maristu

After six months of waiting and calling and bugging people from a million different places, my move will arrive tomorrow! Or so I've been told. Saturday at the very latest. I'll believe it when I see it.

But! If that does happen, and my stuff arrives this weekend? Then I'll have my lovely iMac back. And my vinyl player. And my dark room! Which means I can get to work on those dozens of rolls of film that have been accumulating over the past 6 months. Oh, and my clothes. And my books, and my computer games, and my Buffy and Angel and Smallville DVDs!

How on earth did I survive for the past six months???

I may be depressed. I just cried for about 4 hours after the lady told me that my move wasn't going to arrive for another week. For a person that's waited for six months, what's another week, right? But yeah, that got me going. I then proceeded to cry at the end of Legally Blonde. Now that's a sure sign that something is wrong.

I just don't like it here. And by "here" I mean Brazil. My own country. How twisted is that? The problem is, after you leave for a while, you come back and notice all the flaws and problems that you were used to before. Like, people run red lights and almost kill you, and everyone's always late, and the streets have huge potholes in them, and nothing ever goes according to plan. Scheduling a time for anything is futile.

Case in point: I'm feeling depressed, so I scheduled an appointment with a psychologist at my work. I arrived there about ten minutes early, and waited. Half an hour later, I was still waiting. The woman just DIDN'T SHOW UP. Nada. No note, no phone call to the secretary to say she wasn't coming. I waited for another half hour, wrote her a nasty note, and left. She never called to explain. She's not dead or hurt, in case any of you were wondering. I checked.

And that's the thing. The lack of respect is just killing me. Everyone here feels more entitled than you about everything. Everything is a struggle, a fight, from driving down the street to getting a crew for a shoot to thwarting off people that are trying to cut in front of you at the movies. My brand new iPhone was stolen on my first week of work. From my desk. FROM MY PURSE. And when I showed my outrage about this, you know what the first reply was? Well, you shouldn't just leave your stuff lying around like that. You know how things are around here...

Apparently, I don't. I forgot. And how is leaving my purse on my desk considered "leaving my stuff lying around"? Where else am I supposed to leave it???

And then the shrink, the person who was supposed to make me feel better, made me feel worse. And further proved my point.

I know that leaving won't solve anything. That I should stay and try and change things. But I'm researching for a documentary about Brazilian sociologists and anthropologists and their theories, and it just makes me more depressed. Because this? This has been going on for FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. I mean, ever since the first Portuguese ship came to our shores, things have happened according to status and "who knows who" and not according to what's fair and just. Bribes, corruption, you name it. How the hell do we change a culture that's so ingrained? Brazil is like a Titanic, this huge ship with a tiny rudder. Even if I do stick around and try and change things, I won't be alive to see any major change.

And so I want to leave. For my own sanity. I'm not saying that Europe or the US are perfect, but at least in the US I didn't feel disrespected on a daily basis.

But all of this is moot, seeing as I'm forced to stay here at least for another year, as payment for the time that they gave me to study. I'm actually counting down the days, like a prisoner in jail, marking them off on the wall (well, on a calendar, but still).

In the meantime, I guess I should get myself another shrink.

I'm one of those people who never manage to have a big city on SimCity, or an old sim on The Sims (unless he's created old). At some point in the game, I always think I could've done something better, and decide to start all over. I buy new notebooks every semester, even if the previous ones were barely touched. I like beginnings; I'm not that good on development. This is something I'm trying to change, but changing is a long and painful process.

And so, here I am, starting over. If I've subscribed to your journal and you have no idea who I am, I was known as "maricats" on LJ. And yes, I've been gone for a long time. I'd appear there sporadically, about once every year or two, and then would disappear again. People would delete their LJ accounts, create other ones, and I'd try and catch up and figure out who was who after being away for so long, but my LJ was a big mess. So I decided to start over on DreamWidth. My LJ still exists, and I'll check it every once in a while. But this? It's so tidy and organized! :)

My current plan is to write every day. Not necessarily here on DW, though. I'm working on a screenplay, and I have a movie site that needs constant updating, and other blogs. But I need to discipline myself to write something, anything, every day.

And so it begins... We'll see how this goes!