Bruno: The Devil’s Angel

Bruno is the closest friend I have made in Ireland thus far and generally his craziness is what keeps me holding on to my own sanity at work (Bruno works on my team at HJL, though we work on different projects). Bruno is a very outgoing guy, very talkative, and loves to be social. Now, you might be asking yourself how my closest friend here could be a socialization lover, since I clearly am not, but I guess it falls into that “opposites attract” category. Bruno isn’t Lamda-Lamda-Lamda social, which is, I think, what makes it work. Bruno likes organizing parties and events, dinners, but he’s fairly selective about who he likes to spend his time with and he doesn’t just indulge in mindless prattle - he enjoys having real conversation, not just waxing romantic about the weather to fifteen different people over the din of a pub. This gives us a solid foundation of conversational morals to build a friendship on.

Bruno is Portuguese (and in Portuguese his name would be pronounced Broo-noo, though no one here seems to pick up on that), so he is charged with that fiery Latin spirit that tends to get people in trouble. He has been involved in his fair share of trouble which he generally refers to as his “stupid kid stuff”. This “kid stuff” didn’t end that long ago and he isn’t that much younger than me… He often enough has this mischievous gleam in his dark eyes that suggests he could be up for making trouble at any moment, but at this point he seems to have scaled it back to your odd veiled insult and a few overt pointing and laughing incidents. That or just blatantly saying controversial things to get people fired up, something I wouldn’t be a stranger to either.

That Latin vibe also has a tendency to feed into his inter-gender relationships as well. He would by no means not be the “dogiest” of men, as men and dogs go, but he’s told me more than one story that made my eyes bulge out of my skull a little. These days, however, he has a steady girlfriend that he has been quite happy with. She is a fantastic girl, but he still can’t seem to help himself when it comes to flirting with any person with a discernible set of mammaries. He, somehow, doesn’t seem to recognize this thing he does as flirting. As he would say he “is an angel”. And perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it is just a smiling-eye-batting-sweet-nothings womanizing gene grafted into his genetic code… Perhaps it’s flirting… I really don’t think he can help it though.

Beyond causing him to do things he shouldn’t, that fire tends to have the added benefit of getting me to do things I normally wouldn’t: namely leaving the house. Bruno has been referenced more than once in this epic tale in relation to hosting most of our United Nations style dinners and often enough he is responsible for getting us to come out for a dinner or movie or trip to the beach when I would be more inclined to stay at home, honing my in-progress piece of living art: The Simpsons’ Couch Testimonial.

Our shared sense of humor tends to be the strongest thing that draws us together and we spend most of our “tea” breaks (where we rarely drink tea) cracking jokes, bitching about work, or pining over our next occupational endeavor when we finally give up the ghost and realize that Architecture is only for soulless puppets and masochists (I currently fall into the masochist category, but the soulless puppets have a really good benefits package…). This is the part of the day that keeps me sane and/or just not miserable, so…YAY BRUNO!

At some point Bruno is going to move back to Portugal, or at least away from Ireland, and on that day the dark-gray blanket of sorrow that is the Dublin day is going to get a little darker and grayer.