Quirkyalone

I was on a plane ride recently reading an in-flight magazine, where we got the chance to read five guys’ “real” opinions on Valentine’s Day. These poor husbands and boyfriends felt so oppressed! The words “Happy Valentine’s Day” in the morning filled them with dread as they would have to be romantic on demand.

The saccharine-sweet quality of Valentine’s Day, that fills us with expectation and often tends to make us feel disappointed whether we are single or in a relationship, struck me 8 years when I launched International Quirkyalone Day with parties in four cities. The flagship party was in San Francisco. In our second year, the party got so big the fire marshalls came but then they wanted to party too.

IQD is for everyone, because couples as well as singles needed a liberating alternative holiday to celebrate the joys of connection: to yourself, to your mate (if you have one), to friends, family, passions, and so on.

International Quirkyalone Day marches on! I am astounded that it has been celebrated in so many cities (40). This year I have been more engrossed in my own personal adventures, wrapping up my travels in South America, so I haven’t thrown a quirkyalone day party the way I have in years past.

But I take this opportunity to wish all of you the most alive and fresh Quirkyalone Day ever! I invite you to do something new Quirkyalone Day, shake up your world a bit by visiting a new spot in or outside your town, take a class, take a chance and make a new friend (and I don’t mean on Facebook). Rearrange your furniture, try a new recipe, dance alone in your underwear for an hour. At the least, buy yourself some daisies, chosen for their natural, sunny quality, they are the official flower of the quirkyalone movement.

And above all, love thyself.

Here is a video from Keith Olbermann’s Countdown in MSNBC (RIP) featuring the 2005 IQD party in San Francisco and interviews with yours truly about this new holiday:

The American holiday Thanksgiving is approaching, and with it, millions of families (and urban tribes like mine, pictured above) will gather to gobble down turkey and sweet potatoes with marshmallows baked on top. Many of them will also go around the table to share what they are grateful for in their lives. This ritual has always been my favorite part of Thanksgiving. In a consumer-driven society where we are so often complaining about what’s not quite right with our lives, it feels great to hear people acknowledge their personal abundance.

This year, I have been thinking that I am grateful for still being single, which, honestly is not what I would have said last year. I took this year off to travel and I did the journey alone. I’ve grown in many ways that would not have been possible had I found a lifelong partner before I bought the ticket and made the final decision to go. I’m sure I would be grateful for that person, had we met. But I am also very grateful that I took full advantage of being single this year instead of hanging around San Francisco with the agenda of finding a mate (which honestly, was getting kind of boring–more on that in another post).

So this leads me to thinking about reasons to be grateful for being single this Thanksgiving. This year, let us count the ways. (Add yours in the comments.)

First and foremost, you are alive. Single. Just as you came out of the womb. Being single is the starting point for life, and we will in a sense be single when we pass on. So be grateful for your singular existence now, that you are alive!

The time to discover what makes you happy A relationship can be very time-consuming. When you are single, you have all your free time outside of work and other obligations to discover what brings you joy. Use it and be grateful for it! Being single gives you the opportunity to create more joy in your life without depending on someone else to provide it for you.

Freedom to travel and explore alone I took this year off to travel alone in South America and I’ve had the ability to grow and learn in a way that might or might not have been possible if I had been coupled. (You can still travel alone when you are quirkytogether, but it would be hard to travel alone for a whole year.)

You haven’t settled! No relationship or person will be perfect. But many people are afraid of being single and stay in relationships that are not working in order to avoid the pain of breaking up or being alone. Every person is a little bit wrong, being single means you are free to go out and find someone who is wrong for you in all the right ways.

Finally, total freedom to indulge your secret single behavior Want to pick your toe nails while watching Seinfeld reruns on a Friday night? Eat peas out of a can? No problem, you are single! Embrace your SSB (covered more extensively in Quirkyalone.)

Count your blessings my (single) quirkyalone friends.

Share your reasons for being grateful that you are single at this stage of your life in the comments.

A malandro doing his thing in front of the Arches in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro

The first time that “Malandro” came up I was waiting in a bookstore in Leblon, the most chi-chi part of Rio, with a new friend I had just met. We were waiting for someone I had made plans with and he texted me to say he was almost there, “one minute.” I explained this to the first guy and he reacted with some doubt and asked if I knew the word “Malandro.” No, I said. He told me “Malandro” means a guy who has more than one woman but doesn’t let any of them know, a slippery kind of person. Oh. That night I was looking at Lonely Planet Brazil and noticed the use of “Malandro” in a box of text describing Lapa, the historic center of samba in Rio. A “malandro,” according to Lonely Planet, was a “con artist.”

The next day, a young Lithuanian guy who has lived in Brazil five years and who works at the guesthouse where I am staying asked me if I knew what a “Malandro” is. Amazed, I told him the word had already come up twice in 24 hours. He proceeded to tell me that a “malandro” is like an urban surfer, a guy who doesn’t work but manages to get by somehow and that everyone wants to be a malandro. He’s the cool guy every other guy would like to be. Can a woman be a “malandra”? Oh, definitely not, according to Tita.

That night I asked a few more people about “Malandro.” My friend Roberto told me that a “malandro” was a historical character of Lapa that can now only be found in escolas de samba, samba schools–dapper men who dress all in white. My friend Marcello described a “malandro” as a clever, fast-thinking person who can talk his way out of any situation. He thought “malandras” exist, they’re just fewer in number. Josemando thought a “malandro” is someone that takes advantage of others.

No one seems to really self-identify as a “malandro.” Tita, the outsider, is the only one who really glorified them. Roberto and I joked about going malandro-spotting in a samba school–it would be fun to find some malandros and take pictures.

The word begins with “mal” so I assume that a “malandro” is a shady character but most people say that they’re more complicated than “bad.” That’s one thing I am noticing about Rio. Everything has two sides, everything has a double meaning. At times I wonder if I should be leaving and spending time in another country in order to learn more, be exposed to another culture. But spending more time in one place means that I get to learn more deeply about cultural intricacies like these. And I am still waiting to meet an official “malandro.” Stay tuned for a picture if I ever find one.

This post originally appeared on my travel blog My Unplanned Adventure.

After two weeks in Cali, my Belgian friend Griet and I, wandering our somewhat bohemian neighborhood San Antonio, found a gym an astonishing two blocks away. The gym offered a dance workout—rumba aerobics—Saturday mornings at 10. What a find! Although Cali is a very late-night party city, we decided to call it a relatively early Friday night at 1 at La Matraca, a gorgeously nostalgic tango club, so we could get up early to work out! Yes, we were committed to our health!

The gym’s rumba class combined a series of dance moves: salsa, bachata, and African dance moves. Bachata is a slow sensual hip-rotating rhythym gaining in popularity worldwide that I first encountered here in Cali. The teacher and the class were high-energy. I even got to work on my Caleno-style salsa footwork.

I felt such a high from the class that I couldn’t help but think of the Saturday morning, 10 am class that I took for two years in San Francisco. It was a combination of world dances that had all the potential in the world to be great, but after a month the teacher really started to wear on my nerves. He wasn’t a comedian, but he seemed to think he was one. He used the class as his stage. I persisted in going for over a year even though I gritted my teeth through his jokes.

Why did I keep going to a class I didn’t love for two years? You could argue that I could have adapted to like him more. I think I’ve always had this idea that the more spiritual approach in life is to be zen and learn to be neutral–not actively disliking–things I don’t like. As if I should accept everything and enjoy all the ups and downs of life. But why? He got on my sister’s nerves too. Why continue to do anything that I don’t love, if it is in my power to change it and find something better? With regard to that particular dance class, I could have easily driven or biked bussed to half a dozen other classes and found an experience that I truly loved. The class was convenient. It was a three minute walk from my apartment.

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Colombia is an amazing country, full of mountains as stunning as the Swiss Alps and people as sweet and welcoming as the people I met in the Northeast of Brazil. It’s also full of strange and hilarious bathrooms. Well, two anyway, that I have spotted in three weeks of travel. Bathrooms are not exactly my first point of anthropological interest as a traveler-observer. But the bathrooms in Colombia have been impossible to ignore.

Did you go Miami or Chicago?

When I emerged from the stall I read her sign more closely so I could figure out what I owed. A Miami cost 500 pesos (about 30 cents) and a Chicago cost 1000 (60 cents). So had I done a Miami or a Chicago? “Chicago” she pantomimed for me with a giggle was a “shit.” Why she had chosen “Miami” to represent number one remained completely mysterious.

Why Miami and why Chicago? The question gnawed at me for two full weeks until I remembered I could ask real, live Colombians. I was couchsurfing with some young fashion students in Medellin. I showed them the photo and they died laughing. The verb for pee in Colombia is “miar.” The verb to shit is “cagar.” They marveled at this woman’s creativity in adapting these Spanish verbs into American cities.

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The dreamy streets of Barichara

On my final afternoon in Barichara, a tiny, beautiful, impossibly tranquil Colombian mountain town I have now decided is heaven, I dropped in to a sweet bakery and coffee shop for a rainy-day cappuccino. A Colombian woman, around 50, asked if she could park her bags and herself at my table. Of course. For me, meeting locals is really the whole point of traveling.

My new friend Shoya is a painter and also rents rooms to tourists. She would like to organize artistic tours of Barichara to show visitors the artistic side of the city: sculptors’ studios and the beautiful interiors of Barichara homes. My Brazilian friends Roma and Iracema and I stayed in a couple’s home, sort of an informal bed and breakfast worthy of being written up in Conde Nast Traveler, that only cost $17 a night. The interiors are indeed stunning. The ceilings are about twenty feet high and have exposed driftwood beams, the floors are large cobblestones, and every windowsill and bookshelf was adorned with a piece of unexpected art. My shower consisted of water that shoots over a piece of rock, creating the sensation of taking a shower out in nature.

A hammock in my home away from home in Barichara

Somehow conversation turned to San Francisco’s cable cars and the enjoyment of life. She asked me about the cable cars, and I said, yes, they are great but they are for tourists. Why, she said. I explained they don’t help me get where I need to go. And that in twelve years of living in San Francisco I never even took a cable car.

In my thirteenth year, I decided that I wanted to take a cable car. I wanted to enjoy life and somehow taking a cable car–doing a touristy thing in my own town–became symbolic of enjoying life. I told her I wanted to “disfrutar la vida,.” I finally took a cable car ride with my best friends Jenny, Liz, Sonya, and Adam, and Jenny and Adam’s son Kai as part of a scavenger hunt we organized for Jenny’s birthday. None of us had ever gone on a cable car before. The ride was magic.

My new Colombian sculptor friend immediately latched on to this phrase, “disfrutar la vida,” and become quite animated.

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