A Year

I have this weird kind of disinterest in talking about my time in Argentina. When people ask me "So, how was Argentina" I don't know quite what to say.

It was a year. And now I'm home.

Answering that question is a bit like trying to figure out what to say when someone would ask me "how are you doing?" in that slow, kind way that suggests they're not asking whether your breakfast sat well with you, or if you'd managed to avoid catching swine flu. They mean how are you dealing with grief but saying "so how's the grieving" sounds awkward. They're both difficult precisely because the past year, whether you start counting from February 5th or Feburary 15th, was not an event that happened, but a series of sea changes, a new reality that has to be accommodated.

It was a year. It gave me many things, it took away from me many things. I learned a great deal about myself and about others. I like to think I've grown. I think I've grown.

And it was also the worst year of my mother's life. I am home now something that feels truer than it ever has before. I'm redefining quite what that means and what my life is going to look like. So I don't quite know yet. I'd like to write about some of these changes. But things are still settling. And I have to learn how to write about people, who may actually affected by what I write. I want, perhaps need, to keep writing in some format, but the audience has changed, and some things are more personal--I spent a year writing to my family, but not about them. Things are different now.

There are still many things that need to be unpacked some dust that still needs to settle.

Coming Home

Another telling quote from my migration research:

"Viajar, perder paises, ser otro constantemente. La experiencia de la inmigracion te invita a ser otro. Empezar de cero es una nueva posibilidad, entusiasma tanto...viajar es maravilloso, pero es tambien maravilloso regresar.”

"To travel, to lose countries, to be the other constantly. The experience of immigration invites you to be the other. To start from scratch is a new possibility, it's invigorating...to travel is marvelous, but it's also marvelous to come home."

So true.

From "Emigracion reciente de Argentinos: el regreso a casa" by Marta Palomares, Celeste Castiglione and Lucila Nejamkis from the book Sur-Norte (page 172)

Sometimes I forget speak English

I take weekly individual tango dance lessons from a guy named Oscar at his apartment in downtown Buenos Aires. One day he comes down to let me in, says hi to the doorman (doorwoman? “portera” in Spanish) and as we start walking up the stairs he says “speak in English”. So we talk for a little bit and then I say, in English, “why are we speaking in English?”

“It’s the doorwoman. She asks me about what I do, why I keep bringing people up to my apartment, I try to keep it vague, make things interesting. I thought speaking English would add to the mystery a little bit.”

This then led to a conversation about the nature of how your neighbors knowing what you do can lead to them complaining about you in a different way “oh it’s noisy, must be that musician” if they know you’re a musician, etc. This wasn’t the thing that threw me about our conversation though.

We switched back to Spanish soon after reaching his apartment. What struck me though was how odd it felt at first to speak English to him. I’ve known Oscar for several months now, and I consider him a good friend; in addition to tango we’ve had lots of interesting conversations about everything from politics to physiology to philosophy (and of course women). But I’ve never really spoken to him in English for any length of time and only had a dim recollection that he spoke English (I sent him a link to something about blues dancing and remembered that I wouldn’t have to translate it because he spoke some English).

My study abroad program The Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) tries to encourage its students to speak Spanish all the time amongst ourselves, but I’ve stopped respecting this rule. I was trying to figure out why. It isn’t just because I’m lazy or tired of speaking Spanish all the time—I don’t spend much time with other Americans and don’t actively seek out their company. Part of it may be that I just realize that it isn’t ideal for communicating and I figure I keep up my Spanish just fine speaking with other Argentines. This semester there have been weeks I've gone without speaking any English at all, apart from talking to my family on skype (I certainly read, write and listen to plenty though). You just get used to operating in one language in certain contexts and another language in others.

I always spoke English with my father even though it wasn’t his native tongue. He (and I) received a lot of flack about this later. Why didn’t you teach him Spanish? The closest to an answer my dad ever gave was, “well he didn’t want to”. I think he just didn’t really know why.

I’ve been in Buenos Aires for just a month shy of nine months. I don’t tend to think of him as a foreign student, but my dad was in the U.S. a lot longer than that. Like the entire time he knew my mother (several years, most of which they weren’t officially dating). The jolt I felt with Oscar must have been similar to what he felt speaking Spanish around Mom.

Dad and I have another thing in common of our experiences studying abroad; we both changed our names. Here I’ve told people that my name is Mariano, instead of Stephen, something I decided on doing before I got here. It's not a complete fabrication--Mariano is my middle name, after my great-grandfather on my dad's side. The superficial reason is that Mariano is easier to pronounce in Spanish than “Esteefen”. But it’s also a way of creating a different sort of person for a different world. My dad quit Opus Dei in Guatemala as “Geno” (short for Eugenio, his middle name—Marco was his dad’s name too) to pursue higher education abroad as his given name “Marco”. If someone called our house on the phone and asked for my dad, you instantly knew they were friends or family pre-1980 if they asked for Geno instead of Marco (or, you know, "Dad", another new name).

Rechristening yourself is one of the perks of travel.

Minors, Delinquents and my grandmother

"Menores y Delinquentes" (juvenile delinquents)

This was the name of an episode of "Policias en Accion" (ever watched Cops? It's like that) which my host mother is a big fan of. Sometimes I'll watch it with her, at which there is an odd sort of moment of bonding between us, and at which she reaffirms her belief that the country is going to hell ("va a la mierda") and that South American immigrants and "American cultural habits" like drinking and smoking dope (don't ask) aren't helping. Obviously I have some strong feelings about those views (being the American son of a Latin American immigrant) but let's set that aside for now.

Every episode they have a different theme and this one was juvenile delinquents. But unlike most episdoes, this one included, in addition to the customary Cops style video shoots, they had commentary from some media figures and ordinary people about the political issue of potentially lowering the age where you can go to jail for a crime. My feelings about the issue are in some way a yardstick of how I've shed a lot of my liberal sensibilities since coming here.

I'm not sure if I thought about this issue very much in the United States, but here I was surprised by how firm my opinion was. It seemed like the majority of the commentators (interlaced with scenes of hoodlums being pressed up against police van hoods) were basically saying that the change would be a bad thing, that it's missing the point of the real problem. It's a view I'm sympathetic with. The delinquency is just the symptom of bigger societal issues which will never really be solved until we get to the root of the issue.

It reminds me of a parable my grandmother used to tell me about the drowning babies. The story goes that a man walks down to a river and finds a young child floundering about in a river struggling to avoid drowning. Concerned the man bends down and fishes the baby out and lays it by the bank of the river. Another baby appears, and then another, all of which he carefully fishes out and lays by the side of the river. At this point a stranger walks by sees the babies, stares for a while and then starts running away from the scene.

"Where are you going!" The first man yells to him, "you've got to help me save all these children from drowning!"

"I'm going upriver" the second man yells back, "I wanna figure out who's putting all these babies in the river!"

This notion exists in the background of much of my thinking, about issues as diverse as poverty to Amerca's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you guys didn't forget we were in Iraq did you?) Being that second man, is what my grandmother once told me that she had dreamed of being when she retired for social work, that she wanted to join the peace corps to be a part of just such a solution, and I've shared similar dreams. It's what attracted me to the Peace Corps and is what attracts to me economic development research.

But there's another side to the story. I was robbed by a pair of kids who couldn't have been older than my little brother. Their not going to jail is not doing anythin to keep them from stealing cell phones. True, because of the crime's proximity to Retiro they were probably from Villa 31 one of Buenos Aires urban ghettos (similar to Brazil's Favelas which you'll recognize if you've seen City of God or City of Men), made up of squatters who build ramshackel homes on public land. Because of the cap that said Paraguay that one of them left behind in our scuffle, I would guess that they are the children of immigrants who left their homes behind in an effort to build a better life for themselves in Argentina's biggest city. They probably lived in crushing poverty and didn't have much of a future.

But such liberal empathy becomes harder to sustain when said disadvantaged youth is busy kicking you in the face and while he tries to make off with your valuables. The resulting sensation leaves one more desirous of committing homicide than seeing some kind of elaborate social justice meted out.

Of course these kinds of feelings ought not to be the basis of public policy. But consider the logic; Steven Levitt, a Chicago economist who teaches there on the economics of crime and the author of NY times bestseller Freakonomics, found in his analysis of crime statistics that one of the main causes of the increased crime rate of the 1990's (one less controversial than Roe vs. Wade, which he found to be the principal explanation) was lighter and less frequent prison sentences, during the liberalization of the 1960's and 70's.

The question is of course on some level an empirical one, but it makes theoretical sense if you believe (as economists do) that people respond to incentives, that the demand curve for crime is downward sloping--when the price goes up the demand goes down. This seems to work pretty effectively for things like shoes, hamburgers and automobiles and there's a pretty good case for why it would work for crime. You can increase this "price" of crime in a variety of ways, whether be increasing the penalties for it, increasing the chance people get caught, or (somehow) increasing the moral burden people incur by comitting crime.

Of course making crime more expensive has its limits for all kinds of reasons--we certainly wouldn't wish the death penalty on teenagers caught drinking (actually Levitt also found that application of the death penalty did not serve to decrease crime because of how infrequently--even in states with heroic execution rates like Texas--you can atually expect to get electrocuted for comitting a crime). And it's still true what the commentators say that the root causes of delinquence go a lot deeper than the immediate reasons for the crimes. But as one commentator rightly (in my opinion) pointed out, "you have to stop the bleeding before you can heal the wound". All these nice words about fighting poverty are nice but in the short term (and unaccompanied by action by the way) they seem to wind up doing nothing more than supply these kids with lines like those of the hooligans (God I love that word) from West Side Story singing about why they're stuck in gangs instead of going to school and staying out of trouble. The kids on Policias sing the same song though less politely than Sondheim's delinquents ("Gee Officer Krupke, Krup you!") and are well aware of the rules of the system that lets them off the hook just because they're young.

"If you want to change behavior, you can't give them excuses or let them just get away with stuff"

The words are mine, but they're paraphrased from my grandmother, in explaining her skepticism about Freudian psychology and the psychoanlytic method, which she sees as excusing more behavior in young people than it fixes. She would hear a kid say "but my father drinks and abuses my mom, that's why I robbed the store/broke curfew/do drugs",
"but did you know what the consequences would be?"
"Yeah"
"Alright then"

Maybe these ideas aren't so new to me after all.
Happy Birthday Grandma (she turns 80 today)!

P.S. My grandmother should enjoy this: check out the social worker's dissenting diagnosis of the boys problems in the West Side Story video.

Music is totally a drug...

and I've been doing mostly depressants lately.

You've probably heard people say things like this about music, but I'm gonna try to substantiate this for a minute. Also keep in mind that by depressants I do not mean that I'm horribly sad all the time because of my music choices. Setting aside songs that are actually "sad" and make me tear up from their lyrics, depressants mostly don't make you sad but chill you out. Alcohol is a fine example of this (NB: this apparently does not hold for soldiers/cadets).

Specifically my drugs of choice have been tangos (of various styles) and acid jazz.

There's a reason why people at a tango (music not dance) show get really animated when the musicians start playing an uptempo milonga or folklore number in place the tangos that make up most of their repertoire. Tango just isn't happy music. Since it's beginnings its lyrics were preoccupied with content similar to that of blues: jealous lovers, separation, poverty, crime etc. But unlike blues, tango, with a brief spell of happier (at least musically) tunes during the golden age of orchestras, tango seems to have gotten more serious and somber as time went on. Piazzolla's "nuevo tango" which incorporated elements of classical and jazz (the cat spent his youth in NYC he couldn't help himself) got more sophisticated and at times faster tempo musically, but certainly not something you'd go jogging to (or even dance to really). And while the "electrotango" that's become popular in more recent years uses elements of electronic music, those elements come more often from dub, downtempo and chillout than from party genres like techno or house. And its heavy use of samples of old tango singers and orchestras only furthers the nostalgia that's heavy in the music (and the city too but that's another story).

This is generally just fine, I've increasingly become a fan of more relaxed music, and my evenings out have been filled with a lot more sitting at restaurants/bars sipping a glass of wine than dancing/moshing at a rock club. But one serious disadvantage of this trend has been my physical health: I'm not going to the gym nearly as often.

I know what you're thinking, listening to tango is a pretty lame excuse for not going to the gym. And indeed there are definitely some deeper more important reasons for my being lax on physical activity. But any of you have ever been walking down the street listening to your ipod on shuffle and a more upbeat song came up, giving you the idea that maybe you should run to the bus stop rather than walk, well...you get the idea.

This happened when I added ska-punk to the shuffle of podcasts, Us3 and Billie Holiday (god, talk about some sad music! If Billie Holiday doesn't make you tear up sometime you have no soul) that have been residents for a while. But I could use a little variety.

So anyone out there who is a big fan of some energetic music, whether it be hardcore punk, death metal, or drum & bass wanna send me some tunes or artists to look up (so I don't have to), I'd appreciate it. I really need to hit the gym sometime.

Because Solitude Gives You Time to Think: A Modest Proposal About Sex

By "solitude" I mean hour-long bus rides (although reading this gal's blog probably contributes to the content of those thoughts) and by "Modest Proposal" I mean an idea that ought to be just that, and not that my last name is "Swift" nor that I’m being ironic. And this isn't about eating Irish babies...

Instead this is about gender relations and this is about sex, something which ought to interest anyone who has a gender and likes sex, and maybe other people too. My specific question is "who ought to initiate sex, men or women?" I've decided to treat the question, as is increasingly my habit, like an economics problem. I'm starting from a premise that's common in that discipline, namely that our goals should include maximizing happiness (what economist call "utility"). Oddly this doesn't seem a common metric for evaluating cultural norms of any stripe (try to think of the last time you heard an argument about gay marriage or abortion and someone said--"but people will be happier this way!"), but I can’t honestly think of a better one.


For starters let’s suppose that every man and woman has a certain percentage chance that, upon being propositioned for sex by someone of the opposite sex, he or she will say yes (I’m leaving out being propositioned by members of the same sex because, things seem to work out a little differently on the other side of the fence). We can comfortably assume that for every person there’s going to be some given value between 0 and 100 that will vary based on all sorts of factors we’re not going to get into, but which could include their mood, how their day went, the physical attractiveness of the other person, how they feel about said person, what relationship they have with that person etc. The list goes on.

However one of the primary determinants to the answer to this question is going to be the gender of the person in question. I don’t think I need to gender stereotype too much to say that generally that number will be higher for men than for women. Some men reading this will undoubtedly say “hell yeah 100%, I never turn down sex!” and some of you will say, “that’s not true at all, I’m very discerning”. But I think it’s fair to say that on average (a crucial caveat) that number will be higher (and less than 100) for men than women. Women are, on the whole, just a bit pickier than we are.

I think we can also reasonably suppose that being turned down diminishes people's happiness pretty dramatically. It really stinks to get turned down (for anything really) and people do their best to avoid rejection where possible.

If you accept these premises, which I find fairly modest, then let’s look at the ramifications. Remember we said earlier that our goal was to make people happy. Suppose that only one gender can be the one to do the propositioning whether in the case of casual sex or sex in the context of a relationship or marriage. Which gender would we want this to be?

It should be pretty clear that if we want to maximize people’s happiness we would want this to be women or, if you don’t hold with my first assumption, whichever gender it is that is most likely to turn down sex. Let’s play this out and make some numbers up to illustrate this better. Let’s say that women have an average 25% chance of accepting a proposition of sex to any given man, and that men on the other hand have a 75% acceptance rate. This means that on an average proposition the man will be turned down 75% of the time, making him (and probably her as well) unhappy and making everybody pretty awkward and arguably worse off than if he hadn’t brought it up to begin with. If on the other hand these 25% acceptance rate women are doing the asking they will only be turned down 25% of the time and thus there’s less awkwardness and more happiness for everybody.

Something similar happens in many partner dance scenes. The old default of men asking women to dance has changed to a more pragmatic approach where the gender who is in the majority (in terms of numbers) does the asking. This makes sense if you think about it—if you’re a man and in the minority (as is often the case) the notion that you should go up to a group of women and pick one of them, making everyone else feel crappy because they have to sit out isn’t really worth it. You may not even have particularly cared which one you danced with but you had to pick somebody. If on the other hand the group in the majority does the asking then it becomes a matter of which of them can find an available partner fastest or who feels like dancing to this song (if you’re tired you can just sit out and leave the available men for someone who’s up for dancing this song).

Reality is of course not nearly this simple, people don't literally just ask people to have sex with them, and things like desire and consent can be slippery things. But actually when we complicate the situation it only makes the case stronger. For instance, let’s see what happens when we introduce rape into the equation. Suppose the cost for being turned down, in terms of happiness, self-esteem, etc. is quite large due to social pressures on men for having sex, the male ego and similar forces. Now suppose you can avoid this penalty by persistence and not taking “no” for an answer effectively increasing the costs of refusal for everybody. Suppose further that within our previously assumed 25% acceptance rate there is a “true” acceptance rate of only 10% that is to say that we can divide that acquiescence in the face of a proposition into some percent of the time she wants the sex on its own merits and some other percent fo the time when she strictly prefers saying “yes” over saying “no” as a result of taking into account those costs (which are shared, but now imposed more disproportionately by the other's attempt to avoid rejection) of refusal that we mentioned earlier.

As I said, this actually makes for an even stronger case for female initiation of sex, for if you accept the inevitability of the above assumptions (which I contend are not strong but actually fairly modest) you then have to accept that there will be a certain amount of rape occurring in the traditional arrangement, in addition to a whole lot mediocre sex (if she wouldn’t have picked it without coercion than it’s unlikely to be good sex). Even if you suppose that men suffer none of the consequences of women being raped by men (I have a sister and am thus unconvinced of this) the mere enormity of the costs, physical, social and psychological, of a rape should balance the scales firmly against this arrangement for even any marginal amount of rape produced by this arrangement.

You could argue that if the tables were turned and women were consistently the ones initiating sex we would see a reversal of that outcome and see more men being raped by women. But even if we would see a marginal increase in women raping men, it’s important to keep in mind that I’m not writing about what will happen every time (surely men initiating sex has resulted in plenty of good, consensual sex). I’m talking about that if we want things better, on average, we should encourage cultural norms that support that superior average outcome, or else what the hell good is culture?

Have I just wasted the last 9 months of my life?

Far from it.

But my host mom (the phrase seems more absurd to me every time I have to use it) said something to this effect to me today. She says that I should have done more in the past year and that I didn’t take adequate advantage of my time in Buenos Aires.

This kind of judgment is nothing new. Irma has an opinion about most aspects of my life, whether it be my social life (you need to go out more, you need to have more American friends) to my use of my time (you should spend less time on the computer) to my hygiene (just washing your hands after you use the bathroom is not often enough!) Apparently I also never study, don’t sleep, have no real friends, and am a "Bush supporter".

But while these kinds of observations aren’t new what was new was my reaction to them, if not externally at least internally. I have tended to react defensively to claims that I ought to be living my life in a way differently than I am. I will argue fiercely that I do get some sleep sometimes, or that I have friends and I’m not bothered by the fact that they’re mostly not Americans. I get kind of upset and am arrested for long periods of time thinking on the matter and whether or not she’s right. Perhaps this post is an extension of that defensiveness; I’ll let readers judge that.

Today though, when she said that I wasn’t taking advantage of my time in Argentina, I looked at her statement a different way than is my habit. I realized that Irma (and perhaps these previous students to whom I am compared) had a different idea of studying abroad than I do. Many students (as she reminds me) travel frequently throughout the country in groups of fellow study abroad students. In this sense studying abroad is a bit like an extended vacation.

I do not see myself as on vacation, but more like I’m just living in a place that isn’t Cleveland. I have friends I hang out with, I have regular activities I involve myself in and I eat at the same places most of the time. When I reflected on what Irma said, I realized that I just didn’t have the same goals as she thought I ought to.

It’s a powerful thing realizing that your desires, interests and goals aren’t necessarily in line with the desires of the people who claim to have your best interest at heart. These people are usually your parents. For me the bigger change was realizing what these desires were. For the majority of my time here I have sort of passively accepted someone else’s definition of how I ought to live my life and simply lamented the fact that I wasn’t living up to this. I am increasingly becoming more confident in asserting

It’s the same sort of thing we have to do with our parents. Many of us aren’t confronted with this very often and so may be quite used to defining our desires for ourselves. But having lived with my parents my entire life I have always defined my desires in contrast to theirs. It’s ironic then how much living with a woman who isn’t my mother has taught me of how to be free of my own not primarily what she actually says but what I still believe in the back of my mind even when she’s thousands of miles away.

If you wanted any more proof that we live with our parent’s desires in our heads, no matter how far away they are physically, just think of what is said about the dead. Within literally minutes of learning of my father’s death I was told that I should still go study abroad because “it’s what he would have wanted”. I’m still trying to make him proud of me, even though he’ll never be around to see it.

I even made him a kind of promise, after he’d forever lost the ability to hear it, that I would try to obtain from my year abroad, something he’d always wanted for me: independence and self-reliance, the ability to handle myself, to decide that I will do a thing and go out and do it. That’s a charge that I intend to keep.

Interviews with Exiles

In keeping with this post, I’d like to write reactions to things I’ve read in my research in the past couple weeks. Hopefully this will serve the dual purpose of providing a way for people who are interested to have a sense of what I’m doing and how I’m effected by it, and a way to get me more excited about my work and, optimistically, more motivated to do it.

About a week ago I was reading about studies done in the 1960’s 70’s and 80’s about the emigration of Argentines. One such study looked at the social and psychological conditions of political exiles coming back to Argentina after the return to democracy in the mid 80’s. Conducted by the Argentine sociologist Hector Maletta, it is based on interviews he conducted with former political exiles, and published internally at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella. The irony of living as an expat in Latin America, the son of an immigrant, reading and writing about immigration was not lost on me; relating to this was unavoidable:

“Antes de su retorno, muchos albergaban imágenes idealizadas de Holanda, su pueblo tan amistoso, sus acogedoras relaciones sociales. Despúes del retorno las cosas no lucen tan rosadas como en su imaginación”.

“Before their return, many emigrants harbored idealized images of Holand, their friendly neighbors, their cozy social relations. After they came back things weren’t as rosy as they had imagined.”

I’ve certainly kept a rosy image in my mind of Cleveland. This may seem bizarre for a city’s where the major pastime is complaining about how much it sucks. But I remember everything I love about it; it means “home” for me so much more than it ever has in the past. that idealized image has had almost a year to grow there in my mind. I sort of wonder what I’ll think when I come back.

“El exiliado, como cualquier emigrante, ha estado ausente durante cierto tiempo. Este hecho banal encubre varios niveles de significación. Por una parte, en su ausencia han seguido sucediendo cosas, su país ha continuado existiendo y evolucionando sin él (una clara demostración de que el no es imprescindible). Este costado de la ausencia es uno de los mas angustiantes para el exiliado, porque evoca e implica uno de los aspectos más siniestros en la idea de la muerte: el mundo (el país) puede seguir existiendo aunque yo no esté.”

The exile, like any emigrant, has been away for a certain period of time. This simple fact has several layers of significance. On the one hand, in his absence things have kept happening, and his country has continued existing and evolving without him (a clear demonstration that he isn’t irreplaceable). This aspect of his absence is one of the most anguishing parts of exile, because it evokes and implies one of the most sinister aspects of the idea of death; the world (the country) can keep on existing when I’m not here.

Also:

“entretanto, también a el le han sucedido cosas, también para él ha transcurrido un tiempo que no puede compartir con quienes se quedaron. El cambió, creció, reorientó sus preferencias ideológicas (tal vez no en la misma dirección que sus connacionales) y regresa quizá...con una apreciación de su propio país marcada indeleblemente por su experiencia en otros países, una experiencia que conduce a comparar y relativizar lo que para los otros puede parecer obvio, único o inevitable.”

In the meanwhile things have also kept happening to him, there’s also passed some time for him that he cannot share with those who stayed. He changed, grew, reoriented his ideological preferences (and perhaps not in the same direction as his compatriots) and comes back perhaps with an appreciation for his own country marked indelibly by his experience in other countries, an experience that drives him to compare and to see in a relative way what for others seems obvious, unique and inevitable.

This is very true for me, in ways I can’t begin to describe now. I’ll either be vague enough to be just restating the above less eloquently, or be so specific I’d be writing you a book. Better I think, to write that book in parts, but I will simply say briefly that my views about politics and about ideology, about relationships and about family, about economics and my career all of these have changed in some way. At this juncture, it seems that going back home will be proof positive of just what has changed.

“Muchos se fueron en una etapa de la vida, y vuelven en otra completamente distinta. Se han producido cambios en la constelación familiar: el padre ha muerto, o los hermanos se han casado, o ya no viven todos juntos.

“Many left in one period of their lives and came back in a completely different one. There have been changes in filial configurations: the father has died, or the siblings have gotten married, or they don’t all live together anymore.”

Since I left I have had the sense that a chapter of my life had ended and another one had begun. I feel even more convinced of this now. I’ve spent the last eight months thinking about an urn that’s sitting in my house somewhere, a foreign object that I’ve never seen before, eight months reshaping my goals. With the small but important difference that I'm not here fleeing military dictatorship Maletta could have been writing about me.

The posts that aren’t here

For months now I’ve been engaging in a bit of self-deception related to this blog. As soon as I got off the plane (actually as soon as I showed up at the airport) I started writing in the notebook given to me by a friend and teacher from back home, about the million things I’ve been thinking about ever since February 5th. My intention was that I would take these things I’d scribbled down in my notebook and publish them as a record of my time here, in a manner akin to original meaning of “log” a chronological record of thoughts, experiences and happenings.

That notebook is filled now, the first of such gifts that I’ve ever successfully completed, something I see in itself as a kind of accomplishment. And yet most of the things I wrote have stayed there. Worse, or perhaps just more strange, I’ve misremembered those things I wrote as if I’d posted them. I’ve presupposed a kind of bed of recorded writings on this blog that were never there, that have stayed in ink and paper and never crossed over. And then, perversely, I find that I’ve only written things here, when I didn’t have them written down in any previous medium, precisely because I feared that I’d forget them otherwise.

You’ve all done this. You’ve written something, or practiced a musical instrument or read a book or any number of productive things precisely because you were supposed to be doing something else. It seems we’re always supposed to be doing something else.

But there’s another element to this that occurred to me as I was rereading an email correspondence with a friend. She told me that her dad’s death was always on her mind in the months after it happened, in a way that seemed so obvious to her, but that was not obvious to everyone else.

It happens to me too. I'll be sitting at dinner having pizza and beer with some American friends here, and I mention my dad’s death, because it is relevant to something I was talking about. Well of course it’s relevant! It factors heavily into my thinking, so it seems only natural to make explicit reference to it from time to time. And yet when I do, I have this whole lot of explaining to do and have to deal with people’s reactions which are inevitably frustrating, whether inadequate or overblown. Usually, to avoid this issue, I just don’t bring it up.

This is actually one of the great advantages of a blog as a means of communication. Blogs can be anonymous. I've been reading one such personal blog lately, which among other things is about the personal experiences of a woman who's been in an abusive relationship and was raped. By its anonymity I can read about the thoughts and insights of someone who would never have told me these things face to face, but which I’m able to access precisely and paradoxically because I don’t know her real name.

It's not anonymity that's really important though, my dad's death isn't exactly a secret that I would need to hide with a pseudonym. It’s already in the realm of common knowledge; the obituary comes up in the first few entries in a Google search. Unlike Harriett, what happened to me happens to most people and is completely ordinary in many ways. And yet any treatment I give it verbally seems inadequate, or seems to misrepresent my relation to that reality.

That last sentence seems really abstract, so let me try to be clearer by analogy. My dad’s death isn’t something that happened—it’s a reality that’s in the background of everything, like the bass part of a song—maybe you don’t always notice it’s there, but it colors everything else, and if it were possible, you would notice if it went away. It isn’t the melody, it’s not obvious and in-your-face, even though it may get a solo (and inevitably some people will start talking at this point, as if the music has stopped). It’s undoubtedly important, as it is the base upon which the rest is built. But it is important for its constant and enduring presence and not because of sharp pitch or dramatic changes.

Writing, in particular the blog medium, can be good at this not so much because of the potential anonymity though the net (although this undoubtedly does help some people), but becase it allows you to explain things on (and in) your own terms, and it gives the person on the other side of the glass the ability to take it or leave it.

I had to share this

For those of you who are dorks about linguistic differences I'd like to quickly describe an advertisement that literally could not work in English.

On the left side is the image of a good looking man in stylish clothing. Superimposed over this image are three words:

"La" actitud

"La" Campera

"Las" Gafas

And then on the right side is an image of a perfume bottle, the only text accompanying it:

"El" perfume

So subtle and completely untranslatable...

Those of you who speak romance languages explain it to your friends.

Writing about what I'm writing about

It occurs to me that I haven’t written very much about the major thing that I’m spending my second semester here doing, so I thought that I should remedy that. In addition it ties in significantly with what I’m doing here in the first place, on a number of levels.

As part of my study abroad there are several academic concentrations you can choose to pursue in lieu of simply enrolling in a few classes at the local universities. These include film, human rights, and an independent research, which is what I’m doing, and which is why I chose to do this particularly program, here in Buenos Aires. I had decided a while ago that I would come for two semesters and spend the first semester figuring out exactly what I wanted to research, and the second semester researching it.

After I’d decided this but before I came to Buenos Aires I took a course in research methods, partly to fulfill a class requirement and partly as a kind of preparation. Conveniently, the content of the class was essentially writing a research proposal detailing your topic and the potential research methods you would do to investigate it. I brainstormed a couple different ideas and sent some of them to my professor to see what she thought. But, when the day came that we had to present our topic, I decided on another topic proposal, which I’d typed up hastily that morning:

The education systems of developing countries have produced some brilliant natural and social scientists, doctors and academics, but are often unable to keep them, as these individuals seek opportunities abroad. Sometimes this occurs because certain fields are simply not available in these countries, requiring students to study in Europe or the United States in order to continue their studies. Often though it is simply the appeal of getting out of the country to a place where there are greater opportunities to make more money and enjoy benefits that are not available in the developing world. To what extent are developing countries hurt by their inability to hold onto some of their brightest scholars, and in what ways does allowing academics to study in other countries actually benefit the home country? What sort of policies should such countries enact to encourage or discourage emigration of this kind?

Although it was last minute, this wasn’t at random. I’ve long had an interest in mixing up my studies and my life, and although I’ve spent the last year and a half thinking, reading and writing about this topic, its interest for me goes back far longer.

In 1982 my father joined the ranks of these skilled migrants when he left Guatemala to study abroad, and after meeting my mother his migration became permanent. When I was born in the United States, my dad made sure that I was a dual citizen and that my siblings and I would get to know the country where the rest of his (my) family still lived. In high school I began studying Spanish (which I didn’t grow up speaking) and I’ve basically spent the rest of my life looking south.

In February my dad suffered a fatal heart attack, a week and a half before I left to study abroad. Before that time, Dad used to flirt with the idea of going back to Guatemala to teach, to retire or even to purchase farm land there. When my mom got him to read Three Cups of Tea, a book about an American climber-turned-philanthropist building schools in Pakistan (my dad was an avid climber in his youth), my dad said "I could do that. But it wouldn't make sense to go to Pakistan. I could have more impact" economists would say he'd have a greater comparative advantage, "in giving back to Guatemala". Guatemala has, in the language of my discipline, suffered a permanent loss of highly skilled human capital.

So now here I am, having missed the South I was aiming for by about a continent, and continuing to ask a question that really goes further than “brain drain”—a question about what was lost and how to replace it.

Remembering to Stop and Listen

Well it was warm here for that one glorious week and then it got rainy and cold, and the temperature kept dropping, just to let us know that winter wasn’t quite done with us, just so we didn’t forget.

It’s perhaps ironic then, that this new cause for pulling out the multi-layered outerwear of winter should be accompanied by my going out a lot more than I have in months. I spent an entire week before spending a night in bed by two in the morning. One day I wandered the streets of downtown Buenos Aires with a church group I’d been invited to by a friend from the Catholic University the previous semester, giving soup, sandwiches and lattés to people living on the street. The next day a woman I’d met through a mutual friend invited me to La Catedral, an old factory warehouse turned artsy (and highly atypical) tango dance hall. Wednesday evening I spent enjoying subsidized theatre tickets to see Marat Sade at the Teatro San Martin. Thursday and Friday nights were spent with Luis, the Peruvian student from the Monday night church group, enjoying live music and entirely too much two-for-one beer at a Peña (a folk music jam night tradition imported from the Northern Provinces) and seeing a musical tribute to his uncle in a local community center (who was an Argentine classical violinist) that reminded me in some ways of the many tributes to my father that I’d attended in Guatemala.

After dinner (which was spent with members of the Argentine branch of Luis’ family) I made the last-minute decision to accompany my friend to a party at the house of a number of French exchange students. There I met and conversed at length with a German student, whose mother is Argentine and who quit studying architecture to go back to school to study Latin America and later to come to Buenos Aires to continue her studies.

In the interest of time and my reader’s patience I won’t go into great detail of all the events described above, only to say that many of these experiences made me think quite a bit and all of which I’d be happy to write about at babbling nauseating length if prompted (through you’re welcome to make specific requests for such details in the comments section!).

I also brought this up to bring me to Sunday night, where I want back to La Catedral for their folklore night with Laura, the German student and a few of her countrywomen. They had a folkloric dance lesson (which I missed) and a couple of live bands, including a girl who I’d managed to see play on the subway platform some weeks prior.

It wasn’t until I got back later that Sunday night that I had the feeling that I had broken a kind of spell. For the past several weeks (or months I suppose) I’ve been calling my family (mother really) every Sunday night. Anyone who reads this blog is probably aware that I’m not very good at keeping up with people by phone. I decide I want to speak to my friends at a time when it probably isn’t convenient for them to do so, perhaps send them a message suggesting that we do so, and generally don’t follow through. And this is an improvement! But the Sunday night thing had become a kind of comfortable routine. I had imagined continuing this tradition after getting my own place in Cleveland—to visit on Sundays to have dinner and perhaps go to church with my Grandmother.

The Hebrews millennia ago had it right when they suggested that even God had needed a day of rest. It something lacking from most of American culture and it’s even mostly lacking in Porteño culture, despite the reputation of Latin Americans for siestas. Buenos Aires is too fast-paced to too heavily honor the siesta tradition, too secular to honor a holy days, and don’t sleep much generally so that at most the equivalent of a Sabbath lies in a sort of sleepy “detox” that happens on Sunday or Monday (when/if you go out on Mondays you’ll find almost everyone is a foreigner). No, it’s something that just happens in the provinces.

I spent a Sunday in Salta, the capital city of one of the Northernmost provinces of Argentina and for some reason the spirit struck me to attend a mass, the first I’d attended since the dreadful one that was my father’s funeral. I sat apart from the pews partly out of a distaste for the “sit. stand. kneel.” of mass and partly in deference to my disbelief in most everything catholic as anything more than poetic metaphor (Christ as god, as dying for our sins, the notion of a monolithic (trilithic?) anthropomorphic deity…). Instead I sat on the side, on steps beneath one of the many saint sanctuaries, delighting in the very pagan nature of such saint worship and thinking back on all the previous Sunday mornings I’d spent in churches with my dad. About the first times I was able to attend a full mass instead of going to Sunday school, how much an adult I felt back then sitting next to my dad and looking up the page numbers of the readings all by myself. How quiet he was; in his silent rejection of forcing belief on anyone he let me think all kinds of heretical thoughts there in the pews about things that didn’t make sense about the faith, and about the things that made too much sense. I wonder now how much he shared those thoughts.

Walking through the streets of Salta afterwards while the Church bells tolled, a kind of peace had descended upon the city. Kids played soccer on side streets and I watched them in silence. I turned off my ipod like an Orthodox Jew respecting the prohibition against work on holy days and just walked in the streets where for once ordinary sounds stuck out—friends hailing each other from bikes, the clink of beer bottles of men sitting on stoops making crude jokes about women—instead of becoming part of the vague urban noise we try to filter out.

There’s a benefit of having some time for silence a time to allow a certain kind of contemplation, the sorts of things that are absent from just going from one activity to another from having all the open spots filled on your calendar. It helps to have a sort of weekly ritual, like I’ve had with my mother, and it helps to intentional make time to clear out distractions. It’s the only way I’m able to write this blog, when, despite the fact that I have perhaps better things to do, I make the deliberate effort that this time will be left open just for writing, that this time will be left empty.

It reminds me a bit of something I overheard from a conversation in my friend Nico’s Kiosco. I was sitting chatting with him while he was closing up and a musician friend of his stopped by to chat for a while. I just listened and didn’t chime in too much, content to just hear what the guy had to say. I don’t remember much, but one of the things he said struck me and has stuck with me in a powerful way. He was talking about how to learn to play the guitar and he said “you just gotta find some music that you like that’s not to hard, find out the chord changes and just mess around for a while. The word “mess” isn’t really the most accurate translation of what he said. He used the very Argentine word “boludeando” the gerund form of the famous slang-word “boludo”, which is hard to translate but means something like “egghead” (“balls” head really). So to make a verb of it is something like “messing around” but a little more vulgar (“fucking” around perhaps). But the important thing is that you’re not doing it out of some kind of deliberate attempt to make the first step at something great, without any presumptions of what you’re doing.

This is important and surprisingly radical. We tend to think of the proper way of learning things is to find some expert to teach us, a music teacher, a schoolteacher, a professor and, in a very top-down kind of way, deliver us the knowledge, like manna from god. We turn to them because they have the answers and for a price they can deliver it to us.

But much knowledge, if not all, does not come delivered from on high, but grows deep out of the body, through a series of tiny experiments, lots of tiny failures and a few big successes.

But isn’t that at odds with ritual and deliberation if, after all, you just learn by accident? Maybe there are some things we learn when we’re trying to do something else (my skills at Sudoku or FreeCell come to mind though they’re not things I’m proud of). But usually you’ve got to set out and look for those empty places, where you can make a mess of your guitar playing, where you can dance with out worrying about treading on your partner’s toes, where you can pray without the noise of the street…

Within the Society of Friends’ tradition (popularly known as “Quakers”) there is a belief that God, the ultimate authority, ultimate teacher, does not deliver his will from on high through elaborate hierarchies and intermediaries, but directly through individual, ordinary people, from listening to the holy spirit speak to them, from listening to the silence.

The Importance of Being on Time

Summer seems to have struck Buenos Aires early and suddenly this year, and the city has wasted no time in filling itself with short skirts, tank tops and mosquitoes, and a refrain of “que calor de loco!”

Already?!?

This might not provoke much surprise from those of you living in the Northern hemisphere who are already getting tired of the exhausting summer humidity. But I’ve been back in town just under two weeks and I still remember acutely the feeling of stepping off the plane that had just gotten in from Miami. Something like “why the hell did I come back?” Two days later, the weather turned absolutely gorgeous (and considerably less humid than Miami had been!) and my friends and neighbors begin to complain about the heat, causing me to wonder if Porteños might actually give Clevelanders competition in their ability to complain about everything…

You might well be wondering now “what were you doing in Miami?” Or if you’ve been reading faithfully—“how the hell did you get there from Posadas? And did you ever make it to Paraguay? (If not you’re just wondering what the hell I’m talking about…)

As I’m typing this I have a several page word document, open in another window, of the things I’ve been writing about my travels through Argentina and Paraguay, which transpired almost a month ago. I have two journals back in my bedroom which have bits and pieces of things which I wrote on the way; all things that I really wanted people besides me to read at some point.

The reasons they are still there are at once complicated and simple, a blog is something you don’t have to do, and, at least in my case, is mostly for your own vanity (though you hope other people might get something out of it). The more time passes from the events of the story the less relevant they seem. This is also one of the qualities of the blog as a writing medium. As Andrew Sullivan suggests in an essay for his blog The Daily Dish, the blog is a medium of the now. Because it is possible to write about events that happened literally five minutes ago, the very immediacy of it, the unedited quality—with most blog sites now you view the finished product in the same HTML-free script that the author used to write it—means that it is a medium constantly in the present tense. This makes it difficult to go back and add things once they’ve passed, puts pressure against any tendency the author might have towards a kind of narration, or some kind of gradual development of ideas.


Yet this problem can actually be a very good thing. For those of us who write or essays or journals or novels in our spare time, the tendency for our work to sit in dusty old notebooks and make it no farther than that is extremely high. This isn’t only because we’re terrible writers, or because the market is tiny and no one will publish us. It’s also because it’s very difficult to generate a push for the writing to move beyond that point, for ideas to be developed, for drafts to be edited. After the initial inspiration and the scribbling in journals the initial impetus to publish often fades. Tomorrow becomes eternity.

By contrast a blog has a certain kind of deadline. It still isn’t an explicit one—at least for most of us there’s no one breathing down our necks making sure it gets published now—and yet there is an implicit deadline inherent in the fact that you have to believe that if you don’t write it—and publish it—right away it will not happen. Other things will come up, more interesting ideas, other things to write about. Digging into the archives of writing topics will seem absurd.

Besides the euphoria of this August Indian summer, getting back to Buenos Aires has meant getting myself into the rhythms of a new semester, new classes and gearing up for writing my senior thesis, which I’ll be spending the semester on. Understanding well the natural propensities of college students, my study abroad program in conjunction with the Fundación Simón Rodriguez (the foundation which organizes the research option for IFSA) designs the research option as a series of meetings with an advisor, where every week you’re required to turn in a part of the project by email the day before the meeting. It’s a good system and not a bad way for me to organize the blog as well.

If only the rest of life were like that. I’m a senior now, with the knowledge that when I return to Case it’ll be to finish up my last semester of college. The question of “now what?” is not the one that worries me so much—I’m going to look for a job in at whatever they’ll pay me to do. I’ve lowered my expectations about what that will be. No, I’m more worried about when I’m going to get around to doing what it is that I want to do. I’m worried about the absence of those week deadlines.

Of course there is a deadline. But if the best deadlines are the ones that come often and predictably, then death is a pretty poor one, as it is neither. For most of your life it’s far away and you don’t see it, and then when it comes you often didn’t see it coming. “If I’d known I was going to die at fifty I would have done things differently!” But you didn’t and now you’ve got the rest of eternity to be frustrated about it.

Even what it is we wanted to do can be hard to figure out? While you’re studying you have a vague sense that there’s something you want to do after you graduate but you’re not sure what. You get sidetracked (but from what?), you fall in love, get married and take a job that has nothing to do with your masters degree, so you can pay the bills while your spouse gets his PhD. And then twenty years later you’re a widow with grown children and trying to remember what it was you wanted to do when you grew up.

Or maybe you always felt a sort of vague unease with the system but you never really knew what else there was out there. You drop out of the University where you were studying French or physics (and what the hell were you supposed to do with that, no one ever let you in on that). You start working because it’s something you’ve got to do and you dream about doing great things, though it’s not quite clear what really. In the meantime you learn a lot about the world, making lots of friends and open yourself up to life’s possibilities. But you still don’t have your own family and you live with your aunt and you’re starting to get old enough so that you have to lie about your age to get dates.

I know these people and you probably do too though their stories may be a little different. Modernity has confused the hell out of people of my age, from age twenty to thirty; our great-grandparents all had families of their own right now. In Buenos Aires there’s a generation of kids that grew up in the new democracy and who were told they were supposed to take advantage of opportunities to live the lives they love, which their parents couldn’t have dreamed of. Then the crash of 2001 comes along, so these kids, now in their thirties, all live with their parents because there just isn’t money right now.

A decade younger than these guys, I wonder what I have to look forward to back home in America...or wherever else. It seems pretty daunting at this juncture to look ahead at ten or twenty years, but then it doesn’t really make any sense to worry about it. Probably makes better sense to concern myself with this week. And maybe finish up that word document in the other window for next week....

Blogger allows you to put whatever date you want on your posts, so when I do get around to posting the story about my travels I’ll be sure to mark the date as earlier than this one (not a complete lie since some of it was already written at that point!)

No Room at the Paraguay Inn

After the visa debacle we finally made it to Encarnación, the Paraguayan town across the river which I´d been staring at since I got to Posadas nearly a week earlier. Getting a bus from there to the capital of Asuncion was truly a whirlwind experience. Within about five minutes we were off the bus, offered tickets to the capital from a bus-ticket vendor about five meters away, had our Argentine Pesos exchanged for Paraguayan Guaraníes, bought tickets and climbed on a bus where we were promptly sold chipas and fresh fruit by two different street vendors. Capitalism is a beautiful thing.

Six hours later we woke up in Asunción where it became clear very quickly that Paraguay is not a common place for backpack-toting foreigners to visit. After calling Emily from a telecabina and checking my email for other news (and to try to locate our hotel) we hopped on a bus for the center of town to find our hotel and sleep more comfortable than a bus.

This search turned out to be more difficult than we thought, and has us thinking that we might have settled for a bus! Having been spoiled by the availability of cheap hostels in other places we’d showed up in Asuncion without a hotel reservation, but rather the names of about four hotels that were located close to one another downtown. None of them had availability. A few were nice enough to call nearby hotels to see if they had any availability. After two hours of playing hopscotch from one hotel to another—and feeling comically like Mary and Joseph—we were start to seriously contemplate the possibility that were going to have to sleep outside (and it is not warm in July).

It was at about this time that we encountered a pair of policemen whom we asked for directions to a hotel that might be available. This was an odd and sometimes comical experience for several reasons. The Paraguayan police look a lot more like the military who just twenty years ago ran the Paraguayan state than their black clad, pistol-wielding counterparts in Argentina. But looks notwithstanding they were very helpful. Perhaps more out of boredom and curiosity than out of a sense of civic duty the two walked with us from hotel to hotel while they asked if they had any room, explaining to us in their heavy Paraguayan accents (which we had difficulty understanding and which we made fun of brutally when they were no longer around) that this area of the city (just blocks away from the national palace) is a dicey one where there are robberies and people frequently break windows. Or something like that—like I said their accents were challenging. But the sight of young women in short skirts standing alone on these same street corners, gave us all the evidence we needed to feel fortunate that we were so accompanied.

Apart from their accents, they also asked us questions that were both somewhat comical in the time, but have also made me think. They were interested in what we were doing in Paraguay and in Latin America in general. They seemed not to understand why we were studying in Latin America or why we spoke Spanish. They asked us if we spoke Spanish amongst ourselves (we do, which admittedly is a bit strange) and with other people, which was pretty self-evident.

But the questions made me reflect on the truly strange nature of our enterprise here. The fact is that for the vast majority of the people on this earth, the number one goal in life is progress in material well-being—for yourself, for your family. An absolutely daunting fraction of humanity’s six billion souls are concerned just with having something to eat tomorrow and even those of us who eat well are concerned with making more money, or keeping our jobs, whether this year’s crop goes bad or the factory closes.

Studying abroad in Latin America doesn’t really make sense in this context. People risk their lives and fortunes just to make it to the United States from places like Cuba or Mexico, or as far as China or Paraguay. And here we are, wandering through poorly lit streets in a country we barely know, for reasons that really have nothing to do with advancing our well-being. From this context it makes my travels seem very much like a bourgeois luxury, it makes me feel class in a way I never have before. For us this is relatively normal—I have many friends who have studied abroad, they leave for a semester and come back reporting how wonderful it is, wonder being sufficient justification for doing it.

As an Argentine friend of mine recently told me “you can go to work in the silver mines of Potosí if you want, to try to understand how the miners live, but even then you won’t understand a crucial aspect of their reality—that unlike you there’s no way out for them. They have no hope for a different life.”

Most creatures on this earth have to struggle daily for survival, but we live off of the world’s surplus, somewhere along the line our parents or our parent’s parents fought so that we wouldn’t have to. In exchange they gave us a path, something to do, with parameters to follow, whether explicit or not; do activities, play sports, graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, and support a family.

About a year ago a good friend of mine singlehandedly changed my conception of this path. We met during her only semester at Case Western Reserve University, the place where I’d applied to early at seventeen and where I left behind any thoughts of attending a different school. I was attracted by her attachment to the city that I loved, even though it was based on reasons that I couldn’t have understood at the time. And unlike me she was never really thrilled about the idea of going to college. She applied practically at the last minute and almost didn’t go at all. She transferred to Case for personal reasons and for similar reasons she left after the semester was over to follow other pursuits she’d postponed for years.

Our society would seem to judge harshly her attitudes towards school and her decision not to continue with it. But it’s hard to dispute that there is something odd about the extent to which the American liberal education system is divorced from reality, in which you read about struggles instead of living them and have imaginary deadlines based on the necessities of the academic system and after which you graduate with a degree that has little to do with the careers pursued by such graduates.

I have inherited from my mother a great skepticism for the notion of going off to “find yourself” (particularly on someone else’s bill, as so often happens). And yet I now have equal skepticism of affixing oneself to the preordained ladder of success, the one that dictates a parent be ashamed if his child decides to become an auto-mechanic instead of going to college and that leaves so many of my generation floundering around for four years trying to decide what to do with themselves.

When confronted with what are admittedly peculiarly bourgeois dilemmas about choosing what to do with your life (what a blessing that you have a choice!) the present can be a powerful antidote. Existential angst is easier to set aside when you’re concerned with finding a place to sleep. It is good then, that I have the opportunity to reflect about all this now, and that I was successful months ago in Paraguay, in finding a hotel room and collapsing into sleep a half hour later, leaving such philosophizing for another day.

Rivers, Ruins and Scavenger Hunts

There is something satisfying in traveling with a mission and it was with that of crossing the river Parana that I showed up in the bus station at Posadas. This satisfaction was replaced pretty quickly by that now familiar feeling of "now what" that comes from traeling alone without much planning. I just had an address and a bus number (the latter turned out to be wrong) and an empty stomach as I stepped out into the cold and rainy street . After a half an hour of waiting and crossing the street to get the right bus, I was on my way to the hostel, chewing on the baked good I bought from a street vendor (called a chipa) rendered barely palatable by the rain.

But I instantly fell in love with the hostel, which overlooked the river Paraná and had a view of the country on the other side. This is fortunate as I would spend another five days staring across that river in the bureaucratic labyrinth that followed…

My first order of business was finding the consulate which took me a while for reasons that should be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with my navigating skills. The difficulty in finding the place was compounded by the fact that the consulate is a tiny little building which you’d never peg as a government building from the way it looked from the outside. When I finally got there (I believe it was a Friday) I discovered that the place wasn’t going to be open until Monday.

Still, the wandering around provided me with a great excuse to explore and the consulate not being open gave me a reason to stay in Posadas for longer than I would have otherwise. I got a call from my friend Sam, another student from the study abroad program who was in Puerto Iguazu at the time and was also planning on going to Paraguay, albeit on the way to Salta (one of Argentina’s Northern provinces on the other side of Paraguay). I told him the hostel where I was staying and how to get there and we arranged to meet up in a few days when he got there. This a good display of the amount of planning that had gone into my traveling—the two of us were going to all the same places and yet we’d managed to construct a travel plan wherein we only saw each other for about a week out of our nearly a month of traveling.

The day after Sam showed up we went to the consulate to complete a process we figured would just be a matter of hours. We were sadly mistaken. Here are the things we wound up needing:
Three (3) passport-style photos
Three copies of different parts of our passports
45 American Dollars (which were more difficult to obtain than you might think)

When we showed up at the office it was already siesta (the afternoon nap not observed in Buenos Aires, but in most of the rest of the country). But at 4 o’clock, when siesta was over the office was going to be closed. This meant a catch-22, we could get the required items during the day, but we would have to come in the next day in order to actually get the visa processed. We resolved that we would come in early the next day to do just that, which would leave us with plenty of time, to make it to Asunción (which was only 5 hours away).

So the next day we got up bright and early and headed down to the consulate, letting them process our visas while we went to the bank to exchange for American dollars (how ironic). After a long wait in line we came back with our dollars only to have them tell us that the dollars weren’t good enough—the consulate required only dollars in pristine physical condition, and one of our five dollar bills had a small tear in the upper left corner. Seriously?

And then came a hurdle that was more interesting still: apparently my tourist visa had expired the day before. I was an illegal alien!

Just to clarify a little bit what this all means, I’ll have to explain something of the visa process. For those of you who have been reading this a while, you may recall the long arduous process of getting my visa. In reality, it was not a visa I was applying for, but rather a student residency, one that lets me live in the country, study and even have a state ID, but not work (in theory at least). I had however not brought these residency papers with me, getting around just with my passport.

This is usually fine—you don’t need a student resident to get around the country (although it helps for getting student discounts, I’ve got a college ID from UCA that sometimes works too). For a while anyway, 90 days to be exact, you can get around with a tourist visa. Obviously I’d been in Argentina for longer than 90 days, but the visa renews every time you reenter the country. In my case (Sam’s too but he brought his residency papers) that latest entry to the country had happened exactly 91 days prior when I reentered Argentina from Chile.

So I was in a pickle. The nice folks at the consulate explained to me that I would need to pay a fine of 250 pesos (almost a hundred dollars) on top of what I was already paying for the visa before I could get the visa processed. And not to them because I owed money not to Paraguay but to the Republic of Argentina. This implied getting down to the bridge between the two countries and paying the fine to the Argentine customs officer, at which point I would cross back over and pick up my visa with my newly stamped passport.

At this point I started to get cold feet. It was a lot of money—my travel budget as a whole was just under 500 dollars. Meanwhile the consulate insisted that I would have to pay the fine at some point anyway, as I was in the country illegal and risked harsher penalties if I was caught in transit on my way back home. I wasn’t sure how likely this was, but I decided to do it anyway, and resigned myself to losing an absolutely absurd amount of money.

We took a taxi to the bridge and the driver waited for us while I sidled up to the customs officer and explained that I was here to pay a fine (probably one of the stranger pronouncements he’s heard on the fine). As I told him what I was paying the fine for, he kindly explained to me that it would be cheaper to just apply for a residency, which I could do in Buenos Aires. I explained to him that it would indeed be cheaper if I could magically stop by Buenos Aires because there I had my residency papers in my apartment, with which I wouldn’t need to pay a fine. “Oh” he says and then takes my passport and disappears into the office.

Meanwhile Sam and I stand outside looking at each other wondering if this is a good sign or not. Then I see the guy pull out a stamp and start to get hopeful. A few minutes later he emerges from the office with a piece of paper with my picture on it and lots of helpful information such as where I am from and where I live in Buenos Aires. A copy of my residency!

Of course it hadn’t occurred to us that the Argentine government might have a digitized system with all this information in it. Certainly the consulate couldn’t have done this for us, they’re Paraguayan and so wouldn’t have access to Argentine legal documents. And so, feeling somewhat foolish but extremely relieved we shuttled back to the consulate got our visas stamped into our passports and picked up a bus to Paraguay.

All in all, the bureaucratic nightmare was really sort of its own adventure and Sam and I managed to get a few laughs out of it after our thousands of gripes. It was also an excuse to stay a few more days in what was a really fantastic (if cold) hostel and meet lots of cool people, which it now occurs to me I have written next to nothing about. And although there might not have been anything particularly noteworthy about those experiences (nothing compares to the excitement of international bureaucracy!) the days I spent in Posadas, a city which isn’t known for its touristic attraction, were some of the happiest of my trip.

Leaving Buenos Aires

About a week ago I returned from several weeks of traveling, and as being on the road and out and about exploring new cities has not exactly facilitated blog writing and so I've gotten quite a bit behind in what I'd have wanted to share about my journeying. In the end, my travels included a trip to Puerto Iguazu to see the famous Iguazu waterfalls and to Posadas, capital of the province of Misiones of which Puerto Iguazu is part. There I obtained a visa and crossed the border to Paraguay to visit the capital of Asuncion, where Emily Grannis, a friend of mine from high school, was busy finishing up her month spent studying the Paraguayan press. From there I went back to Buenos Aires to play tourist with Emily over her three-day layover before she returned to Ohio. On the second leg of my journey I visited Cordoba in the sierras, and then Salta in the far north and finally returned to Rosario a couple hundred kilometers away from Buenos Aires.

Rather than try to detail this all in one massive entry I've decided to break it up into "episodes" of a sort. This first one, describes my initial exit from Buenos Aires and the events that led up to my arrival in Posadas.

After finals were over I knew that I needed to get out of Buenos Aires, but I had no idea where I was going to go. Finally my escape from the influenza-crazed city and the threat of long boredom in the period in between semesters was facilitated by my friend Lina selling me her ticket to Puerto Iguazu, a port city a few kilometers away from some of the biggest waterfalls in the world. I went with her to the terminal to buy the tickets and when they gave me the option to leave the time for my departure open, I initially accepted...but then I thought about my tendency for "paralysis by analysis"--putting off indefinitely making a decision, based on the idea that with more information I could make a better one--and decided I would just buy it for the following Tuesday afternoon just a day after I turned in my last final exam. I had no idea where I would stay or where I would go from there. Nonetheless, on Tuesday I hopped on a 20+ hour bus-ride to the northeasternmost reaches of Argentina, armed just with my ticket and a vague idea that I wanted to travel more if possible, hopefully to Paraguay.

Although the sheer act of will (and a kind of pragmatic self-knowledge) that motivated my decision to leave were perhaps uncharacteristic for me, one aspect of my journey will probably not surprise anyone that knows me. I have no pictures of Iguazu because I hadn't bothered to get a converter for my camera before I left Buenos Aires (I told myself it was because I was too busy with finals stuff, but it would have taken like ten minutes). I wrote about my reactions to it in a pocket notebook where I've been taking all sorts of notes for poetry that I'd like to write in the future. This too I have since lost. Typical.

My friend Lina wrote post about the falls and took some great pictures so this may give you some kind of idea about what they looked like. For my part, I didn't have the chance to see the "devil's throat" she refers to as I spent most of the day seeing the smaller waterfalls (of which there were many!) and so by the time I was ready to take the train north to see the really big one
(I'd seen glimpses already, but I'd wanted to save the biggest one for last) the train had already stopped running so I had to head back to the hostel.

In addition to seeing waterfalls my time in Puerto Iguazu was spent taking long looks across the river at Paraguay and trying to figure out how to get there. I went to internet cafes to communicate with Emily and get her contact information, which it ocurred to me I both didn't have and might need, and talked to folks at the hostel about immigration rules over endless cups of mate (the communally consumed bitter tea-like beverage typical to Argentina). It was there I decided I'd have better chances (and possibly a more interesting stay than the small port town) in the capital of Posadas. In addition, nearby Posadas are about a dozen ruins of Jesuit missions that were built there several hundred years ago. Being both from Cleveland, itself a kind of industrial ruin, and roots in Guatemala, a country with some of the most gorgeous ruins in the world, these hold a special interest for me.

Traveling brings a lot of unexpected experiences with it. One such experience happened for me in the hostel where I was staying in Puerto Iguazu, where I met a fellow traveler, a Peruvian girl maybe a few years older than me, who's been traveling all around South America selling hand-made jewelry, mostly to tourists. In this way she has managed to support herself sufficiently to keep traveling and, along with a group of friends has funded her journeying throughout Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. As I left she was on her way to Brazil, having recently gained a portuguese-speaking companion. It was this encounter that gave me the idea of not only of trying to travel while selling wares of some kind to support the travel, but more importantly about how much there is to see and places to go within my own country--just as the Peruvian artisan traveled South America.

Going to Posadas from Puerto Iguazu, with the idea of eventually making it to Paraguay, introduced me to something new--the idea of traveling in a linear fashion, getting to a destination by moving from one place to another and spending various days en route. Almost my travels in the past--camping in Colorado, visiting family in Guatemala, visiting a friend in San Francisco--have been one-shot journeys to a specific place; I go, I stay, I come back. This is the first time where I've traveled by myself and gone somewhere, in order to get somewhere else. It's a fabulous way to travel--you get to see places that are more off the beaten track (hardly anyone goes to Posadas just to see Posadas) and it gives you great satisfaction in having finally gotten someplace when your final destination is reached.

These novelties were (are) exciting. I started to think about the possibility of doing a roadtrip of the United States with my brother, traveling and selling art (my brother is an aspiring artist). In the meantime I still had more traveling to be done.

Next time, the trials of getting a visa in Posadas and finally crossing that river.

Madness in the Southern Hemisphere

Argentine President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner with barbijo (facemask)

Buenos Aires, my home away from home for these past few months has descended into all kinds of craziness in the past few days. A couple days ago they declared a state of emergency in the face of Gripe A the new name for our old friend the swine flu.

I know many of you are probably wondering what I'm talking about. Swine flu? Weren't we all done with that several months ago? Haven't we moved on to more important things like the death of Michael Jackson or Iranian elections or the military coup in Honduras?

But things are different here in the bottom of the world mostly, I suspect, due to one important fact: the southern hemisphere. Buenos Aires has all the right ingredients to keep the swine flu going. First of all for my friends and family in Cleveland, Ohio, it may be hard to remember while you're on the beach and chilling in air conditioned houses, that while flu season is long gone for the north, down here it is the dead of winter (which is actually pretty pathetic by Cleveland standards). So flu season is in full peak. On top of that, Buenos Aires is one of the biggest cities in the world and is, I think, the second in the Southern Hemisphere. I think Rio beats BA but they don't have much to worry about when it comes to cold, they're probably still lying on the beach as we speak (as usual). Being a big city full of international visitors means that it's more likely to have folks from nasty flu infested places come for a visit and bring gifts.

Most of the rest of the other Southern Hemisphere countries are either not that cold, or not that popular. Somehow Buenos Aires is both.

This is a very unhappy fact and while it would be annoying enough if I were living on my own, living with a pair of seventy year-olds. The couple that I live with, particularly Irma, the wife, are very concerned about the flu. This is, I suppose, with good reason as it has the potential to be more dangerous to them than it would be to me.

Still it does seem to be bordering on insanity at times. But it's not just them. The other night the whole family (myself, Irma and her husband Roberto and two of their adult children Hernan and Milagros) were seated around the television listening to the public health people talk about "the situation" while every five minutes Irma gets a call one of her daughters telling her that the government is lying and hiding cases and telling her how bad the situation really is (she works in a hospital, but then again that makes the information biased--hospitals are full of sick people).

So when I went to the doctor yesterday complaining of sneezing, a cough and a sore throat, the guy got about three phone calls just in the twenty minutes that I was there and complained of how much people were overreacting. I showed up with a face mask mostly because my host family asked me too and was amused to find that he wasn't wearing one and asked me to take it off so that he could check my throat, breathing etc. You would think that if doctors aren't even using them they couldn't be good for much.

But it's a crazy world out there. When you don't have too many facts and you don't really trust the people who are giving you advice (the government) it's easy to get a little paranoid.

My solution: I'm getting out of this town till things settle down. Details to follow.

After it's all over

I just turned in my last paper on Thursday and while I have another final exam, it's a ways off now and feels distant. In any case, I can now start sleeping for eight hours a day and stop drinking energy drinks. I'm free now.

So why did I spend all of Friday sitting around in my room not doing anything? Why do I suddenly feel so harried and lost my desire to do anything.

This might seem like a strange comparison, but it's similar to the way one feels after a funeral.

There's a lot to do for a funeral. You have to go to the funeral home and pick out the type of casket you're going to get, the color, the type of wood, do you splurge on the nice casket or go for a cheaper one (it's your loved one, isn't he worth the expensive casket? But does he honestly care?) You have to call everyone and let them know about the death, listen to a hundred people tell you I'm sorry, while you repeat your rehearsed story of the sequence of events. You have to pick a date for the event and send out invitations, write something to submit to the paper for the obituaries page, find some place to put all the flowers you're getting. You have to pick a church, meet with the church representatives to discuss what hymns will be sung and who's going to carry the casket. You have to answer the phone when they call you about donating his organs answer a series of a hundred ridiculous questions about where in what condition those organs have been. It's quite a headache.

You have to meet at a friends house after the ceremony because they won't let you have the reception in the church basement and you wouldn't want to anyway. You have to tell a hundred people how you're holding up and wonder about what that even means given the circumstances. And then you have to say goodbye to everyone and get down to writing thank you cards for all the flowers.

And then it's over.

Now what?

In a way is like a form of procrastination. You can get yourself really worked up and busy about something that honestly isn't going to make a bit of difference a week later, but which at the time seems very important.

I put off a lot of things while I was busy writing papers during my last week of classes, so many things that I just couldn't think about because I needed to get these things done. And then Thursday night after I was done, I didn't want to think about all those things I'd put off.

All the other exchange students (almost all of whom are staying only for a semester) are leaving soon. I need to think about what I'm going to do next semester, what classes I'm going to take and, more immediately what I'm going to do during the break between semesters. I had about a half dozen people that I'd wanted to write long emails to, but told myself that I didn't have time because I had so much work to do. I had more blog posts I wanted to write. And now that I'm finally done it's taken me three days to work up the energy to write this.

I've started listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to start Worry and Start Living" on my iPod (it's been on my computer for a while, ever since my mother put it on there). In one section he talks about the importance of work, of keeping ourselves busy, in staving off worry and keeping ourselves sane. I'm a big believer in that; even more so when I'm not doing any work. There's something very leisurely about doing a study abroad program that bothers me at times. It will be good when I finally come back home and can get a job.

In the meantime, I have to find something else for myself to do that feels like work to occupy my time and to keep me from losing my mind.

I'm considering rock climbing.

Saying No to Drugs and Yes to Lying in Bed with my Laptop...

During my time sleeping, reading and killing time on my computer while sick, I encountered some of these videos on youtube which inspired me to write about my opinions on drugs:



Whenever I think about drugs of any kind, I like to think about a mantra that my dad repeated to me often, that his dad used to tell him: moderation is the key. It's for this reason that I try not to get into the habit of having a cup of coffee every morning, and drink alcohol moderately when I'm at parties. The main thing is that I don't like the idea of becoming dependent on anything.

This attitude flies right in the face of most of the rhetoric about drugs which the above "public service announcement" is just a small part of. "Just say no to drugs", both implies that all drugs are the same, and that the correct response is to universally reject them.

Some people might have reacted with surprise when I mentioned coffee or even alcohol as drugs. But they most certainly are, in that they both affect the body and the mind in some way, they have side effects (anyone who's suffered from caffeine jitters can tell you this) and they can lead to addiction over time (my father despite his advice complained of headaches if he ever didn't have his morning coffee--a perfect example of withdrawal).

It turns out that even more mundane substances, which almost no one consider to be drugs, in fact, are.



In the above video, Dr. Neal Barnard, the author of Breaking the Food Seduction explains how chocolate, cheese, meat, and sugar all have properties that make them addicting and, essentially, drugs. At the beginning of the video he talks about the opiate effects that sugar has on babies ("how to magnetize a baby"), who are conditioned to the mild sweetness of breast milk, and talks later about other physically addicting foods, which to all intents and purposes are drugs (they make you feel good, they're addicting, they can kill you if used immoderately).

I tend to use the word "drug" rather liberally, which has confused my host mother here. When I was sick with tonsillitis I had to take (or rather still am taking) antibiotics, as well as ibuprofen. When I initially referred to "ibuprofeno" with the word "droga" instead of "medicación" she corrected me. But Dr. Barnard, in his book, also uses the word drug to refer to the medication often prescribed by his peers in lieu of suggesting to patients that they change their diet.

If a person was alcoholic you wouldn't tell them to go see six other different types of doctors, you would work on getting them off of alcohol. But the same thing does not happen if someone is addicted to chocolate, cheese, meat or sugar, even though it is having demonstrable health effects for them. And I'm sure that the "Foundation for a Drug Free World" does not consider cheese or chocolate on their list (though they do deal with prescription medication).

And unlike Dr. Barnard the Foundation for a Drug Free World do not use facts, although they say they do. Take this video:



It turns out that smoking marijuana can have negative consequences for ones lungs over a long period of time (though they're related to the act of smoking it and not so much to the effects of the drug) . But the sort of inevitable spiral into "harder" drugs is a myth; "While it is certainly true that many of those who become heroin addicts, for example, have used cannabis, the vast majority of people in the UK (and elsewhere) who have used cannabis, have never used so-called harder drugs such as heroin or cocaine." So the scenario showed in the video of rapidly moving from marijuana to speed and heroin over a short period is a very rare case, and probably made more likely by the criminalization of marijuana.

And that's the point really, that most of the nightmare scenarios shown in these videos (I don't think I need to post any more but there are legions on youtube) are rare events presented in a highly propagandizing fashion. These tactics are a problem, not because they will erroneously turn people off of all drugs, because they promote an attitude in our society that is more sensational than reasoned and interested in data, and because kids (generally the target audience) will see through these efforts to scare them.

Apart from not presenting factual information there's another serious flaw the videos in their stressing the "they said, they lied". The "they" is presumably the kids' peers. So essentially the message is "all your peers are telling you these things, but they're all wrong" as well as "all your peers are doing drugs".

There's an article on the freakonomics blog that explains why this might be a problem. It turns out that people find suggestions more convincing if you tell them that everyone is doing it. Thus convincing someone that everyone washes their hands will give them the idea that only dirty, unsavory people don't wash their hands when they use the restroom (the example given in the article is stealing petrified wood from national parks). Convincing kids that all their peers use drugs, just makes them think "if everybody's doing it, it can't be that bad".

When I think about how harmful a drug is, I look at its side effects (caffeine's tendency to make me jittery and uncomfortable if I don't eat right afterward) and the long term effects along with the likelihood that I'll get hooked on them. This is why I quit smoking (which I did for a few weeks here in Buenos Aires); it's far more addicting that marijuana or alcohol and the long term consequences of doing it regularly could involve lung cancer.

And when I worry about addiction, it's not just drugs. The internet can be deadly addictive, one of the major culprits for my recent insomnia. Even exercise, normally something that's good for you, can be addictive in a way--my mother used to complain about my dad's sometimes obsessive exercising habits, how he would drop everything if it got in the way of his cycling class. That's why I think these issues need to be handled with greater complexity and not in black/white good/bad sorts of frameworks.