Nao te aguento mais

One of my great challenges this week has been trying to find a place to practice. I can't practice at all at home (it's my friend's home office, so she's always working.) The first few days, it was raining too much to play outside. But on Tuesday I finally found a little spot in the wide green park by the Praia do Flamengo (the Flamengo beach), and got in a good long stint of pandeiro practice.

It's a type of practicing I remember from Salvador: always on guard and looking over your shoulder, and always thinking about what to do if you get attacked ("Let's see, I'll fight for my pandeiro, but not for my caixa").

It seemed pretty safe in the park, actually, but a guy in the distance kept circling around and glancing in my direction, and eventually he inched closer, and finally, he came right up to me.

And he launched directly into an extremely long story about how his girlfriend left him 3 months ago. I REALLY wanted to get back to my choro practice, but it was a great grammar lesson in the various uses of "aguentar" - to put up with. I'd just learned this verb a few weeks ago and here it was in full flower: "She just couldn't put up with me any more. She said she had been able to put up with it all for a while but then she just didn't want to put up with me any more. She said she hadn't really ever really enjoyed putting up with me. She said "That's it! I'm not going to put up with you any more!" I wish I could find someone who could put up with me."

On and on and on. OK, thanks for the excellent "aguentar" lesson, kid, now it's time for you to go! I wasn't too worried about him - one advantage of being tall is that I'm not easily intimidated physically - but it was getting annoying. Finally I got out the tamborim, thinking that would drive him away, but it didn't! He just stood there and watched me practice tamborim at full volume from two feet away! Finally the inevitable sexual come-on, which I eluded with my usual sudden lapse of Portuguese comprehension ("I'm sorry, I don't speak any Portuguese... I have no idea what you're saying") and the request for my phone number ("my phone is broken") and email ("I forget").

Annoyed but amused, I packed up my drums and left. At least I got in some good pandeiro practice before he drifted over.

Six months in Brazil last year left me with a very poor opinion of the entire opposite sex, which seem here to come in only a few varieties: crazy, crude, cruel, cold, or all four in a really bad combination. There are a few exceptions (yo, Flavio, Rato!) but they're pretty thin on the ground. After returning the US I couldn't get over the American men's endearing habit of asking a girl her NAME, often before even trying to rip her clothes off; and their equally charming tendency to occasionally talk to women that they aren't even planning to try to rip the clothes off of. And sometimes the American guys get even through an entire five minutes of conversation without asking for sex! (Not that there's anything wrong with sex, but sometimes it's nice to have 1 or 2 other topics of conversation, occasionally, just for variety.) And they don't even seem to expect the woman to make all the dinners and do the cleaning.

It's almost as if the American men view women as... I don't know, almost like human beings or potential friends or something. Strange, huh? Now that I'm back in Rio I'm having a little trouble readjusting.