I meet Americans, but they kinda suck

• Merkdog4's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Buzios

Trip Start Oct 19, 2007 Previous
Entry Trip End Ongoing Next
Entry

  Buzios, Brazil
Thursday, December 6, 2007

I assume I went to the beach today, not sure though.  Later on I am drinking vodka and fruit juice in the hammock.  I notice that I make myself swing in the hammock as much as possible and when the hammock stops swinging I get annoyed.  Why does motion produce a calming affect on oneself?  I have also noticed that I tend to fall asleep in automobiles (sometimes while driving in fact) and I always see people sleeping on the L.  Why is this?  Maybe it has something to do with the theory of relativity.  Everyone knows I'm sure that the faster you move the less time you experience relative to someone standing still.  This has been experimentally confirmed many times.  The most convincing experiment being the use of atomic clocks on jets.  The atomic clock was flown for a certain distance at a high speed (well, high speed as far as humans are concerned) and sure enough the clock ran by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second slower than a stationary clock by the exact amount predicted by Einstein's formulas.  The best explanation I have heard for why this is (and I have read many such explanations, usually concerning trains and light beams) is the fact that you travel through both space and time (hence spacetime).  Imagine yourself traveling in a cardinal north direction and then turning 45 degrees to the east.  You are now traveling partly north and partly east but some of the previous northerly direction has been transferred to the easterly direction.  Same with space and time.  If you are stationary you only travel through time.  But once you start to accelerate and move, some of that motion through time suddenly gets diverted to motion through space.  The faster you move through space the less you can move through time as spacetime is absolute and space and time together must always be the same value.  The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.  So an office worker and an airline pilot will experience slightly different time frames throughout their lives (so small that it would be unnoticeable) and given a certain date in the future, the airline pilot will be slightly younger than the office worker.  Since light travels the maximum speed through space (space itself does not have to follow this law) allowed by the theory of relativity and Maxwell¨s equations of electromagnetism, light's motion is 100% through space and 0% through time.  Light does not age and discovered the long sought after fountain of youth approximately 14 billion years ago.  Anyway, maybe humans like motion because face it, we all hate how fast time seems to move (except sometimes on weekdays it doesn't move fast enough).  In the novel Catch 22, one of the characters (Orr I believe) actually tries to make himself as bored as possible in order to trick himself into thinking that the days go by slower than normal.

So as I am sitting in the hammock, I have a realization, I calculate everything, especially costs and profits.  I calculate grams of fat and protein per serving, I calculate the cost of anything down to individual units, if individual units in fact exist, I calculate odds of this or that, I calculate cost benefit ratio's, I caluclate everything.  I never really realized it before as I think most of the time I did it subconciously.  The reason why I came to this ipiphany is that at first I tried to estimate the number of apartments in the building, then I estimated the average of time per year that one apartment is occupied and then I figured out how much this place made in a given year based on 70R a night.  I forget the number but that's what I did.  I then had to calculate what this place cost me for the next week per day.  It came out to 57.1428R (and yes, I had to go to 4 decimal places) and then it hit me, holy crap, I do this all the time.  Maybe I like numbers so much because numbers don't lie.  Well actually, on Clone High (has anyone ever seen it, it was canceled several years ago) a clone of Gandhi told a clone of Abraham Lincoln that numbers don't lie and then the show switched to this number 4 running across the screen and the number 4 says "I'm the number 3", possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen on TV (Moran, I know you remember this as we both practically fell off da couch laughing).  This trip has tought me a lot about myself.  Some of it good, some of it bad but most of the time weird.  I read some of my Nietzsche book.  The quotes section is pretty sweet.  My favorite quote by far by him (and possibly my favorite quote ever is) "And those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music".  If you really think about this quote, it is mind boggling and can make you rethink your entire worldview.  It's a great quote to remember whenever you want to judge someone else.  I myself judge people all the time, but it's all in fun (mostly).  I listen to my ipod a bit on shuffle and that U2 song "Stuck in a Moment" comes on and it's the first time I have heard it on this trip and one of the reasons why I came on this trip in the first place.

I head out to my usual starting bar and I meet 3 chicks there who I initially thought were Brazilian but once I heard them talking I realized they were Americans.  Nice, I haven't met an American in quite awhile.  I end up talking to them and they are all originally from Dallas.  They don't look American though, but that's because they are partly Indian (not feather Indian, dot Indian).  The one actually lives in Chicago and has an apartment right across the street from where me and Stephan Bonnar used to exchange blows.  They seem cool enough and I hang with them at the bar.  Later another American comes up to the bar and starts talking to me.  He tells me the chick he is with wants to buy me a beer.  He also tells me that she is absolutely loaded and owns half of Buzios.  Sweet, I like free beer and rich chicks.  But then I see her and I'm like sh!t, now I have to go talk to her.  Not bad looking, but bad looking for me (I'm not conceited, I swear, it's called egotistical).  Beans, remember that time those chicks bought us a couple of Sierra Nevada's and we never even ended up talking to them.  Hah, stupid biatches with 12 less dollars.  So I go talk to her just to be courteous and she scares the crap out of me because she tells me she knows where I am staying.  I ask her how she knows this and she tells me that she knows everything that goes on in Buzios.  Wowzers.  Ok, so I go back to the three Indian-Americans and we decide to go to my favorite place - Guapo Loco according to Dave.  Get to the club and sort of dance with them but they are sort of lame and they drink like 2 beers and then switch to water.  Stupid.  The one who lives in New York (and I've met 3 New Yorkers now and they all do this) does this weird little head bob thing whenever she talks.  Like I will say something and then she will say "riiiiiiiighhhhhht" and while doing it she moves her head forwards and backwards like she's sucking on a pole.  Maybe she's just practicing up.  The other Indian girl is fairly good looking but she has a bad tooth to gum ratio just like Gina Davis.  I hang at the club till who knows when but no really good looking chicks are there so I mostly hang with the water drinking girls.  The one girl from NY is actually a lot of fun but the other two want to go home and they are killing the New Yorker's vibe.  Then I see that crazy biatch from earlier who knows where I live and she comes over by me.  Man, this ain't cool, especially when the Indians leave and now the stalker has a path with no obstacles that leads right to me and my death.  I eventually leave and wander around but not much is going on since it is Thursday.  I stop and get a beer and some food and I see these two chicks sitting and one is Asian so I sit down with them.  They are nice but pretty boring.  They speak hardly any English which gives me a good chance to practice some more Portuguese in an altered state.  Funny, I speak better Portuguese when I'm drunk.  They are from Sao Paulo which makes sense.  Sao Paulo has a huge Asian population.  Something like 2 million Japanese people live in Sao Paulo, not joking.  I finally crash at who knows what time, maybe 5.  Damn, and I still have the weekend coming up.

Fin

Print this entry Share Buzios hotels

Previous Entry Next Entry