Lowest Common Dominator

Assunto: A little bit about my classmates so you may have an idea of what my everyday life is like since I spend most of my day here with these people. My professor is named Pedro and he reminds me a lot of Al Pacino. He is the most intense professor I have ever had, and he sometimes gets exhausted and a bit hoarse by the end of each day. When I arrive in the morning he looks like Pacino at the beginning of “A Dog Day Afternoon” and by the end of class he looks a bit like Pacino near the end of the same movie. He is an ex-professional soccer player and now creates dictionaries and also just finished an everyman’s guide to the new orthographical rules for international Portuguese.

The two people who sit next to me are Chanti (pictured at top (right of Maria the Basque)) and Tarantino. They are both from Goa. The former is a Portuguese/English professor in Goa who is wishing to formalize her grammar a bit more. She is constantly yelling things to me in archaic English across Tarantino, translating words I already understood in Portuguese into an old English which means very little to me. It’s like having a 17th century British dictionary with Turrets at arms reach every day. For instance, today, when I was half-asleep, because it’s Friday, I wasn’t even listening to the professor who was talking about older rural houses outside Lisbon and she just yells “fag” at me. I, of course, am used to these outbursts by now, but was still a bit taken aback by this particular word as it has a different connotation in modern English than it does in her English. I said, in English, “WHAT?!!” And then she described to me the stockpiles of logs and sticks that were used as fodder for building fires insides one’s country home. I said, “uh yeah…we just call that a woodpile now.” Then I started to daze again and she yelled at me “hut”. And I look at her with complete disinterest, as I swear this happens twenty times a day and I’m a bit fed up with it all. Then the professor, as a language professor should do, describes to me the word we are looking for in Portuguese and I said, “fireplace.” And then Chanti says, “but isn’t hut also used?”, and I reply, “no, no one has ever, ever, ever used hut to describe a fireplace.” So she spells it out and the word she was trying to say was hearth, which the professor confused for heart…another 20 minute digression and we were back to me saying “no one uses hearth anymore, like I said 20 minutes ago, it’s a fireplace.” I wish I would have written down all these Ye Olde Englysh words she would be spitting out because it would make for a good proposal to the Anglophone countries or the U.N. to send Goa some updated dictionaries. I remember some words: savories, gripe ointment, dutch oven (which made me laugh), starboard, and fortnight. There are many, many more.

Tarantino (who is in no way related to Quentin Tarantino) bathes every day in Brut 33 or Old Spice, I can’t tell which it is, but I feel by the end of the day that I have been huffing rubber cement for hours. My head actually gets a bit spinny and I see some stars. Otherwise, he is a nice enough guy and is very charming when he is wearing his black cowboy hat which I still haven’t been able to fully comprehend. He wears it with the rope tied tightly under the chin.

Harry is a trip. The picture on the right is Harry with our Professor. He wears a different color of frames for his glasses everyday and he is constantly cheating in the most obvious ways. I don’t think the Chinese have really perfected this art yet, gun powder yes, extracting brine yes, making noodles yes, etc., but not cheating. He is the basis of my Chinaman speaking Portuguese impersonation and I feel almost like a method actor studying him most days in class. He’ll just sigh deeply and then “hhoooooooo….muuuiiiitttto trabaaaalhhooo.” When I told the professor that I would be presenting on Portuguese Rock & Roll, he asked the professor, “hhooooooooo…o que é lock en lor?” which means “what is lock en lor”. I realized I really had my work cut out for me when he said that especially because, this day in age, that is a very hard question to answer.

The video below is from today, when we got in a heated debate (in Portuguese of course) about whether it is possible to make popcorn with cell phones. I think the video proves this is just another international urban legend.