Dumber

It's incredible how much you remember things or special occasions because they are really meaningful to you or because the media does their job.

Yesterday was Brazil's Independence Day. September 7th. This should be important to any Brazilian as it is, for example, to Americans. But when your away from "the environment" you simply forget.
I know, I know... The date, for most Brazilians, is just about the holiday itself and the possibility of having a day off work and getting hammered the day before. But the country is going throught a very delicate fase.
I haven't been following the news (well, not even when I was in Brazil...) but I know things are going down big time. How people are feeling now is something I can't tell at all. Should they be patriotic and demand urgent changes or should they be miserable - as I think they might be-?
I wonder how the connection between the Independence Day and all the political shit was made. I have some time to check the news but I simply don't have the patience to sit before the laptop and start reading. I read the headlines and check the football results and that's it. And gossip, of course.

I was talking to Paula yesterday about reading newspapers and magazines to increase my vocabulary and she told me to buy The Sun if I want to learn the infomal lingo. But The Sun is rubbish (although I was kinda used to watching rubbish on TV... Datena...). Anyway, this morning's class we talked a bit about the book 1984 (which I haven't read) and Dan said that in the book, each year the dictionary got smaller and smaller because people were controlled and couldn't pass information on, so what's the point in having language anyway?
I thought about it and I realized that I'm sort of going throught this process. I'm getting dumber and dumber everyday!!! I don't read much, watch lots of TV, listen to music all the time and don't know what's going on around me. So back in Brazil, I new all the holidays before the year began but never cared about the importance of each one. I just wanted a day off, you know? And being in the UK makes me feel even dumber because now I've gotta get used to all this new culture but I don't care about my own culture to begin with. It's something that's gotta change now! Otherwise I'll be speaking in monosyllabels... Not that I don't normally do this... anyway...

I feel empty. Emotionally and intellectually. Sometimes people talk about the morning news and I listen to BBC every day before coming to the school. My excuse is that I didn't understand the vocabulary much, but if I had these chinwags in Portuguese would I be able to carry on the subject? What's been going on?

I reckon I'm afraid of not being absorbing the whole input I'm having or I WANT to have. I obviously have some limitations here, either regarding language or knowledge about the place, but I don't feel like I'm improving on any area. Everything I do is very automatic and, with a few exceptions, I'm pretty much doing the same things I did on the first week I got here. I don't interact much, people aren't very interested in getting to know you. A classmate of mine didn't come to class last Monday and nobody asked what happened apart from me. Not even the teacher! The guy could have been sick or something and nobody seemed to care!
And this all leads back to the emptiness. How can I have the input I want if the sources aren't willing to share? What is the easy way out? Television, CDs, billboards on the streets or anything that doesn't require interaction of any kind. The only piece of interaction I get is when I bump into people and say 'I'm sorry', and this is not exactly the kind of interaction people normally look for, you know?
I've never had problems getting the bus, in fact I kinda like it, right? I'm supposed to get the famous Bus 159 back home and I get to see Big Ben and London Eye as I told you before, but this week I bought the tube pass and I prefer to get the tube home because then I don't have to interact with the "collector". I just sit on the tube and get home in no time. This is kinda sad, right?

Getting dumber... that's happening alright.