In the airport in Vilnius there's a store that sells incredibly overpriced reflective badges. This store plays the best music in the whole airport and that's important to know because it was next to it that I waited for the gate to open and sat crying in silence.

Which is that type of crying where you just shake and make absolutely no noise. Like you stopped breathing.

Like a vacuum of sadness.

Going to Vilnius again was surprisingly natural, a bit like visiting my parents at my hometown. It’s not your home anymore, but it's familiar. You know this place and this place knows you back. 

Summer days feel like a blessing, in Lithuania. There’s an almost tangible need to go outside and enjoy the day before it starts raining again, and it’s something I don’t feel so much back at home.

I had also forgotten how bright it all is. Seeing the sun rising at 4 am still feels like witnessing some rare space oddity.

For the first time, I was in the city with plenty of time. I could be lazy. I could be a tourist.

I went up to the TV tower. and to the Bell tower and to the mountain with the crosses (not to be confused with the mountain made of crosses) and to the castle mountain.

I saw Vilnius from all the high places.

And then I came down and did all that I used to do: Went to a poetry reading, drank beer, hang at Elena’s place and walked aimlessly around the city just noticing people.

I had a book reading in Vilnius and another one in Riga.

When in Latvia, I got a call from my mother who was very worried about a plane crash not far from where I was. To my mum, all post-soviet countries are near each other. 

 I don't consider it bad geographic sense but a wise conclusion that the world is small, that we are all linked and that if just met a portuguese man in a bathroom in Kanepes Kulturas Centrs, so Ukraine isn’t very far either.

I told her I was taking 1, 2, 3 flights on my way back and none of them would fly over conflicted lands.

But, as I passed the airport gates, I felt very much like a conflicted land myself and only by the time I was in Frankfurt I managed to be slightly less teary and more resigned.

The next day I went to work early in the morning. Porto was foggy and the seagulls were very agitated, shirping loudly and flying around like crazy.

The city looked like the beginning of a crime mistery film. It was not a cheery sight, and couldn’t contrast more from the hot sunny mornings I had been having for the past 2 weeks.

But as I passed Praça da Batalha I noticed that theater S. João, that had been covered for construction work for what seemed like 5 years, was finally unveiled.

Like an unwrapped welcoming present, just for me.

Last week a seagull pooped in my eye.
THIS HAPPENED!
IT POOPED!
IN MY EYE!
RIGHT IN THE EYE!

I was in one of the busiest avenues here in Porto and everyone stopped to stare. A man came for my help, with napkins and directions to the nearest bathroom, while ladies in a cafe looked at me with pity.

Some tourists that had, by a few centimeters, missed the shit shower were staring at the floor horrified: they had just realised that Porto is the kind of place where feces rain on you.
They don't tell you that in the city guides, but Porto is a SHIT TRAP: you need to be constantly careful about where you step and, at the same time, watch out for big flocks of birds! 
Luckly, starting from this week, I'm in the hospitality bizz. So I can warn foreigners about sky poop matters.
YES! You heard it right!  I FINALLY GOT A JOB! (well, sort of, it's a part-time. and i'm still doing the training...) I'll be working in the reception of a hostel, and have to deal with reservations, be nice to people and know by heart all the places where you can listen to a fado show in Porto (which is easier said than done.)

But the hostel is really cool and I've been eating my lunch in the upper floor, with this view:

Which always makes me fall back in love with Porto and think that, in spite of the constant danger of seagull shit raining on your face, this is the prettiest and nicest place to be.

 Even though I've been back from Lithuania since AUGUST, there are still people meeting me on the streets of Porto and being all "OH, You're back!"

"hmm... yes.. I've been back for 10 months now"
Coincidently, ten months was also the amount of time I was away, and apparently, it's the longest I can go without packing my things and leaving because this month I did it again. I moved out of my parents home (Can you really move out of your parent's house completely? I have more panties there then here. Real home is where your old stretched-out underwear is.) and came back to Porto!!

But it's not strange that people are still surprised to see me and act like I've been back from the Baltics yesterday, for 3 reasons:

- my facebook account doesn't say where I live.

- I'm dispensable in their lifes.

- I spent a big part of the last 10 months alone, working from home, on this book that just came out this week:

And, at the book launch party last Thursday, a few people asked me how I managed to work on a project for so long, all by myself, without giving up.  So I decided to share with you some of the things that made me more motivated, organized and kept me from losing my mind during my sabbatical reclusion, last winter.

WORKING ON MY OWN: A SURVIVAL MEMOIR.

TELL EVERYBODY!
I'm the type of person that cares deeply about living up to everyone else's expectations and I'm very  afraid of letting people down. At least professionally. So I always try my best to have everything ready on time.
But, when I'm working alone, trying to meet my OWN expectations seems way less worrying and I only feel a faded sense of guilt as I press the snooze button on my alarm clock for the 14th time.

To force myself to respect my own deadlines I started telling them to everyone around me. My mum, my dad, the neighbours, friends...




Because, if I tell everyone that by Friday I'll have this printed, damn sure I'll work to make it happen! I'm too proud to admit I got lazy.

Though this works for me, I'm aware not everyone is so sensitive to social pressure, so I have this other alternative, invented by my former flatmate, Ceren:

SLAP DAY!
This is very self-explanatory. Ceren was doing her thesis and had a bunch of books and texts to read, but kept slacking off. So she instaured what I called "SLAPPING SUNDAYS". She would decide what she had to read that week, and if by Sunday she hadn't finished reading I had permission to slap her face.
Luckly, the fear of being of physically hurt was enough motivation for her to read the whole thing, every week. I say luckily because I doubt that I would be able to hit her. I would probably start crying instead. But I'm sure we can all think of a friend that is less scrupulous and a little sadistic about this things. So, next time, call him/her and start a Sunday Slap tradition!!

 WHAT TIME IS IT? IT'S PAGINATION TIME!
Working alone is the best opportunity not only to find out your favourite patterns of sleep, but also the patterns of work.
For example: In the evening I'm way more focused at making the sort of mechanic and monotonous tasks that would drive me insanly bored and annoyed in the morning. But, when it comes to editing a text, coming up with a solution, or answering emails, I'm at my best during the day, sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee on my side. I had never had the opportunity to make my working and sleeping hours float so freely around the type of work I have to do at a certain point. When I started doing that, and taking on tasks depending on what I felt like doing, it made a huge improvement on my overall sanity.

THERE ARE GOOD TO-DO LISTS AND BAD TO-DO LISTS.
I tend to be an over-achiever when I'm writting lists. I get super confident, write too many things to do and tend to postpone the ones that I dread, over the easy not-so-urgent ones.
Now, I set some sort of priority hierachy. Making a huge list but then underlining only 3 important things that I really need to do now, TODAY! NOW! NOW!
This sounds kind of obvious now that I write it down, but it took me ages to come up with this solution.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE ALWAYS HAPPY
Some people say that when you do what you love, it's not a job.
I would like to punch this people in the face.
Of course it's a job!  No matter how much you love what you do there are always parts that aren't pleasurable at all and will make you feel bad and fantasize about having chosen a different career.
 
That doesn't necessarily mean you are making a mistake.
 
CHRONOMETER YOUR LIFE
If I'm very focused, working on the computer, I forget to move.
or make pauses.
or eat.
I may even be sitting on unconfortable position with a fat cat on my neck.

I will stay still for a long time if nothing distracts me:  And when you're home and alone, there's not much to distract you.
So I dowloaded a software (this one: http://www.dejal.com/timeout/) that litterally blocks my computer every now and then and tells me to move my neck. uncross my legs, or even to make a longer break.
I have a love and hate relationship with this thing. On one side, it works and I feel better when I use it. On the other, being told to take 5 by a female robotic voice coming from my computer makes me really annoyed every time.


 
HAVE SOME SORT OF EXERCISE/MOVING-AROUND ROUTINE.

I'm not very athletic, but at least when I was in school I had to walk everywhere.
Living in Penafiel, I didn't need to move a lot, and some days I would find myself having a hard time sitting still, as if I had too much energy to work. My mind and my body kept wandering off and it took me a while to understand that that was my body telling me I needed some action. So I started dancing around the house or jumping on a little trampoline we have in the living room. (My mum put it there because Dr. Oz told her to.)
I feel there's a difference between doing proper exercise or doing fun things to tire yourself out. I generally choose the latter.

 

So, have any of you worked alone? Do you have any cool tips you'd like to share? Do it and I promise to try them out during the makings of my next book!

The Creative Spiral of Embarrassment.

I wish I could tell you I've been massively busy and that's why I haven't written in here sooner, but that would be a lie.


I was just lazy. And didn't have a lot to write about, to be honest.
The thing is, a lot in this blog is the re-telling of funny stuff that happened to me. And that means that, sometimes, I have to go out and live my life a little and eventually get myself in blog-worthy situations to tell you about.
My creative process looks a lot like this:

Right now, I'm just finishing my comic book, strolling around Porto and getting misterious food poisonings. All things that will, in time, sound very interesting but I don't really feel like sitting down to write about it just yet (so I'm watching all seasons of IT Crowd instead).

If you're portuguese, don't read this.

I'm just posting a very loose english translation of what I wrote here, 

So, move along. the internet is vast. Watch this video about the birds of paradise mating dance instead. come back in a few days when I write something new.

To the rest, here it goes:

SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR VERY SELF-CRITICAL PEOPLE

If you’re a struggling artist with internet connection, there’s a big chance you’ll spent a considerable amount of time browsing behance portfolios and feeling lame and unoriginal. 

During my time in university I learned some tricks to avoid the self-commiserating spiral of oh-god-there’s-so-many-talented-people-in-the-world-why-do-I-even-try. This is a list of the things I try to focus on, to snap out of work-driven ansiety. 

Consider this a life coaching moment for underachievers:

1- There will ALWAYS be someone better than you.

When my friend Sofia told her parents she wanted to study arts, her mum said “you know you’ll never be the best, don’t you?”. It might sound harsh, but I think it’s a good motto. Unless you’re Michael Phelps, there will always be someone faster, richer, more handsome than you. So you might just well accept it, roll up your sleeves and do your best anyway.

2- Even Michael Phelps gets nervous.

Once I started going to art-related events and festivals, and met people out of art school I became more aware that even those that I consider super talented and sucessful had their moments of visible nervousness and perspiration.

I’m aware this is a little despicable, but thinking that the people I admire also get insecure and doubt themselves from time to time makes me very glad.

3- More to learn!

When I went to university, I found myself surrounded by people that knew a lot more about design than me. They mastered the software, talked about typefaces and had little inside jokes about Josef Muller Brockmann! Eventually, I made a conscient choice to avoid thinking about how little I knew and rather how much I could learn from them. 

THE MAGICAL DAY PAULO TAUGHT ME HOW TO USE THE MULTIPLY TOOL ON PHOTOSHOP

Now that I’m not in school, there’s a bigger physical distance between me and the people with shiny behance portfolios. They’re not sitting next to me in the school canteen anymore. 

But I also learned that artists outside the academic world are generally nice and enjoy talking about themselves and their work. My advise is: Don’t just look at other people’s portfolios online. Read their blogs, go to exhibitions, sign up for workshops, ask them stuff, pick their brains, try to find out about their process and inspirations. It’s easy to look at a finished piece of work and think “gaaah... this is genius I’ll never do that” and overlook the fact that it developed out of a lot of failure and experimentation. That piece is the good-looking tip of a huge iceberg of hard work.

4- There’s worst.

I used to entertain myself browsing bad illustration portfolios when I was feeling down. It was a guilty pleasure that I only admitted to a few close friends because I feared it was a bit pathetic to cheer myself up with other people’s lack of talent.

With time, I discovered everyone else does it! (that, or I’m only friends with terrible people) Although I wouldnt advise you to linger too much on this type of comparisions. This are not the healthiest of thoughts and eventually one of the people you think you’re better than will get the job/award/exhibition/visibility you craved for and you’ll feel like the world is unfair, have a rage attack and rip to shreds the latest Time Out issue, because they published a new article about that person’s awfull work. 

5-Call your biggest fan.

 
You have merit! You’ve done some interesting stuff! And if self-compliments don’t work call your mum and ask her to remind you the talented miracle kid you are. Have her tell you how everything you do is beautiful from the pasta collages in kindergarden, to the editorial works from now..

6- You will fail. You will survive.

I used to get so ansious about school my stomach would start to burn. Watching Teleshopping at 4am waiting for the painkillers to kick in is the opposite of a happy life.

To avoid that, now I focus on how all the things that make me worry: deadlines, driving exams, failed relationships, job interviews... are small in the vast universe that is my existence.

VISUALIZING MYSELF AS A GIANT HELPS

That’s how I flunked Printing Technologies on my third year. It was the day before the deadline. I had enough time to do the report, but would probably pass with a low grade, sleep very little and stress a lot.

So, I sang a karaoke version of Eye of the Tiger on Youtube, made up my mind and said to myself: nope, this is not worth the effort. I deserve to be happy. and BAM! I flunked something for the first time in my life!

Newsflash: Nothing bad happened. 

Nobody died. The world didn’t implode because of my failure.

If whatever you’re doing makes you way more miserable and ansious than it should, being well is more important. And it’s not a big deal to give up.

First Day

Though I've never been very keen on New Year's celebrations, I've always made some sort of resolutions, that I would conveniently forget about, during the course of a month.
Last year I wrote them here and now, for the first time, they are coming back to haunt me.

So, one-year-ago-Joana wanted to drink less, stop being lazy about shaving her legs, keep up with the gym and be more patient with herself. Like a lazy and socially inconvenient bear, I was having troubles keeping my skin smooth, my drunk behaviour in control, and was far from being fit.

but I've grown so much since then, you guys!
I've done so many fulfilling things this year.  

Like that time we went to a lake in Moletai. But didn't swim because I didn't expect Moletai would have lakes and hadn't packed a bikini.

or that time I drank kefir for the first time.

or that time my mum and I managed to talk about plastic bags for a whole half an hour, on skype.

or that time I rode a taxi and the driver was drunk and I still payed him because I'm such an idiot and then he asked me for my number and I ran away and lost a glove.

THIS YEAR WAS FULL OF MILESTONES
and I've changed so much!

My legs are shaved, at this very moment, and I was alcohol free for most of the year.
In fact, can proudly say that, in 2013, I didn't vomit even once, and always peed in the right places. I'm aware this achievements are kindergarden level, but I'm going to congratule myself even so.
I quit the gym back in February, BUT since my other resolution was to be more patient with myself, I've decided to embrace the fact I'm not the gym-type person and craddle my fat inner child with lots of love and cookies.

Now, about the new year:
2014 is going to be all about emancipation. I'm tired of this sabbatical state I'm in and will finally start looking for something to do that involves putting on clothes and leaving the house most days of the week. Somehow I'm picturing myself in a power suit plunging throught the art scene of Porto...but that's unlikely.

Here are my goals for 2014:

-move out of my parents' house.
-get a job.
-have sex.
-spend less time on facebook.
(I believe the last two are correlated.)

**wish me luck!**

Yes, I finally have an excuse to google season appropriate lolcats.



Penafiel is soaked in Christmas spirit.
Not only you hear Christmas songs in every shop you enter, there's also a public soundsystem all over the main street, playing carols all day long. Teenager temp workers were hired by the Shopkeepeers' Union, to dress up like Santa and hand out balloons, screaming "hohoho" with their squeaky pubescent voices.
To make it even better, a dutch Circus is coming to town. Their poster is too good for words to describe it:

There's no snow, but that just means you can get to wear prettier shoes to all the Christmas dinner parties. Facebook events are all over the place and though I cherish the prospect of eating loads of desserts, it's time to start worrying about getting presents for all this people.

Do you feel confused about the weird tradition of wrapping things in flashy paper and handing them away? Are you clueless about what to offer this Christmas?
Don't worry.
I'm here for you.

This seasonal blog post will be about
THE SECRET OF GIFT GIVING.

When deciding what to give someone for Christmas (or any other present-giving holiday) keep in mind this golden rule: All gifts fall into one of this 3 categories - useful, fun and/or sentimental. 

A great gift would fulfill all three, but that's pro-level gift giving. The best trick for you beginners is to just focus in one category and the rest will follow.

USEFUL
This has been my dad's technique for years. My mother needs a new mixer...we shall give her one.
People always need more stuff. From keychains a high-tech GPS. You just need to pay attention. Practical gifts can't go wrong, unless your aunt has been complaining how much she needs a cheese grater to everyone in the family, and on Christmas day you're not the only one offering her that. But, even then, that's her problem not yours.

And, to be honest, there's no such thing as too many cheese graters.

FUN
This are my favourite. The main idea is to give people something they probably would love to have but won't buy it for themselves, because it's not a priority.
For example, a party wig. No one ever buys a wig without having a purpose, people get one when they're planning to dress up for a costume party. But it's so nice to have a new wig just for the sake of it! 
A karaoke machine, glow in the dark face paint, inflatable palm trees are some of the things a responsible adult wouldn't buy, but are super cool. You wouldn't know how much you needed them until someone gave them to you.

SENTIMENTAL
This gifts that are somehow symbolic of your relationship with the giftee. A photo, matching friendship bracelets, a sweet mixtape... The sentimental gift can be handmade, but not necessarily.
It's nice when it's about an inside joke between the both of you. When I say it's sentimental I don't mean everyone will hug and cry after unwrapping it. It can be hilarious! 
Sometimes the best thing you can offer is a few good laughs. So go ahead and record yourself clumpsly dancing to one of the new Beyonce songs and send it to a special friend.

After considering what kind of present you want to offer, bear in mind this two tips:

THE BEST GIFT IDEA
I know it's a cliché to offer socks. But, it's a cliché for a reason - it's an awesome gift!
Everyone wears socks!
(except that international student from Brasil, two years ago, that wore sandals all his life before he came to live in Porto)

Socks can be slick and sexy, or comfy and silly. They come in all sizes, and colours and materials! THE CHOICES ARE INFINITE! SOCKS ARE INFINITE!

THE WORST GIFT IDEA
Never, 
NEVER,
offer live animals.

If you're friend wants a pet, let him get one. Offer him a kitty litter, NOT the kitty.
There are other ways to make animal-loving people happy besides giving them something to adopt. Some dog shelters have a special days when you can take the dogs for a walk. Make that your present - take your friend there for a fun afternoon. Or donate to a animal charity in their name. Or buy this Gemma Correl's totebag.



Any of this things are better than giving someone a living thing they will need to feed, clean and take care of from now on.

So, that's about all the advise I can gather.
If after this you still have no ideas of what to offer your loved ones tomorrow night, check the wikipage for Saturnalia, the ancient roman festival that preceded christianity. They also gave presents to each other:

"In his many poems about the Saturnalia, Martial names both expensive and quite cheap gifts, including writing tablets, dice, knucklebones, moneyboxes, combs, toothpicks, a hat, a hunting knife, an axe, various lamps, balls, perfumes, pipes, a pig, a sausage, a parrot, tables, cups, spoons, items of clothing, statues, masks, books, and pets.[38] Gifts might be as costly as a slave or exotic animal,[39] but Martial suggests that token gifts of low intrinsic value inversely measure the high quality of a friendship.
In a practice that might be compared to modern greeting cards, verses sometimes accompanied the gifts. Martial has a collection of poems written as if to be attached to gifts.[42] Catullus received a book of bad poems by "the worst poet of all time" as a joke from a friend.[43]"

Isn't this great? I wouldn't mind receiving a hunting knife, or a mask or a bad poetry book. Apart from the slave giving thing, this is full of precious gift ideas.

Now go and find a shop that sells knucklebones.
*Merry Christmas*