Her name is Rio

Just now as I was talking to myself–yeah, I do it all the time, though I prefer to think of it as “talking as if someone were there,” ’cause it’s not like I have a complete conversation with myself; that would be silly–and I started to say, “I amn’t sure…” I actually had to think hard for a moment, is there really no other way to contract “I am not” short of “I ain’t”? And then it finally came to me: “I‘m not.” Duh. My frappucino must’ve given me a brain freeze. Yeah, that’s it.

Anyway. Speaking of language, on Monday nights I take a course in introductory Brazilian Portuguese at the USDA Graduate School. Yes, the Department of Agriculture. Turns out they run a school aimed at working professionals, with courses in all kinds of subjects. I sort of like the fact that it calls itself a “graduate school.” Do I get to call myself a “grad student”? Actually, the school doesn’t confer degrees (other than certificates in certain subjects), nor does it have any general requirements for admission. It’s basically like a continuing-education program, which is nice, since you can be flexible in choosing courses. (A couple years ago, I took one on general foreign-language translation theory.) And I get to count this as a business expense, since at work I deal with journal articles in Portuguese from time to time.

So yes, Portuguese is fun. Up to now, the only context in which I’ve heard Portuguese is in Brazilian music, so when our teacher started speaking at the first class meeting–something as simple as “Como vai você?“–I couldn’t help but smile: the sound of the language is so smooth and musical.

I downloaded a Portuguese language update from Microsoft, so now most of the menus and dialog boxes on my computer at home are in Portuguese. It’s by turns very cool and very confusing. But now I know how to say esoteric things like “view source code”: exibir código fonte.

Thom, meu namorado (new vocab word!), is getting down with the language at his work, também.