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.