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?
-- Never too many beers -- 