Correcting preconceptions

Yeah, I love when the subject is people's minds and ideas - sometimes I wonder if I'd better study human relations instead of computers. This post is about that, ideas and misconceptions.

Friends. How we need them without confessing it, how we judge people without knowing them, how sad or happy we become when we realize our misconceptions about them. Its the life cycle, i guess.

Well, first of all, I met Maikeru (Michael) in a friend's party some time ago, but recently I discovered that he also likes DDR (Dance dance revolution, the game where you must step in arrows in the rhythm of the music). I used to play it a lot with my friends back in Brazil, it's very nice to lose some weight and laught with (not of) your friends. "Why not try it again?", I said to myself. Then we scheduled to meet in a game center and "dance" a little.

The interesting thing is that Michael is american, and I have some sort of preconception about people born in the US. I know it's not right, but we all have ideas about everything, and with time these ideas changes a lot. I guess the main reason against the americans is that it's too easy for them to come to Japan. Any native american can apply in a program that pays for them to teach english here in Japan for some months. You don't need to have any certification or special communication skills, so many americans come here just to chill out and fuck with the "naive" japanese girls. They don't care much about other things, as they are returning to the US soon anyway. This reputation of the americans sometimes are extended to all foreigners, and that indirectly harms me.

Of course not all americans that come here are like that, and the brazilians are not saints too - I'll talk more about that later. The fact is that Michael is a very nice guy. It was very good to play with him on the hard mode, sweat a lot and remember the old times. We played other games too, including Pop'n'music and Guitar Freaks (guitar simulator). By the way, Guitar Hero is much better ^^.

Later that night I met Junior, a very nice brazilian friend, and this time I didn't changed any ideas about him - everybody knows that he is THE nice guy here. We played a little more, ate some food and laughed a lot. I even drank beer! (usually I don't like it much :p) Too bad that Junior was so late that Michael had to go before he came.

Anyway the other interesting thing was at Sol's house, where I met some japanese and brazilian friends. The japanese girls where very friendly, and we played some very thrilling games in the table :D Now I think that it's possible to have a real good friendship with japanese, regardless the difference in culture. Also, I strengthened relationship with other brazilian dekasseguis. Dekassegui is a term to denote people working far away from home. However we use this word to refer to brazilian nikkeis (japanese descendents) working in factories here in japan. Because of the overwork, their life is tough, they don't practice much japanese and they also sometimes party "too much" on the weekends, causing troubles like fights and car races. Again, not all of them are like that.

Together we went to a brazilian nightclub. I'm not sure if the owner is brazilian, but about 95% of the public is. There I experienced some of the bad things about my culture. Many songs have dirty lyrics, many guys wants to kiss as many girls as possible (and vice-versa), many simple-minded people. There I saw friend betrayal, guys cheating their girlfriends and drunk girls showing their arrogance. All those things made me sad, to think that some people are like that, and even worse, that this is from MY country, this is MY culture. At least not everyone is like that, and I hope I'm not like that either.

Well it was an interesting night anyway. Good to know more about your friends, learn about life and have some fun ;)