Remembering Birthdays

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.