Interests
This is a list of things I enjoy and am passionate about. I often tell people my interests are always changing, but these, listed here, are certainly the top ones.
Reading
If I was to choose a single activity to keep on doing till the last day of my life, it would very likely be reading. Since my early days, I've watched my father reading the newspapers, magazines and books. This taste of his is something I inherited, making me a helpless victim of tsundoku. I have more books now than I guess I'll ever be able to read, but whatever I read brings me so much joy that I just cannot avoid it.
Writing
I remember one early day in my life when I delivered an essay for my Portuguese class. It was a short tale, spanning some pages, which I ended by saying ‘I'd better stop writing now, or else I'll write a book’; to which I was glad to see my teacher added ‘You should really write one!’, in red pen, when she gave me back the corrected essay. I have always loved writing, and starting a website and blog on the internet, years later, was a way to keep on writing. I write something for myself, too, some short stories I make up sometimes, and tales... I like to be always doing so. Well, I'd really like to write a book someday, like I wrote in that essay I delivered... a fiction one. I still haven't done it, but maybe it'll turn up.
Drawing
I grew up reading a lot of comics. Here in Brazil there was a time when Disney comics were very, very popular, and I read comics featuring most of the major characters, like Mickey, Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck. Lucky me, Brazil is also the birthplace of Maurício de Sousa, an amazing and very talented cartoonist, who created Turma da Mônica, counting on almost 200 characters. These influences made me start to draw, trying to copy the styles I saw. I never developed comics of my own (not seriously, at least), but have drawn a couple of cartoons myself... nowadays, in the few moments when I do have a pencil or pen at hand, if I'm not at least doodling, it's not me. I love drawing.
Video and Board Games
What's not to love about games? I was born in a time when the internet was far from being a thing, so I did spend much time playing board games with family and friends. Ranging from the classical Monopoly to the tabletop RPG games such as D&D, I loved every minute of it. As far as video games are concerned, I first played Keystone Kapers and River Raid in an Atari console my parents bought for my sister and me, and these are cartridges which still cause me to remember that time with fondness. Nowadays, besides the infrequent Munchkin play, I love roguelikes, as they've become my favorite game genre.
Languages
I love languages, and language learning. I started studying English in a more serious way when I was only 13, and I loved it so much that I became an ESL teacher for many years. By that time I was invited to take a vocational test, where I found out languages were something easy to pick up for me. This led me to studying a bit of French, and less Spanish. Most recently I got interested in Japanese, as my son lived in Japan for some months in 2024, but this last one is really challenging... although not a bit less fun. I love it.
Kudos to Robert Birming for his interests page, which I saw and immediately resonated with me — so I had to create my own.
🛈 This page was last edited 7 months, 4 weeks ago