Late Night Hobo Blues

My Baby Sister

2010-10-20T22:40:00.001-07:00

My mother has a story she likes to relate about a peculiar interaction I had as a young boy. Another kid approached me (at church of all places) and informed me that his big brother could beat me up. I am told that I responded unfazed, I responded: "well, I can take care of my little sister all by myself". How do you respond to that?

It was not at all obvious to my young Catholic friend that caring for family was an impressive feat, and that's telling. Although it's a silly story it reflects pretty well our modern model for masculinity, which seems to vacillate somewhere between caricature and near non-existence. The standard is either an exaggerated gun-toting action hero or else the bar is set so low that its definition is someone who can appropriately appreciate football and beer. In other words, our model for masculinity is that of an adolescent. And yet at some point we expect men to grow up and become "domesticated" and are somehow surprised when they fail to meet our expectations.

For someone stepping into the workplace and economic independence without my dad as a model, this void is particularly disappointing. There has been an attempt on the part of some to create a kind of alternative model. The Art of Manliness a blog I follow is an attempt to get back to a different conception of masculinity, relating more to personal strength and responsibility than swagger and bravado. The internet can be helpful in helping me find out what I have to learn on my own, from teaching myself to cook, jump a car and invest my money, to the bigger question of how to negotiate my own way towards manhood.

I differ from the standard American 22 year old pretty substantially to begin with. I live in my widowed mother's house with my two siblings, one in college and the other in high school. I have a job and pay my mom a little bit of money to help pay for utilities and I cook dinner most days. We have a "family meeting" every week to discuss who is responsible for various tasks that need doing, like putting out clothes for Easter Seals or removing that fallen tree from our backyard.

In the United States it isn't a widely accepted practice for an adult to live with his family during the period after graduating high school and before getting married. But in the developing world, like my father's side of the family in Guatemala, expectations are very different. Children very rarely move out of their parents' house before they are married and since universities tend to be clustered in the same urban centers as the demographics lucky enough to attend them, college kids tend to commute from home; my dad and I commuting to Case together was an oddity in the US, but is identical to how my cousins got to college in Guatemala City.

So while my family doesn't quite fit with the norm, we try to carve out some kind of system that functions and I try my best to be useful. With my dad gone, I have tried to take on some of the responsibilities associated with being, as the cliché goes, the "man of the house"…with mixed results. It can be difficult at times to straddle the lines between being a mature older brother and a support to my mother. There are challenges and I don't always know whether I am doing the right thing. But I try. Maybe I can't quite take care of my baby sister (who can almost drink legally) "all by myself" but I feel proud of pitching in how I can to support the people I love. Taking care of your own family is way manlier than beating up someone else's.

A Daily Spoonful of Strong Kicking Medicine

2010-10-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

Sitting around in the studios WRUW, I stumbled across this message from jazz drummer Peeter Uuskyla. It comes from the liner notes of the album medicina by the swedish trio of Peter Brotzmann, Friis Nielsen and Uuskyla. Even if you don't like free jazz (and not many people do) I think a lot of people can relate to what he says about music, the act of creation and life. I've produced it here in its entirety:

At work, the everyday job to make the living, ones daily bread. Thinking of breaking the chain of doing this samething. How bored do you have to be? How much money will you get for all these hours, days and years you are selling off from your lifetime? Will be there enough for your kids and the ones you love? Will there ever be enough and who will not get enough? Why must it be boring to earn ones bread? Must it always be boring? So if it's not going to be boring all the time, you have to shorten the boring time and use it as a reference point when defining the good time. To make the good times happen at least once a day, you have to get in touch daily with your dreams and visions. [bold mine]

Music comes first. The sound, the noise, shaped into form while letting it pass your body. It's difficult to keep and own the music, it's not like a piece of art. Maybe you can borrow it for a short while. You can anyway never just buy it and keep it for yourself. It's abstract and untouchable and therefore difficult to dissect. This music is never perfect or complete. It is always in progress. You can change it's direction, like your path in life. It's give and take. You must put in some of whatever you have, leave your fingerprints ringing, loud and clear. You are able to change the over-all sound by the way you are adding your own sound. Like painting and writing, but on the run, you never go backwards for correction. A living music is more ritualistic than a package of rehearsals and concerts. It continues day after day, changing slowly or fast, like life. It sounds now, in this moment, every day, living only once you have to act in every now situation. There is not too much time to talk about it while you better play it, guts out, music as life security, as a daily spoonful of strong kicking medicine.

And you may maybe be able to handle reality.

I'm Gonna be Rich

2010-10-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Well, not for a while...

While I'm spending the year as an AmeriCorps volunteer, I'm being paid just enough to cover, bare expenses.The Corporation for National Community Service, which pays my salary, bases our pay on the federal poverty level for the state in which we serve...which is not much.

Clearly I'm not in this for the money.

A friend and I were once having a discussion about our careers and I mentioned that I'd be interested in doing something different and interesting, even if I didn't make a lot of money doing it, arguing that being young is the best time in my life to not be making very much money. In econ-speak (because I'm a big dork) the "opportunity cost" of doing something like joining the peace corps is much lower when the amount of money you'd be making in anything else is less.

My friend replied by saying that "this is the main difference between you and me. I don't think about things in those terms". Asking what she meant, she explained that she didn't equate things in life in terms of money. Other things are more important.

Now I feel that the distinction is really a suckers choice: at its core money is just one abstract measure of the choices you have available, both how many and what kind. Trying to make the most of your resources does not need to be about some heartless pursuit of wealth for its own sake, but can rather be about getting what you want out of life. It's not money I care about. I care about my family, food, music, a good education. All of these require resources to sustain them somewhere along the line

That's also the philosophy of blogger Ramit Sethi, whose book I will Teach you to be Rich I discovered through a friend and who maintains a blog of the same name. He writes about personal finance and one of his core philosophies is one that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me; that money isn't an end in and of itself. Personal finance should not be about bragging about the hot stocks in your portfolio, but about helping you get the things you want out of life, whether it's saving up for an education or being able to retire someday and travel the world. For most people, money isn't really something that they want to spend energy caring about--as Sethi puts it, getting your personal finances under control allows you to worry about more important things in your life.

I bought Ramit's book and started on the six-week plan for managing my finances (such as they are), which isn't nearly as corny as it sounds like it is. As I figure out what I'm doing I'm learning some stuff and some of it I'm finding kind of interesting.

Ok. So maybe I am treating financial knowledge as an end unto itself. Maybe though, if I share useful things I find and my own experiences my friends and neighbors can benefit in some way. That would be rich (now that is corny).

No garlic, no regrets

2010-09-22T23:45:00.000-07:00

Thursday is John Coltrane’s birthday, so this week’s show featured some of his music; both some mainstream appearances as well as some of his more experimental stuff, including a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King. In addition there was some South African jazz and Nigerian Afro-beat coming from the station’s new shelf, and music from Latin America, from Colombia to Argentina. As always you can listen to this week’s show streaming online here until the next show goes up, or you can download it here by right clicking the 56k link.

Last week in addition to Electronica and Jewish Jazz, the show featured local musicians Carlos Jones and Blue Lunch, off of a set of recordings from the Crooked River Groove record label, a label run out of Cleveland’s own Tri-C. The two I played on the show are longtime favorites of mine, groups I’ve gone out to see more than once.

Carlos Jones along with a number of other area musicians played the garlic festival at Shaker Square a couple weeks ago. Although the event sounded great, and was really close to where I live I hadn’t intended to go to the show, because I was busy that day. Along with my siblings I’d planned to help my mom clean out the basement with the ultimate goal of making the house marketable in case she ever wants to sell it. I was taking a break to make dinner and had to stop at Dave’s Market to pick up some ground beef and I heard the festival music on the way there. I’m not sure which of the groups it was, but I really liked it. I called back home, while I was shopping to see if anyone wanted to go see the show, but there wasn’t any great interest, so I just went home and made dinner.

I should say, by way of explanation that it’s a rather unique living arrangement I currently find myself in. I live with my siblings and my mother in the same house I grew up in. I’m doing a service year through AmeriCorps and I use part of my salary to defray some household expenses. I also cook most of the meals and organize weekly meetings so that our little clan can get together to discuss ways we can contribute to the success of the household.

So basically, the reason I couldn’t go to the concert at the square was my own doing. I couldn’t very well be resentful about it because it was my own idea. It’s a very different position than I was able to have during the summer when I was filling my days looking for work, and trying to be productive. At that time I felt lousy about not going out and being social the way I had in college. Not being able to go to the concert at the square though was entirely the result of deliberate choices I had made to try to help my family and my widowed mother get through a hard time.

It’s incredible what a difference it can make in your outlook if you view the things you do as the result of your choices and the things you don’t do as sacrifices that you choose to make for a worthy cause. For me, it’s the difference between feeling resentful at being “stuck” with my family and appreciating them while being grateful that I can make a difference.

world electronic and jewish jazz

2010-09-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

(This is my first attempt to blog about music as a companion to the show. Bear with me and let me know what you think)

This week's show (audio available here with the complete playlist here) featured a lot of new music. We have a shelf in the on-air studio with all of the music the station has acquired in the past month or so--it's fun to check out new music and it's great to have stuff to play within arm's reach. On the online playlist you can tell which songs came from that shelf because they have a little asterisk next to the artist's name. The entire first half hour I played from a single CD, an album put out periodically by Fabric, a london nightclub that also has their own record label where they release live mixes by the guest DJs. The rest of the hour was taken up by other electronica ranging from Thievery Corporation to a compilation of South African house music. Some interesting stuff.

This week I also played a number of artists from the Tzadik record label, in particular the "Radical Jewish Culture" recordings. The label, started by experimental musician and jazz saxophonist John Zorn, seeks to advance experimental and avant garde music, and with "Radical Jewish Culture" to advance a kind of new Jewish music. You can read more about what he means by that on his website, but the results are definitely some interesting stuff.

Last week I played music by Balkan Beat Box, a group recommended to me by my brother's girlfriend during a long drive home from a renaissance festival (other, long story). I checked them out and found out that the group, formed by New Yorkers with pretty extensive ties to Israel, now has their own record label: JDub, where they put out records by Jewish artists spanning a whole range of genres, from reggae to indie-rock. In that same conversation I'd mentioned John Zorn so I decided I'd look more into all the new Jewish music he was putting out on Tzadik. I wasn't dissapointed.

If you're interested in hearing the show you can listen in live from 5 to 7am Wednesdays and can catch anything you've missed online here for one week after the show airs (or save the mp3 and listen whenever you want).

I'm a hypocrite

2010-09-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

Every time I start writing again (which seems to happen with embarrassing frequency for me) I feel this strange compulsion to write first about writing itself, something I both enjoy and philosophically oppose. Writing written about writing, always seems to present the danger of becoming just naval gazing form of expression possible. Writing, I believe, ought to be a way of getting out of yourself and connecting with others

And yet here I am.

Part of it is an act of justification. I feel I must justify that writing a post is more than just satisfying a strange kind of vanity. Ultimately wanting to speak has to be matched with people receptive to being spoken to. Like the poet Billy Collins, I don't believe in writing "just for yourself" being sufficiently worthwhile, though it can be therapeutic. Like doing a radio show, if there's no listeners, there's no point. The problem is that, as with radio, you don't always know who your listeners are and you just have to hope that the stuff you dig might matter to other people too.

Presumably it's the possibility for connection that propels writing in the first place and helps take it from being self-indulgent to being useful in some way. Just as no one starts a band in their basement expecting it will stay there I don't go to the radio station each week with the expectation that I'm the only one listening. If I'm gonna bother writing something I want real people to read it, not just imaginary future publishers.

That's why blogs are great. You can do it without the pretension that can come with harboring dreams of literary fame that I might have had taking creative writing classes in school.

Several months ago, a friend wrote me about how she had been touched by something I had written about my late dad. I sometimes question the merit of writing about deeply personal subjects, this blog having started as a travel journal, it wasn't something I was prepared for. When I started writing about it, I wasn't sure if anyone would care. But the way I figure it, if even one person is touched by something I write, then that is sufficient justification to sit down every week to do something I love.

The radio show that shares this blogs' name Late Night Hobo Blues (which doesn't really make sense for either one at this point...) started as a jazz and blues show and ended up somewhere very different. I've finally abandoned sticking to a theme or direction to dictate its content. And that's what I plan to do here as well.

Normally that sort of lack of direction bothers me, but I think for now it's good. I'll just keep looking around and seeing what I can find and then on Wednesdays I'll show you what I've found.

Walking Around "Barefoot"

2010-06-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

Blogger is increasingly coming up with new ways to "monetize" the blogging experience, allowing you to make money by putting up ads or amazon.com links. I'm a little leery of the idea, perhaps because I'm still wedded to the idea of artistic expression for its own sake, uncorrupted by commercialism--or something like that. It's hard not too, typing this post as I do in a non-commercial radio station.

But I have to say something about a recent purchase of mine: the Vibram Five Fingers.

I'm not going to use this space to wax poetic about the merits of barefoot shoes and how they let you feel connected with the earth man. Anyway the company's website already does that pretty well. I am going to tell a little story.

Since I got the shoes, I've tried to regularly go on short jogs around my neighborhood in order to get my feet used to running in a different way, and get used to the "shoes". On one such occasion I went out to the small park near my house in an effort to find more grass to run on. This park was apparently one of the reasons my parents decided to live where we live. "We'll be right next to a park! We can go running there whenever we want!" This didn't turn out happening very much...

I myself had not been back to this park in quite a while. One particularly memorable occasion sticks out though, as it did when I was finishing up my jog. A long time ago my girlfriend at the time and I picknicked, by the bank of the stream that runs through this park, and thinking of this I stopped there to sit for a while after my jog. My memory of that day is undoubtedly effected to the events that followed it, in the way that so many memories are changed by future events. Still, I remember it as one of my happiest experiences. We'd ridden bikes from where she lived down to the park and brought along some wine and cheese. It was the sense of peace and freedom that I remember most. I had the sort of feeling that makes one feel like this could go on forever, like there could be many other days like this one.

She had at one time told me about walking up and down streams out in the metroparks, barefoot, in the summer when it's really hot. She suggested we do this together when the summer came, and it was something I looked forward to as the spring went on.

Due to an added benefit of my "shoes" allowing me to go sockless, I decided to wade into the stream, which came up to my ankles. I walked upstream, with a sort of childlike sense of wonder at having gained access to a part of my home that had always been here, but just slightly out of reach. It's so easy and yet it's often the easy things that get put off indefinitely. It's a shame, because you don't always get another shot at it.

Remembering Birthdays

2010-06-01T00:27:00.000-07:00

I've never remembered his birthday. Perhaps its because other family members would always remember before I would, so that I didn't have to, the way programming numbers into my phone prevents me from remembering even my best friends' cell phone numbers. Or the way that I would never take my bike in for service because dad would always take it in before I got around to it, and then lecture me about being irresponsible...

My dad was unassuming in that way--he did a lot of things without asserting his right to recognition for them at first. So perhaps it fits that he wouldn't push the issue of his birthday.

There is also the proximity to my parents' anniversary. Their anniversary is only a few days before his birthday, and this year, as last year when I wasn't here, it would be a difficult one for my mom. Something had to be done. And I realized then, that without any effort of my own, the issue would not be taken care of. Dad quite literally, wouldn't be able to take care of it for me.

So I picked her up some flowers. A small gesture, but one that made a difference.

I've always been a fan of the aphorism "it's the thought that counts" and with it the implicit belief that the important things in life are what you think and feel towards things. I've thought that the strength of a writer has to do with the originality of his ideas and that the packaging of those ideas was secondary, a means to an end. It is for this reason forgetting my dad's birthday worries me--I wonder what it suggests about my feeling towards him, our relationship.

But much of the time it is what you do that is really more important. Good intentions will only get you so far.

Funerals are thick with this. People are quick to promise that they will do "anything" for you, and that you have but to ask. But as it happens, people who are mourning generally have no idea what they want or need and lack the initiative to ask for it. It can at times be even more intimidating to have to remember to call these people who have offered their help, as though you owe it to them.

A friend just lost her stepdad the same week as my dad's birthday. Every time someone dies now, I feel as though I will know what to say, armed with my increased intimacy with death. But the words still aren't there, and the feelings are still muddled. It's a difficult thing for everyone. It is for things like this when deliberateness is important. When simply doing things even if they are the wrong things, is the best way to help someone. By putting a reminder on your calendar to do what needs to be done, to bring the flowers or the wine, regardless of whether you remembered the date.

Beginning Again

2010-05-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday May 17th I finally got the degree I've been working four years to get, within 24 hours I had my first and last day on the job and two days later one of my best friends came back for a brief stay in Cleveland before moving to Mexico. It's been quite a week!

In my head I was aware of the importance of graduating, but last Sunday I found it difficult to make the ritual matter to me. It seemed to feel anticlimactic and I thought it might be because I had other things on my mind. During the diploma awards ceremony I found out why as a classmate from high school had an embrace from his dad (a case faculty) before receiving his diploma. I realized that that would have been me, if things were different, and I felt what I was missing like a blow. It's strange to be at the same event with thousands of other people and to feel it so differently. At a funeral you cry with many other mourners, but on all the other days, you are alone, feeling silly making a mess of yourself while everyone is cheering. I think the difficulty with reconciling my reactions to those around me, might account for some of my difficulty getting back with old friends since I've been back.

But I am a new person now, as our president, wearing her CWRU seal chain, bestowed our degrees upon us "by the power vested in me..." I now pronounce you "bachelor of arts" and as Katie Couric, our graduation speaker, sent us off into the world to do good, and pursue our dreams. Or something like that. I'm just trying to start from where I am.

On Monday that meant going into work at 1pm, where I began my job as a community organizer. I was sent out into the fields of suburbia to gather signatures and money. I practiced my pitch a half dozen times, shadowed an experienced canvasser, and then was tasked with going out on my own and coming back with $40 in donations. After knocking on thirty doors and asking several people for a new pen after mine ran out of ink, I finished with $13 in cash and some dinner that a nice older lady had given me. I rode back to the office, talked to the woman in charge of the field staff and just like that I was out of a job.

It's hard to believe it has only been a week since then. I've been spending most of my time with a good friend who is back in town for the week, and this has in part allowed me to put off thinking about the fact that, for the time being, my life isn't really going anywhere. It's a scary thought to realize that for the first time in my life, there is nothing that has to happen next. If I do nothing, then nothing happens.

I started reading a book my mother gave me (she's reading it herself) called The Zen of Making a Living by Laurence Boldt. The author talks about the need to find the intersection of your talents and the needs of the world, and to take direction from there. In my head I knew I had a direction that felt right to me, but it wasn't until talking to my mother about the book that I realized how little I had admitted what my goal was. Even to myself. It's actually a pretty scary thing to admit what your goals are before you've attained the means to achieve them.

I want to do economic development research in Latin America. This is unfortunately, at odds with my desire to stay in Cleveland and avoid the jarring that I got in 2009 from being away from my family and everything I knew for so long.

But no matter what, reaching my goals is going to take some time, and I'm not leaving anytime soon. My job search was originally focused on what I was going to do until I left, but maybe that doesn't make as much sense now. It seems that I ought to focus on getting there, before I worry about filling the time. There are so many aspects of my life I've neglected over the past few months--friends, exercise, writing--hopefully, I can use this time to put my life together while I plan my next move.

Jazz and paying attention

2010-03-10T00:23:00.000-08:00

Jazz

I saw a jazz performance last night with a friend, over at the Barking Spider in University Circle. We had been in the same place about a year and a half earlier to see the same gig and she remarked that she didn't recognize some of the players. That is because it's a monthly gig organized by Cleveland Sax player Ernie Krivda to give some of his Tri-C Jazz students a chance to show their stuff playing out in a bar the way jazz is supposed to be. Many of the players were different and I only recognized a few faces.

But the feeling of sitting down to watch music made on the spot right in front of you is the same. The spider's the same place I first saw live modern jazz, with this same Sax player leading a gig I've gotten damn near religious about. It's a small place, and the musicians outnumber the patrons, along with a couple of their friends and George Foley, a pianist who's another regular at the spider, who walks in part way into the second set. I first came alone when I heard the music from outside in the parking lot of the coffee shop next door where I had been studying. I've returned what must be almost a dozen times by now.

Since that first time I've always loved watching them play because I can sit real close and see what everyone is doing, and can shift my attention from one instrument to another and try to pick it out as I watch it played. Last night the guitar had a solo which hit me with an unexpected memory. As soon as he started I was brought back to the Buenos Aires subway station where a jazz guitarrist named Elio Geraldi used to play for change, or, more likely, to get his name out (musicians are a dime a dozen in Buenos Aires and it helps to distinguish yourself in some way). I used to sit there underground and watch him play solos over a backing track of rhythm guitars. In an almost indescribable way it pulls you out of the station and simultaneously carves you right into it so that the sound and the place and the trains and the people are stuck together and so that even now they come all packaged together in my memory.

It seems incredible to me sometimes how infrequently I think about my time in Argentina, that entire year I spent in a different world--it just seems to have nothing to do with my life now. When I do, I'm sad to say that it's often been in the context of regret over not having as many courses that would be useful for my degree, for the math classes I didn't take, or for the independence I never quite felt I had. It's not ideal, but it's just hard to relate those experiences to my present reality.

But more than anything I think it's a symptom of, ironically, not being truly present in my life and not paying attention enough to what is going on. I feel that I've been trapped in a kind of several month long myopia, that I haven't been able to sufficiently back away from and pay attention to things. It may seem paradoxical, to say I've had my nose to the grindstone too much to pay attention to anything, but it's true--when you see the world through the microscope of assignments, tests and job interviews, you can fail to see the big picture.

Sometimes you actually have to back off a little bit and allow things to quiet down. My choir director back in high school told us that if you really want to sound impressive and make the audience listen to you, you should be quiet, sing so that you're almost whispering, then you'll have them so that when you want to get louder it will be captivating. Bass solos, with their lower frequencies and quieter volumes are too often tuned out, but I like to lean in even more and catch what's going on underneath else everything else in the ensemble, the heartbeat that is always there.

In the past year my mother has taken up meditation to help deal with the many stresses in her life. They tell you to let go of thoughts and emotions by just focusing on your breathing, or your heartbeat. In so doing, you can gain access to states of consciousness that would not have been possible otherwise. I don't practice it, but I know that that's true nonetheless. If you don't believe me, go see some live jazz, watch and listen for that acoustic bass.

A Year

2009-12-28T01:01:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

"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...

2009-11-06T16:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

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.

My Buenos Aires Apartment in Sickness and in Health

2009-06-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Therapy

2009-05-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

"Writing is my therapy"

I wrote these words about five years ago for a high school creative writing class, in a fit of caffeine and sleep-deprived stream of consciousness writing. It seemed to express well at the time the ability of writing to serve as an outlet for my thoughts, feelings and relationship angst.

As melodramatic as that pronouncement was back then it actually seems accurate now, though I suppose now I'd elect for something less emphatic "I find writing to be therapeutic". In addition to my sparse additions to this blog I've been writing a lot more that hasn't made it here. I've nearly filled the notebook I brought with me, a gift from an old friend and teacher, and I've just started to work on filling a smaller notebook with poetry.

There's a kind of satisfaction involved with watching the blank white pages get filled with words, a sort of constructive instinct, the kind of satisfaction that I imagine you get from
tending a garden, or perhaps cooking. The comparison with therapy is also comforting from a pragmatic standpoint; even if my writing isn't read by anyone other than myself at least it's cheaper than a therapist.

Since I arrived here in Argentina and in light of my father's recent death, seeking "professional help" is something that's been suggested to me by my host mom here, something I've talked about with my mother back home and was brought up by a friend of mine (who also happens to be a therapist). So I thought about it. And it's something that I have mixed feelings about...

Among my people, you don't go and "see somebody" when you have a problem, you just deal with it. The "people" I refer to are those hardened Midwestern folks of Teutonic and Northern-European descent, who have lost jobs to vanishing industries, lived through tornadoes and snowstorms, and lost husbands and sons before their time. In other words, my Grandmother.

Garrison Keeler describes us as "people who disapprove of any sort of weakness in the face of cold weather. We're Northern European stock and we're meant to be stoics and you're meant to pick up your feet and get out there and do what needs to be done, we don't tolerate weakness in the face of cold. Cold is not a personal problem, everybody else is as cold as you are so don't complain about it." I think the same can be said (although perhaps to a lesser extent) about another force of nature: death. In the aftermath you just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other and do what needs to be done, without asking or expecting help from anybody.

This was certainly true of my grandmother. Years ago, when her daughter, my mother, was just a a sophomore in college (about the same age as my sister is now) she lost her husband. When my mother asked her recently what she did after losing her husband she said "well I just had to get by--I was alone and I didn't have the help you have."

I have my own personal resistances to the idea of doing therapy. Talking about intimate thoughts and feelings with a therapist seems about as strange a practice as prostitution, to pay a stranger to do something that is usually reserved for close friends (and I do have to pay out of pocket, I recently found out that my insurance will not cover it). I'm not trying to put down therapists, (at least two of the people who have commented on this blog are therapists) it just seems odd to me that's all.

Sometimes for whatever reason your friends/family can't be burdened with listening to your problems as much as you need them listened to (and the world wide web can be less than receptive at times). Also my host mother has been trying to get me to go for a while. Finally my mom said that "your dad said that it helped him when he went into therapy 20 years ago". So I made an appointment with a woman that my program adviser suggested.

I'm hopeful. I'll let you know how it goes.

Reggae/Ska in Buenos Aires

2009-05-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

It's getting cold here in Buenos Aires, a realization that's made me feel a bit like a wuss because it get's so much colder in Cleveland during the fall/winter than it does here. I can't shake the feeling that the months of warm weather have made me soft.

This can present a problem when going out to clubs. Being the extremely frugal person that I am (some of my friends have less kind words to describe this trait) I abhore the idea of paying for something I don't have to. Four pesos (the equivalent of a little over a dollar american) for a coat check? No way, I could get a cup of coffee or half a pizza with that money! So when I went out on Friday night, dressed in layers, I checked my jacket, but I wore my sweatshirt over my shoulders through a long night of dancing.

Most of the foreign kids who come to stay in Buenos Aires go to boliches (nightclubs) that play music that they're familiar with--American hip hop and rock/pop tunes. While I like to be haughty and say that I'm more adventurous musically than my peers I still like to dance to music I'm familiar with. And in the states I get down to the skittering offbeats of ska, which is what I was after on Friday night when I went to see Dancing Mood and Aztecas Turpos.

But first a few words about ska. Most Americans who know what ska music is do not associate it with reggae, rocksteady and other jamaican musical styles, but with the sort of a American ska punk hybrid that became popular in the 1990's.

This song is one that received a lot of radio airplay back then and is the sort of thing that most Americans probably associate with ska.

There's also a scene for ska bands that play in style closer to that of the original jamaican bands like the Skatalites, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster, many of whom eventually started playing reggae.

In

Argentina

it seems that a lot more of the ska seems to be more associated with reggae, ska’s descendent in Jamaican popular music. And while there are bands that play in the American merging of ska and hardcore punk the show on Friday was more reggae.

I went with a group of kids from my program including my good friend Sam, who is a huge Bob Marley fan, and loves reggae from all over the world. When we walked in, Sam and I gave each other a knowing glance as the smell of weed smoke that's unavoidable at reggae shows washed over us. But as soon as the first band came up playing reggae fronted by a dreadlocked Argentine (I still can't get over that) we went nuts, and it was all uphill from there. The second band, Aztecas Tupro (I never found out the name of the first band) played a heavier, more rock oriented reggae sound, mixing it with some of the local rhythms Argentines are used to (like cumbia--more on that later I think).

This all went down in Teatro Colegiales an old theatre converted by The Roxy, an interantional bar/club organization, which in Buenos Aires brings in international acts as well as local ones like Friday night. The house DJs that played between sets impressed me with their ability to keep people dancing after the band stopped playing. Usually the sound manager throws on some music in between sets that has nothing to do with the music that the band was just playing. Yet this DJ managed to play music in a similar vein--and all music from Latin America that I had never heard before!--and keep people dancing until another form of entertainment interrupted our revelery.

This interruption came in the form of clowns. Certainly not something I'd ever seen happen in a nightclub or a rock club for that matter. I went to the bathroom in the middle of dancing, intending to come back right away and I was surprised to find that people were all crowded around the floor. As I came closer I saw men in brightly colored suits, outrageous hats and shoes juggling. I enjoyed the break from dancing as I was pretty tired by this point and I was really impressed; they were really good. It was also performed to music which added to it quite a bit. It reminded me of a similar change that my friend Jim Kogler enacted in the Case Juggling Club (he's the only one not wearing a T-shirt in this picture). He's also a swing dancer and so the idea of juggling to music appealed to him and he was able to quite successfully perform juggling routines in ways that fit the music that he had picked, something swing dancers would call "musicality". So the show was both entertaining and reminded me of home at the same time.

The headliner of the show was a horns-led big band called Dancing Mood. Dancing Mood plays in a style that's reminiscint of The Skatalites in their fusion of ska rhythms with the jazz convention of playing a theme, letting all of the instruments solo and then going back to the theme. It doesn't necessarily sound like a scheme that would inspire wild dancing from a crowd of people--in fact I'm not sure that it would in the United States--but this is Buenos Aires. As soon as the first song, The Skatalites' Police Woman, started up everyone was jumping, skanking, singing (even though it´s completely instrumental) and coliding into one another like there was no tomorrow. I eventually got too tired to endure more jumping and collisions, so I staggered up to the front where I could see the band better. And this was when I came to appreciate one of the great advantages of this kind of music, you can simultaneously enjoy it as music to chill out to, enjoy the soloing, or dance to it and go nuts. It's an odd combination, to have in the same room people smoking blunts and staring lazily ahead at the band, and people moshing as if it were punk band.

A friend of mine back in the States, upon my telling him that I'd gotten into ska music, told me that he didn't like the vocals, referring I suppose to the off-key singing bordering on yelling common to many ska punk bands.

I went to a dancing mood show before with an Argentine friend of mine, and I told her this combination of the ska and punk scenes in the U.S. and how the musical hybrid had developed and she was surprised ¨but ska is like, relaxing music. It´s got nothing to do with punk¨

In a way they’re both right.

This is one of the things that I like about ska, that it´s been able to be adapted to punk, as well as jazz (like Dancing Mood or the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble) and even electronica in the form of dub.

This kind of diversity can surprise people when they´re used to one thing and they get another. I think it´s a bit like taking someone who’s never heard of rock music and showing them a video of Chuck Berry next to another one of Iron Maiden. They wouldn’t believe you if you said that this was the same type of music.

The common denominator is that ska was and is dancing music (unlike rock which dropped dancing decades ago). Whether it’s the slower groovier beat of Roots ska or the frenetic pace of ska-punk, it’s all dancing music when done right. It means that you can find music that sounds different and offers you something new, but you still understand it because it has that familiar offbeat rhythm. Which is why when I went to the show in Niceto, I danced the night away to music that I still felt like I knew, even though it was very different from the ska bands that play in Cleveland. And it’s why when I walked out dripping, I was reminded of other nights of dancing the night away with my sister, my brother, with girlfriends and with friends. It´s a good way to explore new music here while still enjoying the music I love.

Dancing Mood playing their version of Dave Brubeck´s Take Five.

What Work Is

2009-05-09T03:59:00.000-07:00

Most people who know me are aware that I am a swing dancer. Since I started in college it´s given me a lot--my friends, my taste in music, my volunteer position as a college radio programmer, and my only college girlfriend. Over the past few months (it still amazes me that I can use that word in the plural) I´ve been slowly inserting myself into the local swing scene. Part of me thinks that I should take advantage of all the things Buenos Aires has to offer that I couldn´t get at home. But I can´t really put down swing dancing for a year, and it would be a shame to let all that time I spent learning it go to waste.

There are something like four swing dance companies in Buenos Aires, all of which have either nonexistent or infrequently-updated websites, which explains in part why it took me so long to figure out where these events were held. One week I went with a friend hoping to make it to a beginner´s lesson (I was attempting to introduce her to swing here) and arrived at the address on the website where we found ourselves at a kiosco, one of those ubiquitous corner-store type places that sell cigarettes and candy and sandwiches if you´re lucky. Unsure as to whether this was the right place we asked (somewhat ackwardly) if this was the place where they had swing dancing. To our amazement they said ¨oh yeah yeah¨ it´s downstairs. It turned out that they had dance floors in the basement of this place, where they held dance classes. Unfortunately the class we were looking for had left as of at least a year and no one had bothered to update the website.

The same swing company runs a weekly lesson and practice on Fridays a few blocks away from my house; unlike the kiosco gig this one´s still running. It´s held at a local community center where in addition to a dance room they have soccer fields and lifting machines. And, importantly a bar where the owners use soccer´s tendency to make people hungry and thirsty to sell beer and pizza. One night after the practice ended I went downstairs to have beer and empanadas with some people in lieu of the usual Burger King run we make at the nearby Shopping Center. While there, Charles, a Brazilian jazz enthusiast who´s been hanging out in Buenos Aires since the end of the Lindy Hop Argentina International Festival (LHAIF pronounced like ¨Life¨) back in January, invited me to a birthday/blues party at a friend´s apartment.

I was hestitant as I didn´t know anyone besides Charles (who I don´t really know that well either) but in the end I went. We got there around two in the morning and I stayed there until the end at around six, when Gaston, the host, brought his mattress back out and kicked out the last of us. I met a lot of people, most of them foreigners who´d come to Buenos Aires for one reason or another; a couple students like m; a woman my mother´s age who was working with a tango instructor to teach with him and translate his classes into English and a German film student studying at the FUC, the university of film in Buenos Aires.

One of the most eye-opening conversations I had was with an Irish freelance journalist, who´s here writing about the environment and human rights issues. She´s spent the past three years here in Buenos Aires but she also lived in Guatemala for a couple of years. In Guatemala she worked for an international organization of journalists whose job it was to basically follow around people that were doing things that powerful vested interests didn´t want done so that they didn´t get killed. She followed a guy, I think he was a lawyer, who worked to allow peasants to use legal loopholes that they wouldn´t otherwise have known about to reclaim some of the unused land owned by the local landed oligarchy. It´s not hard to see why certain people would want him dead, but it´s incredible how real a possibility that was without the threat of international repurcussions. Basically--if this man dies, the world will know about it.

In addition she was always just telling me a little about how the country is today, how dangerous it is and how corrupt the system is. To some extent I already knew these things, I remember how angry everyone in my family was when my great-aunt Rosa was robbed, not once but several times by some gang bangers who were shacking up in a nearby abandoned house and I remember how my cousin Jeffrey quit his job with the government complaining of the corruption. And he was just working in computers, probably not the very worst in that sense. So it wasn't as though hearing these things about Guatemala was particularly new to me.

What was new was the reality that she had been living and working there in a way that I've thought about one day doing. And rather than feeling like we had something in common and could be friends, it actually made it harder for me to relate to her on a certain level. It made her seem much older than me in a way, above and beyond the actual years she had on me. Thinking about this later I was reminded of a poem by Philip Levine called What Work Is (I've recently been listening to podcasts from The Poetry Foundation and discovered Philip Levine through the podcasts).

That last line is a little puzzling isn't it? You can't express your love for your brother because you don't know what work is? And anyway Levine said that "You know what work is" at the very beginning right? After all if you've been sitting outside in the rain all morning looking for it, how can you not know what it is?

My one and only experience with doing legitimate, taxable work for pay was working at the recycling plant at my University. This was a really important experience for me in getting a handle on what it meant to have a job, and the discovery that one could come back home and not have to worry about doing homework of any kind, that you could leave work at work, was an exhilarating one. But of course, it wasn't the job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Like many of my generation, especially among study abroad students, I want to do work that "makes a difference" (although most of us aren't quite sure what that means). For me more and more that desire has been directed towards Guatemala, towards living and working in that country and doing something to improve life there. It's the reason that I came here to Buenos Aires really. Admitting that now sounds odd, a bit like Columbus who meant to make it to India and instead ended up thousands of miles away. But it's true. I wanted to study abroad in a Latin American country because I wanted to go to Guatemala and the system didn't have a way for me to do that.

The exact reason why is not always clear to me. I wanted to improve my spanish, which I took up in the first place because I wanted to be able to communicate better with dad's side of the family. Perhaps because we went back there enough when I was younger that it was sufficiently impressed upon me that I needed to learn Spanish. Now it's just one of those things, you invest in something for one reason, and the investment itself becomes a reason to keep doing it, like people who study piano as a kid and just keep on doing it because they've put so much time into it already.

But I think it's more than that. Dad never taught me Spanish, he just gave me, without really trying to, a reason to study it. And he won't hold my hand now either, I've got to figure things out on my own, without him. This was the sense that I felt so powerfully on the day of his wake just days before I left to come here, as if he was telling me, as he often did while he was alive, "I'm not always gonna be here to do things for you. You have to figure things out on your own."

And so, armed with this highly idealistic "quest" sort of mentality, being confronted with the reality of my father's country from a foreigner who has spent time working there, in what must be said a highly idealistic sort of pursuit, was eye-opening. It was just a few days later that the world received this unhappy news about current events in Guatemala. Like Levine's subject who is waiting in the rain hoping to get a job, and that the fickle foreman won't turn him away, I have no real sense of what that work would actually entail if and when I get it. It's an odd paradox, to finally know what you want and yet not really know what that is. And to be confronted with someone who does know a thing or two about that dangerous world for which you've been arming yourself--with tales of chivalry, an old nag and a rusty sword no doubt--makes you stop and think for a minute. Not to deter you, but perhaps to make you think more seriously about what you're doing. At the very least it makes you feel, as Levine's subject, ackward about interaction with the people that have inhabited that uncertain future.

And yet...perhaps we need a certain blindness towards that future, a certain willingness to forget doubt and remember our stories. We have to tell ourselves stories, even if they're fantastic, in order to stir our emotions, in order to inspire us to action. A completely sober view on life would just remind us that we're all just dead in the end, but that's not the sort of thinking that gets you up in the morning when life is hard. As Thoreau wrote in Cape Cod "nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood". So I've started writing poetry. Wish me luck.

Futbol

2009-05-07T21:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to go to a soccer (it’s hard for me to use the American word now) match for a while. It’s one of those things that you feel as though you’re obligated to do, as part of your “cultural education” or something like that, the same way you feel obligated to see certain landmarks as a tourist. I finally went on Saturday and I discovered why it’s so revealing about the culture here in Argentina.

Soccer matches in Argentina are wildly different from those in the United States in ways that are not captured fully on the television screen. Now, I’m aware of the difference between watching something on television and going to the live event. I go to live music shows all the time both at home and here in Buenos Aires, and I’ve been to plenty of sports game in the U.S. While I’m by no means a huge sports fanatic, I have plenty of memories of my dad taking me to see Cleveland Indian’s baseball games, which are practically the only sports games I’ve ever been to. I can recall vividly the sound that the announcer’s made as he would call out each player that came up to bat and announced the sponsor’s of the game and emphatically announced every home run. I remember my dad buying me overpriced hotdogs and the cheap yellow beer that was everywhere in the stadium (and which I was too young for). I remember everyone standing up during a homerun and the particular way my dad said the word “yeah!” on such occasions. Much like popcorn at movie theatres, cheap beer and hotdogs, and other memories were things that had always been associated with sporting events in my mind.

Imagine my surprise then when I found that you couldn’t even enter the stadium, or come within a certain distance of the entrance with alcohol, let alone buy beer during the game. We passed through at least four security checkpoints on our way into the stadium. I would have an easier time getting a weapon onto a plane (which I’ve done before by accident) than I would have getting one into the River stadium.

The differences between these experiences back home and the game I saw last Sunday cannot be solely attributed to the different sports, as the few soccer games I attended in Cleveland were fairly similar (without the same charismatic announcer). Instead I think that there is a different culture in Argentina around Sports and around other things as well. The next day as we were walking back from my class at the UCA, we encountered a public demonstration of some sort, I’m not sure what exactly. I was struck by the similarities between this demonstration and the soccer match. The riot police were in full form at both events, complete with shields and batons, just as they had been at the soccer match, and they had barricaded off parts of the streets in a similar way. Perhaps even more impressive was that at one point the demonstrators started singing a song that I recognized as being a song sung at soccer matches, that familiar “olé! ole, ole, ole! Ole, ole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFLK4iBcok&feature=related

Perhaps it’s cliché at this point to say that Argentines are just very passionate people, but it's true. Even the way they speak--they like to use words like “muy” and the prefix “re” (both of which mean “very”) more than someone from the Midwest would find prudent, and they like to use words like frightful (espantoso), terrible, horrible, ugly (feo) and beautiful (lindo) impressive (impresionante) with great emphasis and often with the suffix –isimo for added emphasis. I remember after my first few weeks of class the first time I said that I really liked something my host mother told me that she didn’t think that I had liked anything else because when she asked me I just “yes”, in a thoroughly unconvincing way. I discovered that in order to communicate that I liked something I had to say that I really liked it—bands I liked were not “buenos” they were “re bueno” or “buenisimo” or else it meant that I didn’t really like it at all and I was just answering in the affirmative so as to change the subject.

Tango lyrics are full of stories about men pining over lovers who have left them or coming back home to find their wife in the arms of another man and killing them both. It's that mix of passionate love that is always on the brink of spilling into aggression and violence. A sign at the stadium pleaded for "Pasion sin violencia". Passion without violence.

Maybe we don’t have this same level of passion in the United States, but one thing that seems to be universal about sports is their ability to allows us to connect with people. My dad really loved sports, long after his body was too full of injuries to continue to play many of them he would keep up with the Cleveland teams, watch games on TV and go to the stadium with tickets that some people in the his department would reserve for him. And even though he’s always loved sports, I’ve long suspected that my dad’s real reason for watching sports—I knew he’d far rather play them than watch if he could--was the way they allowed you to connect with people. During the game’s one goal, everyone was dancing and singing and screaming at the top of their lungs, and we high-fived the guy next to us, who we didn’t even know. I remember that my dad used to talk about sports to everyone, no matter where he was, in bars in other cities, to the hot dog vender on the street outside his work you name it. During my summer working in facilities, a job in which I had very little in common with my co-workers those Cleveland Cavaliers games always gave us something to talk about. In this way we were all Clevelanders together. Sports can unite as and give us a common identity more readily than they start fights.

Which reminds me, I hear the Cavs just swept the second team in a row.

Violent Dreams

2009-04-24T00:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Chile

2009-04-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Fountain Drinks are a Trap

2009-04-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Music and other Serious Things

2009-03-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

I realize that I´ve been doing this blog for a long time, and I´ve written nothing about music. I feel that this is an innaccurate representation of my time here as seeing live music has been one of my primary activities since I got here and I feel that it will become increasingly so.

So a partir de ahora (it means ¨from now on¨ but I like it better) I´m going to write more about music. Actually I´m going to write more in general, but writing about music will serve as a welcome break from writing about more serious things--like how I´m dealing with the emotional fallout from my father´s death, or worse still classes (joke guys, that was a joke).

And while I´m on the subject of joking about serious things I´d like to stop to make a brief aside, which I´ll probably elaborate on more later. It sometimes seems really hard to take things seriously that other people take seriously. Particularly relationships. I was once in a taxi with a couple of friends from the program and the two girls were talking about this Argentine guy she met and whether she should go ahead with this guy, etc. Perhaps it would have seemed trivial to me anyway, but now in particular these sorts of things either make me scornful or amused. I´m working on being more of the latter and less of the former.

That being said here´s a solemn and most serious promise that I will write more about a variety of topics. Those of you with no interest in what I have to say about music, may feel free to skip these entries and move on to more serious things. Or you could adopt my grandmother´s approach to her entertainment choices. As she puts it ¨I´ve had enough sadness in my life [lost her husband, son, son-in-law] I don´t need any more of it in my free time¨. Fair enough.

Getting Settled

2009-03-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

It seems a bit absurd to say this, but I'm finally starting to get a routine of sorts.

I finally had this sense today as I was going over my calendar and figuring out what I have to do over the next few weeks, figuring out when I can get in things like studying, lunch, and working out, in between my classes. This wouldn't seem so absurd, except that I've been here for about a month and a half.

I've already discussed why that is for the most part--a long orientation, an equally long drop-add period, and I don't particularly want to get into that again. Instead I'm going to talk a little bit about what that routine is looking like at this point, and what I still need to add to it.

The other thing that contributed to the sense that I have a routine now is that my class schedule is, finally, officially set--I just turned in the form several hours ago. I'm taking a total of four classes, two at the Universidad Catolica Argentina in the Program for Latin American Studies, one in the Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (social sciences) and one required class for my program at the program office downtown. I managed to drop all of the classes that I was taking at Torcuato di Tella (which is really far away!) and the rest of the classes at the UBA and UCA so that I'm down to just those four. This has left me with a rather odd schedule--I have class three days a week (this has never happened to me before) yet everyday that I have class it starts at 9am. Those lovely 9am start times account for half of my classes. The other two classes are both in the evening at UCA, so that everyday that I have class I have to get up in the morning and then have a really long period in between when my morning class starts and my evening class begins.

I actually think that this could be a good thing. One of my problems over the last few weeks has been that if I have a class that starts late in the day, or worse yet if my only class is an evening class, I just don't get up until a few hours before it starts. That or I spend much of the day sitting at my computer in my boxers not accomplishing very much (clearly I wasn't updating my blog!) Having class at 9am means that you have to shower, put clothes on and get out of the house, which keeps my host family happy too (they don't really like it when I just sit around all day). It also (ought to) makes it easier to study in between those classes because I have a lot of time, but it doesn't really make sense to go home in between classes most of the time, because that just means more time and money spent on commutes.

As for the not having any class two days a week, not counting weekends, it gives me the opportunity to stay out late the evening before, allowing me to go out on Mondays and/or have a three-day weekend starting Thursday night, which could be particularly useful for travelling. The disadvantage to this is, once again, the sitting around all day in my boxers problem, which I hope to address by signing up for some volunteer work, or getting a membership at a gym.

Speaking of volunteering, that is something I still have to do. I'm currently torn between trying to find something that is "useful" to me, in the sense that it would have something to do with my future career, and taking care of babies. The latter is part of a program called Baby Help (yes the name is in English, I don't know why) which helps out single moms by having people watch after their kids while they go out to find work. It's sort of odd but I kind of miss being around little kids, I used to babysit for a neighbor back home, and every time I see small children I'm reminded of my dad for some reason. Apparently when I was a kid and my mom asked me the standard "what do you want to be when you grow up" I told her "I want to be like Daddy", so she said " you mean a scientist", to which I replied "no I want to be a dad". This remains one of the few things that I know about my future career plans.

Classes in Argentina

2009-03-19T20:58:00.001-07:00

A lot of people have been asking me how classes have been going here in Argentina. As I’m doing a study abroad program this seems like a reasonable request, but I’ve neglected to write about classes here until now. There are several reasons for this but to understand that you first have to understand the structure of the way I’m taking classes here in Argentina.

There are two main ways that you can go about doing a study abroad program 1) direct enrollment, wherein you apply to and become an official student in a foreign university or 2) you take classes through a program, wherein the program has a relationship with a university(s) in the foreign country and handles the transfer of credits to your home university. In my case I actually receive a transcript from the university that runs the program, Butler University, even though I took all of the classes thousands of miles away.

The Argentine Universities Program is one of the programs run by the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) of Butler University and it’s the program that runs study abroad in Buenos Aires. As part of the program, we can take classes at any combination of four different universities in the city; the public university Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Universidad Torcuato di Tella, a recently private university, and two catholic (also private) universities, Universidad Catolica Argentina (UCA) and Universidad de Salvador (USAL). The advantage of this is arrangement is that it allows us not only to access different course offerings at different schools, but also to experience what it’s like taking classes at Universities that are very different from one another (something I may get into in greater detail in a later post). We also have a two to four week drop/add period (depending on the start dates of the different schools) where we can try out as many as three classes at any given university. This gives us the ability to weed out classes which don’t really interest us, turn out to be harder than we anticipated, or just don’t fit our schedule anymore.

The disadvantage to this arrangement is that it can be very stressful, especially at first. When you’re first getting to know the city and how to get to various places, trying to take busses across town to get to classes at three (I didn’t take classes at USAL) different universities, when some of those classes overlap (which you may or may not have anticipated) can be a headache. Also, especially for me, the notion of going to a class which you are in all likelihood not going to be attending—because if you try out three times as many classes as you’re going to take that means you’re dropping two thirds of them—is a stressful one. I like to go into a class and prepare myself for what I’m going to have to do for the semester, anticipate what’s ahead and start to plan my life, schedule etc. That’s harder to do when you don’t even know which classes you’re going to take exactly. And some of these decisions end up getting made on the fly—I decided to drop one of my classes, the history of economic thinking, partly based on the anecdotal reports of one of my peers and partly because it overlapped with a few of the last orientation events (including signing up for classes at the UCA) so that I ended up not going just because I’d missed a few classes already.

Now things are finally getting settled and I pretty much know what my schedule is going to be (although several of my professors just changed classrooms/start and end times for classes). I put off signing up for volunteer work, which I intend to do, because I didn’t know what my schedule was going to be yet, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. But it was this phenomenon coupled with our very long orientation period that is the culprit for my not having written anything about classes so far. Hopefully I’ll get around to actually writing about the classes I’ve decided to stick with in the near future.

Music From Back Home

2009-03-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Being away from home can do strange things to you. One of those things is that sometimes you start to miss things from home that you didn't really appreciate when you were there.

The other day, I was on my computer doing one of those "put your iTunes on shuffle and write down the first twenty songs that come up" (for those of you who are not aware this is a very common thing for people my age to put up in their facebook profiles when they're bored or have a paper to write). One of the songs that I came across was a Black Keys song that I had received in a mix from a friend back home. The Black Keys are a sort of Blues-Rock-Punk guitar drum-duo from Akron, Ohio that have really been making a name for themselves recently. And that's saying something since not a lot has come out of Akron since it was the center of a burgeoning punk scene back in the late seventies.

I always liked the Black Keys but I didn't listen to them all that much. I was listening to a lot of ska and jazz then and it just didn´t fit with the other stuff I was listening to. But when I heard them today it was like I'd been hit by a brick. I went on All Music Guide to figure out what album the songs were from (my friend either hadn't labelled them or I'd just forgot to write it down). In any case I started reading about them and got really excited about them and the music they were putting out. I read about their other albums and killed about an hour snooping around for information on a band that probably played in Cleveland a half dozen times last year.

When you´re far from home lots of things can make you excited to be reminded of it. And the important thing is that it´s not just American things. Because American culture is everywhere--from the department stores, to the movies even the music, you can see American imports everywhere. Midwest rustbelt culture, not so much. The Black Eyed Peas, don´t feel like home, but the Black Keys do. Funny how that works.

Daily Life: The last three weeks in review

2009-03-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that while recording my quasi-philosophical musings about this country and about myself might well be fulfilling for me and possibly of interest to others, a lot of people back home reading this blog probably want to know more about what I'm actually doing. Since that was at least part of the purpose of this blog, I'll try to write about that more (at least once a week) as well as just writing more in general.

So first to catch everyone up a little bit on the past three weeks or so.

For the most part my life here began very structured as the IFSA-Butler program has a two week orientation where you have to go to this building near downtown and sit in on seminars about various topics--Argentine history, how not to get robbed, how to comport yourself with your host family etc. Most of these things were rehashings of things we'd already been given information on, things that our host families would later discuss with us, and things which we were told to refer to the website for anyway. Nonetheless the orientation period was valuable in other ways by giving us a chance to get to know how to get around the city, to meet other people from the program, and to get into a kind of schedule.

During our orientation period we also had the chance to visit Bariloche, a small , touristy town in Patagonia near the border with Chile. It was a good experience and a welcome contrast to the noisy, busy city that we'd be spending the next several months in. We did a lot of hiking and I got to go cycling up and down some of the mountains (tiring as all hell). The town of Bariloche was founded by the Swiss, which was evident in the architecture, which combined with the constant presence of mountains made you feel like you were in the Alps (or I suppose, it would if I'd ever been to the Alps). Dad would have loved it there.

The orientation is now over and we're getting into classes now. However because of the way we take classes through the program--we're encouraged to take about three times as many classes as we intend to keep during the "shopping period" and then drop all but about four--it's a really weird and stressful time (at least for me). Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I like knowing what's going on well ahead of time so I have a chance to get comfortable with the idea. I'm not opposed to spontaneity in all things, but class selection is certainly not one of them. And no matter who you are sitting for three hours in a class that you will in all likelihood not be taking, is just an odd experience. As things stand today I'm enrolled in classes at two universities, waiting to hear back about my Argentine language and culture class and have yet to sign up for classes at another university. In addition, a friend from Case is in town for the week. And I badly need a haircut. It's a busy time.

On the other hand busyness does let you forget certain things that might be far more painful if you were bored. Like that I'm thousands of miles away from home and the people that I love and that care about me and that I'm not going to see those people for a long time. Or that I'm never going to see my dad again and tell him how the trip went. So maybe busyness is not so bad.

The Question of Authenticity

2009-03-06T21:45:00.000-08:00

I think that there is an issue that not only I, but many others who study abroad struggle with living in a foreign country and that is the search for an "authentic" experience. This can get a bit absurd at times and difficult to define, but the basic idea is that we don't want to travel halfway around the world, just to spend our time eating at Burger Kings and watching Hollywood movies. We want to avoid going to venues and stores and sites that cater to tourists and where everyone speaks English to you and go to places where "real Argentines" hang out.

There are a couple of problems with this pursuit. For one, it is hard to define what is authentic as sometimes those things that are the most traditionally culturally important are also of the most interest to foreigners for the same reason. For instance I was warned by a friend who had studied abroad in Buenos Aires, not to bother taking tango classes, because they are "for tourists". The vast majority of young argentines are more likely to be found dancing to electronic music at a disco than to tango at a milonga.

For me the comparison with the American swing scene is an obvious one--while swing is certainly classic American music, swing dancing is definitely not mainstream, and I understand that I am not in the majority in this respect. Nonetheless, this doesn't make me any less of a real American because I do it. Similarly I don't think that I necessarily need to avoid tango to experience Argentina, I just have to recognize the place it holds in Argentine society, which is necessarily different from the place it would hold in other countries, but is still certainly not pop music.

On the other hand, I don't think that having an authentic experience has to mean sacrificing cultural imports from the rest of the world. It wouldn't be any more authentic to shut oneself off from the music of the rest of the world, because in a cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires that isn't what the locals do either. By contrast you hear American Top 40 everywhere in Buenos Aires. This sort of phenomenon complicates the issue immensely. I don't listen to American Top 40 in the U.S. so I'm certainly not going to listen to it here. But interestingly this will make me interested in different music than someone here might be interested in. Ironically if I am interested in foreign music, people like me who share an interest in music from foreign lands would be interested in "my" music while I am interested in "theirs".

At the same time as we look for authentic experiences I think it's important to not be restricted by this either. Just because Jazz wasn't born in Argentina, doesn't mean that there's something "fake" about seeing a jazz here, and there is always something different. Music is always colored by where it's created so the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is still a different scene than the scene in Cleveland or the scene in New York. For instance Jazz Clubs in Buenos Aires also feature tango groups, something which cannot be said of American cities, where if tango is performed it probably falls under the purview of "world" music or classical music.

For this reason it is interesting to see how they categorize music here versus how we categorize music at home. Flipping through the paper I saw that "Jazz, Blues and Hip-Hop" was one section, tango another section, singers, folk and rock/pop. A little bit different from how we would classify them in the United States.

I think that one has to move past a sort of artificially imposed definition of authenticity as being "this is real Argentine culture and this is not". That's the sort of thing that dictators do, like Mao Zedong did in the cultural revolution. The fact is that culture is organic, and authenticity to the extent that we can say it exists, is a relative thing, and it isn't so obvious or black and white as we often assume.

In sense this whole issue shows one of the advantages of being in a place, like Cleveland, that is not at all popular to the rest of the world. You never have to worry about being in the real Cleveland--that's all you've got. I don't know that many people come to Cleveland as tourists, so there's nothing that's catered to foreigners with lots of cash.

Change of Name and Direction

2009-03-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

Studying abroad is supposed to change your life--everyone says so. It’s become for me almost a cliché by now, but it’s something that I’ve taken seriously. I had planned to study abroad since I was in high school, I was frustrated with the limitations of learning Spanish in school and I thought the best way to learn Spanish would be to go away for a year and just speak Spanish all the time.

And then two weeks before I was supposed to leave—ten days to be exact, my father suffered a fatal heart attack in his office. Most of you probably already know this of course, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time, but I seem to have put off addressing it. Part of the reason for that is because it’s such an enormous thing—and I’ve always put off writing about things that feel really important. However it would be dishonest not to include this event in writing about my study abroad experience, an event which surely has been, and will be, a life changing one.

It seems to me at this juncture, that if I were writing about my life it would inevitably be broken into two chapters. Part I ended on February 5, 2009.

And part II? I don’t know yet. During many of those ten days I spent in Cleveland after dad died and before I left, I was very unsure as to what I was going to do. When Mom first came into the hospital waiting room and was talking to some of the other people there I remember overhearing her say “and Stephen was going to go to study abroad in two weeks”. Was. She didn’t know what was going to happen really and I wasn’t sure either. Dr. Seidel, a long-time friend and colleague of my father’s was in the waiting room when I first got there and I remember him saying “You should do the study abroad. It’s what your father would have wanted.” I remember wondering what it matters what a dead man would have wanted.

I finally decided to go. Partly I left because I really wanted to get out of the house, and because I dreaded the idea of staying in Cleveland for the rest of the semester without the possibility of taking classes or keeping myself occupied in any way. I think that would have driven me insane. But more importantly, I thought of how Dad always wanted me to grow up, wanted me to figure out how to take care of myself and, as cliché as it may sound, to be a man. It was as if by his death he was telling me that I had to grow up and couldn’t rely on him any longer. It was even something he told me explicitly back when I was a teenager, “when I was your age, I didn’t have a father. You won’t always have me around to take care of you”.

It’s a goal that energizes me and excites me at times, but it can also depress me. It feels as though (and of course everyone tells me) that now is a very important time in my life, for my growth as a person. It feels like this is monumental or that it ought to be. And yet now that I’m here, I keep expecting something to happen that isn’t happening.

Of course, I’ve only been here for about two weeks—it would actually be rather ridiculous to think that I could undergo some kind of incredible personal growth on vacation. Because that’s what it feels like right now. I still don’t have a sense of the permanency of these changes. That I live (although temporarily) here in Buenos Aires, that I’ll be here for a year, or that I’ll never see my dad again.

But as my dad stressed vehemently in one particularly important drive, “I’m not paying for you to go on vacation”. And when I think about the matter a little more soberly, it’s clear that I do have the opportunity to make this more than a vacation.

Still, it won’t happen on its own, which is something I fully intend to keep on mind. I get the distinct sense that a journey like this is what you make of it. And though I don’t have any idea where I’m going to end up, I know the direction I want to head and I have an idea of the balance I have to strike, between school and fun, between having American friends and making Argentine ones, between maintaining old relationships and building new ones.

For this reason I have changed the name of this blog to better fit what I am trying to do. A Gringo-Chapin in Argentina was for me my clever way of saying who I am and where I’m going to be. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going anywhere. Mi Odisea Argentina, my Argentine Odyssey seems more appropriate for reasons that should be clear by now.

The Monedas Problem

2009-02-24T14:16:00.001-08:00

Translation: "Where are the coins?!"

There is a major problem in Buenos Aires today--there aren't enough coins (monedas) to go around. There are a number of theories as to why this is so--some say that people are melting down the coins for their metal value (something similar happened in the United States with copper pennies--they're mostly zinc now for this reason). Others say that it's the colectivos (the busses) who are intentionally hoarding them (the colectivos require coins to ride). Still more claim that it's actually the mafia that's hoarding all the coins.

Regardless of the cause the results are at times inconvenient and other times (for me at least) amusing. Since the colectivos only take monedas you have to hoard up your coins--which are hard to get--in order to take them. As a result, I never go to a restaurant and tip the waiter by way of saying "keep the change" since that 1 peso coin I get back is gold. Once I went to a pharmacy in an attempt to get change to take a colectivo when I didn't have sufficient change--I purchased a bag of chips that were supposed to cost 1.20. I paid for it with a ten peso note and received 9 pesos in change a 5 and two 2's (Argentine currency has two peso notes but one peso comes only in coins). When I looked at my receipt at I saw that it said I had paid 10.20--they had credited me 20 centavos that I had not paid, just to avoid giving me change! Sometimes when you buy something small like candy or cigarettes, rather than give you change they'll ask you if you'll take another, or some other small item, in addition.

Once when my host dad was trying to show me which bus line to take we went to a nearby pastry store to get change.
"No tengo monedas!" I don't have any coins, he told us.
"Es un desastre." It's a disaster, he said
"Totalmente desastre" my host dad agreed.

So it is.

My Host Family

2009-02-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

Having written about the place I live last night I'd like to take a minute now to write about the people with whom I live. I live with an elderly couple in one of the older neighborhoods in the city. My host Mother's name is Irma, but she goes by Kuky (which is pronounced like "cookie"--I don't know whether or not this is intentional). She's very experienced with having foreign students in her home and is very nice. She takes care to explain things to me when I don't understand, speaks slowly and clearly and seems to take a genuine interest in my life, which I appreciate. It is a good feeling to come back home every night to someone who cares about you and about your well being and your safety. She was also very supportive when I told her that I recently lost my dad and this I appreciate a great deal. If she has any fault that I know of, it is only that she feeds me too much.

Her husband is a quiet and kind fellow, who likes to watch soccer on the television a great deal. I have less interaction with him however, because sadly he has Parkinson's disease, which makes it very difficult to understand him, and this tends to make conversations between us very awkward. I can understand when people speak Spanish to me, and if he spoke English I might be able to make out what he said, but the combination of the two is very difficult for me, although hopefully this will improve as my Spanish improves.

Though Argentines in general try to imitate Europeans a great deal, they seem similar to other Latinos with respect to their families, if Irma's family is at all representative of other Argentine families. This is to say that extended families are much more important here than in the States. I've already met several of Irma's children and one of her grandchildren. And it seems that they come by regularly. The day after I got here we celebrated the birthday of her oldest (if I remember correctly) son Hernan whose son Marco was also present, as well as another grandson whose name I can't remember.

By coincidence Marco, who has the same name as my brother (marco with "s" they told me), is also the same age as my Marco. His parents are divorced and he lives with his mother, but he still comes over to the apartment here with great frequency, and even has a bed made up here with some of his things. He is quite adept at using Irma's computer (which she knows next to nothing about) which is additionally impressive considering that the ancient monitor is completely green, making it hard to make out anything on the screen. Although I haven't been here long, this indicates to me that Marco has and will continue to be around this apartment a lot and I'm likely to see a lot more of him. So far I have not had many interactions with him, but from watching an American movie with him and seeing him around the house when we were both back here for lunch, he seems like a really good kid.

My New Home

2009-02-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

There are so many things to write about, particularly in these first few days, but one important thing that I wanted to write about is the place I'm going to be living for the next year and the people who live there.

I live in a small apartment on avendia medrano, near the corner of corrientes and medrano where the subte (the metro) stops. From my balcony I can see the street four stories below and several of the old trees that grow on the wide sidewalks (which, consequently, do not have tree lawns). I love having a balcony and I go there often just to stare at the street, the cars, trees, the people walking by and just to think for a bit.

The door to my apartment complex is wide and made of glass with one entrances for healthy people and one that slopes for those who need a wheelchair. Inside there is both an ancient elevator and a winding staircase. I prefer the latter. The stairs are dark and made of stone and are lit by lights set into the walls like torches, which turn on automatically as you near them. The door to our apartment is wooden with three locks of varying types. Inside the apartment are numerous pieces of art collected over the years from various places, a table used for dinner, a kitchen to the left, and a sofa and two chairs at the end of the room, with the t.v. and the entrance to the balcony. The balcony connects all the rooms of the house, and each room has a door to the balcony.

A narrow hallway is the second entrance on the right as you enter with two bathrooms (a half guest and a full bath) on the right and my room on the left, with the full bedroom at the end of the hall. My room is small, neat, with a suitcase next to my desk and another under the bed. On my desk I have my computer (where I type up all of these entries), pictures of my three best friends from Shaker, a picture of my father kissing my mother (in a characteristically goofy fashion) and one of the prayer cards from my father's wake. The desk has two drawers which contain the contents of my pockets that I empty every night, including my change which is precious (more on that later).My bed is small, but comfortable, with a bedside table adorned only by a lamp and a picture of my dad and I during our trip to Hawaii. It's my favorite picture, because he has a slight smile, as if smiling at a private joke, something that only he and I share.

Visa Issues Part III

2009-02-16T03:00:00.000-08:00

The distinction between the tourist visa I got in the airport and the student visa, which the IFSA-Butler is going to help me to obtain, is an important one. I was reading over some of the papers I received from the Butler program and I encountered the following:

"Students are allowed to enter Argentina by showing their passports, student visa (temporary resident visa) and letter from the student's local consulate (check with your consulate to see if they provide such a letter). The immigration officers will stamp your documents upon entry"

I read the above paragraph in the plane on my way to Buenos Aires, with no opportunity to call anyone from the program to clarifiy its meaning. This left me with the terrifying conclusion that I would be flying into a kind of purgatory where, without the required student visa, I would be detained in Buenos Aires, unable to leave the airport, but unable to go back home either, or owing to my lack of an international phone, to call anyone.

Fortunately another twenty minutes or so of reading through material made clear to me what I know now. I'm here in Buenos Aires on a tourist visa. However, this visa is only good for about a month, at which point (or before that point really) I have to apply for a student visa, which will be good for the rest of my time in Argentina. The IFSA-Butler staff are going to help us get these during the initial two-week orientation, which is a huge relief as bureaucratic red tape is difficult enough in one's first language, let alone a language with which you still struggle to catch busses.

On a related note, the student status of the visa means that I am only allowed to stay as long as I am an unemployed student. If either of those things change they have the right to deport me, end of story. This little tidbit should be of interest to those of you who asked whether I could work while I'm down here--not worth the risk as it turns out.

Visa Issues Part I

2009-01-25T19:45:00.001-08:00

Something that I had not fully appreciated when I first decided to do study abroad was the amount of paperwork you've got to get done in order to get a visa to stay in a foreign country for a year. I just recently resolved a bit of the stress associated with this process so this seems an ideal time to document it. Check it out:

In order to get a visa to stay in Argentina as a student for longer than six months, I need to get an FBI background check, in addition to paying the $130 that everyone has to pay just because we're Americans. This $130 is apparently payback for The United States imposing a similar fee on everyone who wants to stay in the U.S. They're not subtle about this--they suggest that this is the reason for the fee on the website. Oh well.

As for the FBI background check, this requires me getting fingerprints from my local police department so that I can send these to the FBI and they can make sure that they didn't already have these fingerprints on their record. They don't. But just to find out I have to pay the FBI another $18. Getting the fingerprints involved considerable hassle as I had to come in a couple of different times due to my misunderstanding where they needed to be sent and because the place is only open to do fingerprints on Mondays and Wednesday from 4:30 to 5:45.

After I get these back--presumably to insure that I didn't somehow forge the FBI documents--I need to get a secretary of state (of Ohio, not Clinton) to stamp said document with what's called an Apostille, basically a step up from a notarization in official status. It certifies documents for the purpose of foreign governments. All this to prove that I'm not a criminal in the U.S. although apparently they would have been fine with my being a criminal if I were to be staying in the country for less than six months. Bureaucracy.

All this is just a prelude to what I'll have to do once I actually get to Argentina in between my traveler's visa expiring and my getting a year-long student visa. Fortunately I will have staff from the Butler Institute for Study Abroad helping me out with that.

The fingerprints have been sent and are currently being processed by the FBI (or I sincerely hope that they are). I had to request to get them expedited so that they could come in time for me to get the apostille and bring them with me to Argentina. Updates on that to come.

First Post

2009-01-06T01:06:00.000-08:00

My name is Stephen Cabrera and I'm a third year undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University. In a little over a month, I'll be leaving my hometown in Cleveland, Ohio to study abroad in Buenos Aires for a year, in what will be the longest time I've ever been away from Cleveland. My aim with this blog is to archive some of my experiences while in Argentina, note my observations about the country and allow my friends and family to read about what I'm up to without my having to write people specifically on a regular basis.

In light of this blog's purpose, this post and the ones that follow are a little premature, but I want to get in the habit of writing everyday before I leave, so in this month before I leave I'm going to try to write as much as I can (both here and elsewhere) about the place I'm leaving. This includes Shaker Heights, where I live, and various other places in the greater Cleveland area where I go to school and spend much of my time.

Also, in case you were wondering, the name of the blog comes from informal names given to Americans (gringos) and Guatemalans (chapines) respectively. As my background is half of each I thought that it served as an appropriate moniker for me and that "in Argentina" summed up the aim of the blog in chronicling my journey.