I was in Portugal this month for vacation for just a week — not enough to immerse myself in Portuguese customs, but more than a dip. One of my favorite ways to learn about a culture is to tour a grocery store. Wasn’t it Descartes who said “I eat, therefore I am”? And I can learn what someone eats from what they buy. Portuguese grocery stores have the usual European delicious excess of deli meats, cheeses, freshly baked goods. There are also a few oddities. First, the bacalhau section — an area with huge slabs of salted cod, unsurprising given the importance of cod to the Portuguese diet. Second, a large selection of chocolates and powdered drinking chocolates, also unsurprising since hot chocolate is typically enjoyed as a daily breakfast drink. Finally, “pick a number”-style line-ups for any deli, bakery or even fruit selection, suggesting these are a people who are either fed up with disorder, or maybe enjoy a bit of English-style queuing. Between salt cod, chocolate and queuing, I’ll take a few Milka bars to-go.

So this is how it begins — not with a bang, but with a WordPress blog. Yes, I have ambitious plans for my writing. With a toddler son slowly gaining independence, I find my free time correspondingly growing. My challenge is focus — the villain is choice. There is a famous American psychologist who coined the phrase “Paradox of Choice” to explain how sometimes too many options causes a traffic jam in our brains. For example, customers are more likely to buy a jar of jam if they are only presented with 6 flavors, instead of 24 or 30 choices. Now, what was I writing about? Oh, right, focus. I want a blog with a theme. It’s easier to write the fewer choices about topics there are.