NSFW

This post is Not Safe For Work

and it's also about things I found at my workplace, ha!

Those who read this blog from the start probably know that I'm working in a LGBT organization in Vilnius. 

Sometimes people ask me what do I exactly do there and as much as I would like to answer, "oh, I'm fighting homophobia in the baltics", because it sounds like I'm kicking ass and it's cool, the truth is that, in a day to day basis, most of what I do is normal office work.

We have meetings, and a coffee machine, and working hours and excel tables. It's like being an intern in any other office apart from the rainbowflags everywhere and a big jar of condoms at the entrance.

BUT, there are days that remind me how cool and weird this place can be:

Some months ago the Gay League got new furniture. We, volunteers, were moving books and flyers from old shelfs and found some interesting stuff. I decided to photograph the best, and share it with you:

1 - The postcard with "Sucking Tips"

 

the front image is very straight to the point, and so is the text in the back.

2- The other postcard with a penis.

 

I like to think about the designer who came up with this.

3 - Not-So-Sexy Santa

 

It somehow disturbs me because he kind of looks like someone I could know.

 4 - Russian Pamphlet

 

I guess CEKC means sex.

5 - Swedish Way

This is such a nice booklet. Every page of it emanates 90's feeling and people in the photos look like a gay version of Friends' cast.

 

 for real... don't you think that guy looks like Ross?

6 - THE Manual!

Apart from some illustrations and instructions for sex, it also gives you important tips for the dating world, like how to start a conversation with a stranger in a supermarket ("That's a very interesting vegetable. Have you ever cooked it?")

I also read a part explaining the handkerchief code, which involved wearing a bandana in the back pocket with a colour corresponding to the person's sexual preferences.
I'm guessing gay women never had much codes for meeting one another, since the only book I found about lesbians was this:

7- The Eternal Quest

In the beginning, part of the purpose for writting this blog in english was that I would practise my writting skills - foreseeing the amount of letters and business paperwork I would have to do in my volunteer job.
And that's going well. Apart from almost sending Christmas Cards to all embassies saying "Dear Embassador" instead of "Dear Ambassador" I didn't make any major mistake.
(I still think "embassador" makes much more sense and they should change the dictionary)

the thing is,
contrary to when I was living in Budapest, now I'm not hanging mainly with native speakers. 
Back then, it was common for me to be the only person in the room speaking english as a foreign language. I felt somehow pressured to say everything well and conjugate all the verbs properly and would feel very embarrassed if I made a mistake.

But now, everyone around me is speaking english as a second language: with all the mistakes, weird grammar, and funny pronunciations that come along with it.
That made me much more relaxed and sometimes find myself saying things that AREN'T CORRECT AT ALL and just shrug and be like "who cares? as long as you get my point..".
My spoken english is probably much worse than a year ago.

The problem is.. so is my portuguese.
I few weeks ago I called my mum and was seriously having trouble remembering some really simple words. I talked slower and carefully.
She was looking at me like I was retarded.

I'm worried that if both my portuguese and english continue to decline, soon I'll only communicate with sounds and gestures.

What I've been doing

HEEEEY!
It's been SUCH A LONG TIME since I wrote here!

In my defense, I've been having very little free time. And I've been prefering to spend that time awaaaay from the computer. And near Vilniaus NeFiltruota.

A lot happened since my last post. I'll give you some of the highlights:

Bleached My Hair
And made this gif:




and then dyed it purple and appeared on national newspapers:

(Ok, appearing on the news was completly unrelated to the hair colour, but I had to share it anyway: how many times in my life will my photo appear over the subtitle "Lithuanian Homosexuals shoot a commercial to air on national TV"*?, not many, I bet!)

Since then it's getting kind of pink. To a point that last week some teenagers started singing "I'm a barbie girl" to me in the bus stop.
(I felt like pointing it out that Barbie was BLOND, like them!)

*not really sure if that's what it's saying there.

Mid-Term Volunteer training

Again, we went to a small town and attended daily sessions of team-building exercises and discussed our volunteer experiences.
The word dillema came up a lot.

In one of the exercises we had to lay down and meditate on our plans for the future: "Picture yourself in 5 years.."
This made me so anxious I had to go out and kick the snow.

During that painfull week without internet Anna lent me her Kindle (How did I survive for so long without a kindle?? How?? I need one!! ) and I read part of a book of essays about consent, called Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape and then moved on to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.


(This was the only Judith Butler meme I could find. Internet, you disappointed me.)

Later, when we went for a day trip in a ethnographic museum, the guide made us play some traditional lithuanian games that couples used to do, before getting married. One of them involved a girl holding a cookie from string that the man would playfully try to get with his mouth. The girl should make it hard for the man to get the cookie, but not too hard or else she could risk him giving up the chase.
Like this:

(Wrote stoll, but meant stool. Can't be bothered to fix it.)

With those essays fresh in my mind, I was looking at this scene, arms crossed, smiling with superiority : "oh, this is such an illustration of the commodity model of sex."

This smug i-read-feminist-books-and-disagree-with-the-message-inherent-to-your-little-heterosexual-couples-game attitude combined by the fact that, during that same week I found myself saying, very casually, something about gender non-conformativity in a conversation, made me a bit aware of how much some things about myself have changed.

THIS IS GOING TO BE A LAME MOMENT ABOUT SELF-GROWTH AND STUFF. BUT GIVE ME A BREAK, I WAS 5 DAYS IN AN ISOLATED PLACE THINKING, DISCUSSING AND MAKING COLLAGES ABOUT MY SELF-GROWTH. IT WAS BOUND TO AFFECT ME!

let me give you an little outlook on my life so far:
3 years ago I didn't know what LGBT standed for. (I mean, I knew it was something gay but I never really thought about the meaning of the acronym). It was Paulo who explained it to me, during a class of Comunication Theory - "Common Joana, you should know this better than me."

I've learned a lot, specially since I've started working in LGL.

Now, I'm sending newsfeeds to Ilga Europe on a monthly basis, reading about hate speech and organizing events like this.


Like Joey Stylez, I came a long way.

(it took me about 1:30 minutes to understand this video isn't a satire)

But that also means that I've become the person that grumbles everytime I'm filling a form that asks my sex and the only options are male or female.
A lot of what I've learned made me see differently things that I didn't question or that didn't even bother me, before.

And this makes me worried in two ways:

Partly, because I don't want to become the kind of person that bitches about the supermarket's rice family-package representation of a family not being inclusive enough.(yes, Elena, I've seen you doing this.) I don't want to be annoyed all the time, or stop myself from enjoying some stupid chasing-a-cookie game because I'm against what it, deep down, represents.

and partly, because when I come back, I won't even know how to translate some of this things, let alone have people wanting to talk with me about it.
I tried to tell my mum about this magazine, about fitness and health but written with a feminist and body-positive attitude. - She got suspicious when I said feminist and very confused with my awkward translantion of the term body-positivity.
How do I even say that in portuguese? seriously, how?


Went to Poznan and Berlin, AGAIN

In Poznan I was in a competition in Ligatura, the international comics festival they have there, wich involved pitching my idea for a comic book to a juri.
It was really nice to stay there and made me miss a lot being at school and surrounded by an artsy crowd. Just picture me walking around the exhibitions holding a plastic cup with cheap wine and looking at everyone feeling all "I'M JUST SO HAPPY TO BE HERE"
Also, won first place in the competition!! Which probably means they will publish my book, in Poland. Except that I haven't been contacted since. If it wasn't for the diploma hanging on the fridge  I would have started questioning if all of it was nothing but a stress-induced allucination.

Also, Berlin was much nicer this time. Taught Telmo the wonders of mixing vodka with ginger tea, went to the Opera, to H&M and the Erotic Museum.