It has been quiet around here, and besides the lacking of will to write, it’s been one year since my first post on a personal blog – a good time to rethink about the blog itself.

It all started posting on a shared blog with a friend and at the time, it’s main propose was to update friends with my whereabouts as an exchange student in The Netherlands. It always had a temporary character and eventually it got replaced by a personal blog in the livejournal.com and later on, migrated to this version integrated on my homepage. Along the way, my ideals about blogging have changed considerably and that reflected on both the content and the format of what I wrote. There were a couple of times when the blog was nearly to be putted aside but it has survived so far – and in my case, I need those moments to justify all the others.

For all those who might don’t know yet, my lil’P stories are an attempt to document how my erasmus experience was, back in 2003/04. It’s meant to have what wasn’t written on the first blog using a different approach, this time giving more emphasis on how important it really was to me – something I didn’t do properly on the first attempt. It just felt like a documentary, I guess.

Anyway, blogging will keep going around here, for the moment. And to take some juice out of this personal rant on my blogging experience, here are some of the most curious search strings people used on search engines and ended up (somehow) on this page.

by no particular order:

mini bikes
string photos
micro string fotos
gothic crucifixe pics
red light district in utrecht
orgasmatron
algarve stadium structural design details
braga hot girl
gothic wear
kamasutra
reasons to live in portugal
street bikers
just a bit of silliness really
luís figo wife foto
smokers lungs fotos
what is meaning of 24 over 7

some in portuguese:

sorriso amarelo
mamarracho dos poetas
que trata de wife swap
como tricotar
tatuagens new school
fotos de atraso mental
moelas em fotos
consequências das cãibras
o meu…penso que é mesmo cansaço!
coisas bizarras
combater insonias
fotos de guitarras brancas de bandas
músicas transmontanas
dores depois de extrair siso
requisitos para ser cantora
ovos em conserva
carta para amigo secreto brincadeira
mousse de chocolate simplificada
kamasutra simbolos -venda -oral -anal -compra -blog -blogger -procura-se
braga cortinas

for more, check here

The next person to accuse me of lacking in ambition will have to put up with me.

Doesn’t mater religion, beliefs or race. It can happen to anyone. And despite everybody knowing this for a fact, everybody still falls on the very same mistake: we all prefer not to think about it, and just assume that they will always be there, side-by-side, till the old age. Until it happens.
So one day, we feel inside a space that is completely empty, a big hole that makes all the difference on the daily life. I’m still not certain about how I’ll cope with all this – people says that time cures everything, but I find it hard to believe. I miss my tooth a lot.

Portugal is a place where people are used to eat well. Very well. Not only the meal time is a moment to sit around a table, with time and a nice warm meal, Portugal has one of the best gastronomy’s in the world.
Despite all that, young people are known for not having very healthy food habits, in particular the students who live by themselves during school time. Usually this is even worse between male students that live together and find out that the amount of recipes they manage to do successfully is quite low. Even counting with the microwaves ones.
Some become avid fast-food consumers, others re-invent the concept of breakfast cereals, but only a few really try to cook on a regular basis. From this last group, I’ve seen a lot in the past 5 years, but I’m not going to rant about that now.

I happen to live with an excellent cook. Not only he enjoys eating well – like me and any portuguese -, but he also enjoys cooking and does it in a way capable of blushing quite a bunch of so called professional cooks. Each meal is not only a pleasure to both eyes and mouth, but cooking is also a constant place for improvisation being the surprise one of the ingredients he masters best.

I know I’ll miss this one day.

Yesterday, was one of those days when it’s easy to catch me with a distante look and a stupid smile drawn on the face: it was exactly one year since I returned from my 6 month exchange period in The Netherlands. From time to time, watching someone riding a bike, seeing a windmill, or a simple mention to it reminds me of how much I miss it and how much I want to return there. It’s on days like this that I restart making plans to return, while wondering why I’m still here and why I didn’t return already.
On any other day, I just want to return there.

PS: sometimes I thank myself for not owning a credit card.

Some time ago, for some odd reason, I decided to reach my building rooftop. People are not supposed to go there so the passage is closed, but I didn’t see anything wrong about that (other than my own safety) so I’ve kept my intentions. At some point, it became a personal challenge and I was ready to learn lock picking, elevator mechanisms and whatever it was necessary to reach it. But, it turned out that there is a fairly easy way to reach it after all. So much the better for me.
Once up there, there are only two things to see: the building chimneys and the view around. Usually, I like to put them together. That is, to sit on top of a chimney and watch the view, if possible, at night with an hot drink between my hands. The seven floors might not be as impressive as the petronas towers, but it has a nice view over my university campus, and a big part of the city. At night, all those nearly-almost-there fading lights mix up with the moving ones from the cars forming a live city map. It’s quiet up there, so once in a while I go there to relax, to think, or just because I don’t have anything better to do.

The queues for surgeries in the Portuguese social health care services are known for being long. What I wasn’t aware of, was that this doesn’t apply only to surgeries.

Around June last year, my father asked for a psychiatrist consultation in his local hospital and was putted on hold. Unfortunately, in August he had a stroke and now he is part of what he was before. After several consultations on private doctors he managed to recover quite well, but never 100%. He was lucky though, it could had been much worse and we know that.
Why am I writing about this now? Because today he told me that on last January, he got a letter from the hospital, scheduling the requested consultation, for next April. He had already forgotten of it. Would a on time consultation change anything for him? I really can’t tell. Still, 9 months to get a psychiatry consultation that lasts a few moments is ridiculous. At least to me.
I’m tired of living on a country where this things are so common they are considered normal by some. Where some people still have to get up at 5am to try to be received by a doctor that has too many patients to attend to properly. Where some people got to the point of nicknaming their local hospital as the ‘butcher’. And mock about it. Where some people have too much suffering that could be avoided if there was a proper social health care service. Where the guys who are supposed to fix this are fighting and pouting about their sexual orientation while running to get to be prime-ministers.

Note to self: I can’t compensate 4 hours of sleep and an exam with 5 coffees.

This was meant to be a post to talk about my whereabouts lately and to say that I’m still alive. Well, kinda of. There isn’t much to talk about, really – just that I’m plain tired. Tired of the bunch of exams I’m supposed to do in a row, most of them leaving behind a feeling of not had learned much from it. But that’s more than enough about exams for this post.

My to-do list seems impossible to control at the moment so priorities have taken place. On the top, is to go home whenever I get a real break. It’s been more than a month I’m at Braga and I’m missing my parents and their eternal set of questions.
There’s an internship search I should be looking into and that I’m permanently postponing, a postcard project that I keep toying on my head, a few changes to this page that I want to implement and letters to write. There’s also a lot of sleeping to do – although useful now, I’m a bit apprehensive about my sleeping average time lately. This can’t be very healthy.
For the next month, there are plans for shooting my first photo session and a visit from Teo, the crazy caffeine-moved romanian girl I’ve met in the Netherlands.
More posting should take place soon, meanwhile, if you know anything about instant human cloning, time travelling or time stretching, please let me know.

I think what takes people to watch so voraciously all kinds of reality-shows is not just pure human curiosity. Either that, or let’s hope the saying above isn’t right. Everytime I hear about a new reality-show, I loose a bit more hope in mankind, but, like all problems, it’s a matter of proportion and perspective. So far, Portugal had it’s own instances of a big chunk of the bad reality-shows that came mostly from north-american TV stations. From big brother to survivor, everybody had the chance to taste several flavours of bad TV.

But when one (naïve, like me) thinks it can’t get any worse, someone comes up with a even more despicable idea for a reality show. Worse, audiences love it. On Fox TV, there are two examples (that I’m aware) of this freaky tv shows that gives me the creep. The first is the The swan, where a handful of women with low self-esteem mutate to… be prettier. For that, they submit themselves to all kind of things, from therapy to several plastic surgeries, on the attempt to carve on them someone’s beauty standard – of course this is done for their good, not for the public amusement.
Another even more creepy example, also on Fox TV (screened just a few days ago), is called Who’s your daddy? where a daughter given up for adoption as an infant attempts to guess the identity of her birth father among eight men presented to her, all claiming to be her father. If she points the right guy, then she goes home with 100K dollars. Oh, and with the birth father as well, I guess. And what if she fails? Then the money goes to the wrong option guy. Neat, uh? :-|
But hey, let’s be fair – it’s not always for the money. This last despicable example, was on ABC network on the 20/20 show, where five couples competed to win… a baby. Yes, they were trying to adopt a baby of a 16-year-old woman. How twisted can it get?

My son, if you watch this things and you don’t have anything better to do, I can strongly recommend you to read 1984 where you can learn where the ‘big brother’ concept came from, or to get a copy of this to have a peek on other people’s live while teasing your imagination, instead of being a couch mushroom.

PS: please, forgive the sarcasm on this post