A Vida É Bela

stuff

When I arrived in São Paulo in 2008, I was extremely proud of my luggage, or rather, lack thereof. Everything I would need for the indefinite future fit in a suitcase and two backpacks. I might not have needed the suitcase at all if I hadn’t insisted on bringing winter camping gear, you know, in case I went camping in the Andes in the indefinite future. (I did, but first I used my sub-zero sleeping bag, wool and fleece to survive a São Paulo winter).

I hauled the same suitcase and backpacks on the bus when I moved to São José dos Campos, but after nearly two years of settled-ness, numerous bags and boxes were required to shuttle my stuff to our new apartment (thankfully just across the building). My not-so-portable belongings now include a piano keyboard and a humongous mirror (it’s for dance practice, I swear) and not to mention furniture, which I had managed to avoid buying, ever, until moving to São José.

Perhaps my frequent moving has been a way to control shopping binges, or at least assure the effects won’t be permanent. Though I get paid in local currency, I still automatically divide prices by 2ish to convert to USD; Brazilian clothes and food seem cheap so I buy twice as much. And precious time with family and friends on rare trips to the US becomes punctuated by shopping sprees for shoes, consumer electronics, and personal care products that are either extremely difficult to find in Brazil (100% peanut butter) or ridiculously marked up (sunscreen, camping gear, anything with a plug). The flipside of deprivation is obsession – when I wandered into a mid-level Boulder grocery store on my first day back in the States in June, I spent a good hour and a half in a daze, trying to choose between twenty kinds of mustard and an entire wall of organic produce. (What I ended up with were the odd things I miss: Wheat Thins, blueberries, hummus, baby carrots, cottage cheese, mushrooms, tempeh. Cheap junk food, I can buy in Brazil.)

So what’s my problem? Stuff stresses me out, how it sucks time, attention, energy and time away from people, ideas, health, the environment (you know, the priceless stuff..). I get a kick from traveling the moment I walk out the door with my backpack, knowing that as long as I have my passport, credit card, and a toothbrush, I can figure out the rest as I go. (Of course the toothbrush is optional, because as my Mom always reminds me while I’m obsessively packing, they have stores there. But they might not have a bookstore, so emergency reading material is not optional.)

Philosophies differ. One friend insists they need to see their money materialized in houses, cars, etc. to feel a sense of progress and accomplishment. Another, transitioning from a life of road trips between seasonal work to marriage and grad school, sees the purchase of furniture and home appliances as a rite of passage. I do quite regularly yearn for a hotter shower, a clothes dryer, more diverse footwear, a new MacBook Pro. I’d love to have the disposable income to explore some new continents, or for that matter, visit my family more often. But I’m grateful for the tradeoff – the time and stability to become comfortable in a new country, the luxury of learning for a living, and the flexibility to get out of town when I need a break from routine. At the moment, I’m back in São José, and need to go unpack.