Another piece of the puzzle

I've long known that I work best in the evening. Before I met Bethany, I was convinced that I was most productive between the hours of 10 PM and 2 AM. I hope an explanation appears in the New York Times soon as to why some people are more productive at night. (They specialize in medical articles on topics like that - the series What Ails the Upper Class generates many pageviews. It's true - this article is historically the most emailed.)

However, I have no explanation for why my most productive work hours have come on the weekend (particularly Friday and Saturday) while in Brazil.

Tonight, another (big) piece of the puzzle fell into place. It turns out that the World Bank conditioned state fiscal reform loans on the creation of a regulatory system in place to deal with privatization. The original documents are all here. One day I'll explain why this is so important to my dissertation. Non-academic readers might find it dull. Academics might also find it dull.

Unfortunately - depending on your point of view - I'm energized for another five hours of work this Saturday night.

Instead, for my own sake, I should instead go find a bar for the Argentina-Brazil World Cup qualifying match.

Some other brief highlights from the past week:

1. I sent off interview requests, and heard one response. Interviews start next week.

2. I tried to swat and kill a mosquito, and put my palm through the glass window. Shards of glass fell nine stories. No injuries, but the window won't be fixed until Tuesday. (Nothing is open on the weekends. Monday is Independence Day, the day Dom Pedro I declared that he wouldn't go back to Portugal on the orders of his father, and that Brazil would be independent. He declared this in between Sao Paulo and Santos, from the banks of the Ipiranga River. This act is mentioned in the national anthem, and every city has an Avenida Sete de Setembro.)

3. I have a cellular phone and, more importantly, it works. Unless the situation is dire, please don't call it - receiving and sending calls here is terribly expensive.


And to add one thousand words, the view out the living room window on a cloudy day. The day was sufficiently cloudy to block out the view of Jesus, which you can normally see by sticking your head out the window and looking right. This is my normal office view. It looks over the Modern Art Museum and Gloria Marina in the foreground, and the Morro da Urca and Sugarloaf in the background.




UPDATE: Brazil qualify for the 2010 World Cup with a 3-1 win over Argentina. My roommate was cheering for Argentina; as the game came to a close, even the waiters (at Amarelinho, a mildly famous bar in Cinelandia) started razzing him. And boy, do Brazilians dislike Diego Maradona. Do they ever. They also know several ugly epithets in Spanish for him.

Friday night sleuthing

Dissertation research - call it "fieldwork" - is a lot like detective work. That is, I feel like a one-man detective agency, save that a) no one has died, or has asked me to investigate a case, b) other people might not find the cases interesting, c) my life is in little danger, and no television producers are calling or d) I don't smoke, and I don't currently have an office. In all other respects, it's like playing Dick Tracy.

I certainly didn't expect the following sequence:

I need to talk to Mr. Smith. He worked at the agency back in the late 1990s. Mr. Smith, by all accounts, lives in Rio de Janeiro. But he is now retired, and the last two times he appeared on the Google, he was 1) first in line for tickets to a Roberto Carlos (the Neil Diamond of Brazil) concert last year, and 2) asking a members-only car aficionado site how to fix his power windows, in 2005. Yet I really need to talk to Mr. Smith.

So tonight, Friday night, I joined the members-only car aficionado site, so that I could send a private message to Mr. Smith about the possibility of meeting to talk. Maybe we could meet at the beach on a Wednesday morning; that seems to be what retired people do here. We'll see if he responds. Hopefully his email address hasn't changed.

At least I have live music while I work; there's another concert on the balcony of the Modern Art Museum across the street. The last concert lasted until midnight last night, with no regard for noise ordinances. It was quite loud. Thankfully, they covered some songs I like, such as Minha Menina by the Mutants.

Finally, a photo taken from today's evening run in Flamengo, the famous crying coconut:



The caption encourages people to, at the end of a beach day, put their garbage in the trash can. Each hour, half a ton of garbage is abandoned on the beach. And you don't want to be responsible for making sad garbage, now do you?