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A life without difficulties is not worth living. Since I am not a suicide boy, I decided to come up with some challenges for myself...

The first of my marvellous ideas was learning Portuguese. I inscribed for a trial lesson, and had lots of trouble trying not to speak in Spanish whenever the teacher asked me talk. But soon I started learning words and tried to use them as correctly as possible, pronouncing the 'r' as if I were German, or the vocals 'ao' as if I had nasal problems. At the end of the class I knew probably as much as the other students, who had been there already for a month, so I felt -stupidly- proud of myself and ready to inscribe to the course. When the other students left, the teacher came to me and started talking in Portuguese, as if I could understand what she said. I then answered back in Spanish, and for the next 5 minutes, we spoke in this mixture of languages. After the conversation ended it became clear that I had to look for another course, because this one was too easy for someone who already knew Spanish. Unfortunately, all the advanced courses take place in the opposite extreme of the city, so I am still wondering whether the effort is worth...

My second idea was not much better than the first, but at least I persevered a little bit longer. I decided to take the GMAT, so for four weeks I devoted myself to becoming an expert in the art of multiple selection. After many hours looking up words in the dictionary and showing the finger to my PC whenever he told me I was wrong, I took the test. The result itself was very good (I scored 700, which means I did better than 93% of the people would probably do), but what I found striking was the fact that, unlike other similar tests I have taken in the past, this one seemed to favor my verbal skills. For a over-confident electronic engineer, who always took pride on his ability of solving tricky mathematical problems, it certainly becomes an issue when he discovers that his words, rather than his numeric abstractions, are his lifesavers. Not that there is something wrong with not being better at math than at reading and writing, but given my dark past, full of equations, graphs and algorithms, I would have expected doing a little bit better with the numbers.

The spring is now almost here, and with it, hopefully new inspiration for new challenges. What comes next? It's hard to say. But anyway it's only one month before I fly to L.A., so I guess all crazy ideas can wait until I come back...