Category: Inspiration

Creative October Challenge

Published on by Mika11 Comments

UPDATED April 30th, 2019 — half-the-way through the challenge last October, i was invited to give a presentation at the I TEDxDrobetaTurnuSeverin in Romania, and Fuji was invited to teach movement and choreography at Wiks Folkhögskola (outside Uppsala, Sweden). With other priorities in mind, we put the experiment on hold until recently, when we decided it would be psychologically beneficial to give it some closure before moving on — if you want to go straight to the results you may check out fiction_Extract_test1.0, The Stubborn Face of Matter, Haikus from Borzhava, Infinity + 1, “Failure” Is just a Story or Collagenge.

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My friend, artist, and supporter Fuji Hoffmann proposed we challenge each other throughout the month of October to create and share something every week — there are no editorial bounds to what we may request from each other, and i’m looking forward to what his creative mind will send my way!

The video below explains the experiment and describes our first challenge to each other. The progress, results and further challenges will be posted on vimeo as they develop throughout the month, and you’re invited to head over there and follow me to stay in the loop 😉

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Experiments: Creative October Challenge; Fuji & Mika

Trelograms #25 — Dream Log

Published on by Mika5 Comments

My maternal grandfather, with whom i shared a bedroom growing up, has been the single most important presence and reference in my life. He passed away in 2010, at the age of 95-almost-96 (longevity ran in his family). Being raised by this wise and experienced man a generous lifetime older than me often felt magical — i was once certain (read hopeful) he was immortal.

I am now convinced ‘he’ no longer exists — at least not in any way i could interact with — except in my dreams!

For a few weeks after his passing, he was the subject of vivid dreams that i would often wake up from with a wide smile on my face! — duly filled by our recent “interaction” — grateful for the new “memory” from Grandpa to cherish until it dissipated along my morning routine.

Those dreams have become less and less frequent, and it’s been just a couple of those a year these days. A few years ago i decided to start “collecting” them — i’ll usually record them into my phone when i wake up in the middle of the night, and then transcribe them into a notebook in the morning. Even when i don’t remember the dream itself, hearing my groggy voice describing it is still refreshing!

One fascinating feature of those dreams is that i have never had a single negative interaction with Grandpa in any of them throughout all those years. I’m not sure how dreams are constructed and what that may or may not mean — it makes me look forward to a lifetime of occasional, unexpected, nourishing visits from Grandpa though.

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Featured photo: greeting Grandpa upon my arrival in one of my visits back home when i was studying in the US ( Brasília, Brazil – Summer ’09 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; home

Trelograms #24 — Checklists

Published on by Mika2 Comments

The Check Yourself episode of Hidden Brain (one of my favorite podcasts these days) talks about checklists — a simple productivity hack that hurts the egos of some and saves the lives of many.

Unlike pilots and surgeons, i can’t be sure my checklists have saved a life. They have no doubt saved me a fair amount of time and spared me a fair amount of stress though — even, perhaps especially after hundreds of nights outdoors, i don’t know how i’d manage to pack for a five-day hike (in the middle of unpacking from having just moved into a new place) without a checklist.

I’ve been a fan of checklists for a long time now. I’m particularly fond of my grocery shopping system, which i employ at home as well as on the road:

  1. Anything i remember or notice i need to buy goes first into an inbox where i collect everything else that asks for my attention, GTD-style (more on that some other time);
  2. I regularly process this inbox, adding the “grocery store stuff” to the “grocery shopping list” — tomatoes, toothpaste, if i can get it at the supermarket or from the grannies across the street from it, then it goes on that list;
  3. I regularly budget time to go do the groceries;
  4. When the time for it comes, doing the groceries is then best described as a mission to complete that checklist as effectively as i can;
  5. I allow myself at most one “wild card” item per shopping trip — something not on the list because i only thought about it at the store, an improvised treat to myself, or a random new item to be tried out — believe it or not, anything that comes to mind during the shopping process goes into the inbox, and won’t make it into my shopping basket until the next trip!

I acknowledge this rigidity might have caused some psychological pain to the occasional shopping companion unfamiliar with my process. It has nevertheless saved me a fair amount of time and energy — then available to be spent in situations where i don’t mind inefficiency at all — for instance, long-distance hiking 🙂

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Featured photo: (un)packing upon moving in ( Fall ’19 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking, hiking; worldwide

Trelograms #23 — I’m Not Special

Published on by Mika2 Comments

I’ve heard it many times and rather frequently — and not just from my mother! — that i’m special.

If you think i’m special because i’m willing to relocate, leaving behind family, close friends, career prospects and large fractions of my belongings to follow yet another exciting opportunity, whether it takes me to Scandinavian utopia or post-Soviet disrepair, then you probably don’t follow enough travel blogs.

If you think i’m special because i’ve pledged to donate 10% of my gross income to the best poverty-relief charity that i’m currently aware of — and kept up with that pledge through my self-unemployment — then you should check out the effective altruism folks who have been dedicating 100% of their resources to that and other, potentially more relevant causes.

If you think i’m special because i’m able to travel on a $5–10/day budget for five months, then you must not have met my friend Bogdan, who has done that for two years on about $1/day — not to mention that his tour took place largely in Western Europe, including countries especially notorious for their prohibitive costs such as Denmark, where we first met. There are many others like him you’ll bump into on the road whom you haven’t heard about just because they don’t have blogs or facegrams.

If you think i’m special because i’ve been hospitable (and courageous) to welcome “strangers” from hospitality networks into my home, then you might not have met or heard about the hundreds of literal strangers along my way who have invited me into their own homes (and cars) having nothing on me besides their gut reaction from first looking at me.

By the day, it seems to me that there exist essentially two kinds of people — those who know they’re amazing, and those who haven’t yet found out — we’re all fabulous in varied ways and degrees, and that makes none of us special.

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Featured photo: the Bourbaki symbol for the empty set — my favorite Math concept

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; worldwide

Out of My Head and into the World! — My Ossobuco May ’18 Presentation

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I gave a presentation earlier this year at the May edition of Ossobuco – Mais tutano pra sua vida, a local “TEDx-like” event in my hometown (Brasília). The presentation is in Portuguese, but i’ve now added English subtitles to the video, so more of you may enjoy it!

In the presentation i talk about my journey from growing up protected by my grandparents, to a nomadic career in academia, and the eventual transition into my current lifestyle as a full-time long-term traveler. I talk, in special, about how i gradually learned to stop indiscriminately fearing strangers along my way.

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Featured photo: courtesy of Jataí Fotografia

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