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.
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.
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).
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.
(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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)
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.
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 notserve 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
