Movie marathon… mixed feelings about it!

I haven’t been that busy in a long time… but I kinda like it because the summer is almost over — thank God! — and so is the Immersion Program season 2009/2010, and I’ve hardly noticed. This week there are two people at school having classes and they are simply the kindest folks ever (I do hope we’ve left a good impression on them as well!). Obviously there were a few problems with schedule, but they didn’t seem to be bothered by that.

Apart from the usual Immersion routine, my co-worker and I have been preparing activities to be done during the Immersion “Special Edition” that will take place at the folks’ company, for five days. We’ve already finished four complete activities and another one is on the way — the one that’ll wrap up the visit. We decided to make them produce their own podcast based on everything that they’ll have seen during the four days of classes. I’m really excited about it and so is my co-worker, but I’m not sure if the students will like it… I mean, it’s something different and they’ll still be working on business content, and we thought it would be nice to, you know, loosen up a little on the last day because they’ll definitely be pretty beat by then. The classes will happen in two weeks’ time and it will be a daily 9-hour journey.

Speaking of classes, I’m teaching a regular group this semester. It’s gonna be a Prime 4 — my personal favourite level — and these guys were my students at the very beginning, during Prime 1. They are willing to pay extra to be a customized group — obviously I won’t see the colour of the extra cash in my bank account — to have classes with me. How flattering is that? The down side is that the class starts at my favourite time: 8am! Twice a week! I have to confess, though, that for a couple of weeks I’ve been working mornings and at the end of the day it isn’t that bad. I get to go home earlier — occasionally… — and have time for other stuff. Well, time for some stuff but not everything that I want to do. You can’t always have what you want, anyway, as Mick would say…

For instance, haven’t had time for the news. At all. Something that I like doing is to read the headlines on the web and haven’t had time for that either. During the few brief moments I have to catch up, I basically favourite some for later. Also got a pile of Guardian Weekly waiting to be read on my nightstand. TV is on when I’m around the house but I’m usually so tired that don’t really pay much attention to it. I was talking to a student this morning during phone class and I don’t know why he brought up the subject of dengue epidemic in the country. He said that in cities upstate there were hundreds of people with the disease and he was hoping for lower temperatures so that it could curb its spread. I told him that I haven’t watched local news in more than 6 months, so I wasn’t affected at all by this piece of information. However, a year ago, during summer, also as hot as this one has been and watching local TV news, I would get absolutely terrified every time I saw a mosquito hovering around my living room.

Well, I do think now that summer is getting to an end. We did suffer on a daily basis with 37ºC+ temperatures and it’s time now to cool it! But last weekend was still pretty hot, so I decided to crash at my mom’s flat, which is much bigger than mine, — she’s been at the beach for a week now — with a selection of movie channels plus an air conditioner in every room. It couldn’t have asked for a better time and the cherry on top was to find ice-cream in the freezer! I was definitely a kid in a candy shop… So, I must have watched some ten movies during the weekend, one better than the other — including old stuff such as “Scarface” — but there was a down side to it. There are lots of films that I want to see later in the month but won’t be able to since my cable pack doesn’t include these channels… So, needless to say that coming back to my tiny-flat-and-no-good-movie-channels reality was pretty harsh…

Botched attack!

I kinda have mixed feelings when it comes to Carnaval. It is good to have a few days off, on the other hand the environment in which these days take place is absolutely unbearable. There’s nothing more depressing than Porto Alegre during this holiday; well, to be honest there’s nothing more depressing than this holiday. As expected, I am completely oblivious to what is going on up north in the country — but I do have a pretty good idea — and I’m totally ok with that. One thing that made international news was the fact that this 7-year-old girl in Rio was chosen to be samba queen and, unfortunately, it doesn’t shock me at all. It created some sort of buzz for a couple of days and everybody seemed to disagree with her parent’s decision to let her participate in the samba school presentation, but is this exposure any different from those beauty pageants or “Toddlers and Tiaras” shows? I’m not defending anybody here; I think these kids should be at home and those parents doing something productive with them, maybe trying to prevent them from becoming reality show “celebrities”.

Speaking of which, one more Big Brother on TV — the last maybe? — and I couldn’t care less. I think it all comes to having options. I remember that last year I didn’t have cable in my house, as well as internet,  and I suffered every single day. You end up getting used to whatever is on and find yourself watching the dumbest, most superficial types of programmes.

Well, as it’s not the case anymore, I’ve been enjoying watching TCM channel, which basically shows old movies and series. Last week I mostly got home in the afternoon after work, since I started working in the morning, and I basically crash on the couch with the TV on for a couple of hours before doing anything in the house. On the sofa half asleep, I saw that the movie “Attack of the 50 ft. Woman” would be on a little later. I’d always wanted to watch the movie, even though I knew I would be very cheesy, so I struggled through the first hour to keep my eyes open but in the last 15 minutes, the part of the movie that she actually becomes a 50ft giant, I was sound asleep. It was frustrating because I watched one hour of bad movie just to see her attack and destroy the whole city…

I guess I'll have to watch one more hour of bad movie

Desired temperature: -5ºC

I don’t remember experiencing such excruciating heat in years. I don’t know, it’s 10pm now and the temperature must be seriously above 35ºC. There isn’t one tiny blow of air, a half of a weak breeze or anything that resembles some sort of wind to ease this extremely uncomfortable situation.

This might be the Sahara desert, but it accurately portrays Porto Alegre at 4pm

One way that my mom describes really hot summer days: “it’s Senegalese hot”. I don’t know why she chose Senegal, I don’t know if she heard it somewhere and started using it, I only know that I grew up listening to that sentence. Obviously I’ve never been there so there’s no way I can tell it’s accurate or not, but it’s sure funny. So I googled the country and saw this image. For sure it doesn’t resemble not even for a second our southern Brazilian coast — which is a piece of crap (that’s actually the colour of the sea down here) — and with that Senegalese view before me I don’t think I would mind the Senegalese hot days. But being more realistic, for the past few days I’ve envied the guys that could make it to our crappy beaches because at least the temperature there is 10ºC lower.

A beach in Senegal

It’s the end of a holiday in the city today — obviously we weren’t granted with a long weekend and we all had to go to work yesterday. But honestly, it was better to spend the day at work because at least we had air-conditioning. It’s basically going to be a pretty busy February. Even though my work hours have been expanded I don’t think I’ll be able to finish everything in time without doing some overtime. In fact, I had to stay for almost two hours after my shift and I don’t know how and when I’ll be compensated for the extra hours. So, I was kind of thinking about asking for the 17th off since it’s Carnaval’s ashes and, well, my birthday, but the answer that I got, after all those weeks doing overtime and not being paid, was that we had to see with HR first but it’s not likely to happen. That really put me down, seriously.

After a few days watching some different programmes, I watched Beck earlier. What am I supposed to say? I can’t understand why people seem to enjoy what he does on the show, I’m actually shocked by some things. Today he “explained” the metaphors he used on a previous show about Obama leading the country to a plane crash and people being taken to be slaughtered or something. So there were people on other shows — O’Reilly included — that were disagreeing with the way he delivers his opinions. Why use all that crap? Is it entertaining? Is it amusing? Is that what people are really looking for? If so, well, I think the future is bleak. I think it shouldn’t be about this or that network; people should be getting the information from a variety of sources, listen to different opinions from both right and left, liberals and conservatives and put everything into perspective and base their decision on different sources. Well, if they are doing whatever they want on TV, they should be open to criticism as well, without throwing a fit on the air. I don’t think Beck likes when people don’t agree with him… hum… isn’t that what dictators do?