Testing new server.

But, if Proverb, the most perceptive and intelligent person I've ever known, disagrees I'm either failing to communicate or I'm wrong. Maybe it's like my grand-daddy always said, "This conversation will only make sense if you understand what I'm saying."

We live in a world of superlatives, rankings, and comparisons. There's a 1-100, "best of" or "most" list for everything. And the world is competitive, even with respect to things that are ultimately subjective like fine art competitions and battles of the bands. The connotation attached to mediocre isn't pretty. Who wants to hear someone call their finest effort mediocre at best?

What I mean by advocating the celebration of mediocrity is that we should learn to cherish and celebrate personal excellence that is comparatively mediocre. Most of us do that most of the time when it comes to friends and family, but I think the inability to do it in general causes a fair amount of unnecessary pain.

Here's an example.

But no time for that now. Tomorrow morning we go to London for 4 days - Proverb, our daughter, and Proverb's father and his fiancé.

Will have some info and hopefully some photos from London when we return.

Next week I'll publish Proverb's old entries.

I'm in the process of re-publishing our old entries, which will take awhile. No telling when we'll have time to add new posts or get caught up with all that's gone on since our last post on the old Contemporary Love.

In a nutshell, Proverb and I are happily married since September 1, 2003, we still live in Portugal, and we now have a beautiful baby daughter who is seven-months-old.

Been a long, hard road, but one filled with a true contemporary love.

And to my Proverb - Happy Valentine's Day! I love you!

I finally did an assignment about the minimum wage. In fact, I had wanted to do it for a very long time so I gave the idea to my newspaper, they accepted it, and I did it. The article ran three pages and, in addition to all the statistical information and economic explanations, contained stories about real people struggling to survive. What they told me was sad, very sad, but was not a surprise. I have to admit though that I was very surprised by the number of people that didn't speak, giving up at the last minute, because they were afraid of having problems with their bosses.

Although a country where the official dictatorship ended 30 years ago, Portugal is still a country that lives, in many aspects, under fear. And that continues to shock me. When I was a little younger I used to think that these people were cowards because they failed to help themselves or a collective cause (better salaries, better lives, better companies, better profits, stronger economies). Today, I have a different idea. Probably because when some of the times I decided to speak out loud about what I considered unfair I got hurt (though, looking back now, not as much as I could have been). So, today, even shocked, even sad, even not agreeing that silence is the better answer, I can understand people that struggle quietly to survive in order to avoid hurting their children and families.

And all the stories these people told me for my minimum wage article made me think about something completely different but that somehow relates to it: silent dictatorship. You know, all the things you have to avoid doing or saying, for your own health, even if nobody tells you to. And I am not speaking only about people that struggle to survive at a basic level (they just refreshed this in my mind). I am speaking about all the things that go with and lurk behind surviving in any environment. All the fearful situations that we all help to create that result in unfair things. And yes, I can honestly say that I hear a silent dictatorship in most places.

How many people do you know that are good professionals but have miserable salaries compared to their equally good professional colleagues that do exactly the same work? And how many of these people have you seen quietly accepting this until, one day, they revolt and they say everything they think with the wrong delivery because they've reached their limit ? What did you observe then? Most of the time they got more hurt, right? If not directly - because nobody can fire anybody without strong reason - indirectly, like suddenly nobody gives them work to do, or gives them always the same kind of work, until they get tired and depressed.

Four week ago, for example, in my country, two women decided to speak about the things they considered unfair in their jobs. Their boss (a woman - never think a woman is more sensitive) decided to seek revenge and put them working in the garage of the store without being allowed to come outside. They were basically treated as if they were in jail. Cruel, right? Also rude but at least obvious enough to draw attention to this ridiculous revenge.

But what about when these things happen in a polite way, among graduated people, people that lived with books but learned very little about loving mankind? Seems even worse, right? But it happens often enough... People that pretend to be friends for convenience, people that always have a nice smile when they say a bitter thing, people that always try to step on other people to achieve their goals, authoritarian rule disguised as smooth suggestion. I cannot tell you how many people (the ones with good relationships - which means friends of the bosses) I heard during my working life saying things like: "I will not rest until I destroy him (or her)". Would be nice if it had been only a nervous moment, but it wasn't. Often, after the "nervous moment", when they recover their charade of politeness, as if it was just coincidence they decide to say a simple and apparently innocent sentence about the "poor work" of the person that they just wanted to destroy. Imagine this innocent sentence day after day, spoken next to a friend (read boss).

And how many times has this happened to you? How many times have you decided to pretend you didn't understand? And how many times you did you look the other way because you knew that it would be worse to speak what you feel? How many times have you kept smiling? How many times, tired of pretending, have you started to be honest? What happened? Did you win something with it? How many times have you heard that, anyway, you are the one with the bad temper? Welcome to the dictatorship of silence. And this does not apply only to the ones that really struggle to survive. I believe it applies to all of us.

An example: How many times were you going to be the next boss of your department, but suddenly a guy that nobody knows where he came from took your place just because your general boss likes him more than he likes you? And how many times did you keep smiling because you clung to hope and because you believed that it would be worse to say what you really thought and felt?

So, after having to fight hard to have a job or to win the minimum wage you have to fight hard to be the boss's friend to keep the privilege of winning the minimum wage. And when you are lucky and competent enough to have a good job and a good salary, you still have to lick your boss's boots and approve any nonsense he says because your ideas are always worse than his... simply because he is the boss (which means you have to trust luck and hope to have a good, organized and competent boss).

Do I believe that this silent dictatorship happens everywhere? Yes. But do I also believe this happens more in countries like Portugal? Yes. Too many affections involved, too many sympathies and antipathies involved. Here I have the feeling that it's not always competence that matters.

Portugal is a country where it's so hard to conquer something, where it's so hard to keep what you conquered. It's a country where people cannot separate their personal tastes from competence or incompetence. Because Portugal is still a country not very professional and still growing in that matter, people become wild and do whatever they feel they must to keep what they have conquered. And this is the silent dictatorship we live every day of our lives, taking it everywhere we go.

And this country that demands from itself the same speed it sees in developed countries is still lost in the question of how to do things in a professional manner, because it is still lost in personal affections, lobbies and poor power games. Like a teenager, Portugal is somehow lost between what it was and what it wants to be, struggling to grow but meanwhile creating bad habits like fear and the resulting lack of initiative or creativity caused by fear.

Regards,

Proverb

Last month I wrote a little piece about contemporary romance entitled, Contemporary Romance: Sense and Nonsense, Part One.

This is Part Two.

Part One took a brief look at the meaning of "romance". My conclusion was that "romance" was the means by which we obtain affection from someone we desire. I described two types of romance, unilateral and bilateral, the difference being whether or not there was a pre-existing affectionate relationship. If so, romance is bilateral in nature, if not, unilateral.

What are your wishes for 2004?

"What are your wishes for 2004?" my friend asked me. It should have been enough to say, "more wisdom to the world," but wasn't. She wanted to know what I demanded from myself for myself. From among several choices - like having more time for family and friends, being more patient, etc., etc., I answered that I wanted to continue to avoid using cynicism and sarcasm with my "enemies", even if too hard and sometimes a strong temptation. She looked at me seriously and questioned me again, "Aren't those important tools for survival?"

Are they?

A long talk began.

See, I have a different perspective. To me, cynicism and sarcasm are signs of intelligence (like humor) and because intelligence is so expensive I don't think we should waste it on those we don't care about. What I see out there masquerading as "cynicism" and "sarcasm" aren't really signs of intelligent speech. Actually, they are nothing more than cheap attacks disguised as witty conversation by the use of fake smiles and polite manners. And what's the point of wasting the little intelligence I have with those who wouldn't get it anyway? I prefer to save my wit for the ones I love instead of spending it on "amateurs".

"But you can be very sarcastic when you write," my friend said back to me. Yes, I can, because as a matter of principle I like people I haven't met yet.

So I use cynicism, sarcasm and rude humor among my people to play with the nonsense I read in the news (example: in a country like Portugal where the minimum wage is less than 400 dollars the price of bread was going to increase 35%); to describe our government's blindness (example: illegal immigrants were allowed to pay taxes but not remain in our country); or to describe the cheap attacks I see everyday between people that are supposed to be adults. Because if there's something I really like it's a good laugh among friends. And the world is out there full of reasons to laugh (though basically they are exactly the same reasons to cry).

Here's to 2004...

And now I am too sleepy...

Regards,

Proverb

But you know something? I would do it all again.

So, the first thing I want to tell you is: Love is a wonderful thing. Second: I wish you a lot of love. Third: I wish you a Merry Christmas or a joyful holiday season, and a very Happy New Year. Fourth, I wish you health, patience and persistence.

And today I say no more because I am really tired and tomorrow is going to be a very long day.

One thing I promise you: I will speak about what is going on in France and the law that forbids religious symbols in schools.

Proverb

Since putting these journals/diaries/weblogs, or whatever we should call them, online in August of 2003, I've received a fair amount of email from people around the world asking questions about: long distance relationships; being a U.S. citizen living abroad; technical visa questions; and, a variety of other topics related to love and romance.

In the last post I never offered a solution to the minimum wage problem here, I was more concerned about things as they are, at least my perspective of how they are. Today I want to present one very basic solution. To make life bearable in this country we need to take one of three roads: lower retail prices; increase wages; or, why not, achieve a liveable harmony between them, lowering the prices and raising the minimum wage until the two reach a healthy balance.

Our minimum wage is unbearable. We need a law to change it. But more than laws, we need intelligent people. We need intelligent governments that are not subordinated to big companies, and we need big companies that follow the law and want to grow without exploiting people. How many centuries will Portugal take to imitate good examples? Again, what we need is a change of mentality.

Example: I had an opportunity to appreciate how America works. Very generally speaking, American people work hard and well, but American people are also very well paid. America is a country that promotes intelligence and creativity. And here are the basic differences. Portugal has companies that don't follow laws and governments (whatever their political color) that are subordinated to those companies. What further complicates the problem is the fact that Portuguese corporate culture is still largely based on the "buddy system" where we see big companies in this country hiring and promoting people whose highest work skill is making friends with or being related to the bosses.

From an economic point of view, Portugal is a recipe for disaster and the victims of the disaster aren't our large corporations.

Let's face it. Someone's making money here. The math is simple: in a situation where retail prices are high and the cost of labor is low, somebody's making good money. And it's not the labor.

What do we need to achieve a situation in which workers earn a minimum wage high enough to be a true living wage?

What do we need to achieve an economic recovery?

Sacrifice.

Who always sacrifices more? Consumers. Well, I prefer to call them workers. But what more do they have to sacrifice?

Economic recovery requires that companies sacrifice. They must lower the prices of their goods, raise salaries or, as I said above, strike a balance between those two alternatives. Left alone, it's not something that's likely to happen. To do so would mean less corporate revenue, at least in the short term, and corporate managers keep their jobs by producing more short term revenue for investors, not less. Don't expect the large corporations that are benefitting from this cost of living -- minimum wage discrepancy to fix it.

Can we expect the government to step in and correct the situation? Are governments that look to the big companies to sustain the national economy likely to correct the situation by asking them to sacrifice? Of course not.

Recovery is also and mainly up to those who are currently suffering and sacrificing from this bad economic situation. The voter. The worker.

Why is this so difficult? Because workers believe what companies and governments tell them. Workers believe the companies when the companies tell them they have no money for higher wages, although they continue to raise the prices of their goods. So we need informed workers.

And we need workers (voters) who have courage, who refuse to remain silent about the situation out of fear of losing their job. Laws that protect workers from being fired for voicing their opinions would help.

Workers (voters) also believe governments who tell them that the economic situation is too complicated to hope for a quick or easy solution. Of course it's complicated, if you want to "fix" the problem without causing the large companies any pain or suffering.

A good solution will require good laws that are strongly enforced. Those good laws won't happen until voters make it so.

Enough of basic economy (anyway I am not an expert, just an idealist). One of these days I will return to the creativity issue.

Regards,

Proverb

Search. Get the feeling dictionary definitions of romance are closely tied to the editor's personal situation.

Case in point. Yesterday I tell the laptop to shut down (I now know I should have asked politely). It refuses. I wait. Get tired of waiting and pull the plug. User has the last word.

Wrong.