I'm Back, Bitches

This bizarre, unplanned ramadan of mine is officially over - in every way.

I am back. The whole me.

I am not concerned about measuring how long I was actually gone (a month? a year?) nor the reasons behind why I went away. At this point, it's absolutely irrelevant because all that matters is today and tomorrow.

Steve arrives from Paris in a matter of days, and Sean will arrive days later. I'll spend Easter on Praia Mole in Florianopolis with Vini, Sean, Ran and Dane, then celebrate my birthday the following week here in São Paulo with Ran and Dane along for the ride. Then, I'll be going to Washington for a week on business - in fact I might end up on the same flight with Ran and Dane - where I'll get to cap off this long set of reunions with the dearest friends I have in the world. I'll also get to meet Dena's new son, Nathaniel, and D.C.'s new dance club, Town.

With the urgency of all this wonderfulness rushing towards me, I have thrown myself into preparations. The kitchen is close to being finished. The art will be hung next week. The living room drapes are being delivered on Tuesday. I'm clearing my daily schedule so I can concentrate on my visitors.

And the overhaul my tired body and soul have been yearning for is underway as well. I've finally hired a personal trainer, and he's fantastic. We've set aggressive goals, and I can already feel both the long climb that is ahead of me and the excited sense of energy returning to my system. I've changed medical insurance carriers, so I've scheduled appointments with new specialists to get myself tuned up. I've also finally made the move to put myself in the hands of Gilberto on Consolação - I've got a whole afternoon of beauty scheduled today.

And tomorrow night, I'm organizing my first real night out with my friends. I called up Bruno early in the week to get on his calendar, and it also seems that there will be other friends going out on the town as well who we'll certainly run into.

So, the whirl has finally returned to the innermost parts of me. I'm so whipped up in it that even this week of incredibly stressful workdays (starting as early as 6:30am and ending sometimes after 1:00am) hasn't conquered me or thrown me off. The dollar has dropped to R$1.66 -- and I don't care.

Wanna come along, bitches? :-)

The Tao of Karaoke

It's been a trip, as they say. I'm in, perhaps, my least favorite work destination on Earth in many respects. Kingston is the capital city of a very poor country, and it's part of the whole experience. And most times I'm here, I have a raft of challenges to overcome to just be able to carry on business. But this week, it's been a trip indeed.

I came here straight from New York. The trip to New York was not all good. I didn't arrive here in a good state of mind. And I will be in Kingston a total of about two weeks -- the longest business trip I have yet made in my career. The recipe was for a big, spicy pot of disaster.

And yet, as things have evolved in my little seaside redoubt, I once again was struck by how grand silliness is woven into the fabric of life just at the right moments. And there is always a lesson in it, if not always a reason.

It began the first night. My room at the hotel overlooks the grounds, where there is a huge pool and a garden. On Monday night, at about 7pm, what sounded like a bad wedding band started up after a series of Jamaican-accented sound checks on the blaring sound system. I was instantly annoyed, and my first instinct was to call the front desk to complain until I realized how dumb that would be. This is the hotel's entertainment. Right away I thought (in my grouchy haze nonetheless), why do I have to be in a hermetically sealed container of grumpiness and pain? (I'd also injured my back the last day in New York.) The music kinda sucked, but I let it go.

On Tuesday, at about 7:10pm, suddenly I heard a loud "whoooo!" start off a reggae set from a different area of the garden. It was so loud a starting-yell that I could hear it echoing off of buildings around New Kingston. It rattled me, and I was pissed. I stormed out onto the balcony and saw it was a small stage, and there were a couple of people lounging around the pool and not much of an audience. I couldn't hear the TV. I got all upset. It ended around 9.

On Wednesday, my back was much better and my mood was more sad. I was getting lonesome and homesick. A steel drum band was playing a bit more softly until about 11pm, and it just made me feel more wistful. Something about steel drum music - it has a joviality that is sometimes deceptive. There's also a layer of saudades under it sometimes. Very expressive. But it also irritated me.

On Thursday, it was Valentine's Day. I was stopped and cornered by every female in Kingston, it seemed, all day. "Happy Valentine's Day!" over and over. The chambermaid left me chocolates and a note. But nothing from Vini. Granted, our Dia dos Namorados is celebrated in June, not in February. But it was still sad. The only thing that could have lifted my lonely and sad mood would have been an email or a message of some kind from Vini. Just one line. He was home sick with a cold. I ended up calling him, but he wasn't in the mood to talk. I got very sour. I think my last post showed that.

I was anxious as 7:00pm approached, and I could see them setting up tables by candlelight around the pool, and the sound checks began. I had a lot of work to do that night. And then the music started. It was a local woman singing love songs, a bizarre combination of 70's pop ballads and the occasional old standard. She wasn't a bad singer, but her set went on and on and on for hours. She was tireless. I was increasingly angry and sad and self-pitying as it went on. This is a business hotel, I raged to myself. What the hell is wrong with these people? Her set ended with a very soulful, predictably full-throated rendition of And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going. Kind of a strange choice to close a Valentine's Day set, huh? I have to admit, though, it made me chuckle. (Vini also loves that song.) But I was still far too tense to sleep well, and needed a pill.

On Friday, the level of tension was at a peak for me. I was incredibly, incredibly tense and very, very homesick, while it was dawning on me that I was only halfway through this trip and was going to lose a weekend on top of it all. I was going to facilitate the highlight business meeting for this trip beginning at 8am on Saturday morning and I had to be very prepared. I was imagining that maybe on a Friday, the hotel's entertainment office would ease up a bit and let folks go out and soak up some local color instead. No such luck. Promptly at 7pm, I heard the booming voice of a woman "welcoming all ye" to the show to come. I rolled my eyes and shot out onto the balcony, and saw they'd set out literally hundreds of chairs in theater rows, facing a stage on which a very substantial Jamaican woman (all 200 pounds of her) was hosting some sort of show that clearly was a draw for many local folks. The place was packed, and people were in a buoyant mood.

It was karaoke night in New Kingston. Little did I know.

I was so angry and desperate, I can't even describe how much. I ordered the biggest room service order of the trip and proceeded to gorge myself with comfort food as I struggled through my preparatory work, unable to shield my room from the escalating noise coming from the grounds. One after the other, people cycled up to the stage and alternately belted out -- or simply howled out -- a string of pop songs like it was Jamaican Idol. The occasional duet. Many, many awful singers that Simon Cowell would have dispatched with ice picks. The occasionally talented one. None were professionals. And the audience was absolutely enraptured.

It seemed the more awful the singers, the louder and more adoring the crowds. It was like I'd stumbled onto a gigantic family reunion. No one would be booed off the stage. It was insane. I was pulling my hair out. I was afraid to go out onto the balcony again for fear of leaping to my own death in desperation.

And then, it happened again. It just broke, like an infected sore. This woman got onto the stage and began to caterwaul at the top of her lungs with such brio, such oomph and confidence that I was absolutely knocked over. She was easily the worst singer, but also the most unselfconscious, and the audience was on its feet, clapping and cheering wildly.

That was when I got it.

The tao of karaoke. The joy and pride of being yourself, and letting it shine.

That was what made them stand and cheer. That's what made them feel happy and joyous. It was almost a religious experience -- for them, and for me. It was almost intelligently designed to crack open my despair and make me give it up.

I grabbed my digital camera and captured a minute or so of her song (see above), but failed to get the truly best moments. You can get a sense, though. I stood out there and looked out over the crowd under the trees, and the New Kingston skyline in front of the mountain in the distance that trails into the Caribbean Sea off to the right, still and beautiful. And it all just suddenly seemed so funny and wonderful.

And my despair was suddenly so clear to me: I was so depressed and sad lately not for all the apparent reasons around me. Not in New York, not in Kingston. Not back in São Paulo off and on for the last year. Not because I missed Washington or missed Vini or missed my family, or missed Elaine. It's because I desperately miss being myself.

Something happened to me almost a year ago when I moved to Brazil. I don't know why it happened, or what was behind it. I almost don't care at this point. But I stopped being myself. Really out there, karaoke-night-style. Like I had been back in Logan Circle, to the 'nth degree. No wonder I have been so horrendously unhappy so often. It's no way to live.

And as the night went on, and I sat out on the balcony laughing and clapping along with the crowd several stories below, I realized that it was time to figuratively put my name in for the karaoke night of life, and get back up to microphone damn soon.

Always a Reason

Thanks for the emails asking about where the hell I have gone to. Sure, I was in New York last week and now I'm back in Kingston for work. But that hasn't been a factor before.

When I stop blogging for a while, there is indeed always a reason. I've been a writer of one kind or another since I was a child, and I'm always more prolific when I have a lot of emotions.

I used to have a personal diary, and it would fill up during weeks like the past two I've had. But this blog is not really private. Alas, always a reason.

In any case, I miss you guys. I'll be back soon.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The Shock of Living in Emerging Times

The massive and unprecedented transportation crisis in China set off by winter storms have unfolded like a horror movie. Television images around the world have shown the startling throngs of millions of people stranded for days without food, shelter or other basic facilities of life, simply because the Chinese transport system couldn't cope with the snow.

The staggering misery at Guangzhou's train stations today is something many of us in the west can't fathom. We don't have than many zeroes in our census results; the scale of this is too big to comprehend. And while many, many of us have been stuck in airports over night at least once, no doubt, thanks to weather, we've probably never faced the desperation of those who have been told to be ready to camp out for as much as two weeks.

This at a time when China is positioned as one of four large countries - known as the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, China) -- once mired in poverty and desperation for centuries, now "emerging" economic powers in the world thanks to globalization and wider trade.

And China's sudden and massive woes this week were not the only ones in the BRIC world. An undersea cable rupture off Egypt's coast has blacked out the internet from Cairo to Bangladesh, knocking out many of the region's main trading houses in Dubai and startling India's booming global services sector. Vital systems inside India's much-vaunted call centers were cut off for almost two days, causing immense concern not only there but among many multinationals dependent on the sector.

And this is where all these staggering problems unfolding on TV around the world have something in common. These are the shocks we should expect when truly gigantic countries begin to emerge economically. It can never happen seamlessly, but the scale of all of this shows that this emergence is indeed happening apace, and very dramatically.

I've written plenty about the strains and struggles here in Brazil as the country chugs along economically to "investment grade" status. All last year, the nation was gripped by the near collapse of the domestic air travel system, roiled from being starved of infrastructure investments, technology upgrades and proper control staffing or regulatory coordination for too many years, while average Brazilians suddenly had enough money to start zipping around their country on budget carriers and the industry began a wave of growth. We had two record-setting and traumatizing airline crashes blamed clearly on failures in the domestic system, and a government scrambling to blame everyone else.

But in reality, these shocks - upsetting as they are from a human perspective - are also harbingers of good news as well. They confirm that China, India and Brazil truly are undergoing economic transformations, writ large by the scale of these shocks. The vast majority of stranded travelers in China are migrant workers trying to get home to rural areas for the Lunar New Year holidays; these are people who were starving to death across the countryside 30 and 40 years ago under China's old economic order. True, they represent the wide sector of Chinese society that has not felt the dramatic benefits of the country's sustained boom, but as much of the bottom end of society they are also employed and they are mobile. That is a dramatic change. What's more, senior Communist leaders in government have been dashing all over the country to show their faces in the troubled areas, sending soldiers to bolster electricity grid repairs, and doing something truly unthinkable for a Communist country -- they are publicly and personally apologizing to the people suffering from the failures in the system.

At once, we see a wave of humanity with the means to travel that is larger than the country's ability to handle them, and a government worried and humbled by public opinion in the peasantry. Those are signs of great progress hidden in the images of the crisis.

Also, while a two-day national blackout of internet service in the United States would be economically devastating and even might lead to social disorder, industry and government in India rebounded well today. A majority of links were restored by today, and the results showed that both the private and public sectors had indeed thought about such things happening and had some sense of how to handle it, even if it didn't have sufficient backup systems that were not so fragile as to be downed by two measly cables in the water off Alexandria, Egypt. Odds are they have learned a lot in the last 48 hours that will be useful going forward.

And in Brazil, we are about to go into the Carnaval holiday, and the travel grid is going to be strained to the limit again. If the Christmas and New Year season was any indication, the (late) changes and reforms applied immediately after the TAM crash in São Paulo last July reduced traffic at the source of most of the system's congestion, our domestic Congonhas airport, and things went relatively smoothly. On our return from Europe, we had to wait on a fairly long line through customs, but it seemed only because of the number of passengers who forgot to fill out their forms. Nothing else to complain about.

Last night, there was another comically Brazilian sign of pseudo-progress. A happy shock. We got two robocalls on our house phone throughout the day -- presumably one for each of us -- from the federal airports management authority Infraero. It was a heavily accented caipira voice-actor (I guess to give him a sense of common-man authenticity), who cheerily wished us a happy Carnaval season and advised us not only to get to the airport early if we were traveling, but to remember that Infraero is working day and night to make sure we get to our destination safely and on time.

I was floored! When was the last time the FAA rang you up back home to say Merry Christmas?? And not only that, but so efficiently?? (The first call was at 4pm, the second at 8pm. Was it alphabetical? How in hell did they get our phone number in a country where nothing ever works perfectly like that?) This wasn't an airline. It wasn't even a consumer NGO. It was the government!

So, at moments like this in any huge economic emergence, the shocks that are natural are tests of the people's mettle as well as the systems and governments in place. Will the misery they face in the transition upward turn to cynicism and lost faith? Will it summon old populist ghosts and scapegoating from the bad old days? Or will it serve to not only tame governments and shine lights on the flaws in need of attention, but strengthen the people's resolve to raise the bar of their expectations and not look back?