Here again

 I just read my entry from three years ago, which I never published. It's interesting, some things I still think about today. Maybe most of them.

Three years have passed, and a lot has changed. I bought this apartment, which I was already about to by then. My contract with the EC won't be renewed again, so I'm already en route to complete the six years. I was engaged, broke up, and last year I was with many girls. Some with whom I'm still today, in different cities/countries, from different continents, in one way or another.

We can start by dating. It's difficult to come to terms with dating not being easy because society wants you to think that it's your fault. We all, perhaps especially men, shame each other for being "alone". Like having a partner is a trophy you show to others, to signal that your worth is bigger. I no longer consciously think that way, which is amazing compared to 10-15 years ago. And last year, I think I finally acknowledged to myself that yes, I'm an interesting guy, I can see when a girl is into me and when she isn't. But all of this still affects me, because the commodification of dating makes us all, app-users or not, follow it. Just this week, I read this extremely interesting Instagram post about how emotionally available people are being punished, and that's super true. I know that, on one hand, some emotionally available girls are or have been into me, and I am/was not. But I never punished them, nevertheless. On the other hand, my dating style is very engaging, and it seems like it needs to be more typically nonchalant to work. Which means that I have to perform, and that's precisely what I avoided doing last year - and what made me have so much success, not because I dated a big number of girls but because I was exactly myself. But non-chalancy went, in my head, from "it's a Portuguese thing because we're more into gender roles" to "it's how modern dating works because everyone is afraid of each other".

Because once again, meeting girls in the EU bubble feels like it's all just an illusion. We talk a lot during the parties, engage, kind of flirt, I think. And then it doesn't deliver anything. Here I am, once again checking if these girls have already replied to me. And they can just not be into me, which is fine. I may also be underrating their previous experiences in not wanting to openly tell me they ain't. With some of them, I read between the lines, and now we're good friend-colleagues. Most of them will be like that. But this ambiguity is really not fun. And even beyond that, I'd really like to date a (relatively distant) colleague and share the stuff in common that we have. And normalize hitting on girls I meet in person, not just girls that are behind a dating app. For some reason, I tend to think that they are all judging me for doing it. It kinda happened last year between two, saying I texted one "only" two months after the other. And in Portugal, this was my understanding of how people thought, too. But why, once again, the performance? I like you, it doesn't work, no prob. I like other people too. We're not that special.

That, and/or a Portuguese. It's been almost a decade since I've been with a Portuguese girl. Even lusophone. And I do kinda miss it. I'm not really sure what I should do to do it, because in Portuguese events there doesn't seem to be much interest from them in me (or at least not reciprocated, but I can only think of one case anyway). But I'd really like it. It'll happen if it will.

Maybe this will all change next week, though. First, via this climate activists speed dating thing. It's people who are going there for that purpose precisely, so I can be even more open about this intention. And second, the neurodivergent crew, for our next gathering here at mine on relationships and stuff. Maybe it's really there that I'll find the person I can have an intellectual bond with.

We'll see. Tough world for dating, but I'm still among the privileged. I don't need apps; I am attractive, and I'm in a good place with my own confidence in myself about this. The rest of the world makes me have moments where I doubt it, but as Michael says, it's the pain of the process. Last year, I focused on what I didn't want; this year, I'm focusing on what I want. Not everyone will be aligned with me on this; most probably won't. But as long as I trust that I'm doing it right, and don't get myself scared away or affected by thinking how my reputation is being affected - for example, are my colleagues commenting that I'm engaging with a lot of them? - I'll be on the right path.

My trip to Korea (and other stories)

I wanna use my blog more as a journal now. It makes sense for a lot of reasons, but also because it was precisely in Brussels that I started using it that way. Back in 2016, when I first came here to Erasmus, I changed the scope of this blog - as a reminder, Uspeti means success in Serbian and I created it after Nole won Wimbledon in 2011 to become world number one for the first time - and turned it into this sort of journal/reporting on my first big adventure abroad. You know what? Hang on a second, I'm gonna read again what I wrote back in the day. It's been a while.

Oh, God. This was therapeutic, nostalgic, wholesome and cringe at the same time. Gosh, what an amazing idea to keep it in writing. I feel so good after reading it. Now I can't develop much cause I gotta have dinner and then go out, but I'll continue this post. Maybe tomorrow again.

________________________________________//________________________________________

Damn. Just a bit more than a year later, I actually started a journal. I wrote it more often in the beginning of the year than now in October, but still, I've been keeping it on my mind. I'll write on it today too, and I'll mention that I wrote on Uspeti today - and I'm writing on Uspeti by mentioning I'll write on my journal too. Ah, nice.

The reason I opened this up again just now though, and having totally forgotten about this blog post, is because I think I should start writing a book. People have always told me that since I'm a kid, and yesterday at improv something rang a bell: when Dan asked me to name an action for my colleagues to mimic while acting, I said "you're moping the floor of a classroom after hours". He was like "no no, just moping the floor, Pedro always has a storyline already made". As I was like "oh damn sorry guys I'll try to be more specific" he finally said "not at all, keep it, it's good for improv". And this goes in line with what my therapist says: I have a lot of energy and creativity that I need to use. This is the time to, slowly, start writing a book. I'll start a blog post, in Portuguese, and if I have something to publish I will with no schedule, no nothing.

I also got a piano for that purpose. In fact, the first joint purchase with Sindi, whom I think it's the first time I mention in this blog post. I'm not feeling like playing it too often to be honest, though I really wanna learn, but having it here is already nice and I'll also slowly do it. I'm not in a rush in life. For a lot of reasons, I should remind myself of it.

Finally, I guess I'll leave some lines on Korea too. It was great, and I miss it. It's one of those trips that you know you'll remember forever while you do it, and of course, by then I thought it was time to end right when it ended. But I guess that's normal, specially in such a different place, but I feel real, real good looking back now. Still trying to find myself here - do I travel because I crave living somewhere else, or I'm really fine just traveling and returning to Brussels/Europe even if i then have these feelings of saudade? We'll find out together, even if together is just me and I.

Money

I've been meaning to write this blog post for a while. Ideas have been coming and going about this topic, from many different dimensions - philosophical, moral, material, social even. It may be time to put it into words.

What's money? It's not like I'm asking a question nobody ever remembered to ask. Nevertheless, I think what we should do is never stop to ask it. And that's what we kinda did. We just accepted what others told us that money is, the propaganda we get in our heads since we're kids, the systemic indoctrination. And then we stopped debating what money is - and, perhaps even more dramatically, what it isn't.

Let's start with a very basic example from pop culture. In Ozark - a really cool Netflix show for those who like character development, but not that good if you have no patience for slow plot developments -, already on the first minutes of the first episodes, Marty (Jason Bateman) says that money is "choices". Money is the outcome of our choices, meaning: good choices lead to more money. Bad choices lead to less money.

Is it really though? Of course, it isn't. This bulshit is, first of all, privilege: you can only say money is the result of your choices when you can choose anything you want. And 95% of the world, at least, cannot. A kid in Malawi can always choose the right things: choose the right education, choose the right job, choose the right friends. Everything. If he has no money to take them, though? Doesn't matter for shit. Zero. Studies show that in the UK - a shithole these days but still with some sort of, albeit crooked af, social elevator - mediocre kids from rich parents earn more on average than smart kids from poor parents. What's the choice factor here exactly? Unless you believe you choose your parents. If that's the case, then you shouldn't be reading this blog, you need help.

So we already concluded that money is a barrier - for those who don't have it -, and its absence - for those who have it. What else does that quote from Ozark tell us, though? It comes from an American TV show, and God how I love to trash the US. But this could have totally been said in exactly the same way by a Dutchman, or a German. This is the Protestant moral, the one that while I actually like it a lot regarding religion - you don't need a stupid Pope, just read the Bible yourself at home and let priests marry and have kids like everyone else -, it's what has been forcing us into capitalism for two centuries. Then, it also influenced Charles Darwin to use his Theory of Evolution to justify being selfish aka the fittest. The rationale is simple: God loves you if and only if you work. The fruit of your work is money. Therefore, if you make a lot of money, God loves you more - and others can see that God loves you more. Ironically, at least in Europe Protestant countries are the least religious ones, but this moral remains, and it remains hard.

So money is also morality. And this is the biggest indoctrination we get since the day we're born. Money is all that matters because it's the way it is. And because it's the way it is, not having is bad and you need to have it. This is why people, or at least my mother, talk about the "principle". If someone owes me 20 cents, it's not a lot of money but I should still insist that they pay me. It's about not the quantity, but the "principle".

And while I just did this whole, I believe very rational, essay about the role of money in our society, I still get caught up by these "principles". By what the economists call, precisely, "rationality" - which isn't rational at all, because money comes only after the human being, and not before. But we just cannot imagine a world without it. Even if Marx talked about a society without money, I confess I cannot imagine it. I can see how it makes sense, but I'm so used to it that I can't imagine it.

That's because, on one hand, I managed to get away from the barrier dimension of money - or at least, I am in the process. For the past four years, since I started working in the Netherlands, I don't look at my finances at all. I don't do budgets, I don't save, I don't calculate how much I need for this or that. I just have enough money to know I can do anything I want and still save a lot of it. By anything I want, I don't mean that I waste it - just that my lifestyle is non-extravagant enough so that I naturally do not spend more money than I need. For example, I have money to buy an iPhone. The new model every year, in fact. But I don't. Because I think it's a waste of money for the service it provides, compared to other options in the market. And this is what naturally keeps me in check, these same "rationality" economists talk about.

But at the same time, I still have this morality mentality, the idea that more money is better - which is what we're incentivized to do, to accumulate. I can still go to a restaurant and a Margherita pizza is 10€. While the Regina is 15€. I'd still think, at first glance, that I should take the Margherita because it's cheaper. But I prefer Regina. So why don't I take it? Because in my brain, I still shouldn't spend money. But not because it'll have consequences - like it does when we're students, or we have a low income, where spending money here means not spending there. No: I can totally, absolutely spend these 5€ more. But in my mind, deeply intricated in my brain cells, I "know" I should always take the cheapest decision possible. Because that's the right thing to do.

I'm still navigating all of this, and with time I am indeed proceeding to the point I want to be on - where money is simply a tool and not a goal. In the end, it's what money is for all of us: money is a means to reach an end. If you think about it, nobody really wants money. We just want what money can give us - what barriers it can break, and how moral it makes us feel towards others. Even if you accumulate a lot of money, you are doing it because you know it can be useful in the future. Not to simply have it stay with you. Okay, maybe some people think like that but I think the majority doesn't. 

The majority wants money to spend money because money is access. And no money is no access - which is the case against unpaid internships, by the way. Unpaid internships, in particular, and what in Portugal we've been calling "emotional salary" is yet again another huge contradiction in capitalism. A system that constantly tells you to idolize money, then tells you money isn't everything? They don't tell you because it suddenly stopped being everything, no; they tell you because they want to be the ones accumulating it. It's still everything for them, just not for you because they own the means of production and you need to work for them or risk starvation. And the worse part is that many of us believe in it. Many of us think it makes sense to do an unpaid UN internship, because "you gain experience" and "that's how you start". Funny enough, most of those who say stuff like this are privileged. The ones for whom money never meant a barrier - so why would it mean now? And above all, why would it mean for anyone at all, if it doesn't for me? And even if it means for others, then that's because they have no merit - or not enough merit. This is what they tell us about the homeless too, after all.

We end it here today. Take care,

P

From my balcony

Been a while, huh? Here I am, writing from my balcony in my rocking chair. Just got it like what, two weeks ago, and it took quite a while to assemble together. But now it's alright, and it's chilling. Also, the new table for the balcony is here, with four chairs - I'll add one when my whole family comes - and we just put the old one in this area, called "esplanade", both for recycling and for leaving stuff we think other neighbours might want.

By we I mean with Marija, my friend/housemate/tenant. We thought about renting together, but then I told her, what if I buy and you rent from me? Makes much more sense in this economy, doesn't it. And here we are now. She's great: met her in Copenhagen four years ago, we kept in touch more or less till she came to Algarve in 2021 and then coincidentally moved to Brussels too. She's a bit more extroverted than me, about which I often have the same reaction most of my friends have with me - like Oscar and Andrei being like "how come it's 9am and you're already so active and happy?". But this means she also suffers more from my problem in the Netherlands, which is not finding people that vibe your way. And instead of always being "too much", being too generous and empathetic, and not getting enough reciprocity. This adds up to the fact she's very - stopping it a bit but still - into her standards for the "right man" in Croatia, which often conflict with the more feminist standards in a place like Brussels.

I say this a lot, maybe never here: Brussels is the right place to be right now in my life. I can't say I love it - although, if I really think about it, I don't really love any place. The closest to it it's Olhos d'Água, but even there after living one month straight in 2016 I wanted to leave already. So I think this is just how life is: you live here now, there later, "acolá" in the future and you should use the people as the main criterion. And my people are here. Intellectually, this is the place where I am right now, and I do remember feeling it wasn't in Lisbon a year and a half ago. And being so international means the local culture is more international than the local culture, which I can super coordinate with wanting to be involved with the community here in Schaerbeek. French also helps, compared to Dutch from when I lived in the Netherlands.

And so that's how I bought this apartment. I wrote this almost a month ago, before getting back to it just now. I should really write more, but I haven't been doing it. There isn't really a reason why I haven't other than I just opt to watch more and more Netflix. I mean, I watch stuff that I like but still I should diversify my time at home more. And it was during the first half of this week, when I was in Albania, that was talking with Henrique about it, as well as reading more. I haven't been reading books that I like to read the ones people give me first, but that's stupid because then it never ends. And there's this Spanish one my aunt gave me years ago, called Four Friends, that I'll start this afternoon.

Speaking of books, and Albania, they are connected by the fact that I've been reading Attached on kindle. It's a book that talks about different attachment styles, from anxious to secure to avoidant, and how to identify them, both in yourself and others. It's super enlightening and life-changing, because it puts into words what I've been thinking for a while: it's okay to be anxious, to wanting to be attached, connected, and that the people that always call this as "being too needy", that you should be independent and not needing anyone, are simply wrong. No, they are. My main two takeaways are: we all need someone, including avoidant people, to satisfy needs and wanting that, biologically, we obviously cannot and will not to alone. And I mean not as much about sex, but about care, affection, chemistry. And the second is that if you are like that, if you are more anxious and need more reassurance, more touch, contact, then you need to find someone that understands it and loves you for it. And not someone that tells you constantly that you're "too much".

Why is it connected with Albania? Because I finally met Sindi. We've been texting since late August, after - in a very millennial way - I saw her on a story from Lea. She's already been in Brussels last May but I was in Portugal by then/I didn't know she was around, and this actually goes back to her telling Lea I looked like El Profesor two years ago during the college. With some ups and downs since we started texting, we finally met after so much anticipation. And it was really awesome. She came to pick me up at the airport, had dinner cooked and then we spent every single second together, both in Tirana and by the beach in the south - amazing, super recommend. The best thing about being with Sindi is that not only I can apply what I learned in Attached - and we seem to be very much in sync about being both very passionate, very touchy, wanting to reassure one another -, but also helps me better understand the way I want to be with a partner following the experiences within my circles.

I wrote about this already but for some years now, I feel feminist men are struggling a bit to find themselves between the world they told us worked in a certain way, the way women around us expect us to behave and, last but not the least, the way we want to behave/feel comfortable. I've been feeling it in Brussels, where people are tendentially more progressive but 1) sometimes I just don't know and I can end up be more or less progressive with a girl that wants the opposite and 2) Brussels is a place where the "European" way of doing things - often simply the way it's done in France and Germany - is seen as the correct one, and that others need to catchup. And it's not like that. About feminism in particular - cause about politics it takes another post -, I found out it's really more about me, as a man, to behave in a case-by-case situation. For example, Sindi wanted to iron one of my polos and my first reaction was "oh, well, no, I mean I can do it myself, you don't have to". But then I realize, if she wants to, what's the problem? I also do things more "manly" to her, like sending flowers, and I do it because I want to. Because love is about taking care of each other, making each other happy. So I learned that yes, I have my way of wanting to be a particular type of man, which is a feminist one, but above all it's about feeling good with someone behaving the way they also want to be behave - also because the way feminism is pursued needs to be adapted to particular contexts and particular times. 

And I felt very good with Sindi. I felt we connected a lot and behave in a very wholesome way towards each other. And that's why just less than half-an-hour ago, I booked our Louvre tickets to be there within three weeks from now. Can't wait.

April 8

This is the name of this blog entry since I have so much to write about that no other title would make sense. This is a publication to take stock on what's been up in my life recently, and that I have been postponing writing just because. In fact, I should be postponing again today as I got an abscess removed yesterday on my left arm that got me on sick leave for the week but hey - you can always find excuses not to do stuff.

I haven't written yet about my trip to Ivory Coast, and thus I think I'll start with that. It was on the last week of January to visit irmão Nick in Abidjan, and my first time in Africa. I gotta say, first of all, I was really pop-eyed by the level of colonization of this country. For starters: what the fuck is *the* ivory coast? What kind of independent country calls itself the name the colonizer gave them because it saw them as no more than a place to steal ivory from the locals and to make money out of it? Burkina Faso, up north and the country of Thomas Sankara - the leftist, feminist leader barbarously killed because he wouldn't bend to the French and the Americans - changed their name from Haute Volta to "Land of Incorruptible People" after independence. But I mean, obviously, the locals know better how they want to be called so this is just my (very limited) understanding.

In Ivory Coast, the independentist leader and first president took the notion of representing to the next level. Do you know how rappers go like "yeah this is Queen's motherfucker" or "I'm from Compton, California"? Anti-communist Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who following Wikipedia is a "suspect" of having played a role in the coup that took down Sankara right across the border, was born in Yamoussoukro and was like "everybody should think my hometown is as dope as I think it is". That's why, even today, almost 30 years since his death, every national and international organisation may be in Abidjan but "Yakro" - as the locals call it - is still the capital, with its slightly-bigger-than-the-Vatican cathedral.

We were in Yakro on the day Ivory Coast played Egypt for the quarters of CAN, a competition that taught me two things about 1) the mentality of, at least, the Ivorians in general and 2) football in Africa. First, we watched it together with locals on this terrace, everybody having fun and was passionate about the match, calling us "les blancs"... And then, the match goes to penalties, everybody is stressed, then "we" unfortunately lose and they stay 5 seconds (if that many) sad-ish only to then be like "whatever, life goes on". In Portugal, people would be minimum the rest of the day upset and sad and depressed.

The second thing I learned was the role that, indeed, football plays in being more than just a game. I never liked this mentality back in Europe because, in the end, if football is not just a game nowadays it's because it became all about the money. However, seeing Nick's neighbourhood celebrating in the streets, with fireworks in the skies, "only" because Burkina Faso qualified for the semis was staggering really. In Portugal, we would never, ever, celebrate Spain qualifying for anything. It really is more than just a game.

There's a lot I can talk about from the trip, however, I'll limit this first part of the story to when I got a positive test for malaria. I say it like that because I did a second one two days later and then another back in Lisbon and both were negative, however, I had the symptoms while in Yakro: nausea, shivers, hot-and-colds, a bit of a fever, walking in the street and start puking, not being able to sleep unless with my belly turning up and, overall, just feeling like I'd rather die. Luckily I had good insurance (one time for IATI) and Nick was there being a true homie. About this, in particular, we had quite a friction some days later when we went to a College of Europe (CoE) alumni meeting at... the Belgian Embassy to the Ivory Coast, in Abidjan. The Ambassador is a former CoE alumnus from 20 years ago and invited us and others in town to have this meeting at his place, which was yet another first experience for me. And it was great because I took it as it was: an informal meeting between people that studied at the same place. I treated the Ambassador as "vous" because, and obviously, he's an Ambassador and we are at his place, but I'm neither Belgian nor Ivorian: therefore, I'm there to meet a CoE alumnus, not an ambassador. I understand, however, that this isn't everyone's opinion and that the diplomatic world relies on protocol and untold rules. This is why we had an argument over that, but in the end, I think that I at least, learned from it. And I guess it's different when you see somewhere as your workplace instead of your holiday place as I did.

I then had huge stress about needing to have a negative covid-19 PCR test to return home - likely because they are afraid the West will unfairly close borders again with an African country that is honest about its numbers -, first because it took ages to arrive, then because it was positive, in the meantime my insurance put me in a hotel where I met this very nice receptionist and we still had time to go for a date, and then, at last, I managed to return to Portugal already in February. Then, I took the CAST exam in the middle of the month - the competency-based exam you need to join the EU institutions with a contract and I passed, which is something I'll come up to in a bit. This is just to say that, in the meantime, I moved to Brussels to work as intérimaire (for now) at DG Energy, being really at the center of the European energy policy - which is at the center of the EU's foreign policy overall, given the barbaric and criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Now that I'm back living in Brussels, a place I already knew very well from my Erasmus, it feels like home really. Still trying to solve some things, both here and back in Portugal, but overall it's going pretty great. I took a CAST exam again almost three weeks ago, for another competence, which I passed again and this is the first thing I wanna share: following an already-visible trend on my blog, I tend to refer to Kendrick's song often and on FAITH. he talks about how he's afraid he will lose his creativity, which is his breadwinning. I think I can relate to it in the sense that, sometimes, and given my path at the CoE, and now my career at the institutions, all of these evaluations that I have been nailing - somehow I feel like one day I may wake up and just not know these things anymore, for some reason (amnesia, whatever). This is clearly a very first-world problem, but it's thoughts I sometimes have that makes me really value more and more what I have.

Also, if being in Brussels as an engineering student had already triggered me to be politically stimulated, now that I am working in policy it definitely does it even more. Having become a climate activist for the past months (although I often do not like to call myself that way as my actions are not as "hands-on" as, say, Greta Thunberg or Xiye Bastida), there are things that I currently reflect on more, and especially for being close to really interesting and awesome people that think alike. And it is very hypocritical, for example, how we have been spending almost a decade arguing we have "no space" for war refugees and now, suddenly we do for Ukrainians. We have job offers specifically for Ukrainians. And I don't even want to consider the possibility of being misinterpreted but, in case it happens, my point is that, and clearly, we have space, work possibilities, everything for every human being in the world. What we didn't have before was empathy, and it would be good if we critically look at our leaders now. It's not right to blatantly say "now they look like us so we'll help us". First, it's borderline eugenia. Second, even in the parallel dimension of psychopathy where that's a valid argument, I personally even look more Syrian than Ukrainian. So no, refugees welcome, no human being is illegal, war must end everywhere and Slava Ukraina.

Finally, just a reflection I have been having for a while but that I never put into words on this blog: as late-stage capitalism evolves, we are reaching a period in a society where we become even more and more unequal, and even more and more having a big chunk of the population serving a small portion of it. I'm talking about the growth of Uber (Eats) jobs, where literally these people work in very shitty conditions and their job is to satisfy the whims of some of us. But this is also visible on a bigger scale, for example how I see most of my former engineering colleagues graduating and then going to work in IT. I am, naturally, not talking about those who did Informatics, but instead Chemical, Physics, Biomedical, Mechanical engineers that see the market as forcing them to follow the path that the market always does: the one that maximises wealth for those who control the means of production. I'll write more and better about this in the future, I hope.

Be safe,