September 16, 2022 • 21 mins
After wrapping up Season 1 of Not Lost, and a few odds & ends at home, Brendan heads to Portugal and experiences an emotion he can’t quite explain... so he asks locals to help him out.
“Postcards” are an occasional series of shorter Not Lost episodes that Brendan produces when he travels.
Not Lost is a co-production of Pushkin Industries, Topic Studios, and iHeartMedia
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, you've received a pace god from Portugal. Greetings, Not
(00:42):
Lost listeners. I'm sending you this audio card to let
you know that I've been thinking about you. I know,
I know it's taking me a moment to put ben
to paper, or rather microphone to mouth, but I haven't
forgotten you. In fact, I've been working on a batch
of Not Lost Chat episodes which is becoming to you
later this fall. That'll be a set of travel ori
(01:05):
ended conversations to fill your ears while the production team
and I embark on the more time consuming process of
actually traveling, conjuring dinner parties, and then editing. But in
the meantime, I went on a little holiday this summer
and I couldn't help but want to tell you about it.
(01:26):
After wrapping up season one I'm Not Lost, I began
to take care of all the life tasks I've been neglecting,
getting a wheel alignment from my car, submitting receipts to
work inhaling tubes of fig Newman's while flat on my
back watching old episodes of The Great British Bake Off.
I also caught COVID, which wasn't intentional but did end
(01:46):
up working in my favor. It turned out that covid
antibodies are the biological equivalent of a TSA prejeck. They
allow you to travel with a little less stress. And
when I recovered, I helped my then partner move out
of our apartment. Yes, another relationship ended. I was single again,
(02:10):
back where I started at the beginning of Not Lost.
This ending was less sudden and fractious as previous breakups,
but that didn't make the undertaking any less heavy. It
was still a breakup stage. Around that time, this lovely
(02:31):
incantatory song came out by Brazilian musician Tim Bernardes, and
I kind of served as a bomb for all that
had been going on. Now. The song's in Portuguese. I
don't speak Portuguese, so I didn't know what the words meant,
but I found it soothing just the same, and after
listening on repeat for a few days, I finally put
the name of the title and Google translate be Born,
(03:00):
Live Die. With all the had been going on, it
was nice to be reminded that there's really only one
to do list that matters. So I had Portuguese on
the mind in my ears, which was helpful because I
was struggling with a new dilemma, where do you travel
(03:23):
for fun when traveling is what you do for work.
I'd been to Brazil before Sam Paulo, with its tangle
of steel, glass and heat at once Ferrell and Cosmopolitan,
and I thought about going again. But I caught win
that a friend of a friend recently bought a place
in Portugal, and that's a place I've always wanted to go.
I love sardines. A couple summers back, my bloodstream was
(03:46):
made up primarily of vino Verde. And also, Portugal is
just a great word to say Portugal. It feels good
coming out of the mouth. And if it does come
out of your mouth within earshot of a certain class
of Americans, they will say something like, I hear it's
a great place to retire. I heard this from my colleagues,
(04:06):
my dentist, even an old friend in la I'm not
sure how you retire from being supported by your girlfriend,
but that's his plan. To be fair. Portugal encouraged this
perception of itself as a poker ratan with wine Country,
partially by creating the so called Golden Visa program, which
means if you invest a certain amount of money, it
(04:27):
will give you the equivalent of a green card. Now, personally,
I found all these people fantasizing about moving to another
place they'd never been a little bit distasteful and opportunistic, Like, Okay,
invest a little bit of money in a country and voila,
you get to live somewhere with low crime, solid healthcare,
and beautiful beaches and fresh fish dinners for a handful
(04:49):
of euro balby knights. So I decided to check out Portugal.
I bought my plane ticket, and after that I went
to a bookstore and I bought a little prank guidebook.
That's right, a guide book. I always buy guide books.
(05:13):
I don't need an Instagram listical telling me about a
town's five hottest restaurants. That's information I can get on
the ground. But I do need a concise go to
guide that gives me a neat bit of local history
and tells me how to operate the metro machines. Some
things don't need to be messed with. Pines, ketchup, kissing.
Travel guides are among them. After crawling the gauntlet of
(05:41):
airline security, I slumped into my seat on the airplane
and opened up to page one of Insight Guide's Portugal
pocket guide, and I began to read. Few countries have
risen as triumphantly or fallen as forlornly as Portugal, from
preeminent global superpower in the sixteenth century with far flung
colonies and abundant riches, to brushed off backwater of continental Europe.
(06:06):
Portugal is again an Optimi stick country and society in transition.
Sounded a bit like me, global superpower at sixteen. Now
I brushed off backwater, but optimistic and in transition. So
(06:33):
I'm walking through beautiful Lisbon on a Sunday morning, lots
of hills. Even though I was on vacation, I couldn't
resist bringing my recorder out with me as I took
a walk one afternoon. Besides, I didn't have anyone else
to talk to. At first, I thought it'd be fun
(06:54):
to take you along with me while I described what
I saw. But I quickly realized that was a fool's
errand Portugal covered in tiles blue and yellow, and or
its symbols put uniform patterns so that I won't even
try to explain. Lisbon has a heady cocktail of architectural styles.
(07:16):
There's Roman architecture, Gothic architecture, Moorish architecture, Manu light architecture,
all things you'd be way better off googling and taking
a look at for yourself, as opposed to having me
google them and pretend I knew about them beforehand. But
the buildings are covered in them and they're beautiful. But
I can do is show you what Lisbon sounds like.
(07:36):
So I recorded some audio snapshots of things I found
around town, like this fountain in the center of a
square in the barrow Alto neighborhood. Another familiar sound in
Lisbon is the tram. The Portuguese call it the electricode.
But the most deafening sounds on the streets of Lisbon
in the summer the rolling suitcase armies of taurists click
(08:04):
clicking through the streets in and out of their lodgings.
Thank you. Oh, and that's a guy who's trying to
sell me drugs. I just offered me hash cocaine, which
makes me feel good, like I'm still looking young and modern.
I was offered cocaine a couple of times while I
was in Lisbon, which honestly made me feel kind of good.
(08:25):
I was flattered that these guys thought that I looked interesting,
enough and that my social life might be robust enough
that I maybe wanted to do drugs because in truth,
all I really wanted was a small beer, a salad
and an app. Okay, well, maybe I wanted something more.
I don't know how the Italian couples like. Did they
(08:48):
press their shirts in the morning. It's like gorgeous couple
muck by as lovely as it was the trapes about
Lisbon unhindered, I was feeling a bit lonely. Don't get
me wrong. Traveling alone has its advantages wake up whenever
you want, navigate through crowds with ease, pretend Canadian without
(09:09):
anyone calling you on it. Plus the whole opportunity for romance.
I mean, I haven't seen Eat, Pray, Love, but I
get the gist how you scrambled eggs with red wine.
Of course, there are also disadvantages traveling alone. When you
find a table in front of a cafe, there's no
one to hold onto it while you run inside to order.
(09:31):
Then when you do order, you have to limit the
amount of dishes because there's no one to split them with.
And then when you're eating, you've no one to talk
to the same person you've been talking to you for decades.
You barely like that person anymore. You know all their stories.
They get grumpy when they're hungry, and they sometimes pretend
they're Canadian for no reason. That person is you or
(09:54):
in this case me, Hey in front of an empty
shop and the sign on it says in English nowhere. Sometimes,
when I was really tired of myself and I wasn't
(10:14):
recording and I wasn't reading for leisure, I have a
return to my travel guide, and that's where I found
this nugget about Portugal's national emotion, Sell Dodd. The presence
of absence, a longing for someone or something that you
remember fondly, but no, you can never experience again. Now That,
(10:37):
more than the sardines, the fountains, the trams, hit home.
Last time I'd been to Europe was the summer before
with my axe, who went to Roman Venice. And though
I didn't pine for our relationship ending, it was the
right thing for us. I was nostalgic for our companionship.
How we would people watch, hold bags for one another
(10:58):
while trying to unclose, agree in a restaurant order, and
hold hands while waiting for drinks. The guide went on
an untranslatable word that encompasses longing and melancholy. Well, I've
been walking the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, inhaling the diesel
fumes of its buses and trying to use those cafe
napkins which seemed to be made of onion paper and
(11:20):
stick your face instead of cleaning it. I was accompanied
by a unique feeling. It wasn't exactly regret, not exactly sadness,
and yet it was a touch melancholic. Perhaps I was
experiencing this untranslatable emotion seldad. There was only one way
to find out. Okay, So I'm trying to ask what
(11:41):
the word seldad means in English. Yeah, ask the Portuguese.
It's the It's the loss of something, a person, a place.
It's a feeling. It's a feeling from the heart, very profound.
On my way back to where I was staying, I
(12:01):
stopped at a bookshop in a train station where I
met Maria. Do you know this feeling? Do you have
seldad for anything? Yes, for my childhood, for my sister
that passed away from my the place where I where
I grew up, grow up. But people say it's not
(12:26):
it's not all bad. Oh, it's not all bad, because
the sad things make you more understanding, appreciate more what
you've got right now, appreciate the present well you learned
with soda. Thank you for chatting with me. Can I
(12:47):
get your name? Maria, Maria Jose, Maria Jose, non abregado.
So sodad was a profound feeling from the heart, and
not all bad either, because the sad things make you
appreciate the present more, like a sprinkle of salt and
grinded pepper, enhancing the main course. Me being me. After
(13:10):
the bookshop, I stopped at a wine shop and I
asked the owner, Sergio and his wife Carla, what they
thought the word man so that it's difficult to explain
from words because it's a very specific Portuguese word. It's
like missing, but more strong, more sentimental, because we are
(13:37):
very nostalgic people. It's not ugly, but it's it's here.
You have missing about many things, but so that is
something more strong, more intense. But it's very difficult to
(13:58):
express my words. You've done a good job. You don't
know women, they can people just miss you. Man. I'm
trying to figure that's my that's the mystery I'm trying
to figure out. So how would you describe what the
word meant? Well, it was like miss you, but more intense.
(14:18):
It's like missing nostalgia, but more intense. When you call
to your mom, mom, I miss you, or I said
in puts my things so nuch to us. It's a
little bit more intense. But I'm see to a fault.
It's like, I miss you. Tell me some of the
things that make you feel that way. I have seluch
(14:39):
from my grandmother. Then she she roll me what what
was her name? Cecilia? Cecilia? Was she a character like you? Well,
she was worse. She'll talk about sex really to you,
to everyone, And well, I like, what would she say
(15:01):
about sex? That everyone likes it? Like even the animals?
That's true. After chatting with Sergio and Carlo about Sadad,
we got to talking about life more generally and wine
more specifically. We hit it off and they invited me
to a pop up restaurant happening at a neighboring shop
(15:22):
the following night. The crowd was very hip, all haircuts
and tasteful tattoos. We sip wine that was natural and
adolf plates that were small and it was there I
met Francisco and his father Pedro, and I pulled them
(15:42):
outside to talk about my now favorite topic. So so
that can be well academically translated as this deep longing
for something, But because it is a very specific word
and concept within within our collective thought, it would it
(16:02):
is very It's best described as, for example, when you
when you tell someone I miss you, it's like a
part of you is missing. And so that because it's
a bit more broad, you miss someone, you you have,
so that of someone, it's something you have because it's
(16:23):
a feeling. There's some sort of constancy in that feeling.
So it's that's that's how I could put It's something
that is no longer there, either absolutely or in the
shape in which you grew accustomed to or you loved,
and then you just feel so that what do you
think about that? It's happy melancholy, meaning that there's something
(16:49):
good that happened and you you miss, you don't really
miss you know, it's not it won't come back again.
So it's it's a memory of something you consider it
like a positive thing. Yeah, And usually we use it
(17:10):
in in the plural, we have sodas meaning there are
a few events that we've shared or something that we
keep in our hearts, so that that's that's mother the idea,
for instance, when someone dies or someone lives abroad, which
(17:31):
is very common for Portuguese. So we missed those people.
We have soda again plural, not only in a single form,
but we missed when we refer to So that my
opinion is that we missed the good moments. It's not
crying about. It doesn't have to be some heavy, heavy
(17:54):
kind of relationship or yeah, you meet again the person
you had good moments and you had sodas you are
killing so that we say so that we are killing
the sada, so wiping it out right now exactly when
you're in some sort recuperating or getting back that memory
(18:16):
that was found to you. And so I'm killing this
for the moment, so it's let's let's let's kill So
that a funny thing happened while I was talking to
everyone about sodad. I started to lose that feeling. I
certainly wasn't missing the United States. As for the lack
(18:37):
of companionship with all the mingling and talking I've been doing,
that didn't make so much either. So maybe I killed Sodad,
and yet before Sodad's body was even cold, a different
sort of emotion started to creep in. It's mostly dealing
with the past, but because it's something deeply ingrained in
(18:57):
the culture and vocabulary. There was this interesting episode a
couple of years ago. I think Namar the football star,
he wrote to some girl and it got leaked at
Soda As. You don't be winged though, It's like I
miss that which we have not lived yet. This is
the the football star taxed this to a lover, something
(19:19):
something to that effect, and so so it does. It
does not always, it does carry that sense of sounds
just going to be something in the future. I know
I already miss it. I know that this is going
to be good, and now already miss it. I miss
that which we have not lived yet. That felt right.
(19:41):
I didn't miss who I was before coming to Portugal,
the overworking COVID, the felt relationship, but being here, spending
time alone, talking to others, hearing about those they loved
and missed, it all created sort of a firebreak from
my life before and my life to come. In other words,
(20:01):
it did what a vacation is supposed to do, and now,
after two weeks away, I was starting to miss the
future I had not lived yet. It was time for
me to get back to New York and begin making
new memories that someday I'm probably gonna miss. This Postcard
(20:52):
from Portugal was written and produced by me Brendan Francis
Nuno Bart Warshaw also produced, mixed and mastered it. Thanks
to Justine Lang and Deevid Glover for lending their voices,
and thanks to Latamilad and Jacob Smith for their notes,
and be sure to check out Tim Bernard's His song
Nassar viver morej appears on his latest album entitled Meal,
(21:14):
Cassas and Visiervas, which translates into A Thousand Invisible Things
put out by Psychic Hotline Records, and last but not least,
thanks to Portugal, I miss you a little bit, but
I've got stuff to do here before I return
Pushkin, you've received a pace god from Portugal. Greetings, Not
(00:42):
Lost listeners. I'm sending you this audio card to let
you know that I've been thinking about you. I know,
I know it's taking me a moment to put ben
to paper, or rather microphone to mouth, but I haven't
forgotten you. In fact, I've been working on a batch
of Not Lost Chat episodes which is becoming to you
later this fall. That'll be a set of travel ori
(01:05):
ended conversations to fill your ears while the production team
and I embark on the more time consuming process of
actually traveling, conjuring dinner parties, and then editing. But in
the meantime, I went on a little holiday this summer
and I couldn't help but want to tell you about it.
(01:26):
After wrapping up season one I'm Not Lost, I began
to take care of all the life tasks I've been neglecting,
getting a wheel alignment from my car, submitting receipts to
work inhaling tubes of fig Newman's while flat on my
back watching old episodes of The Great British Bake Off.
I also caught COVID, which wasn't intentional but did end
(01:46):
up working in my favor. It turned out that covid
antibodies are the biological equivalent of a TSA prejeck. They
allow you to travel with a little less stress. And
when I recovered, I helped my then partner move out
of our apartment. Yes, another relationship ended. I was single again,
(02:10):
back where I started at the beginning of Not Lost.
This ending was less sudden and fractious as previous breakups,
but that didn't make the undertaking any less heavy. It
was still a breakup stage. Around that time, this lovely
(02:31):
incantatory song came out by Brazilian musician Tim Bernardes, and
I kind of served as a bomb for all that
had been going on. Now. The song's in Portuguese. I
don't speak Portuguese, so I didn't know what the words meant,
but I found it soothing just the same, and after
listening on repeat for a few days, I finally put
the name of the title and Google translate be Born,
(03:00):
Live Die. With all the had been going on, it
was nice to be reminded that there's really only one
to do list that matters. So I had Portuguese on
the mind in my ears, which was helpful because I
was struggling with a new dilemma, where do you travel
(03:23):
for fun when traveling is what you do for work.
I'd been to Brazil before Sam Paulo, with its tangle
of steel, glass and heat at once Ferrell and Cosmopolitan,
and I thought about going again. But I caught win
that a friend of a friend recently bought a place
in Portugal, and that's a place I've always wanted to go.
I love sardines. A couple summers back, my bloodstream was
(03:46):
made up primarily of vino Verde. And also, Portugal is
just a great word to say Portugal. It feels good
coming out of the mouth. And if it does come
out of your mouth within earshot of a certain class
of Americans, they will say something like, I hear it's
a great place to retire. I heard this from my colleagues,
(04:06):
my dentist, even an old friend in la I'm not
sure how you retire from being supported by your girlfriend,
but that's his plan. To be fair. Portugal encouraged this
perception of itself as a poker ratan with wine Country,
partially by creating the so called Golden Visa program, which
means if you invest a certain amount of money, it
(04:27):
will give you the equivalent of a green card. Now, personally,
I found all these people fantasizing about moving to another
place they'd never been a little bit distasteful and opportunistic, Like, Okay,
invest a little bit of money in a country and voila,
you get to live somewhere with low crime, solid healthcare,
and beautiful beaches and fresh fish dinners for a handful
(04:49):
of euro balby knights. So I decided to check out Portugal.
I bought my plane ticket, and after that I went
to a bookstore and I bought a little prank guidebook.
That's right, a guide book. I always buy guide books.
(05:13):
I don't need an Instagram listical telling me about a
town's five hottest restaurants. That's information I can get on
the ground. But I do need a concise go to
guide that gives me a neat bit of local history
and tells me how to operate the metro machines. Some
things don't need to be messed with. Pines, ketchup, kissing.
Travel guides are among them. After crawling the gauntlet of
(05:41):
airline security, I slumped into my seat on the airplane
and opened up to page one of Insight Guide's Portugal
pocket guide, and I began to read. Few countries have
risen as triumphantly or fallen as forlornly as Portugal, from
preeminent global superpower in the sixteenth century with far flung
colonies and abundant riches, to brushed off backwater of continental Europe.
(06:06):
Portugal is again an Optimi stick country and society in transition.
Sounded a bit like me, global superpower at sixteen. Now
I brushed off backwater, but optimistic and in transition. So
(06:33):
I'm walking through beautiful Lisbon on a Sunday morning, lots
of hills. Even though I was on vacation, I couldn't
resist bringing my recorder out with me as I took
a walk one afternoon. Besides, I didn't have anyone else
to talk to. At first, I thought it'd be fun
(06:54):
to take you along with me while I described what
I saw. But I quickly realized that was a fool's
errand Portugal covered in tiles blue and yellow, and or
its symbols put uniform patterns so that I won't even
try to explain. Lisbon has a heady cocktail of architectural styles.
(07:16):
There's Roman architecture, Gothic architecture, Moorish architecture, Manu light architecture,
all things you'd be way better off googling and taking
a look at for yourself, as opposed to having me
google them and pretend I knew about them beforehand. But
the buildings are covered in them and they're beautiful. But
I can do is show you what Lisbon sounds like.
(07:36):
So I recorded some audio snapshots of things I found
around town, like this fountain in the center of a
square in the barrow Alto neighborhood. Another familiar sound in
Lisbon is the tram. The Portuguese call it the electricode.
But the most deafening sounds on the streets of Lisbon
in the summer the rolling suitcase armies of taurists click
(08:04):
clicking through the streets in and out of their lodgings.
Thank you. Oh, and that's a guy who's trying to
sell me drugs. I just offered me hash cocaine, which
makes me feel good, like I'm still looking young and modern.
I was offered cocaine a couple of times while I
was in Lisbon, which honestly made me feel kind of good.
(08:25):
I was flattered that these guys thought that I looked interesting,
enough and that my social life might be robust enough
that I maybe wanted to do drugs because in truth,
all I really wanted was a small beer, a salad
and an app. Okay, well, maybe I wanted something more.
I don't know how the Italian couples like. Did they
(08:48):
press their shirts in the morning. It's like gorgeous couple
muck by as lovely as it was the trapes about
Lisbon unhindered, I was feeling a bit lonely. Don't get
me wrong. Traveling alone has its advantages wake up whenever
you want, navigate through crowds with ease, pretend Canadian without
(09:09):
anyone calling you on it. Plus the whole opportunity for romance.
I mean, I haven't seen Eat, Pray, Love, but I
get the gist how you scrambled eggs with red wine.
Of course, there are also disadvantages traveling alone. When you
find a table in front of a cafe, there's no
one to hold onto it while you run inside to order.
(09:31):
Then when you do order, you have to limit the
amount of dishes because there's no one to split them with.
And then when you're eating, you've no one to talk
to the same person you've been talking to you for decades.
You barely like that person anymore. You know all their stories.
They get grumpy when they're hungry, and they sometimes pretend
they're Canadian for no reason. That person is you or
(09:54):
in this case me, Hey in front of an empty
shop and the sign on it says in English nowhere. Sometimes,
when I was really tired of myself and I wasn't
(10:14):
recording and I wasn't reading for leisure, I have a
return to my travel guide, and that's where I found
this nugget about Portugal's national emotion, Sell Dodd. The presence
of absence, a longing for someone or something that you
remember fondly, but no, you can never experience again. Now That,
(10:37):
more than the sardines, the fountains, the trams, hit home.
Last time I'd been to Europe was the summer before
with my axe, who went to Roman Venice. And though
I didn't pine for our relationship ending, it was the
right thing for us. I was nostalgic for our companionship.
How we would people watch, hold bags for one another
(10:58):
while trying to unclose, agree in a restaurant order, and
hold hands while waiting for drinks. The guide went on
an untranslatable word that encompasses longing and melancholy. Well, I've
been walking the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, inhaling the diesel
fumes of its buses and trying to use those cafe
napkins which seemed to be made of onion paper and
(11:20):
stick your face instead of cleaning it. I was accompanied
by a unique feeling. It wasn't exactly regret, not exactly sadness,
and yet it was a touch melancholic. Perhaps I was
experiencing this untranslatable emotion seldad. There was only one way
to find out. Okay, So I'm trying to ask what
(11:41):
the word seldad means in English. Yeah, ask the Portuguese.
It's the It's the loss of something, a person, a place.
It's a feeling. It's a feeling from the heart, very profound.
On my way back to where I was staying, I
(12:01):
stopped at a bookshop in a train station where I
met Maria. Do you know this feeling? Do you have
seldad for anything? Yes, for my childhood, for my sister
that passed away from my the place where I where
I grew up, grow up. But people say it's not
(12:26):
it's not all bad. Oh, it's not all bad, because
the sad things make you more understanding, appreciate more what
you've got right now, appreciate the present well you learned
with soda. Thank you for chatting with me. Can I
(12:47):
get your name? Maria, Maria Jose, Maria Jose, non abregado.
So sodad was a profound feeling from the heart, and
not all bad either, because the sad things make you
appreciate the present more, like a sprinkle of salt and
grinded pepper, enhancing the main course. Me being me. After
(13:10):
the bookshop, I stopped at a wine shop and I
asked the owner, Sergio and his wife Carla, what they
thought the word man so that it's difficult to explain
from words because it's a very specific Portuguese word. It's
like missing, but more strong, more sentimental, because we are
(13:37):
very nostalgic people. It's not ugly, but it's it's here.
You have missing about many things, but so that is
something more strong, more intense. But it's very difficult to
(13:58):
express my words. You've done a good job. You don't
know women, they can people just miss you. Man. I'm
trying to figure that's my that's the mystery I'm trying
to figure out. So how would you describe what the
word meant? Well, it was like miss you, but more intense.
(14:18):
It's like missing nostalgia, but more intense. When you call
to your mom, mom, I miss you, or I said
in puts my things so nuch to us. It's a
little bit more intense. But I'm see to a fault.
It's like, I miss you. Tell me some of the
things that make you feel that way. I have seluch
(14:39):
from my grandmother. Then she she roll me what what
was her name? Cecilia? Cecilia? Was she a character like you? Well,
she was worse. She'll talk about sex really to you,
to everyone, And well, I like, what would she say
(15:01):
about sex? That everyone likes it? Like even the animals?
That's true. After chatting with Sergio and Carlo about Sadad,
we got to talking about life more generally and wine
more specifically. We hit it off and they invited me
to a pop up restaurant happening at a neighboring shop
(15:22):
the following night. The crowd was very hip, all haircuts
and tasteful tattoos. We sip wine that was natural and
adolf plates that were small and it was there I
met Francisco and his father Pedro, and I pulled them
(15:42):
outside to talk about my now favorite topic. So so
that can be well academically translated as this deep longing
for something, But because it is a very specific word
and concept within within our collective thought, it would it
(16:02):
is very It's best described as, for example, when you
when you tell someone I miss you, it's like a
part of you is missing. And so that because it's
a bit more broad, you miss someone, you you have,
so that of someone, it's something you have because it's
(16:23):
a feeling. There's some sort of constancy in that feeling.
So it's that's that's how I could put It's something
that is no longer there, either absolutely or in the
shape in which you grew accustomed to or you loved,
and then you just feel so that what do you
think about that? It's happy melancholy, meaning that there's something
(16:49):
good that happened and you you miss, you don't really
miss you know, it's not it won't come back again.
So it's it's a memory of something you consider it
like a positive thing. Yeah, And usually we use it
(17:10):
in in the plural, we have sodas meaning there are
a few events that we've shared or something that we
keep in our hearts, so that that's that's mother the idea,
for instance, when someone dies or someone lives abroad, which
(17:31):
is very common for Portuguese. So we missed those people.
We have soda again plural, not only in a single form,
but we missed when we refer to So that my
opinion is that we missed the good moments. It's not
crying about. It doesn't have to be some heavy, heavy
(17:54):
kind of relationship or yeah, you meet again the person
you had good moments and you had sodas you are
killing so that we say so that we are killing
the sada, so wiping it out right now exactly when
you're in some sort recuperating or getting back that memory
(18:16):
that was found to you. And so I'm killing this
for the moment, so it's let's let's let's kill So
that a funny thing happened while I was talking to
everyone about sodad. I started to lose that feeling. I
certainly wasn't missing the United States. As for the lack
(18:37):
of companionship with all the mingling and talking I've been doing,
that didn't make so much either. So maybe I killed Sodad,
and yet before Sodad's body was even cold, a different
sort of emotion started to creep in. It's mostly dealing
with the past, but because it's something deeply ingrained in
(18:57):
the culture and vocabulary. There was this interesting episode a
couple of years ago. I think Namar the football star,
he wrote to some girl and it got leaked at
Soda As. You don't be winged though, It's like I
miss that which we have not lived yet. This is
the the football star taxed this to a lover, something
(19:19):
something to that effect, and so so it does. It
does not always, it does carry that sense of sounds
just going to be something in the future. I know
I already miss it. I know that this is going
to be good, and now already miss it. I miss
that which we have not lived yet. That felt right.
(19:41):
I didn't miss who I was before coming to Portugal,
the overworking COVID, the felt relationship, but being here, spending
time alone, talking to others, hearing about those they loved
and missed, it all created sort of a firebreak from
my life before and my life to come. In other words,
(20:01):
it did what a vacation is supposed to do, and now,
after two weeks away, I was starting to miss the
future I had not lived yet. It was time for
me to get back to New York and begin making
new memories that someday I'm probably gonna miss. This Postcard
(20:52):
from Portugal was written and produced by me Brendan Francis
Nuno Bart Warshaw also produced, mixed and mastered it. Thanks
to Justine Lang and Deevid Glover for lending their voices,
and thanks to Latamilad and Jacob Smith for their notes,
and be sure to check out Tim Bernard's His song
Nassar viver morej appears on his latest album entitled Meal,
(21:14):
Cassas and Visiervas, which translates into A Thousand Invisible Things
put out by Psychic Hotline Records, and last but not least,
thanks to Portugal, I miss you a little bit, but
I've got stuff to do here before I return
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