This was keeping me up the other night so I figured I may as well write about it as long as I’m not sleeping.
Last Saturday I was robbed violently.
That last word is a significant one. While the economic effects of having things stolen from you remain the same regardless of how the stealing was done, a violent robbery messes with your head in very different ways than just being pick-pocketed would. Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a pretty peaceful dude most of the time. And yet I was kept up by very vivid fantasies about visiting terrible violence upon a kid probably only a little older than my brother.
It happened like this. I met an Argentinean girl who’s a film student at the film school here in Buenos Aires and she invited me to come see a movie with her at a theatre that I’d never been to before. Immediately prior I had been having dinner with a friend of mine from the program and since the theatre looked to be in the same direction as where she lived, we figured we’d take the same bus and I would just get off a few stops later. So we took the bus, she got off at her stop and I sat down staring at my pocket city map following (or thought I was following) the bus and trying to figure out what would be the best time for me to get off.
As it turned out I guessed wrong as to where would be the best place to get off. It’s difficult because the bus will go one way and then turn and go the other way for a while so you kind of have to bet as to whether staying on the bus will eventually get you closer or if you’re better off getting off now and walking the rest of the way. In the end I get off on the right street about thirty blocks away. I was already late and was furiously texting this girl when I realized that we were at the end of the line in Retiro.
I had been to Retiro before and I’m relatively comfortable with the place, during the day. But Retiro is one of the train stations in Buenos Aires, and as we were warned during orientation the train stations can be dangerous at night. It’s odd because it isn’t abandoned or dark and while not full of people there’s always lots of people around, so it’s not really the place you’d expect to get robbed. But you do get the sense that it’s sort of the edge of the city and in Buenos Aires, in contrast to most cities in the U.S. it’s the suburbs that are the most dodgy while the center of town is safest.
All of these things which, of course, I knew, did not occur to me at the time because I was more worried about how I had ended up so far from the train station, and how I was possibly going to get there in time to meet this girl—would the movie start without me, would she wait for me, would this be a deal breaker for future dates with this woman etc. I was standing on a corner looking up at the street signs and staring at my city map when a couple of youths accosted me.
After it happened and I was explaining the bruises on my face to my host family, my host mom’s son told me “listen, you need to just give them what they want and don’t resist. Better that you lose your watch or your phone than your life.” This makes lots of sense in the case of a robbery “alright this is a stickup, give me all the money in your wallet now!” The thing was I just didn’t feel like I was being robbed.
I should explain something before I get any further. There are a lot of people in this city who come up to you and make odd requests. Every street corner is filled with someone handing out slips of paper with information about titty bars, tarot readers or restaurants. I met the above mentioned girl because while we were waiting for the bus and I suggested we walk home because a drunk was rather aggressively hassling me for some change to buy booze. I even had a kid ask me, as I was walking to class sipping on a red bull, if he could take a swig of my drink. Finally there was a kid with a group of his friends at the subway station who was rather aggressively asking for my ipod; I didn’t understand him really well, but he was grabbing at it and he and his friends were laughing when I got defensive about it. Somehow I was made to feel that I was the uptight one in not wanting him to get his hands on my possessions.
So it was into this context that I heard these two youths asking me for my cell phone. I figured that the best response given my past experiences, was to hold onto my possessions lest they inadvertently be grabbed, and pretend like I hadn’t heard them—the way you ignore people offering to sell you things on the subway. This didn’t work very well and they started to get upset with me when I didn’t respond, and started to grab at my pockets. At this point things become a little unclear to me, but what I do remember is that I was very concerned that these boys would make off with my ipod, the way the kid on the subway nearly did and so was attempting to cover that and make it either not visible or difficult to snatch quickly. To my surprise they persisted, wouldn’t let me go and start to fight with me, alternating between demanding my phone, hitting me and grabbing at my pockets where they figured it was.
After a little bit of this I found myself on the ground getting hit or kicked (not sure which) in the face (I suppose it was closer down there) after I’d gotten a few hits at one of their heads as well. It was at about this time that I remember thinking “wow this is really happening, I’m being robbed” much like it felt in the hospital room when Dad died. Believe it or not, this is it. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t matter to them that my dad had died a few months ago, and that I wouldn’t have time to make that ridiculous plea anyway. Suddenly they left me and started to run and for one fraction of a second I made the decision whether to run after them or not. I’m not sure if this happened before or after I checked my belongings to see what was missing, but I decided not to run, reasoning that they had a bit of head start so I wouldn’t catch them anyway.
Afterwards I was able to get home because a pair of onlookers gave me some money to take a taxi home, which is I was very grateful for as I had no money and still didn’t entirely know how to get where I was going (this was after it had become to clear me that I had definitely missed my date). It also reminded me of something about Buenos Aires that I’d known already: that the people here are really quite friendly (most of them).
But it’s the image of those two hooligans running away that keeps me up at night, they running and my decision not to run after them. It keeps me up, much the way you might be kept up with thoughts and images running through your mind about making love to a beautiful woman. Only instead of sex, the daydreams (are they still daydreams if they’re at night?) were about violence, about if I’d run after them and I caught up to the second kid and grabbed him by the leg causing him to trip, the other kid keeps running but turns back twenty feet away or so, in time to see me grab the fallen one and punch him in the head repeatedly, until his face starts to bleed all over the cement, and the people waiting outside the train station start to look concernedly on at the scene. The kid in front runs back to confront me, but he’s alone now as the fallen one is in no place to help him. We stare at each other for a while and as other people start to come closer to see what’s going on he decides it’s best that he leaves and continues to run away while he still has something to show for the evening’s adventure.
It might be interesting to note that nowhere in this fantasy does my wallet get returned to me because that isn’t the point for my animal brain. It’s like Vincent says in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction “What I wouldn’t give to catch the guy who did it [keyed his car]. You know, it would be worth him doing it, just to catch him at it.” Ownership in this case is about more than possession, it’s about pride, and it’s about power, about who’s on the ground and who’s standing.
Women don’t think like this. A female friend of mine was recently robbed violently as well; a woman was waiting for her in the doorway of an apartment building and without warning or saying anything started punching her in the chest, repeatedly, until my friend threw her purse at her yelling to stop. I’m sure she was affected by the event powerfully, but I doubt she has quite these kinds of dreams. In some ways at least women are more rational than men.
I was happy and sort of amused when I stood up, a little bit dizzy and searched through my right pocket to assess the damage to find that my cellphone, my ipod shuffle and my brother’s swiss army knife were all still there. Though my wallet was gone, it gave me satisfaction at least to know that I hadn’t been robbed clean of everything, and that my assailants hadn’t got what they wanted (although they were no doubt quite pleased with the hundred or so pesos that were in my wallet). I also attained great satisfaction from finding a hat discarded on the ground, which had fallen from one of the boys in the fight. I picked this up and kept it, I brought it home as a sort of trophy, as if to say “here is proof that I didn’t go down without a fight”.
It also amused me later, that my first coherent thoughts after the event were “shit, now how am I gonna get to the movie” followed by “this transaction constitutes an economic deadweight loss for society as there are numerous costs borne by me that are not equally compensated by gains for my aggressors, i.e. physical damage, the wallet which will likely be discarded, the debit card which I will cancel and will thus be useless to the thieves. This is a prime example of why crime is costly for society in ways that constitute more than simply transfers between parties”. You know you’re a huge economics dork when…
The question of the movie was resolved by calling the girl, since I fortunately still had my phone. I really wanted to see her, or someone that I knew well, but she didn’t know how to get to where I was so, upon hearing that I’d found a way to get home, she told me we could get together another time. It was only afterwards that I realized the significance of still having my phone. I didn’t have her number written anywhere, or memorized or anything. I had gotten her number from her the night I’d met her at the bus stop and the only place it was stored was in my phone. Had I given the phone away as the thieves had wanted I would never see her again, as I didn’t have an email address, last name (for facebook), or any other way of contacting her. She would have thought I stood her up and never called again, and would probably think I was a jerk for never returning her calls and eventually write me off or wonder what had went wrong that she hadn’t seen coming. And that almost happened, but for my vigilance in holding on to my ipod (which was attached to the same pocket that contained my phone).
Finally, on the way home in the taxi, too late I thought of the cross that I was wearing at the time of the assault, threaded on a thin chain that had broken during the fight and now remained abandoned on that street corner. I had purchased the cross while I was in Santiago, at the shrine to our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. It depicted Jesus on the cross with God behind him with his arms outspread and a dove at his head. I had planned to send it to my brother Marco along with the following message: “A good Catholic when he sees this cross would see the holy trinity. But I’m not a good Catholic—I see an image of a son whose going through a very difficult time in his life, and whether he knows it or not his father is watching over him from heaven. So I want you to have it.” It wasn’t until I realized that Marco will never get the cross and that there’s no way of getting it back (it’s doubtless been picked up by now) that I first started to tear up a little bit in the taxi.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Chile
It’s been quite a while now since I got back from Chile, so I thought before I get any farther I ought to write about how that went.
We got Thursday and Friday off for holy week and as a result we decided to go a little farther away then we could on a normal long weekend (and by we I mean my friend Sam decided and I last minute elected to go with him). The logic was that we’d never be able to go to Chile again and this is probably true so I’m glad we went.
The downside to this is that the knowledge that “we’re never going to be here again” alters the mood of the trip a little bit. I noticed right away that taking a weekend trip is very different from the study abroad program. Here in Buenos Aires I don’t feel as though I have to go out and see things every day, because after all, I have a year. There’s no rush. I can spend the night in and read a book, I can study for my classes, I can wander around and explore whenever I feel like it. When we arrived in Santiago we had no idea what we were going to do there. When we finally got to the Hostel and set our stuff down we picked up a map and started to look around for places to go and things to do. Sam marked up the map with places that
It was just the three of us Sam, a friend of mine from the program, Dylan, a friend of his who I didn’t know nearly as well, and I. Still it was often hard to make decisions and we would often encounter situations like “well I don’t have any preference about what we do, I just want to see as much as we can since we’re only going to be here two days.”
But although that aspect of the trip was stressful we still managed to find some interesting things to do. On our second day (our one full day in Santiago) we climbed a cerro (like a hill) that had at its peak a sanctuary dedicated to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (my word processor just capitalized that phrase automatically so apparently it’s a pretty important dogma). Although I don’t in the slightest believe in the notion of asexual human reproduction in the time before in vitro I found the place to be very moving. First of all I like the idea of shrines on top of mountains—it’s something that’s very common in Japan that really appealed to me there as well. There they have Shinto shrines all over the place but they’re always in really remote old places on top of mountains with woods surrounding them. Even if down below is a relatively urban area the fact that the shrine is up in the mountains lends a more tranquil air to them than you would get in a church situated on a major street in a city. Also there is something to be said about the trouble of reaching the shrine. Hiking or even just driving up forever, makes arriving at the shrine that much more meaningful and important. And it makes them more important as places.
Unlike Shinto, which you can only practice in Japan because of the place-specificity of these shrines, Christianity is a very universal religion that you can practice just about anywhere—just bring your rosary and your bible. Mountains are purely optional. This was the approach my dad took to his Catholicism, practicing it wherever was convenient, going to whatever church he happened to be in the same country as he was. As for me, I’ve always been really attached to places, and I stopped being Catholic the day we stopped going to the same church every Sunday and started this business of migrating, going to whatever church fit our schedule just to fulfill the obligation. That completely killed it for me. I like my places to have meaning particularly my holy ones. Thus the notion of having shrines up on mountains, the “this is our lady of Cerro San Cristobal because that’s where she is” notion appeals to me quite a bit.
They had cremations up there too, next to a trio of statues of Jesus on the cross and Mary and someone else (probably the other Mary) looking on. I liked that. If you’re going to cry about something while staring at a statue, that statue ought to be a depiction of a situation at least as wretched as what you’re crying about. Plus I know dad would love to spend the rest of his life up on the top of a mountain, so the notion of keeping cremation boxes up there sat well with me as well.
The other highlight of Santiago, for me anyway was going to see Pablo Neruda’s house. Pablo Neruda actually had three houses (we saw two of them in Chile!) one on Isla Negra, one in Valparaiso and one in Santiago. They’ve all been kept up and turned into Museums by the Fundación Pablo Neruda, and our last day in Santiago we got to visit his house there. What was probably most impressive was the amount of art he had in there! It helps that he was friends with a lot of artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, some of whom made pieces specifically for him. He had one piece made for him that depicted his then-mistress-later-wife Mathilde with two faces, with the face of Neruda hidden in her hair. This was supposed to represent the double life that Mathilde was living as her lover Neruda was married at the time. Nice gift.
Places were pretty important to Neruda as well, and he designed the house (or rather had it designed for him) with the idea of it resembling the interior of a boat, since the sea had always fascinated him. This too was interesting to see in the architecture of the place, which I’m sure would have interested my brother and aspiring architect Marco.
I also enjoyed the place because it reminded me of a contradiction of mine—how much I liked Neruda and how little of his poetry I had read. This is to say, that I know a lot about him, his life, his politics, when he wrote most of the books that he wrote, I’ve written literature papers about him in Spanish and yet I’ve read relatively few of his poems. When you consider he’s written several dozen books and I own one and am really familiar with only about a half dozen of his poems, I find that sort of shameful. I suppose that this is not so uncommon—there are many poets who are very well known but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s read all of the poems of well-known poets like Borges, Hughes, Eliot and Whitman (poets whose poems—the couple I have read—I have liked).
It’s a bit like the ipod culture we’ve created around music. We download that one famous Stones song we like, along with the half dozen Beatles songs we’re fond of and that tune we just heard on the radio that we buy on itunes and throw onto our “gym mix”. We don’t listen to albums anymore, we rarely sit down and listen through the album that a group of musicians put together and read through the liner notes and try to decipher the lyrics. A lot of that has to do with the time we have available to listen to music. A lot of it’s a matter of convenience or a function of the amount of music we’re able to store at one time on the devices on which we listen to music. But I think we miss something there.
Thinking some of these things while walking around the museum, I resolved to pick up a small book of Neruda’s poetry. Not three books that I’d never finish (a common tendency of mine) but just one that was digestible, something I could pick up, page through and finish reading in a few days, and then go back to my favorites, or after looking up some key words. I wanted to read a book of his poetry the way he’d originally put it together, the way it was originally published. So I bought Odas Elementales (“Elemental” or “basic” odes) a little of poems he wrote about simple things, written to such things his socks, artichoke, onion, the city of Valparaiso and the poet Cesar Vallejo.
That was another thing you could tell about his house, he really liked things—art, photos, old postcards, statues, glass bottles, playing cards—and clearly used them as inspiration. This is something else I dig about him as a poet, and it’s something that resonates with me. I wear my dad’s watch every day even though its battery is dead, not to keep time, but to remember times. I carry my little brother’s Swiss army knife for security not because it’s going to be remotely useful in defending myself (it wasn’t—more on that later) but because of the way it makes me feel. Under my futon at home I still keep the box I’ve had since high school, that’s full of little things that have meaning for me.
Neruda’s other house was in Valparaiso and as it so happened, we went there too (we managed to hit two of his houses in one trip). Valparaiso is very different from Santiago and I liked it. It was different in a very obvious and visual way—altitude. The whole city, or at least the residential part, was built on the hills that descended down to the ocean and as a result the whole city was very vertical. Climbing up to our hostel, dragging my luggage whose wheels were useless on the stairs that crisscrossed the city, this difference was apparent right away. But despite the difficulties, I loved it.
In place of barrios (“neighborhoods”) as they’re called in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Valparaiso’s neighborhoods are called cerros (literally “hills”). As in “yeah my friend lives over on San Tomas hill and my girlfriend lives down on hill Los Heroes”. And it’s beautiful. The hills force the architecture to be much more creative as houses are built up and down the hills and there are stairs that go down to the houses in between hills, and stairs that go between hills so that nothing is uniform and boring and routes to get places are vastly different for a car and a pedestrian. And there’s art everywhere. Besides the natural art of things growing in between the hills and parts of streets being totally abandoned to nature, there are murals on so many of the walls and the vertical nature of the city means that many of the walls that house these murals are enormous. Then there are art galleries all over the place particularly in the area around all the hostels (a tactical decision to be sure). I kept thinking of Marco there and how he’d like it.
The last day we spent most of our day in Viña del Mar, the neighboring town of Valparaiso with magnificent beaches on the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever swam in the sea before and I say this because I don’t recall ever experiencing the surprise of the salt content in the water I’d just gulped up accidentally. I loved it, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining the water was refreshing (by which I mean freezing). It was a warm day, but around sunset it started to get chilly, which is why some of those pictures I have up on facebook show me with a sweater on—it was not like this most of the day, but I did find it sort of funny to think that here I was sitting on the beach and I was wearing a sweater.
We got Thursday and Friday off for holy week and as a result we decided to go a little farther away then we could on a normal long weekend (and by we I mean my friend Sam decided and I last minute elected to go with him). The logic was that we’d never be able to go to Chile again and this is probably true so I’m glad we went.
The downside to this is that the knowledge that “we’re never going to be here again” alters the mood of the trip a little bit. I noticed right away that taking a weekend trip is very different from the study abroad program. Here in Buenos Aires I don’t feel as though I have to go out and see things every day, because after all, I have a year. There’s no rush. I can spend the night in and read a book, I can study for my classes, I can wander around and explore whenever I feel like it. When we arrived in Santiago we had no idea what we were going to do there. When we finally got to the Hostel and set our stuff down we picked up a map and started to look around for places to go and things to do. Sam marked up the map with places that
It was just the three of us Sam, a friend of mine from the program, Dylan, a friend of his who I didn’t know nearly as well, and I. Still it was often hard to make decisions and we would often encounter situations like “well I don’t have any preference about what we do, I just want to see as much as we can since we’re only going to be here two days.”
But although that aspect of the trip was stressful we still managed to find some interesting things to do. On our second day (our one full day in Santiago) we climbed a cerro (like a hill) that had at its peak a sanctuary dedicated to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (my word processor just capitalized that phrase automatically so apparently it’s a pretty important dogma). Although I don’t in the slightest believe in the notion of asexual human reproduction in the time before in vitro I found the place to be very moving. First of all I like the idea of shrines on top of mountains—it’s something that’s very common in Japan that really appealed to me there as well. There they have Shinto shrines all over the place but they’re always in really remote old places on top of mountains with woods surrounding them. Even if down below is a relatively urban area the fact that the shrine is up in the mountains lends a more tranquil air to them than you would get in a church situated on a major street in a city. Also there is something to be said about the trouble of reaching the shrine. Hiking or even just driving up forever, makes arriving at the shrine that much more meaningful and important. And it makes them more important as places.
Unlike Shinto, which you can only practice in Japan because of the place-specificity of these shrines, Christianity is a very universal religion that you can practice just about anywhere—just bring your rosary and your bible. Mountains are purely optional. This was the approach my dad took to his Catholicism, practicing it wherever was convenient, going to whatever church he happened to be in the same country as he was. As for me, I’ve always been really attached to places, and I stopped being Catholic the day we stopped going to the same church every Sunday and started this business of migrating, going to whatever church fit our schedule just to fulfill the obligation. That completely killed it for me. I like my places to have meaning particularly my holy ones. Thus the notion of having shrines up on mountains, the “this is our lady of Cerro San Cristobal because that’s where she is” notion appeals to me quite a bit.
They had cremations up there too, next to a trio of statues of Jesus on the cross and Mary and someone else (probably the other Mary) looking on. I liked that. If you’re going to cry about something while staring at a statue, that statue ought to be a depiction of a situation at least as wretched as what you’re crying about. Plus I know dad would love to spend the rest of his life up on the top of a mountain, so the notion of keeping cremation boxes up there sat well with me as well.
The other highlight of Santiago, for me anyway was going to see Pablo Neruda’s house. Pablo Neruda actually had three houses (we saw two of them in Chile!) one on Isla Negra, one in Valparaiso and one in Santiago. They’ve all been kept up and turned into Museums by the Fundación Pablo Neruda, and our last day in Santiago we got to visit his house there. What was probably most impressive was the amount of art he had in there! It helps that he was friends with a lot of artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, some of whom made pieces specifically for him. He had one piece made for him that depicted his then-mistress-later-wife Mathilde with two faces, with the face of Neruda hidden in her hair. This was supposed to represent the double life that Mathilde was living as her lover Neruda was married at the time. Nice gift.
Places were pretty important to Neruda as well, and he designed the house (or rather had it designed for him) with the idea of it resembling the interior of a boat, since the sea had always fascinated him. This too was interesting to see in the architecture of the place, which I’m sure would have interested my brother and aspiring architect Marco.
I also enjoyed the place because it reminded me of a contradiction of mine—how much I liked Neruda and how little of his poetry I had read. This is to say, that I know a lot about him, his life, his politics, when he wrote most of the books that he wrote, I’ve written literature papers about him in Spanish and yet I’ve read relatively few of his poems. When you consider he’s written several dozen books and I own one and am really familiar with only about a half dozen of his poems, I find that sort of shameful. I suppose that this is not so uncommon—there are many poets who are very well known but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s read all of the poems of well-known poets like Borges, Hughes, Eliot and Whitman (poets whose poems—the couple I have read—I have liked).
It’s a bit like the ipod culture we’ve created around music. We download that one famous Stones song we like, along with the half dozen Beatles songs we’re fond of and that tune we just heard on the radio that we buy on itunes and throw onto our “gym mix”. We don’t listen to albums anymore, we rarely sit down and listen through the album that a group of musicians put together and read through the liner notes and try to decipher the lyrics. A lot of that has to do with the time we have available to listen to music. A lot of it’s a matter of convenience or a function of the amount of music we’re able to store at one time on the devices on which we listen to music. But I think we miss something there.
Thinking some of these things while walking around the museum, I resolved to pick up a small book of Neruda’s poetry. Not three books that I’d never finish (a common tendency of mine) but just one that was digestible, something I could pick up, page through and finish reading in a few days, and then go back to my favorites, or after looking up some key words. I wanted to read a book of his poetry the way he’d originally put it together, the way it was originally published. So I bought Odas Elementales (“Elemental” or “basic” odes) a little of poems he wrote about simple things, written to such things his socks, artichoke, onion, the city of Valparaiso and the poet Cesar Vallejo.
That was another thing you could tell about his house, he really liked things—art, photos, old postcards, statues, glass bottles, playing cards—and clearly used them as inspiration. This is something else I dig about him as a poet, and it’s something that resonates with me. I wear my dad’s watch every day even though its battery is dead, not to keep time, but to remember times. I carry my little brother’s Swiss army knife for security not because it’s going to be remotely useful in defending myself (it wasn’t—more on that later) but because of the way it makes me feel. Under my futon at home I still keep the box I’ve had since high school, that’s full of little things that have meaning for me.
Neruda’s other house was in Valparaiso and as it so happened, we went there too (we managed to hit two of his houses in one trip). Valparaiso is very different from Santiago and I liked it. It was different in a very obvious and visual way—altitude. The whole city, or at least the residential part, was built on the hills that descended down to the ocean and as a result the whole city was very vertical. Climbing up to our hostel, dragging my luggage whose wheels were useless on the stairs that crisscrossed the city, this difference was apparent right away. But despite the difficulties, I loved it.
In place of barrios (“neighborhoods”) as they’re called in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Valparaiso’s neighborhoods are called cerros (literally “hills”). As in “yeah my friend lives over on San Tomas hill and my girlfriend lives down on hill Los Heroes”. And it’s beautiful. The hills force the architecture to be much more creative as houses are built up and down the hills and there are stairs that go down to the houses in between hills, and stairs that go between hills so that nothing is uniform and boring and routes to get places are vastly different for a car and a pedestrian. And there’s art everywhere. Besides the natural art of things growing in between the hills and parts of streets being totally abandoned to nature, there are murals on so many of the walls and the vertical nature of the city means that many of the walls that house these murals are enormous. Then there are art galleries all over the place particularly in the area around all the hostels (a tactical decision to be sure). I kept thinking of Marco there and how he’d like it.
The last day we spent most of our day in Viña del Mar, the neighboring town of Valparaiso with magnificent beaches on the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever swam in the sea before and I say this because I don’t recall ever experiencing the surprise of the salt content in the water I’d just gulped up accidentally. I loved it, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining the water was refreshing (by which I mean freezing). It was a warm day, but around sunset it started to get chilly, which is why some of those pictures I have up on facebook show me with a sweater on—it was not like this most of the day, but I did find it sort of funny to think that here I was sitting on the beach and I was wearing a sweater.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Fountain Drinks are a Trap
I´ve been lusting over popcorn for a couple of days now, probably the combination of gratuitious amounts of movie theatre advertising finally taking its toll, and the late Argentine dinner hour that´s meant I frequently go to the cinema hungry. Normally my thrift instinct prevents me from wasting money so close to dinner time (which is at 9:00pm), but I finally couldn´t resist. I splurged on a rather enormous bag of popcorn. I was sort of an autopilot when they asked ¨dulce¨ and just said yeah sure, the way you respond when they ask you if you want whipped cream on your coffee. I quickly discovered that I don´t at like sweet popcorn, and that the popcorn that had figured in my daydreams was definitely of the buttered and salted variety. Now I´m stuck with this enormous bag of sweet popcorn that I dropped twelve pesos on (for perspective, keep in mind that you can get a cheap large cheese pizza for ten--Ugi´s pizza has become my standard by which other prices are compared that and the Lo de Jose restuarant across the street from my apartment).
Yet despite the fact that I somehow convinced myself to drop an exorbitant amount of money on popcorn, and the stuff makes you thirsty--I couldn´t bring myself to buy a drink. Fountain drinks are such a scam. They trick you in buying them with the ¨combos¨ (all of them have drinks, and if you notice, every fast food place sells such combos) and all they do is pour water through some kind of sugary mixture and they´re able to sell that to you for like five pesos. Five pesos isn´t really bad but when you consider that you can get a glass of pretty decent wine for the same sum, it just sounds ridiculous.
So here I am sitting on this ridiculous, pepsi-themed (I kid you not), cushion feeling stupid and mindlessly munching on my sweet popcorn, and getting steadily thirstier. I realize that I won´t be able to text my host mom to tell her that I´m not coming home for dinner and this doesn´t make me feel any better. Finally I decide that I´m going to get a drink after all--from the bathroom sink downstairs. On my way to the bathroom I´m delighted to find a discarded sprite bottle, which I promptly fill with tap water. Hidden in my bag I march back upstairs with my free drink, my mood improved at having succeeded in sticking it to the man, and feeling considerably better about the nasty overpriced popcorn, which I left upstairs half-hoping that someone would steal it.
This is all going down at the 11th annual Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI) which is pronounced Bah-Fee-See because spanish-speakers like to say their abbreviations rather than spell them. Fun fact, the shorts are called Baficitos (I get a kick out of that).
The BAFICI succeeded in overcoming my normal reason for not going to see movies--movies show all month, whereas live (music) shows are one-night-only. Film festivals on the other hand, reintroduce that scarcity because they have like two hundred films in only a week and a half or so and you couldn´t possibly see them all even if you tried. So there´s a lot of pressure--you can´t see just one!
Since last friday I´ve seen 9 films and I´m probably going to see more before the week is out. That´s kind of crazy. But before you start getting really worried about all the money I´m spending I´d like to point out that three of the films I saw for free, and the other six only cost me a half dozen pesos because of the student discount. This means that I just saw 9 films for the equivalent of about ten dollars.
Here´s a list of the films and if I get around to it I´ll try to summarize them a little bit. I may come back and edit this post (so keep checking back!) or else I might refer to a film in a future post.
1. Um Amor du Perdiçao (A love of perdition)
2. L´intrus (The intruder)
3. The Odds of Recovery
4. KFZ - 1348
5. She Unfolds by Day
6. Ellos Son, Los Violadres (They are, The Rapists)
7. Defamation
8. 35 Rhums (Thirty five shots [like of an alcoholic beverage])
9. Elevator
I saw all but one of these films completely by myself, and all but one of them I knew nothing about before stepping into the theatre. The one film I didn´t see by myself I went with a complete stranger who I´d met in the theatre ten minutes before.
This sort of spontaneously going to movies by myself is something entirely new for me. It happened as a combination of my phone not working (for reasons that are still a mystery to me), my being tired of trying and failing to get people to do stuff with me, and my newfound discovery of the joys of being alone. This was actually part of why I wanted to study abroad, it was, I thought, an opportunity to spend a little bit more time alone with my thoughts, a little bit more time writing (you can be the judge as to whether I´ve succeeded in that respect or not).
Obviously there needs to be a balance of some kind, and it´s one that I´m still trying to strike. Recently my host mom came to talk to me, and said that she was concerned that I was spending too much time alone, that I needed to spend more time going out with friends, doing things with people my own age etc. She was worried that this was related to my father´s death, and thinks that it is a bad thing to keep everything inside and it´s better to talk with other people and things like that.
After spending what felt like an excessive amount of money on alcohol and overpriced clubs, I wasn´t convinced that what I needed to be doing more of was going out. I mentioned this and she said that I should go out more during the day, but it´s hard to go out during the day when the Porteño youth culture is to stay out till six in the morning in clubs. Of course you don´t need to go along with what everyone else is doing, but there again that brings me back to why I´m doing things by myself more often now...
It´s not that I actively try to do things on my own, more often it´s the case that I´m just interested in doing something and I´m tired of feeling like I have to depend on someone else going with me in order to do it. There were times in the past where I wouldn´t go to a show or a movie if I couldn´t find anyone else to go with me. It´s a very liberating thing to be able to say ¨so I´m going to this show saturday night, anyone who is interested is welcome to join me¨ the implication being ¨but I´m going anyway¨. At first when I got here I would get stressed out when I went out intending to meet people and couldn´t get a hold of people, or people didn´t show up to things I´d expected them to. I´ve found it´s much easier to just go expecting that you´ll be going alone, and being confident that you´ll enjoy yourself anyway.
Besides, all sorts of exciting spontaneous things can happen when you don´t having any expectations ahead of time. I was at the movie theatre the other day and had gotten there too late and had missed my movie (ten minutes late and they wouldn´t let me in). I was about to wait in line to get another ticket when a woman approached me and asked me if I wanted a ticket to see L´intrus, her son was supposed to come but he was watching Argentina play Bolivia or whoever it was. So I said, ¨Yeah, why not¨. I ended up having a great conversation with this woman in the line waiting for the movie and sitting in our seats before it started, talking about the relative merits of San Francisco, New York (porteños always seem to get a kick out of the fact that I´ve never been there) and Buenos Aires. This would not have happened if things had gone as planned, or if I had gone with another person. I saw several other films that I really enjoyed completely by accident as well and today, walking home from the movie theatre, I met a really cool gal who´s studying film at the FUC (the famous Buenos Aires film studies school) and chatted with her all the way home, just because we happened to have the same bus stop and didn´t feel like waiting for the bus.
I did think about what my host mom said though. Am I really so different here than I am in the States? After thinking about it for a while I´ve started to figure out why I so often end up by myself here (apart from the obvious phone difficulties). Back home, I do what I want to do, and I hang out with people who like doing what I do. And what I do for fun in my spare time is dance. Almost all of the people I hang out with at home, are friends from swing dancing. And you don´t usually have to hassle them too much to get them to go out dancing with you. In fact, the great advantage of dancing is that I don´t even need to let anyone know that I´m showing up. I know exactly what most of my friends are doing this weekend--they´re going to swing workshops and dancing to the Boilermakers Jazz band at the exchange that case is holding this weekend. If I took a plane back this weekend, I could go and join them, absolutely no coordination required, and I wouldn´t have to go to a club that played music I didn´t like or hang out with people who didn´t really want to dance with me.
But I´m not worried. I´m too cheap to go to a shrink like she suggested anyway, and I doubt that much of this is related to dad. This is not to say that his death doesn´t sneak its way into everything that I think about or do, but not in such dramatic and obvious ways as making me suddenly and completely socially maladjusted. And I have talked about it with other people in addition to sharing stuff with the whole world on this blog for pete´s sake.
Maybe I´ll follow her advice about making more guy friends though--if all your friends are girls you can´t really hang out with a lot of them at once without it getting really weird--being the only guy in a group is never a good thing. Once again this was not really a problem in the swing scene back home, and it probably won´t be in the swing scene here either, but for the other people in my life it might be helpful to have more guy friends. We´ll see how it all goes.
Yet despite the fact that I somehow convinced myself to drop an exorbitant amount of money on popcorn, and the stuff makes you thirsty--I couldn´t bring myself to buy a drink. Fountain drinks are such a scam. They trick you in buying them with the ¨combos¨ (all of them have drinks, and if you notice, every fast food place sells such combos) and all they do is pour water through some kind of sugary mixture and they´re able to sell that to you for like five pesos. Five pesos isn´t really bad but when you consider that you can get a glass of pretty decent wine for the same sum, it just sounds ridiculous.
So here I am sitting on this ridiculous, pepsi-themed (I kid you not), cushion feeling stupid and mindlessly munching on my sweet popcorn, and getting steadily thirstier. I realize that I won´t be able to text my host mom to tell her that I´m not coming home for dinner and this doesn´t make me feel any better. Finally I decide that I´m going to get a drink after all--from the bathroom sink downstairs. On my way to the bathroom I´m delighted to find a discarded sprite bottle, which I promptly fill with tap water. Hidden in my bag I march back upstairs with my free drink, my mood improved at having succeeded in sticking it to the man, and feeling considerably better about the nasty overpriced popcorn, which I left upstairs half-hoping that someone would steal it.
This is all going down at the 11th annual Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI) which is pronounced Bah-Fee-See because spanish-speakers like to say their abbreviations rather than spell them. Fun fact, the shorts are called Baficitos (I get a kick out of that).
The BAFICI succeeded in overcoming my normal reason for not going to see movies--movies show all month, whereas live (music) shows are one-night-only. Film festivals on the other hand, reintroduce that scarcity because they have like two hundred films in only a week and a half or so and you couldn´t possibly see them all even if you tried. So there´s a lot of pressure--you can´t see just one!
Since last friday I´ve seen 9 films and I´m probably going to see more before the week is out. That´s kind of crazy. But before you start getting really worried about all the money I´m spending I´d like to point out that three of the films I saw for free, and the other six only cost me a half dozen pesos because of the student discount. This means that I just saw 9 films for the equivalent of about ten dollars.
Here´s a list of the films and if I get around to it I´ll try to summarize them a little bit. I may come back and edit this post (so keep checking back!) or else I might refer to a film in a future post.
1. Um Amor du Perdiçao (A love of perdition)
2. L´intrus (The intruder)
3. The Odds of Recovery
4. KFZ - 1348
5. She Unfolds by Day
6. Ellos Son, Los Violadres (They are, The Rapists)
7. Defamation
8. 35 Rhums (Thirty five shots [like of an alcoholic beverage])
9. Elevator
I saw all but one of these films completely by myself, and all but one of them I knew nothing about before stepping into the theatre. The one film I didn´t see by myself I went with a complete stranger who I´d met in the theatre ten minutes before.
This sort of spontaneously going to movies by myself is something entirely new for me. It happened as a combination of my phone not working (for reasons that are still a mystery to me), my being tired of trying and failing to get people to do stuff with me, and my newfound discovery of the joys of being alone. This was actually part of why I wanted to study abroad, it was, I thought, an opportunity to spend a little bit more time alone with my thoughts, a little bit more time writing (you can be the judge as to whether I´ve succeeded in that respect or not).
Obviously there needs to be a balance of some kind, and it´s one that I´m still trying to strike. Recently my host mom came to talk to me, and said that she was concerned that I was spending too much time alone, that I needed to spend more time going out with friends, doing things with people my own age etc. She was worried that this was related to my father´s death, and thinks that it is a bad thing to keep everything inside and it´s better to talk with other people and things like that.
After spending what felt like an excessive amount of money on alcohol and overpriced clubs, I wasn´t convinced that what I needed to be doing more of was going out. I mentioned this and she said that I should go out more during the day, but it´s hard to go out during the day when the Porteño youth culture is to stay out till six in the morning in clubs. Of course you don´t need to go along with what everyone else is doing, but there again that brings me back to why I´m doing things by myself more often now...
It´s not that I actively try to do things on my own, more often it´s the case that I´m just interested in doing something and I´m tired of feeling like I have to depend on someone else going with me in order to do it. There were times in the past where I wouldn´t go to a show or a movie if I couldn´t find anyone else to go with me. It´s a very liberating thing to be able to say ¨so I´m going to this show saturday night, anyone who is interested is welcome to join me¨ the implication being ¨but I´m going anyway¨. At first when I got here I would get stressed out when I went out intending to meet people and couldn´t get a hold of people, or people didn´t show up to things I´d expected them to. I´ve found it´s much easier to just go expecting that you´ll be going alone, and being confident that you´ll enjoy yourself anyway.
Besides, all sorts of exciting spontaneous things can happen when you don´t having any expectations ahead of time. I was at the movie theatre the other day and had gotten there too late and had missed my movie (ten minutes late and they wouldn´t let me in). I was about to wait in line to get another ticket when a woman approached me and asked me if I wanted a ticket to see L´intrus, her son was supposed to come but he was watching Argentina play Bolivia or whoever it was. So I said, ¨Yeah, why not¨. I ended up having a great conversation with this woman in the line waiting for the movie and sitting in our seats before it started, talking about the relative merits of San Francisco, New York (porteños always seem to get a kick out of the fact that I´ve never been there) and Buenos Aires. This would not have happened if things had gone as planned, or if I had gone with another person. I saw several other films that I really enjoyed completely by accident as well and today, walking home from the movie theatre, I met a really cool gal who´s studying film at the FUC (the famous Buenos Aires film studies school) and chatted with her all the way home, just because we happened to have the same bus stop and didn´t feel like waiting for the bus.
I did think about what my host mom said though. Am I really so different here than I am in the States? After thinking about it for a while I´ve started to figure out why I so often end up by myself here (apart from the obvious phone difficulties). Back home, I do what I want to do, and I hang out with people who like doing what I do. And what I do for fun in my spare time is dance. Almost all of the people I hang out with at home, are friends from swing dancing. And you don´t usually have to hassle them too much to get them to go out dancing with you. In fact, the great advantage of dancing is that I don´t even need to let anyone know that I´m showing up. I know exactly what most of my friends are doing this weekend--they´re going to swing workshops and dancing to the Boilermakers Jazz band at the exchange that case is holding this weekend. If I took a plane back this weekend, I could go and join them, absolutely no coordination required, and I wouldn´t have to go to a club that played music I didn´t like or hang out with people who didn´t really want to dance with me.
But I´m not worried. I´m too cheap to go to a shrink like she suggested anyway, and I doubt that much of this is related to dad. This is not to say that his death doesn´t sneak its way into everything that I think about or do, but not in such dramatic and obvious ways as making me suddenly and completely socially maladjusted. And I have talked about it with other people in addition to sharing stuff with the whole world on this blog for pete´s sake.
Maybe I´ll follow her advice about making more guy friends though--if all your friends are girls you can´t really hang out with a lot of them at once without it getting really weird--being the only guy in a group is never a good thing. Once again this was not really a problem in the swing scene back home, and it probably won´t be in the swing scene here either, but for the other people in my life it might be helpful to have more guy friends. We´ll see how it all goes.
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