My Buenos Aires Apartment in Sickness and in Health

The temperature has been dropping in Buenos Aires, which has caused my host mother to complain loudly about the cold. She is also constantly telling me to put coats on when I'm already wearing three layers of clothing. I do this out of hard experience with Cleveland weather--you constantly end up going out with a huge coat and end up ruing the decision later in the day when it turns unexpectedly warm. It helps to be prepared.

Despite this, I've had a cold for a few weeks now (I always seem to have a cold). On Tuesday my host mom was concerned (she always is) and this time with reason because I was coming down with a fever. Late Tuesday night it was discovered that I had tonisilitis when we called a doctor to come by the house. The man looked me over, briefly asked me about symptoms looked in my mouth and said "yes, there it is. You have pus, that's the problem. Take antibiotics and get rest you should be fine by Monday". That was it. I paid him 100 pesos for that (which is covered by my insurance fortunately).

This was a bit of a mixed blessing. I had a test the next day which would need to be rescheduled but this now meant that I had plenty of time to work on all that studying when I was stuck at home. And indeed having a computer and internet access means that you are instantly connected to the rest of the world just from sitting on your bed. So why was I depressed after the first day?

For the same reason that my previous five-day weekend had been difficult for me. The same reason that I go to cafes to study even though there's nothing to stop me from studying in my room. I just don't do anything when I'm sitting around in my room and although I keep myself occupied (my host mom mentioned I could watch T.V. or a movie, and then there was the laptop) this was not what I was worried about. I feel unproductive and worthless when the most I can say for my day is that I checked my email a dozen times and played free cell. Meanwhile I have a to-do list a page long with a two items checked off.

At least on the long weekend I had the possibility of going out as something I knew that I perhaps ought to be doing. But here I was on doctor's orders to do nothing but sit around in bed (and sleep sometimes I suppose). The freedom from such obligation is at once oddly exhilerating (I have so much time to get things done!) and feels like an anvil hanging over my head. Because if I don't get anything done...

Kuky, my host mother, took care of me very well, brining me soup and tea to my room, and doing everything she could to ensure my rapid return to health (meanwhile she got herself vaccinated against the flu, afraid that she or her husband would catch it from me--though I didn't have it). Yet her vigilance, while nice, just contributed to my feelings of uselessness.

After a full day of mostly sitting on my computer playing games I decided I needed to get something accomplished and came up with what I think is a rather clever innovation. I took out a piece of paper and wrote "accomplishments" at the top, did 50 pushups and 100 situps and wrote this down on the page. I did some of the ankle exercises that I'm supposed to do for my injured ankle and wrote that down as well. I wrote a blog entry and added that to the list (it was something I was meaning to write about for a while). I wrote a poem and wrote that down as well. I did more pushups and every time I did it felt good to be able to say that I was accomplishing something more in my day (I couldn't leave and go to the gym for fear of affecting people but I was already feeling fine by this point). I figured out that it's much easier to get things done when you're looking at the day as a clean slate than as already filled up with all the things you didn't do yesterday. You're not really going to forget those things, and if you do you can look at the the old list. But just staring a huge to-do list and contemplating the seeming impossibility at chipping away at it seems to be a bit too daunting. I usually try to do something unrelated so that I don't have to think about it.

On my last set of push ups I started thinking, "why am I doing this". I don't know if arm strength is really something that's going to benefit me in any significant way at this point in my life (I don't really play any sport that depends heavily on arm strength). I even questioned the whole purpose of keeping one's body in good shape in the first place--my dad worked out all the time and he died at 54 of a heart attack. There's a certain thrilling romanticism about it, fighting the inevitable, trying to strengthen bodies that are nonetheless steadily and inexorably moving towards collapse.

For those unfamiliar with the second law of thermodynamics, it states that the universe is steadily progressing towards entropy, because heat flows from hot things to cold things, things naturally progress towards disorder and what's called entropy increases. It's easier to break things than put them back together (anyone who' s been frustrated by broken dishes knows what I'm talking about). Yet somehow we keep trying to make things, keep trying to progress and grow things, even though it seems all too easy for everything to fall apart. You spend your whole adult life, twenty years! building your career, your family, stressing about the future, saving for your retirement, dreaming of living someplace more tranquil where there's mountains, just to die in your office chair at 54.

Think about herrings. David Gessner writes about them in his book A wild Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod. The poor bastards swim upstream, up waterfalls even, facing bears, birds and all manner of other predators and obstacles just to make it to the place they were born so they can spawn. And die.

Yet we need to do work, we can't just sit around playing games, masturbating our time away. We night to fight the current in some kind of way, which is why I can't stand vacation, I can stand staying at home even though I enjoy it. Van Gogh wrote it well in his journals when he said: "Just then I feel what work is to me, how it gives tone to life, apart from approval or disapproval; and on days that would otherwise make me melancholy, one is glad to have an aim." [My italics]

Gessner writes about how like the herring, we have hordes of writers in our society today, swimming out of creative writing and MFA programs with the aim of publishing, and we know that there just isn't enough demand for writing for them all to get published. Like the doomed fish many of them will not make it. I'd love to be published someday and maybe that's part of the appeal of hitting the "publish post" button at the bottom of my screen everytime I write a blog post. I'm casting my words out into the world. And in all probability the only people reading are my family and maybe a few of my friends, so that there isn't any real need to generalize my language, that I could probably refer to people by their first names without anyone wondering who Natalia and Marco (my siblings) are in the context of my story. But the aim of publication (even in a blog) and the desire to create something lasting (of any kind) are important to me and they're what get me up in the morning.

Gessner offers this advice which I have taken to heart "Don't worry too much about the consequences...just keep throwing yourself into things. And think like a herring."

That's what I try to do. So now, ironically after a week of bad health, I feel better than ever.