (and owned one), I loved carrying them in my arms. I felt that the touch they received from me was important. I also felt that the closeness made them feel safe. I never though I was spoiling them.  Dr. Spock theories about “spoiling” babies did not feel right to me. After hearing a lot about “training your baby by not picking it up when it is crying all the time”, I once let my older child cry herself to sleep in her crib, breaking my heart in the process. It felt terrible. I wish I did not make her more fearful and distrustful in the process.

American parents use the stolller all the time (strollers in busy malls and sidewalks are very annoying). Maybe  holding their babies more often could be better for their babies’s health. Touch, as it has been documented by various research, is fundamental to babies’ development and emotional well being.

I had some Brazilian visitors at my house and they know my disgust with the fact that David Goldman still does not have his son back in the United States. I asked them their position on David’s case and they are in favor of Sean being returned to his father (“obviously”, they pointed out). However, their attitude is of “defeatism” and “apologism”.

They gave me a very grim picture of Lula’s government and the ever existing corruption in the country. They said Lula is almost dictator-like and the poor population loves him due to popular actions like a “basic basket” of free monthly food items to those who have an income lower than a certain amount, the “school-scholarship” which is a certain amount of money given to parents who guarantee their kids go to school, etc.

Apparently Lula bailed out the Globo media group, which was struggling, and now they never badmouth him. Globo is the largest TV station in Brazil with the most viewership.

Meanwhile, corruption runs wild in a big scale, and most Brazilians feel helpless. Even though I lived in Brazil most of my life, it still shocks me to hear that the population accepts the corruption passively. They complain and complain, decade after decade, but they simply do not get together and act against it. They claim is has gotten better than in the past, but still has a long way to go.

I tried to argue that Brazil is an avid internet user and that widespread information is the best weapon to bring corruption to light and provoke enough ire that public opinion forces change. I gave as an example Twitter, extremely popular in Brazil, which has corruption stories availabe for all to see. My visitors said it doesn’t matter. The majority of the population just doesn’t care. All they want to watch or read about is SOCCER, Formula 1 and SOAP OPERAS. They skip the news on TV and watch the “novelas”, the soap operas that millions and millions of Brazilians watch every single night. If you try to discuss something more serious with many people, even the “educated” ones, they immediately lose interest. Girls are raised to try to be “models” and boys aspire to become soccer players.

They accept corruption with passiveness. They shrug their shoulders and say “fazer o quê, né?” (“do what, right?”). There is little sense of organization, community and activism. They say that it will take “100 years” to change the mentality, instead of trying to change things NOW. I blame only one thing for the state of affairs and corruption in Brazil: the Brazilian population. Finally, they did not try to find out more and showed no interest when my husband and I talked further about David’s case. I think they think this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of corruption. I believe that is the attitude of many educated middle class Brazilians now.

When girls become teenagers, they usually have a best friend at school or in their neighborhood. As they become adults, life changes such as new jobs, marriage, kids and relocation sometimes makes the best female friend fall into the backdrop of life. Some young women while vying for male attention become very competitive, and prefer to surround themselves with male friends instead of female ones. And many of us while married prioritize the relationship with our husbands, children and the new family unit we build for ourselves.

Something happens though after our forties: we need our female friends more than ever. Middle age can be a time of our lives where big changes happens: menopause, divorce, empty nest, cancer, loneliness, aging parents…life stresses that all of us can go through. That is when having a network of good female friends can be a buffer, a respite, a support. Women are less competitive when more mature. We know we do not have the power to seduce every man that walks by any longer, so we are not so focused on who looks better than who. We don’t see other women as competition.

Additionally, we see many of our “sisters” going through the same life changes that we do, and a bond is formed.  Finally, we have more common interests with these women from our generation than with the men in our lives.  Ah, and we all share our cheap reading glasses when we go out

Everyone has those constant irritants that make our day worse.  Here are some of them:

1. Slow drivers. Those people who apparently love to spend time in traffic…

2. Products that need scissors to open.

3. Products with instructions in very fine print (the population is aging!).

4. Loud talk show audiences screaming: they drive me nuts.

5. Ads that are much louder than the show you are watching.

6) Auto-correct on the iPhone when you are typing in another language.

7. People that write to you in caps.

8. People who send you corny chain emails in PowerPoint.

9. People talking loudly in a foreign language in a public space (I have been guilty of this once or twice..).

10. Medical bills sent sometimes 6 months after an appointment and you simply don’t remember.

11. Drivers who don’t signal.

12. Needing reading glasses for everything, and no laser surgery for that yet.

13. Parents who take all their young kids (and strollers)to the mall on a busy day

More to come..patience is not my strongest virtue

Pierre Aderne, the leader of the Brazilian musical group “Doces Cariocas”, will have a show at the end of August for the Bring Sean Home cause. I am happy that a Brazilian artist decided to publicly show his support to David. The group received the “Premio de Musica Brasileira 2009″, which is like our Grammy award! They will be recording their DVD in August at the Teatro Tom Jobim and will be playing in great venues in Rio and Sao Paulo such as Teatro Rival, Copacabana Palace, Cinematheque and Estudio SP. Congrats Pierre and all the members of the group!

Here is Doces Cariocas’ Myspace pages:

www.myspace.com/docescariocas

www.myspace.com/abacateiro

Legião Urbana – Perfeição (clipe original)

This great song from my favorite 80’s Brazilian rock group questions the Brazilian government’s incompetence and corruption. Renato Russo had the most amazing tenor voice.  I met him when he was starting, he was in my school when we were teenagers. He died young, like many music geniuses, of drug abuse.