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SAN FRANCISCO. SUMMER, APPARENTLY. 🍒

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There are places you visit because they happen to be on your way. And then there are places that have been sitting on your bucket list for so long that, frankly, they should have started paying rent. San Francisco belonged firmly in the second category. I had wanted to see it for years. The Golden Gate Bridge. The cable cars. The famous hills. The beautiful houses. The whole thing. I had a rather romantic picture of it all. Naturally, the weather had other ideas. I arrived from Los Angeles, where summer was behaving exactly as summer should. Sunshine, heat, people dressed accordingly. A perfectly respectable arrangement. A few hundred kilometres later, San Francisco greeted me with approximately 14°C. In summer. Fourteen. I am Portuguese. We have a fairly straightforward understanding of the seasons. Summer means summer. Winter means winter. And if you need to light a fireplace in the middle of July, someone, somewhere, has made an administrative error. Yet there it was...
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THE INVISIBLE STUFF. 🍒

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  Some people enter your life without ever really becoming visible. No face. No physical presence. Just a voice. Words. Conversations. And, strangely enough, that can be enough. I’ve always listened to people. Possibly too much. It’s one of my less profitable hobbies. Because if you listen long enough, people tell you who they are. Not immediately, obviously. That would be terribly efficient. First you get the edited version. The wit. The kindness. The interesting stories. The carefully selected pieces that make you think: Oh. There’s something rather lovely here. And sometimes there is. That’s the inconvenient part. Not everything that ends badly was fake at the beginning. People are more complicated than that. Annoying, I know. It would be much easier if arseholes arrived carrying identification. HELLO. I’M GOING TO DISAPPOINT YOU IN APPROXIMATELY SIX MONTHS. Perhaps a badge. But they don’t. So you listen. You talk. You laugh. You allow someone into a small corner of your life. A...
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NO ESTOY ESPERANDO NADA. 🍒

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Hay un momento en la vida en que una deja de esperar ciertas cosas. Una disculpa, por ejemplo. Si no llegó cuando tenía que llegar, cuando todavía importaba, cuando todavía podía reparar algo, después ya no hace falta. Una disculpa tardía se parece bastante a mandar una carta a una dirección donde ya no vive nadie. Puedes enviarla. Pero no esperes respuesta. También llega un momento en que dejas de necesitar que todo tenga una explicación. A veces la explicación ya estaba ahí. Simplemente no era la que querías escuchar. Literal. Eso también es una respuesta. Y aunque suene menos dramático, suele ser mucho más útil. Porque cuando dejas de esperar que lo evidente sea reconocido, recuperas una cantidad sorprendente de tiempo. Tiempo para desayunar tarde. Para reservar un vuelo sin convertirlo en una cumbre diplomática. Para pasar una tarde entera caminando por Chicago. Para manejar sin prisa por una carretera que no lleva a ninguna parte urgente. Para sentarte sola en una mesa en París, q...
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I'M NOT A BABY LAWYER. I'M A GLADIATOR IN A SUIT. 🍒

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  Gladiators don't run. They fight. They slay dragons. Apparently, they also answer emails at obscene hours, read documents nobody else wants to touch, solve problems that arrived wearing somebody's name tag, and occasionally discover that "urgent" is simply corporate for someone ignored this for three weeks . I have now been working for more than 24 hours. Not continuously, obviously. I'm a lawyer, not a hostage. But long enough to remember something I occasionally forget: I am not a baby lawyer. I am not a junior anything. I am not "finding my feet". My feet have been found. They are currently in very good shoes, standing in the middle of a disaster. There is a particular kind of work that lands on your desk when everyone else has run out of easy options. The complicated one. The ugly one. The one with too many documents, too little time and at least one person saying, "This should be quite straightforward." It never is. Straigh...
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