On blogging, and other deep stuff

I have been reflecting on the nature of blogging in the six-or-so days that I have not written in my blog. Blogging is nihilistic. It is about perspective, experience from a particular--personal--position. This blog rejects any other perspective, because it is written purely from my perspective. It is really postmodern, no? Really relativistic, in the sense that everyone's experiences and opinions are valid (or validated) in a blog.
This is the point at which I pause and consider what that might mean. At first glance, I think it seems extravagant to write about how I am experiencing the physical world, when there are so many other people experiencing it in frankly and obviously horrible ways and, instead of contemplating my navel and writing about it, perhaps it would be more useful to do something...useful. I do. I do useful things in the ways that I can. Things that don't only serve my own existence but also that of others. At least I like to think so.
So, knowing that, I arrive to the question of whether blogging is useful and not just some postmodern activity that shares some of the qualities of masturbation. Well, at this point I remember that I read, a lot. I read novels, many, many novels, all the time (I am on my 6th novel since I arrived to Brazil 9 days ago). I remember and reflect that many of my ideas of love, value, justice, and even cynicism have been inspired by messages found within the pages and between the lines of novels of my favorite authors, artists like José Saramago and Carlos Fuentes. This tells me something: art (and a blog is art, as it is the invention of a mind and the expression of experience) is extravagant, it is superfluous to violence and violation, the unnecessary pain of human beings, but it is a necessary expression of hope, a communication of other and better ways than we perhaps learned by more conventional channels.
So, I resolve myself to believe that this blog matters. It does to me.

Moving on. This week I have continued to get accustomed to things here. I have hung out with new friends, met new people, and continued getting to know the people I had met already. I got to hang out for the afternoon with the Pontes family on Sunday. The picture at right is Great-Aunt Norma with her sister, Pedro´s grandma. They are great. They are obsessed with embroidering. It is awesome.

I also had lunch on Saturday with some new friends and ended up hanging out with them until late that night. It was nice to just feel like I had a normal social life where I could spend time just talking with people for hours. No picture of that.

Today when I got to the office the lab was locked, so I went outside to wait, and ran into two friends from the lab. We starting talking about raspberries for some reason and, when I was trying to explain what a raspberry was, they took me behind the lab building to a tree which was filled with ripe fruit, which looked like raspberries! I have no idea what they are, but they look and taste just like raspberries, but grow on a tree instead of on a bramble! (If anyone has any idea what those are, please let me know). So I snapped the picture at right while we stood there for a half hour picking and eating these berries. After we cleaned the tree out, we sat down on a curb to look at the view, and we stayed there for another half hour discussing George Bush, the problem of the lack of public transportation and its relationship to the petroleum crisis, and then problems with the monopolies that control the biodeisel industry here. Very interesting and pleasurable morning. Then I went to work.