Circle in a Square

I now live near Bartel Pritchard square, which is really a circle. It's a rather large traffic circle on the south western corner of Prospect Park, steps away from the F train. It's quite a change from where I used to live in a small gated Vila in Rio de Janeiro. I haven't bothered to find out who Bartel Pritchard was but in 00's it's only a Google away. I prefer to live with the mystery, at least, for a little longer. My friend Gilberto Silvany _ the man in many ways responsible for my interest in Brazil and my eventual move there _ came to visit me there once and, as a pick-up line, used to ask women at stop lights if they knew who the people were that the streets were named for: the Barao de Torre, Visconde de Piraja and so on. A year or so before I left, the streets signs started appearing with subtitles explaining just that _ apparently to stop desparate men from using street names to hit on young women. Anyway, many things are different now. We used to have a three story house a few blocks away from Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, it used to be sunny almost all the time and I never really needed a coat. Now we live in three bedroom apartment (which costs about twice as much as the house did) it's been a very cold winter _ until today _ and I really need a coat, as do my wife and two young children. So why did I do it? Leave Rio? Well, there was the tanking dollar and the rising Real that made it very expensive to live. There was the job which I felt I'd stayed in too long, and I thought it would be good for my kids to know their American side and for my wife to firm up her English. I am now actively reconsidering all those things. I was happy to be here for Obama's election and to see him take office. I couldn't convince AP to send me down to Washington for the inauguration, though. It looked very cold out there that day. My job as an editor on AP's international desk somehow morphed into a much less challenging job on their North American desk, where we basically take copy and rewrite it for foreign readers: Change Ill. to Illinois, convert meters to feet and change Taser to "stun gun" just in case Taser doesn't have international brand recognition. I remember once covering and arms fair in Rio and seeing a huge crowd of people lining up to see what it was like getting Tazed. We must keep in mind human beings are strange creatures. Ate mais.