The experience is over. I'm back in North Canton spending time with my parents and family for a few weeks before moving to Denver to start a new job.
The normally arduous flight back to Ohio from BA was shortened significantly via great conversations with college students coming back from Buenos Aires after a 4 month study abroad program. Together, we reflected, affirmed and validated each other, and breathed mutual sighs of relief to be leaving the big city. And we admitted that we would likely miss it.
In Atlanta, it was sad to see the Argentines peel off to their respective terminals to catch their connecting flights. My last interaction was with an older Argentine woman who looked confused on the terminal train in Atlanta. I asked her where she was going and explained to her where she needed to get off. And when I left the train before her I said, 'chau!' and she fittingly responded, 'bye bye!'.
So I've been thinking about the take away. The biggest lesson I've learned here. The different forms of thinking and ways of seeing I experienced throughout my life in Argentina. I went from in love with the city to overwhelmed by the city to culture shock to deep pessimmism and frustration to enjoying the city and country in the summer and finally to coming to an understanding of the city, learning the game, and ending with mixed feelings.
In short, what it comes down to is that for much of the trip I felt burned by the city and some of the people (one more than the rest). And so I'd become pessimistic and super critical of the place. It was as if Buenos Aires had been a best friend who stole my girlfriend but then wanted to be my friend again. And for most of the trip, I wasn't having it. I was wary of the city and people and biding my time to leave. But over time I came to understand the city better. While I couldn't accept many of the characteristics that led me to my initial cynical view, I at least understood.
I think I had become infected by a sort of existential every man for himself jaundiced view of the city. I call it the Porteno Mentality. I'd seen it time and time again, in about half of my friends and a significant number of people that I interacted with every day. In fact, most of the people I did business with or wanted to do business with were wary of me upon our initial meeting, as if even my desire to give them money to procure a service had some type of ulterior viveca criollo motive.
But after a while I realized that my negativity was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, even if someone responded to me in a genuine and honest way, my negativity and heightened wariness soured the interaction and made the result negative. For instance, when the mailman called up to my apartment to tell me that I was late on one of my bills, I immediately thought he was a crook trying to get me to open up my door so he could rob me. I told him rudely to leave, only to find out later that he was right. I was late on my bill and the fact that I waited longer to pay it meant that I had to take a 2 hour trip across town to pay the bill at a special location.
Once I made a number of these mistakes, I began to realize that half of my problems were my fault: my negativity, my lack of trust, my newfound Porteno Mentality.
So I tried to change. I tried hard to be positive until I had evidence to the contrary. And I also tried to overcompensate to try to undo others pessimissm by opening doors, giving bigger than normal tips, catching people on the bus and subway when they were jarred to the floor by sharp turns or jerky stops, and helping out whenever the opportunity presented itself. I also tried hard to do what I said I was going to do, be on time, return emails and calls, and do nice things for people without expecting anything in return or without ulterior motives. I found meaning in the work of undoing the Porteno Mentality, of trying to be selfless and responsible in the hopes of showing people that their cynicism and wariness, to the degree that it exists in BA, is unwarranted.
Now that it's all over and I'm back in a place where the Porteno Mentality doesn't exist, I find myself still negative, todavia Porteno. For example, I travelled up to a used car dealership to check out a car that had a clean carfax report and that I was told over the phone was in great shape. In reality, the car was a wreck. It had clearly been repaired after an accident, had a bolt sticking out of one of the tires, had been terribly repainted to hide the accident, had almost no oil in the engine, and was visibly dripping oil underneath. I didn't even have to turn the car on to know that it was junk. I felt burned again. Stupid for having trusted any used car salesman, despite the clean carfax report.
After the experience, my Porteno Mentality told me never to trust another used car salesman. That they were all dishonest and that I should completely exclude dealerships from my car searches. And then I remembered what I had learned. I realized that generalizing one bad experience to all used car salesmen would result in a much more difficult search. I told myself that while I might run across more dishonest car salesmen, there were bound to be a few honest ones with good cars to sell. I had to keep being cautiously optimistic in order to not pass up a potential opportunity. Because if I dismissed the veracity of all car salesmen, I'd be missing out on a great deal.
So the next reasonable deal I saw, I decided to check it out, despite the fact that it was yet another used car dealership. As it turned out, this vehicle was much better than the last. It had not been in an accident, but had some dings and dents and had been well used in general. However, it was mechanically sound and the salesman was genuinely forthcoming in telling me everything that was wrong with the vehicle. His honesty was refreshing and he proved my point when he agreed with me that the car was too well worn to trust at the price it was being sold at, or any price for that matter.
The take away then is that an attitude of cautious optimism yields better results than outright cynicism. There are dishonest people out there. But their opposites exist too. If you are negative about everyone, you will miss out on the good in life. Even when it happens to you, you won't recognize it. And it will happen to you less because you will sour potential opportunities. It's simply the way the world works.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out
In my 1st and 2nd years of graduate school, I lived in a cheap and efficient but terrible apartment. I was proud of myself for having found what I thought was the best combination of cheap, efficient, and most well located place on campus. I even took over someone's lease and therefore didn't have to put down a deposit. The apartment cost $425/month. It had one bedroom, a living room, a windowless office (to prepare me for life as a school psychologist), and a small nook kitchen. The utility costs were negligible and it was a short bike ride to the gym, university center, and grocery store. I thought I'd love it.
In the end, I learned the meaning of the saying, You get what you pay for. Or in Argentina, lo que sale barato al fin sale caro. Or what's cheap ends up being expensive. Allow me to run down the issues with the apartment.
1. Train: I was less than 30 yards from train tracks and the train passed multiple times daily and nightly. And every time it did, because it was a college town and drunken college kids were known to wander down the tracks, it would blare its horn relentlessly and invariably wake me up multiple times throughout the night.
2. Former uranium processing plant: I was about 250 yards away from a former uranium processing plant. I didn't believe the rumor at first but confirmed it by going to talk to the city's environmental director who showed me the former map of the area and gave me the history of the 2 botched cleanups. It turns out that in WWII we disguised a uranium processing plant with a dairy farm smack dab in the middle of Oxford. It has been cleaned up twice, but doubts remain as to the quality of the cleanup. On top of it now sits new student housing that some builder finally got the guts to build, as if 50 years were enough for the effects of radioactive material to dissipate.
3. Lack of Airconditioning: There was one window unit in the apartment that did little to cool even the kitchen area which it blew right into. And in the inferno Oxford summers I had a technique of running my fan in the window all night and putting in front of it a large bowl of ice from my freezer. The semi cool air usually lasted about 30 minutes and I tried my hardest to fall asleep in this time.
4. Neighbors: The house next to me seemed to have parties every night. My upstairs neighbor I called my roommate because I could hear her every move. I knew when she got home at 3 in the morning. I could hear her vomit at 8 in the morning when I'd wake up early to finish reports before class. And worst of all, I had to call the police on her when she threw a huge Rocky Horror Picture Show party. I had a test the next day and was trying to sleep and at 4 in the morning, after asking twice for them to quiet down, I brought the cops into the game...And it worked. The party broke up. But when I walked out of my apartment in the morning, I realized that no good deed goes unpunished. I think every partgoer, or at least a a few, had taken turns peeing on my door.
When I finished my stay, I was more than happy to be leaving. Leaving, however, didn't turn out to be as easy as I'd hoped. My upstairs neighbor left a week before I did. She moved like she lived. Sloppily and loudly. Everything was packed up in large black trash bags and thrown down flights of stairs. When it came time for the big couches and chairs, she simply pushed them down the stairs. It sounded as if someone were tumbling boulders through the apartment all day.
When her Uhaul finally pulled out, I breathed at least 10 sighs of relief. Good riddance. But it wasn't that easy. One Saturday night while I was watching a movie in my apartment, I heard a crash come from my bathroom. I walked in to see what had happened and found that my ceiling had caved in. I called building maintenance and they were there in 5 minutes (If it were only so in Argentina!!!). The guy must have come straight from the bar because he was half drunk and when he barged into the empy apartment above me found a flooded apartment. My ex-neighbor had left the water running slightly in her bathtub and because her drain was clogged, the water backed up and flooded the bathroom and the surrounding apartment. It was as if the ghost of my neighbor had stuck around to make sure that I wasn't getting too comfortable.
It's been a long time since I've had an apartment situation that bad. But my current apartment I think I can officially say has been the worst ever. Allow me to go down the list:
1. Dirty: For the first time in my life, I had to do serious cleaning before entering an apartment. In every single apartment I've rented in the US, it's cleaned before I enter. This one, no. There were dirty rags and paint cans scattered all over the place and it was generally filthy. I called the owner to ask him if someone was going to clean it and he said 'yeah, you are'. Welcome to Argentina.
2. Loud: Want to dream of monsters every night? Come to my apartment and try to sleep. If you can sleep through the window rattling busses that pass every 2 minutes, or the lawn mower mo-peds, you may be lucky enough to dream that you're stuck in the bowels of a brontasaurus.
3. Busted: Almost everything has broken once in this apartment. Allow me to go down the list: Water heater, toilet, clogged kitchen sink, exploding lights in the kitchen and bedroom (because light bulbs burned through cables that were placed too close), clogged bathtub, broken pipe under the kitchen sink, leaky pipes in the bathroom sink, bathroom door, doors to my balcony, oven, wooden curtains in both the living room and bedroom, internet 5 times, possible gas leak, elevator, no water 2 times for almost a total of a week. Put more simply, the only thing that hasn't broken is my wall heater. Knock on wood.
The apartment has more or less been a disaster. Or an almost constant test of my patience and problem solving ability. And just as my apartment during graduate school gave me a fun sendoff, this one too has not disappointed, right in time for my last week here.
A few days ago, I went to use my bathroom and noticed that the water was not running constantly in the toilet as it usually does. Bad sign. That means that at least my cold water is not turned on. Someone in the building, as often happens, had turned it off without informing me. Maybe it'll be back on by the end of the day, I thought.
Tomorrow will be day 4 without any water, hot or cold. No one bothered to inform me. And when I complained to the building janitor and the building administrator, I received annoyed responses that it's the weekend and the plumber can't come on the weekend. And today when I asked why the plumber wasn't there fixing the problem, the janitor looked at me like I was the stupidest guy in the world and said, feriado. Or that it's a holiday and that the plumber doesn't work on holidays. Then the janitor, visibly annoyed, said look Patrick, if you want water, you can get it from the side of the building. It was equivalent to when I was 13 years old and a caddy and there was no more water in the water cooler and Kip the caddymaster scowled, 'Drink from the hose'.
And so I've been been taking my empty water bottles up and down the 7 flights of stairs multiple times daily to manually flush my toilet, wash my hands, and boil water to wash dishes. And I still have to go to my friend's apartment or the gym to shower.
The good thing is that the janitor and the building administrator don't seem to be terribly bothered by the fact that the majority of the building is without water. To them, it seems like second nature. No water, no problem. And they have water in their places so no biggy.
And so, after complaining better and more clearly in Spanish than I have ever complained. I mean, I had the building manager reeling and nervous. And still, nothing came of it. My experience here is that you can complain until you're blue in the face and it doesn't change a thing.
I was spoiled in the US where a well worded complaint and perseverance often leads to action. Here they just don't seem to care.
So because there's really nothing I can do now but wait it out and live like a boyscout in my-what's expensive for Buenos Aires-apartment, I'm trying to think about this all more philosophically. How can I make an opportunity out of this situation. Lemonade out of lemons.
I think for me this inconvenience means being much more adaptable than I typically am. Being a 30-year-old bachelor who has lived on his own for many years now means that I have my rituals and have become a bit rigid in my every day routine. As such, I like things to work and go as I expect them to go and when they don't, I'm easily upset. What does this say about my ability to raise children, God only knows....In any case, this apartment is constantly confounding my rituals. I can never fully count on my day going off without some type of hitch. So I'm almost constantly having to deal with the unexpected. Which is good for me.
I've also started to become aware of how much water we use on an every day basis. Did you know that it takes a good 10 Liters of water to manually flush my toilet? By God, we ought to flush less often. And it also takes a good liter and a half to wash your hands, if you are quick. If I do this long enough, I might change my water usage habits semi-permanently.
Going without water has also forced me to get out more often in my final days here. I have hermit like tendencies and having to beg my friends to use their showers and sinks has forced me to do something I should be doing anyway-seeing the people who have made my stay here what it's been. For instance, yesterday my friend Cecilia and I travelled to La Plata, 1 hour away by bus and hung out at the zoo and ate at an awesome parilla. And today I went over to my friend Erica's to take a shower and chat for a while.
So as Buenos Aires gets me back for all the times I've trashed it in this blog, I've been trying to turn it around. I don't know if everything in life happens for a reason. That to me is a cliche. But I do think you can turn everything into some type of opportunity. And as the door hits me on my way out of Buenos Aires, I'm trying to see it instead as a friendly and useful tap on the arse.
In the end, I learned the meaning of the saying, You get what you pay for. Or in Argentina, lo que sale barato al fin sale caro. Or what's cheap ends up being expensive. Allow me to run down the issues with the apartment.
1. Train: I was less than 30 yards from train tracks and the train passed multiple times daily and nightly. And every time it did, because it was a college town and drunken college kids were known to wander down the tracks, it would blare its horn relentlessly and invariably wake me up multiple times throughout the night.
2. Former uranium processing plant: I was about 250 yards away from a former uranium processing plant. I didn't believe the rumor at first but confirmed it by going to talk to the city's environmental director who showed me the former map of the area and gave me the history of the 2 botched cleanups. It turns out that in WWII we disguised a uranium processing plant with a dairy farm smack dab in the middle of Oxford. It has been cleaned up twice, but doubts remain as to the quality of the cleanup. On top of it now sits new student housing that some builder finally got the guts to build, as if 50 years were enough for the effects of radioactive material to dissipate.
3. Lack of Airconditioning: There was one window unit in the apartment that did little to cool even the kitchen area which it blew right into. And in the inferno Oxford summers I had a technique of running my fan in the window all night and putting in front of it a large bowl of ice from my freezer. The semi cool air usually lasted about 30 minutes and I tried my hardest to fall asleep in this time.
4. Neighbors: The house next to me seemed to have parties every night. My upstairs neighbor I called my roommate because I could hear her every move. I knew when she got home at 3 in the morning. I could hear her vomit at 8 in the morning when I'd wake up early to finish reports before class. And worst of all, I had to call the police on her when she threw a huge Rocky Horror Picture Show party. I had a test the next day and was trying to sleep and at 4 in the morning, after asking twice for them to quiet down, I brought the cops into the game...And it worked. The party broke up. But when I walked out of my apartment in the morning, I realized that no good deed goes unpunished. I think every partgoer, or at least a a few, had taken turns peeing on my door.
When I finished my stay, I was more than happy to be leaving. Leaving, however, didn't turn out to be as easy as I'd hoped. My upstairs neighbor left a week before I did. She moved like she lived. Sloppily and loudly. Everything was packed up in large black trash bags and thrown down flights of stairs. When it came time for the big couches and chairs, she simply pushed them down the stairs. It sounded as if someone were tumbling boulders through the apartment all day.
When her Uhaul finally pulled out, I breathed at least 10 sighs of relief. Good riddance. But it wasn't that easy. One Saturday night while I was watching a movie in my apartment, I heard a crash come from my bathroom. I walked in to see what had happened and found that my ceiling had caved in. I called building maintenance and they were there in 5 minutes (If it were only so in Argentina!!!). The guy must have come straight from the bar because he was half drunk and when he barged into the empy apartment above me found a flooded apartment. My ex-neighbor had left the water running slightly in her bathtub and because her drain was clogged, the water backed up and flooded the bathroom and the surrounding apartment. It was as if the ghost of my neighbor had stuck around to make sure that I wasn't getting too comfortable.
It's been a long time since I've had an apartment situation that bad. But my current apartment I think I can officially say has been the worst ever. Allow me to go down the list:
1. Dirty: For the first time in my life, I had to do serious cleaning before entering an apartment. In every single apartment I've rented in the US, it's cleaned before I enter. This one, no. There were dirty rags and paint cans scattered all over the place and it was generally filthy. I called the owner to ask him if someone was going to clean it and he said 'yeah, you are'. Welcome to Argentina.
2. Loud: Want to dream of monsters every night? Come to my apartment and try to sleep. If you can sleep through the window rattling busses that pass every 2 minutes, or the lawn mower mo-peds, you may be lucky enough to dream that you're stuck in the bowels of a brontasaurus.
3. Busted: Almost everything has broken once in this apartment. Allow me to go down the list: Water heater, toilet, clogged kitchen sink, exploding lights in the kitchen and bedroom (because light bulbs burned through cables that were placed too close), clogged bathtub, broken pipe under the kitchen sink, leaky pipes in the bathroom sink, bathroom door, doors to my balcony, oven, wooden curtains in both the living room and bedroom, internet 5 times, possible gas leak, elevator, no water 2 times for almost a total of a week. Put more simply, the only thing that hasn't broken is my wall heater. Knock on wood.
The apartment has more or less been a disaster. Or an almost constant test of my patience and problem solving ability. And just as my apartment during graduate school gave me a fun sendoff, this one too has not disappointed, right in time for my last week here.
A few days ago, I went to use my bathroom and noticed that the water was not running constantly in the toilet as it usually does. Bad sign. That means that at least my cold water is not turned on. Someone in the building, as often happens, had turned it off without informing me. Maybe it'll be back on by the end of the day, I thought.
Tomorrow will be day 4 without any water, hot or cold. No one bothered to inform me. And when I complained to the building janitor and the building administrator, I received annoyed responses that it's the weekend and the plumber can't come on the weekend. And today when I asked why the plumber wasn't there fixing the problem, the janitor looked at me like I was the stupidest guy in the world and said, feriado. Or that it's a holiday and that the plumber doesn't work on holidays. Then the janitor, visibly annoyed, said look Patrick, if you want water, you can get it from the side of the building. It was equivalent to when I was 13 years old and a caddy and there was no more water in the water cooler and Kip the caddymaster scowled, 'Drink from the hose'.
And so I've been been taking my empty water bottles up and down the 7 flights of stairs multiple times daily to manually flush my toilet, wash my hands, and boil water to wash dishes. And I still have to go to my friend's apartment or the gym to shower.
The good thing is that the janitor and the building administrator don't seem to be terribly bothered by the fact that the majority of the building is without water. To them, it seems like second nature. No water, no problem. And they have water in their places so no biggy.
And so, after complaining better and more clearly in Spanish than I have ever complained. I mean, I had the building manager reeling and nervous. And still, nothing came of it. My experience here is that you can complain until you're blue in the face and it doesn't change a thing.
I was spoiled in the US where a well worded complaint and perseverance often leads to action. Here they just don't seem to care.
So because there's really nothing I can do now but wait it out and live like a boyscout in my-what's expensive for Buenos Aires-apartment, I'm trying to think about this all more philosophically. How can I make an opportunity out of this situation. Lemonade out of lemons.
I think for me this inconvenience means being much more adaptable than I typically am. Being a 30-year-old bachelor who has lived on his own for many years now means that I have my rituals and have become a bit rigid in my every day routine. As such, I like things to work and go as I expect them to go and when they don't, I'm easily upset. What does this say about my ability to raise children, God only knows....In any case, this apartment is constantly confounding my rituals. I can never fully count on my day going off without some type of hitch. So I'm almost constantly having to deal with the unexpected. Which is good for me.
I've also started to become aware of how much water we use on an every day basis. Did you know that it takes a good 10 Liters of water to manually flush my toilet? By God, we ought to flush less often. And it also takes a good liter and a half to wash your hands, if you are quick. If I do this long enough, I might change my water usage habits semi-permanently.
Going without water has also forced me to get out more often in my final days here. I have hermit like tendencies and having to beg my friends to use their showers and sinks has forced me to do something I should be doing anyway-seeing the people who have made my stay here what it's been. For instance, yesterday my friend Cecilia and I travelled to La Plata, 1 hour away by bus and hung out at the zoo and ate at an awesome parilla. And today I went over to my friend Erica's to take a shower and chat for a while.
So as Buenos Aires gets me back for all the times I've trashed it in this blog, I've been trying to turn it around. I don't know if everything in life happens for a reason. That to me is a cliche. But I do think you can turn everything into some type of opportunity. And as the door hits me on my way out of Buenos Aires, I'm trying to see it instead as a friendly and useful tap on the arse.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Final Thoughts I
I'll be home in 2 weeks and my blog will end at the same time as my experience.
I want to have a total of 52 entries to represent the 52 weeks of my stay. This entry is number 50.
I arrived in BA on the Shortest Day of the Year (2008) and will leave on the 20th of June 2009, the longest day in the North.
It's transitioning from fall to winter. The mornings and nights are chilly (though nothing like in Ohio), the trees have lost most of their leaves, the autumn incense is no longer, it's getting dark a little after 5 pm, and people in the streets are huddled in coats and scarves. It feels kind of like Holiday time in the states.
These days, I spend most of my evenings inside writing or preparing classes and more than ever attending yoga classes and chatting with friends in their apartments or online. I'm cooking more too since it's not as hot as it was before and it actually feels good to turn on the oven and fill the apartment with the smell of a chicken roast with onions, garlic, carrots, and rosemary.
My apartment is becoming emptier and emptier too as I clean it out, give away, and sell stuff. Where my futon used to be sits a blanket and a pillow on the wood floor for when I want to watch TV before bed. And a half an hour is about all I can take since my butt hurts too much after that. Luckily, I still have cable even though I'm not paying for it. I even told Fibertel that this was the case, but the guy who came to fix my internet (after it went down for the 5th unexplained time this year) gave it to me anyway after we concluded a chat about how much he likes the US and how he wants to buy a US flag. I thought he was kidding. I asked snarkily, 'Why do you want a US flag?' He replied, 'Porque me encanta Los Estados Unidos' (Because I love the United States). It was surprising to hear that from an Argentine. In fact, it's the first time I've heard one say it.
In any case, he gave me cable and I gave him a glass of water and a powerbar from the U.S. I also rifled through my clothes to see if I had anything with a US flag on it that I could give him, but there was nothing. I really wanted to leave him with some sort of memento from the States.
Anyhow, in the next 13 or so days, I'll be finishing up my work with the family from San Francisco as well as teaching English one last class with the former ambassador from Columbia to the UN. I'll also be eating out with my friends, saying goodbye to Argelia and her family, preparing my trip here in December, going out to movies and dinners with Cecilia, and preparing a bit to buy a car and rent an apartment in Denver.
I felt a bit sad about leaving for the first time yesterday. Life could easily be more boring and normal in the states. Here it was a constant adventure with new opportunities that seemed to fall in my lap at every stage of the journey. On top of that, I had a ton of time here to address my major goal of reflecting on life and deciding where I wanted to go next. I would be surprised if I had that much time in Denver pero veremos.
Speaking of goals that I accomplished here... I also succeeded in gaining new job experiences, improving my physical health, improving my mental health, reflection (to some degree), and improving my Spanish. More than anything else, this has been an experience of spiritual and phsyical cleansing. It wasn't fun or something to be jealous of. For example, it wasn't until the end of my experience that I was laughing on a regular basis. I used to love to have fun and laugh and be silly and stupid. But for whatever reason I've become more serious throughout the years. And when I came down here, broken hearted, lonely, messed up stomach, confused as heck....I was not laughing or having fun. It wasn't until the last few months that I felt as though my fever of life finally turned the corner. And now I'm laughing again, allowing myself to have fun and be stupid and happy. I used to think it was a luxury to feel this way, but now I know that at least for me, it's also a necessity.
But you can't always genuinely feel this way. I had to go through a kind of journey here in which I got my body back on track first, and then focused on my mind and getting to know and caring for myself better. And I think that while I've just started this process, I know now that I ought to sacrifice my physical and mental health only on the rarest of occasions. But I think in the U.S., there is a culture of carelessly handing these treasures over to corporations and our jobs. We don't guard them, but instead guard are jobs. Which is not to say that I plan on being a lazy bum in my job. But I can't let my job take over and force me to put my mind and body second. If I don't have a healthy mind and body, I'm no good for my job anyway. It's kind of the difference between going to war carelessly (as in Iraq) versus only doing it when it's absolutely necessary.
Yes, yet another enlightened musing... I kind of know my trip here has been a stereotype. Like in the webpage my sister sent me of Stupid Things White People Do. One of these stupid things is taking a year off from your job to travel, teach English in another country, write long emails to all of your friends about spiritual enlightenment, and then propose to write a book about it all. Ok, guilty (all except the book about my experience part. Not that I haven't considered it, but it's too cliche and probably been done by a gazillion BA expats. But hey, I'm still not ruling it out). But, shouldn't everyone take the opportunity to step back for a time to find out what it's all about, why they're doing what they're doing or why they're running in the direction they're running. Because if we get to the end and realize we have no idea why we were running our entire lives, that we know no more than we did when we started the chaotic journey, isn't that kind of depressing?
Maybe I'll never make it to a more enlightened and peaceful state. Maybe I'll continue a frustrated path of mock discovery only to realize that I would have been better avoiding it. I don't think there are any assurances that hard work on learning about oneself leads to any kind of true fulfilment. But I think I've traveled beyond the point of no return, so to speak. I've realized too much and there likely isn't any going back now.
I want to have a total of 52 entries to represent the 52 weeks of my stay. This entry is number 50.
I arrived in BA on the Shortest Day of the Year (2008) and will leave on the 20th of June 2009, the longest day in the North.
It's transitioning from fall to winter. The mornings and nights are chilly (though nothing like in Ohio), the trees have lost most of their leaves, the autumn incense is no longer, it's getting dark a little after 5 pm, and people in the streets are huddled in coats and scarves. It feels kind of like Holiday time in the states.
These days, I spend most of my evenings inside writing or preparing classes and more than ever attending yoga classes and chatting with friends in their apartments or online. I'm cooking more too since it's not as hot as it was before and it actually feels good to turn on the oven and fill the apartment with the smell of a chicken roast with onions, garlic, carrots, and rosemary.
My apartment is becoming emptier and emptier too as I clean it out, give away, and sell stuff. Where my futon used to be sits a blanket and a pillow on the wood floor for when I want to watch TV before bed. And a half an hour is about all I can take since my butt hurts too much after that. Luckily, I still have cable even though I'm not paying for it. I even told Fibertel that this was the case, but the guy who came to fix my internet (after it went down for the 5th unexplained time this year) gave it to me anyway after we concluded a chat about how much he likes the US and how he wants to buy a US flag. I thought he was kidding. I asked snarkily, 'Why do you want a US flag?' He replied, 'Porque me encanta Los Estados Unidos' (Because I love the United States). It was surprising to hear that from an Argentine. In fact, it's the first time I've heard one say it.
In any case, he gave me cable and I gave him a glass of water and a powerbar from the U.S. I also rifled through my clothes to see if I had anything with a US flag on it that I could give him, but there was nothing. I really wanted to leave him with some sort of memento from the States.
Anyhow, in the next 13 or so days, I'll be finishing up my work with the family from San Francisco as well as teaching English one last class with the former ambassador from Columbia to the UN. I'll also be eating out with my friends, saying goodbye to Argelia and her family, preparing my trip here in December, going out to movies and dinners with Cecilia, and preparing a bit to buy a car and rent an apartment in Denver.
I felt a bit sad about leaving for the first time yesterday. Life could easily be more boring and normal in the states. Here it was a constant adventure with new opportunities that seemed to fall in my lap at every stage of the journey. On top of that, I had a ton of time here to address my major goal of reflecting on life and deciding where I wanted to go next. I would be surprised if I had that much time in Denver pero veremos.
Speaking of goals that I accomplished here... I also succeeded in gaining new job experiences, improving my physical health, improving my mental health, reflection (to some degree), and improving my Spanish. More than anything else, this has been an experience of spiritual and phsyical cleansing. It wasn't fun or something to be jealous of. For example, it wasn't until the end of my experience that I was laughing on a regular basis. I used to love to have fun and laugh and be silly and stupid. But for whatever reason I've become more serious throughout the years. And when I came down here, broken hearted, lonely, messed up stomach, confused as heck....I was not laughing or having fun. It wasn't until the last few months that I felt as though my fever of life finally turned the corner. And now I'm laughing again, allowing myself to have fun and be stupid and happy. I used to think it was a luxury to feel this way, but now I know that at least for me, it's also a necessity.
But you can't always genuinely feel this way. I had to go through a kind of journey here in which I got my body back on track first, and then focused on my mind and getting to know and caring for myself better. And I think that while I've just started this process, I know now that I ought to sacrifice my physical and mental health only on the rarest of occasions. But I think in the U.S., there is a culture of carelessly handing these treasures over to corporations and our jobs. We don't guard them, but instead guard are jobs. Which is not to say that I plan on being a lazy bum in my job. But I can't let my job take over and force me to put my mind and body second. If I don't have a healthy mind and body, I'm no good for my job anyway. It's kind of the difference between going to war carelessly (as in Iraq) versus only doing it when it's absolutely necessary.
Yes, yet another enlightened musing... I kind of know my trip here has been a stereotype. Like in the webpage my sister sent me of Stupid Things White People Do. One of these stupid things is taking a year off from your job to travel, teach English in another country, write long emails to all of your friends about spiritual enlightenment, and then propose to write a book about it all. Ok, guilty (all except the book about my experience part. Not that I haven't considered it, but it's too cliche and probably been done by a gazillion BA expats. But hey, I'm still not ruling it out). But, shouldn't everyone take the opportunity to step back for a time to find out what it's all about, why they're doing what they're doing or why they're running in the direction they're running. Because if we get to the end and realize we have no idea why we were running our entire lives, that we know no more than we did when we started the chaotic journey, isn't that kind of depressing?
Maybe I'll never make it to a more enlightened and peaceful state. Maybe I'll continue a frustrated path of mock discovery only to realize that I would have been better avoiding it. I don't think there are any assurances that hard work on learning about oneself leads to any kind of true fulfilment. But I think I've traveled beyond the point of no return, so to speak. I've realized too much and there likely isn't any going back now.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
9 to 5
I always felt lucky to be a school psychologist at Reynoldsburg. I was doing something I generally liked. The work gave me a sense of fulfillment. I felt respected and well treated. I was paid well and the benefits were great. I only worked 186 days a year and had all kinds of breaks for holidays, snow days and teacher work days. By all accounts, I led a privileged life.
I felt that way until I moved here.
When I moved down to BA, I almost immediately found 4 or so jobs and was plenty busy. But as the year progressed, I dropped more and more of the jobs and have now only work to meet my basic needs. Before, I felt a need to work for the sake of working, because I didn't know what to do or how to fill the days without work. I just felt like I should be working because I used to work all the time and not working made me feel nervous, anxious, jumpy, like I should be doing something. Waking up at 9am and not being at work and not needing to do anything was scary. I'm still not completely over it.
Losing work I suppose is like losing anything else. It's a huge part of your life. It makes decisions for you. It structures your life. It decides what you're going to from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. It dictates when you can vacation (it makes the concept of vacation necessary), when you eat lunch, when you wake up, when you go to sleep, what stresses you will encounter, what type of healthcare you will receive, the environment you'll spend your day in. The typical 9-5 job is both a blanket of comfort, schedule, routine, and certainty but also something that controls, constrains, and takes away our freedom.
But that's ok because as the sociologist Erich Fromm pointed out, most of us want to Escape From Freedom anyway. Freedom is not as cool as it sounds. When you constantly have to make decisions, when you assume total responsibility for your actions and behavior, when you're freed from many of the bonds and boundaries of life, you don't all of a sudden feel a huge relief or happiness or sense of a fulfillment. I think you instead feel like you've just been shoved outside of a warm cozy cabin on a subzero day in your underwear.
As much as 'patriots' in the United States say that we should put Freedom first or vote for Freedom (which somehow is supposed to mean vote for the dude who wants to go fight every war we can get ourselves into), I don't think the average person wants freedom at all. I think the average person wants certainty. Why else is Christianity or intense religion so comforting to people? It's easy. If you accept the Bible, everything suddenly makes sense. You no longer have to struggle with the existential battle of existence. You know why you're here, how you got here, and how it will all end. Pack this up in a big box community church with well respected mainstream churgoers and why not take the plunge of faith? As astronomer and philosopher Karl Sagan observed, 'If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize'?
Getting back to the point.... I think true freedom means pulling off the cloaks of structure, culture, norms, religion, society, subtextual and other messages that we are constantly absorbing from our environment so that we are making decisions based on our knowledge of ourselves and our individual needs and desires, as opposed to what we've been told we ought to do. I don't think this is 100% possible. But I think that most of us have a ton of room for improvement toward freedom. But I don't think most are interested.
Many choose paths that structure life almost as soon as they're able to make our their own decisions apart from their parents. The lucky ones choose college after high school. At least 4 years of what's supposed to be rigorous academics and higher learning that usually results in making the decision to imprison our lives even more by taking 9-5 jobs that allow 2 week vacations.
And if we don't choose college, we might get married quickly out of high school. Combine that with a full time job or career and we compound even further our loss of freedom or cloak of structure and comfort, whatever you want to call it. Other ways of escaping freedom are joining a religion that purports to have all the answers, submitting to the path that society and the dominant culture lays out for us, or doing what our parents and other family members tell us that we ought to be doing.
And maybe these escapes from freedom aren't so bad. Maybe they're not bad at all. If we don't know what the heck life is all about, why not put ourselves in a position of constantly reacting to a structuring mechanism that we have chosen. For example, if you choose to have a family, you are more or less constantly reacting. You live to take care of your children and your family and you do everything you can to ensure that they are ok now and in the future. You're constantly responding to their needs and the #1 goal and focus is crystal clear. You work, manage money, wake up in the middle of the night to change diapers, shuttle kids to events, support them as they grow older, and eventually become a grandparent to their kids. The structure is there for life.
And why not choose one of these structuring mechanisms. Is it really better to be stuck in your own head trying to figure out what it's all about when you could enjoy a sense of fulfilment or at least forget the existential void? So I'm not judging, I'm just saying.... I think most of us want to escape freedom. And as much as many don't want to admit it, we make choices to do so. We make choices to start families and therefore not be able to spend as much time ruminating on what it's all about. How can you when your baby is screaming and needs his bottle? Or we make choices to lose ourselves in work. Or religion. Or consumerism. Or food. Or anything that fills us up or structures our lives or gives us the illusion of direction, purpose, comfort, or certainty.
But if we truly want freedom, we must start getting rid of all of the messages from outside that tell us what we should be doing or how we should be living our lives. And we should look inside to find out more about ourselves and what We really want and need.
So more than any other lesson I've learned here, I've learned that it's ok for me not to work most of the time, especially if I don't feel a sense of fulfillment from it. Right now, I'm teaching a 5, 9, and 11 year old and I love it. I only do it about 10 or so hours a week but it's enough. The time we spend together is intense learning, serious critical thinking. Ok, not with the 5 year old, but the older kids. And my other job is teaching English to the former Columbian Ambassador to the United Nations. Which for me is just totally cool.
And that's all I do. It pays the bills and I live well. I don't save a thing. But I feel really healthy. I swim, cook, read, research, enjoy long meals, visit museums, talk with friends, think, go out to movies, eat out with friends, travel on the cheap, and write. If it were not for the stress of the big city and the fact that my family is so far away and that I have issues with the Porteno culture, I'd be set.
There came a point at which I realized that working for the sake of working is a little bit ridiculous. What does it say about me if I can't find a way to occupy my time without work?
So I feel like now I am living. When I work 9-5, I don't get that sense nearly as much. I am instead working to live.
And so this is my concern about going back to the States. Will I be able to handle returning to the 9-5 situation that I've set myself up with in Denver? Granted, I've handpicked my job out of 8 or so choices in 8 or so different cities so that I will in theory very much like what I'm doing. And I feel totally privileged to have been able to do so. Especially in a time when so many people are out of work. But then again, I don't need the job, despite the financial crisis or the fears of US society at the moment. My job in Denver is more than enough to support me. It's easily too much.
So I'm worried that I will find myself in the 9-5 position of working as a means of getting away again to maybe Spain or Costa Rica or some other adventure. I wonder if I will always work most of the year to live part of the year. Which doesn't make sense. We ought to be living full time and working to support life instead of the opposite. My hope is that my job is less like work and more of something that I'd be doing if I weren't being paid. And seeing as how I've chosen a position in which I'll be speaking Spanish all day and working with Hispanic families, I think that might be the case.
But if it's not, if I find out that I'm stuck in a windowless office most of the day writing drudgerous reports and administering mindless tests and dreaming of being somewhere else...., I hope I come to the conclusion that I should find a way to work in a position that is less like work and more something I want to be doing or work less so that I can at least be living more each day than I work.
From this point out, my goals is to be more deliberate about the way that I choose to lose my freedom. I think I'll always to some extent feel pushed and pulled in directions by messages from the outside that tell me that I should have a family, a high paying job, a published novel, accomplishments, religion, a nice car, a big house...All that stuff that previous generations claim was just something that they were supposed to do, expected to to, Had to do. Because we really don't Have to do nearly as much as we're told. We give in to these messages. And yes, we make the decision to capitulate, to give up our freedom.
So for whatever reason, I've wound up at age 30 without too much structure. I've got no family, no debt, no serious financial obligations. Ostensibly, I'm fairly free. But I've chosen to go back to 9-5. I'm hoping it's not an escape from freedom, but rather intensified and deliberate living. But only the next year will tell.
I felt that way until I moved here.
When I moved down to BA, I almost immediately found 4 or so jobs and was plenty busy. But as the year progressed, I dropped more and more of the jobs and have now only work to meet my basic needs. Before, I felt a need to work for the sake of working, because I didn't know what to do or how to fill the days without work. I just felt like I should be working because I used to work all the time and not working made me feel nervous, anxious, jumpy, like I should be doing something. Waking up at 9am and not being at work and not needing to do anything was scary. I'm still not completely over it.
Losing work I suppose is like losing anything else. It's a huge part of your life. It makes decisions for you. It structures your life. It decides what you're going to from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. It dictates when you can vacation (it makes the concept of vacation necessary), when you eat lunch, when you wake up, when you go to sleep, what stresses you will encounter, what type of healthcare you will receive, the environment you'll spend your day in. The typical 9-5 job is both a blanket of comfort, schedule, routine, and certainty but also something that controls, constrains, and takes away our freedom.
But that's ok because as the sociologist Erich Fromm pointed out, most of us want to Escape From Freedom anyway. Freedom is not as cool as it sounds. When you constantly have to make decisions, when you assume total responsibility for your actions and behavior, when you're freed from many of the bonds and boundaries of life, you don't all of a sudden feel a huge relief or happiness or sense of a fulfillment. I think you instead feel like you've just been shoved outside of a warm cozy cabin on a subzero day in your underwear.
As much as 'patriots' in the United States say that we should put Freedom first or vote for Freedom (which somehow is supposed to mean vote for the dude who wants to go fight every war we can get ourselves into), I don't think the average person wants freedom at all. I think the average person wants certainty. Why else is Christianity or intense religion so comforting to people? It's easy. If you accept the Bible, everything suddenly makes sense. You no longer have to struggle with the existential battle of existence. You know why you're here, how you got here, and how it will all end. Pack this up in a big box community church with well respected mainstream churgoers and why not take the plunge of faith? As astronomer and philosopher Karl Sagan observed, 'If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize'?
Getting back to the point.... I think true freedom means pulling off the cloaks of structure, culture, norms, religion, society, subtextual and other messages that we are constantly absorbing from our environment so that we are making decisions based on our knowledge of ourselves and our individual needs and desires, as opposed to what we've been told we ought to do. I don't think this is 100% possible. But I think that most of us have a ton of room for improvement toward freedom. But I don't think most are interested.
Many choose paths that structure life almost as soon as they're able to make our their own decisions apart from their parents. The lucky ones choose college after high school. At least 4 years of what's supposed to be rigorous academics and higher learning that usually results in making the decision to imprison our lives even more by taking 9-5 jobs that allow 2 week vacations.
And if we don't choose college, we might get married quickly out of high school. Combine that with a full time job or career and we compound even further our loss of freedom or cloak of structure and comfort, whatever you want to call it. Other ways of escaping freedom are joining a religion that purports to have all the answers, submitting to the path that society and the dominant culture lays out for us, or doing what our parents and other family members tell us that we ought to be doing.
And maybe these escapes from freedom aren't so bad. Maybe they're not bad at all. If we don't know what the heck life is all about, why not put ourselves in a position of constantly reacting to a structuring mechanism that we have chosen. For example, if you choose to have a family, you are more or less constantly reacting. You live to take care of your children and your family and you do everything you can to ensure that they are ok now and in the future. You're constantly responding to their needs and the #1 goal and focus is crystal clear. You work, manage money, wake up in the middle of the night to change diapers, shuttle kids to events, support them as they grow older, and eventually become a grandparent to their kids. The structure is there for life.
And why not choose one of these structuring mechanisms. Is it really better to be stuck in your own head trying to figure out what it's all about when you could enjoy a sense of fulfilment or at least forget the existential void? So I'm not judging, I'm just saying.... I think most of us want to escape freedom. And as much as many don't want to admit it, we make choices to do so. We make choices to start families and therefore not be able to spend as much time ruminating on what it's all about. How can you when your baby is screaming and needs his bottle? Or we make choices to lose ourselves in work. Or religion. Or consumerism. Or food. Or anything that fills us up or structures our lives or gives us the illusion of direction, purpose, comfort, or certainty.
But if we truly want freedom, we must start getting rid of all of the messages from outside that tell us what we should be doing or how we should be living our lives. And we should look inside to find out more about ourselves and what We really want and need.
So more than any other lesson I've learned here, I've learned that it's ok for me not to work most of the time, especially if I don't feel a sense of fulfillment from it. Right now, I'm teaching a 5, 9, and 11 year old and I love it. I only do it about 10 or so hours a week but it's enough. The time we spend together is intense learning, serious critical thinking. Ok, not with the 5 year old, but the older kids. And my other job is teaching English to the former Columbian Ambassador to the United Nations. Which for me is just totally cool.
And that's all I do. It pays the bills and I live well. I don't save a thing. But I feel really healthy. I swim, cook, read, research, enjoy long meals, visit museums, talk with friends, think, go out to movies, eat out with friends, travel on the cheap, and write. If it were not for the stress of the big city and the fact that my family is so far away and that I have issues with the Porteno culture, I'd be set.
There came a point at which I realized that working for the sake of working is a little bit ridiculous. What does it say about me if I can't find a way to occupy my time without work?
So I feel like now I am living. When I work 9-5, I don't get that sense nearly as much. I am instead working to live.
And so this is my concern about going back to the States. Will I be able to handle returning to the 9-5 situation that I've set myself up with in Denver? Granted, I've handpicked my job out of 8 or so choices in 8 or so different cities so that I will in theory very much like what I'm doing. And I feel totally privileged to have been able to do so. Especially in a time when so many people are out of work. But then again, I don't need the job, despite the financial crisis or the fears of US society at the moment. My job in Denver is more than enough to support me. It's easily too much.
So I'm worried that I will find myself in the 9-5 position of working as a means of getting away again to maybe Spain or Costa Rica or some other adventure. I wonder if I will always work most of the year to live part of the year. Which doesn't make sense. We ought to be living full time and working to support life instead of the opposite. My hope is that my job is less like work and more of something that I'd be doing if I weren't being paid. And seeing as how I've chosen a position in which I'll be speaking Spanish all day and working with Hispanic families, I think that might be the case.
But if it's not, if I find out that I'm stuck in a windowless office most of the day writing drudgerous reports and administering mindless tests and dreaming of being somewhere else...., I hope I come to the conclusion that I should find a way to work in a position that is less like work and more something I want to be doing or work less so that I can at least be living more each day than I work.
From this point out, my goals is to be more deliberate about the way that I choose to lose my freedom. I think I'll always to some extent feel pushed and pulled in directions by messages from the outside that tell me that I should have a family, a high paying job, a published novel, accomplishments, religion, a nice car, a big house...All that stuff that previous generations claim was just something that they were supposed to do, expected to to, Had to do. Because we really don't Have to do nearly as much as we're told. We give in to these messages. And yes, we make the decision to capitulate, to give up our freedom.
So for whatever reason, I've wound up at age 30 without too much structure. I've got no family, no debt, no serious financial obligations. Ostensibly, I'm fairly free. But I've chosen to go back to 9-5. I'm hoping it's not an escape from freedom, but rather intensified and deliberate living. But only the next year will tell.
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Perfect Place
I've spent a good many entries detailing my problems with Buenos Aires. It's catharsis. And I want to document all my issues. Because in the US, I might know who to call or how to complain so as to affect change but in the absence of having a strong command of the language, culture, and system in Buenos Aires, my only recourse is to damn the city and it's people in my blog.
It's like this, I wake up, go through the motions of my day...Invariably a bunch of things bug me. I don't feel empowered and don't know how to affect change here, but I still feel a need to do something, to at least tell someone, to make sure those responsible are somehow held accountable, to raise awareness, whatever. So I whine and complain about it in the blog as a means of getting back.
But Buenos Aires isn't all bad. More than anything (as one of my recent and now more faithful readers pointed out) Buenos Aires is very flawed based on the standards to which I am holding it. What are those standards? The standards are characteristics that I personally find important. That is, based on who I am and what I know about myself and what I need and desire. So what are my standards? Who am I and what does that say about what I need in a city?
The who am I part is ongoing and I've blogged that into the ground, but the what's important to me in a city is worth mentioning. So the following is a list of the most important characteristics in a city, based on what I've figured out about myself and what I need and want:
1. A large stock of smart and critical thinking people who communicate well through words and take the time to do so on a regular basis. Folks who value deep and meaningful conversation and communication and who are good at it. Folks who aren't afraid to share their opinions, who listen well, who are sensitive to the world, who can articulate their opinions diplomatically and as Obama says, 'Disagree without being disagreeable'.
2. A spiritually diverse community. In Ohio if you are interested in becoming more spirtiual, plumbing the depths, if you will, you can chose between Christianity, Christianity, or Christianity. Outside of fringe groups, I didn't find too much in terms of an alternative spiritual community. For years, I've put out the spiritual vibe and found nothing but evangelical Christians in different niche packages who try time and again to convert me. There are rocker Christians, sporty Christians, alternative brooding druggy Christians, and much more.
Christianity in Ohio is like different forms of sugar. If you don't like plain old white sugar, there's molasses, maple syrup, honey, evaporated cane juice, brown sugar, organic cane sugar, or agave nectar. But when it comes down to it it's still Sugar.
I want choices. I know there's more out there. Other ways of going deeper without having to accept the tenants of a religion that, given my God given 5 senses, is impossible to swallow without a quantam leap of faith (and unfortunately, as much as I want to, I don't understand it and don't have it). Surely there is a way to be spiritual, to explore under the surface using only the senses that I was given.
3. City and nature. I'd like to be in a city center that has a large and diverse population but that also has nature, or some type of pure natural setting nearby. I'd like all the benefits of city life-culture, lots of different people and ideas, arts, activities, food-along with clean air, water, and a place nearby where I can hike around in peace and quiet, away from people when I need it.
4. Heat and sun. My body does not like rough winters nor can it deal with a lack of light. I need a place with decent weather.
5. Sense of community. People who trust in and use government and charitable organizations as a means of benefiting the greater good. People who treat each other well. People who actually look at each other, acknowledge each other, and care and feel a sense of responsibility for their neighbors.
I'm not so sure this Top 5 list is in order of importance to me. The top spot and order probably depend more on the day of week and time of day you ask me. In any case, at least at the moment, these 5 things are the most important to me.
As an exercise, I'm going to test Buenos Aires against these standards.
1. In my experience, Buenos Aires has it. More than any other city I've lived in, folks here know how to have a good conversations. They tend to be bright, opinionated, civil, interested in chatting, they take time for it, they value it, they're good at it, and they listen well.
2. I really have no idea what kind of spiritual community Buenos Aires has. I've met a number of atheists, one hardcore Catholic, and a number of superstitious Catholics (people with crosses hanging from their rearview mirrors who make the sign of the cross when they pass a church but who probably know little to nothing about the religion.) And finally I met someone who is part of a group that uses a more philosophical text as a means of self and spiritual exploration, the type of spirituality I think I'm more suited for.
3. Buenos Aires has city. But no nature. Tigre just doesn't cut it for me. The fact that you have to take an overnight bus to more or less get into some serious nature is hard for me. Buenos Aires is tall apartment buildings for as far as the eye can see. I feel trapped by the city-smog and hordes of stressed people who flow through it like bad blood through the veins and arteries of the city's streets. And as far as clean air and water. Fogetaboutit. The deisel buses and smokers make it so that everyone living in the city, whether he smokes or not, takes in the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes per day. I expect to go through withdrawal when I move back to the States. And the water, if it is from the Rio De La Plata, as I've been told, cannot be clean. I don't care what type of purification process it goes through. That muddy sludge-shake of a river es un asco.
4. Heat and Sun. Yep, Buenos Aires has it. The climate here is great, compared to what I'm accustomed to in Ohio. The winters can be grim and chilly but nooooothing like winters in Ohio. My main complaint here is that the buildings turn into giant ice blocks in the winter. That is, they collect and give off cold throughout the winter so even though it's 60 degrees and sunny, it feels much colder because the buildings are blocking the sun and giving off cold at the same time.
5. I don't need to harp on this one. Buenos Aires ain't got it. Not even close. Casi nada.
But all in all, I have to give it to the city, it's much more suited to me than I've been claiming. It meets almost 3 of the categories, about half of what I'm looking for. For a marriage, however, I'm looking for at least 4 out of 5. Perfection obviously I'm not going to find. But something with the majority of what I'm looking for surely is out there.
In fact, Denver I think is going to be at least a 3 out of 5.
1. I don't know how bright and interested in conversation the folks in Denver are. Can't give them this one, although I've heard positive reports.
2. I know Denver and the surrounding area has a diverse spiritual community, maybe not as diverse as California, but a quick study has revealed a number of substantial alternatives to the common US religion menu. I will note, in any case, that Colorado has an intense mega church going Christian population. Which I find unsettling.
3. City and nature. Check and check. Big city, arts, diversity, culture, food. Rocky mountain national park. Rated best big city water in the country by Men's Health Magazine. Clean air as a result of natural gas and hybrid buses as well as bike commuters and a large green community and concern for the environment.
4. Heat and sun. It's sunny, and mild in the winter. But not as warm in general as I would like and too much snow. I'll give it a .5 as being better than Ohio but not perfect for me.
5. And yes, it seems to have a strong sense of community. The people are super friendly, the city is clean, there are bike paths everywhere, parks, and a strong and intelligent progressive government.
So according to what I know about Denver, it is at least a 3.5 and maybe more, depending on what I find out about the people.
So I feel bad for knocking Buenos Aires the way I have. It does have a number of characteristics important to me. And when I was walking the streets today paying bills and dodging traffic, I knew I would miss it. I could see myself in the future, bored in the States, yearning to have my adventure back. Desiring again the instability, the movement, the energy, the entropy of this crazy place. I can't say that I'm ever bored here. Even commonplace days are an adventure, sometimes just from the perspective of seeing so many different people. My relationship with this place is surely love/hate. The most intense and passionate relationships are. I expect to be pulled back to this place some day...
It's like this, I wake up, go through the motions of my day...Invariably a bunch of things bug me. I don't feel empowered and don't know how to affect change here, but I still feel a need to do something, to at least tell someone, to make sure those responsible are somehow held accountable, to raise awareness, whatever. So I whine and complain about it in the blog as a means of getting back.
But Buenos Aires isn't all bad. More than anything (as one of my recent and now more faithful readers pointed out) Buenos Aires is very flawed based on the standards to which I am holding it. What are those standards? The standards are characteristics that I personally find important. That is, based on who I am and what I know about myself and what I need and desire. So what are my standards? Who am I and what does that say about what I need in a city?
The who am I part is ongoing and I've blogged that into the ground, but the what's important to me in a city is worth mentioning. So the following is a list of the most important characteristics in a city, based on what I've figured out about myself and what I need and want:
1. A large stock of smart and critical thinking people who communicate well through words and take the time to do so on a regular basis. Folks who value deep and meaningful conversation and communication and who are good at it. Folks who aren't afraid to share their opinions, who listen well, who are sensitive to the world, who can articulate their opinions diplomatically and as Obama says, 'Disagree without being disagreeable'.
2. A spiritually diverse community. In Ohio if you are interested in becoming more spirtiual, plumbing the depths, if you will, you can chose between Christianity, Christianity, or Christianity. Outside of fringe groups, I didn't find too much in terms of an alternative spiritual community. For years, I've put out the spiritual vibe and found nothing but evangelical Christians in different niche packages who try time and again to convert me. There are rocker Christians, sporty Christians, alternative brooding druggy Christians, and much more.
Christianity in Ohio is like different forms of sugar. If you don't like plain old white sugar, there's molasses, maple syrup, honey, evaporated cane juice, brown sugar, organic cane sugar, or agave nectar. But when it comes down to it it's still Sugar.
I want choices. I know there's more out there. Other ways of going deeper without having to accept the tenants of a religion that, given my God given 5 senses, is impossible to swallow without a quantam leap of faith (and unfortunately, as much as I want to, I don't understand it and don't have it). Surely there is a way to be spiritual, to explore under the surface using only the senses that I was given.
3. City and nature. I'd like to be in a city center that has a large and diverse population but that also has nature, or some type of pure natural setting nearby. I'd like all the benefits of city life-culture, lots of different people and ideas, arts, activities, food-along with clean air, water, and a place nearby where I can hike around in peace and quiet, away from people when I need it.
4. Heat and sun. My body does not like rough winters nor can it deal with a lack of light. I need a place with decent weather.
5. Sense of community. People who trust in and use government and charitable organizations as a means of benefiting the greater good. People who treat each other well. People who actually look at each other, acknowledge each other, and care and feel a sense of responsibility for their neighbors.
I'm not so sure this Top 5 list is in order of importance to me. The top spot and order probably depend more on the day of week and time of day you ask me. In any case, at least at the moment, these 5 things are the most important to me.
As an exercise, I'm going to test Buenos Aires against these standards.
1. In my experience, Buenos Aires has it. More than any other city I've lived in, folks here know how to have a good conversations. They tend to be bright, opinionated, civil, interested in chatting, they take time for it, they value it, they're good at it, and they listen well.
2. I really have no idea what kind of spiritual community Buenos Aires has. I've met a number of atheists, one hardcore Catholic, and a number of superstitious Catholics (people with crosses hanging from their rearview mirrors who make the sign of the cross when they pass a church but who probably know little to nothing about the religion.) And finally I met someone who is part of a group that uses a more philosophical text as a means of self and spiritual exploration, the type of spirituality I think I'm more suited for.
3. Buenos Aires has city. But no nature. Tigre just doesn't cut it for me. The fact that you have to take an overnight bus to more or less get into some serious nature is hard for me. Buenos Aires is tall apartment buildings for as far as the eye can see. I feel trapped by the city-smog and hordes of stressed people who flow through it like bad blood through the veins and arteries of the city's streets. And as far as clean air and water. Fogetaboutit. The deisel buses and smokers make it so that everyone living in the city, whether he smokes or not, takes in the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes per day. I expect to go through withdrawal when I move back to the States. And the water, if it is from the Rio De La Plata, as I've been told, cannot be clean. I don't care what type of purification process it goes through. That muddy sludge-shake of a river es un asco.
4. Heat and Sun. Yep, Buenos Aires has it. The climate here is great, compared to what I'm accustomed to in Ohio. The winters can be grim and chilly but nooooothing like winters in Ohio. My main complaint here is that the buildings turn into giant ice blocks in the winter. That is, they collect and give off cold throughout the winter so even though it's 60 degrees and sunny, it feels much colder because the buildings are blocking the sun and giving off cold at the same time.
5. I don't need to harp on this one. Buenos Aires ain't got it. Not even close. Casi nada.
But all in all, I have to give it to the city, it's much more suited to me than I've been claiming. It meets almost 3 of the categories, about half of what I'm looking for. For a marriage, however, I'm looking for at least 4 out of 5. Perfection obviously I'm not going to find. But something with the majority of what I'm looking for surely is out there.
In fact, Denver I think is going to be at least a 3 out of 5.
1. I don't know how bright and interested in conversation the folks in Denver are. Can't give them this one, although I've heard positive reports.
2. I know Denver and the surrounding area has a diverse spiritual community, maybe not as diverse as California, but a quick study has revealed a number of substantial alternatives to the common US religion menu. I will note, in any case, that Colorado has an intense mega church going Christian population. Which I find unsettling.
3. City and nature. Check and check. Big city, arts, diversity, culture, food. Rocky mountain national park. Rated best big city water in the country by Men's Health Magazine. Clean air as a result of natural gas and hybrid buses as well as bike commuters and a large green community and concern for the environment.
4. Heat and sun. It's sunny, and mild in the winter. But not as warm in general as I would like and too much snow. I'll give it a .5 as being better than Ohio but not perfect for me.
5. And yes, it seems to have a strong sense of community. The people are super friendly, the city is clean, there are bike paths everywhere, parks, and a strong and intelligent progressive government.
So according to what I know about Denver, it is at least a 3.5 and maybe more, depending on what I find out about the people.
So I feel bad for knocking Buenos Aires the way I have. It does have a number of characteristics important to me. And when I was walking the streets today paying bills and dodging traffic, I knew I would miss it. I could see myself in the future, bored in the States, yearning to have my adventure back. Desiring again the instability, the movement, the energy, the entropy of this crazy place. I can't say that I'm ever bored here. Even commonplace days are an adventure, sometimes just from the perspective of seeing so many different people. My relationship with this place is surely love/hate. The most intense and passionate relationships are. I expect to be pulled back to this place some day...
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Ode To Cecilia
Around the time I turned 16 I was promoted to the position of Caddymaster at a country club at the end of the street from my parent's place. I had been a caddy for 3-4 years previous. And while I wasn't the best looper out there, I was straight-laced and honest so I ended up with the job. The gig mostly entailed controlling the flow of play on the golf course, cleaning golf clubs, pulling out golf carts, loading golf clubs on golf carts, and doing random things for the members of the country club. A small part of the job as well was managing the dwindling, but substantial caddying program. Included in this was running the caddy training program, administering the exams, grading them, promoting and in some cases firing existing caddies, deciding which caddies would caddy for which members, and making sure caddies got paid appropriately.
My first year on the job was an adjustment. I was an awkward teen and utterly lacking common sense. So dealing with and responding to basic social and other challenges was something that I had to learn explicitly instead of just getting it. I also found it hard to swallow my pride all the time and I was a 5 on a scale of 10 in terms of my ability to kiss ass. In short, it was a role that I was not made for.
At the same time I got the job, my friend Mike started caddying far away at another country club. He had been my closest friend and had also been in contention for the caddymaster job. But Mike had a problem with theft and dishonesty that no one could prove outright, but that many sensed. So when Mike saw the writing on the wall (so to speak) he left to caddy elsewhere. And I was suddenly without my closest friend.
As top caddy-I was very proud-I began to feel a sort of captains or leaders isolation, in which a leader feels lonely because he has to isolate himself from his crew in order to maintain a certain distance and level of respect. On top of that, I was still a kid and all of a sudden I had to act semi-responsible and it wasn't fun.
Caddy school took place in mid to late April. A group of 40-50 kids from local schools showed up. I knew that only 5-10 of them would ever last until the end of the summer. The rest would loop once or twice and then never come back. One who showed up was named Kevin Ostrowski. I knew of him from elementary school. A loud, brash, obnoxious, irreverant, impulsive piece of work. He was everything I didn't want to be. And he thought he was going to caddy.
Caddying is all about self discipline, patience, control, politeness, attention, and keen observation-All the things that Kevin lacked. I did not want him caddying. I didn't want to be responsible for him. I didn't want him anywhere near me. I was going to make it super hard for him to pass his test.
As is the case with the universe....Kevin was the first to take the test. As also is the case with the universe. Kevin didn't miss any questions. The first day he was allowed to come to caddy, he was there bright and early, waiting for me to open up the pro-shop and bagroom. I nodded to acknowledge his presence and hoped that I could find him a loop quickly so that he would be out of my sight. Luckily, the club president showed up and in a request that was unusual for him, asked for a caddy. And so I sent Kevin out with his first loop.
Kevin was not made to caddy or to work much in general. His first bag was mammoth and the man for whom he was carrying it was old and not a great golfer. It must have been a miserable first loop.
When it was over, I heard Kevin say something I've never heard any caddy say, especially not to the club president: 'Old man, you better give me a lot of money because this bag is huge and that wasn't easy'. I couldn't believe it. Stunned. I didn't know how to respond. Would I be fired because I had hired this kid, knowing full well that he was a train wreck waiting to happen on his first loop. But what happened was....nothing. I don't know if the president didn't hear him or just didn't care or liked Kevin's attitude or what. But he simply laughed, gave Kevin 13 or so dollars (which is what he gave everyone at the time for 18 holes) and left.
I was shocked that he had gotten away with it. Appalled. But a part of me was also envious. A part of me thought it was hilarious what he'd done. He was everything that I wasn't, but maybe I did want to be a bit.
So I never did say anything to Kevin about what he said to the club president, nor did I punish him in any way. I think I wanted to see it happen again. He was entertaining. But I never acknowledged that I got a kick out of what he did. Instead, I was extra hard on and made a special effort to ignore him.
Even so, Kevin kept coming back. Again and again. Every morning there waiting. Every morning, I sighed as I walked up the path to the caddyshack, wondering why me? Why did this obnoxious kid have to be there every morning for me to put up with? He talked my ear off. Asked constant questions. Made stupid jokes. Wasn't terribly interested in caddying. Harrased the girls in the snackbar. Harrased the lifeguards. Swung every members' club he could get his hands on. And followed me everywhere.
By August, I had accepted his presence and his help. One night, while he was helping me pick up the driving range and the sun was setting, he said to me, 'Pat, wouldn't you probably say that I'm your best friend?'
I thought about it.... And he was right. I murmured, 'I guess so'. This guy who a few months back I had hated had quickly developed from my worst nightmare to my best friend by sheer force of day to day companionship and loyalty. And he did crazy stuff that I wish I could have gotten away with. I laughed. He did more crazy stuff. And we worked well together.
So I went from a lonely angsty teen to a happy and sometimes brooding teen. All because of my new best friend.
In Buenos Aires, I had a similar experience. In my final year in Columbus I had more or less drifted apart from my Ohio friends. I was working all the time in 4-5 jobs depending on the season and when I wasn't working I was chatting on the internet with my Argentine friends. I had lost the habit of meeting up and hanging out with people in general. When I moved to Buenos Aires things didn't change, even though I had cultivated a number of quality friendships there.
In Buenos Aires, the full force of having been dropped like a cigarette butt by my modelesque Patagonian ex-girlfriend hit me. She did not come back, wasn't interested in talking, and more or less wanted nothing to do with me. So I did what I do best. I buried myself in learning and doing my 4 new jobs. And I spent the rest of my time in my apartment reading, cooking, and occasionally writing. I rarely hung out with my Argentine friends and lived out a somewhat mechanized existence.
While most of my friends became accustomed to my excuses for why I couldn't hang out and stopped trying, one friend persevered, wouldn't give up. She kept calling and texting and calling and texting......Until I finally started accepting. At first because I had turned her down so many times before and I felt guilty. It wasn't her that I didn't want to see. I just didn't want to be out of the comfort and safety of my apartment and I was down and sulking and didn't want to be around anyone.
When I first started accepting Cecilia's offers to hang out, I would greet her reluctantly and would have to force myself to engage in conversation. I yearned to look at the time and calculated in my head how much longer I would have to hang out before I could justify leaving. I only accepted invitations on my terms. We would do exactly what I wanted to do, whether it was eating at my favorite parilla, practicing giving my tour, watching a movie I wanted to see, or going to a museum I wanted to go to. Cecilia was game for whatever and whenever, even though she had to travel and 2 hours round trip to see me.
Sunday was our day to hang out and it became the staple activity of my weekly schedule, my one surebet friend interaction per week. And for Ceci it was the same. She was so loyal to our Sundays that she even came back the week after she had been attacked and robbed while returning from one of our Sunday night parilla outings. When I found out what had happened I felt a mix of guilt and shame for letting her return so late without offering my futon, mixed with genuine concern for my friend and anger at the attackers, something I honestly wasn't expecting to feel. It had been difficult to allow myself to care deeply for anyone outside of family members again. I suffered from a lack of trust and a fear of being hurt. But somehow Cecilia had worked her way into my well guarded heart.
I remember the one night over the Argentine summer in January or February when I had gone from seeing Cecilia in a mechanical way to being genuinely happy to see my friend. I was walking to the Patio Bulrich Mall to see a movie with her (As always with a 2x1 pass that I had saved from the subway) and when I saw her from a distance an involuntary smile formed across my face and I threw my hands up to signal to her that I had arrived. My friend was waiting for me. By sheer force of loyalty, consistency, and putting up with a boring, cynical, ultra-grumpy, and often-times critical me, she had become my best friend. I don't know why she kept calling. I don't know what she saw in the pathetic shell that I was then. But she stuck around and now I care about her almost as one of my family.
Part of my getting better I owe to Cecilia getting me out of my apartment. The other part was likely the passage of time, active reflection, and swimming. She helped me to trust again even when I was convinced that I could trust no one in Buenos Aires. She's as honest and trustworthy as anyone I know.
I should point out as well that Cecilia wasn't as hard a sell as my old best friend (and still good friend) Kevin. Cecilia is trilingual (English, Spanish, and German). She works 6 days a week, from 9am-9pm using all 3 languages in her jobs, she spent a year studying in Germany, she's even tempered, she has good social skills, is super easy to get along with, and she's pretty. Why she wanted to be friends with me even throughout the dark self-pity days is a wonder.
When I leave in 20 days I will miss Cecilia very much. Sundays will never be the same. Who will amble through museums with me, accompany me for parilla, go out for late movies and ice cream afterwards, force me to go dancing de vez en cuando, introduce me to new Latin music, let me practice my tours on her, walk all over town with me even though she doesn't have the right shoes, take long bus rides out to street fairs, or simply put up with me in general???
I only hope that our friendship continues in some capacity after I leave. Cecilia has become something like the little sister I never had. And as much as she hates when I say that, it means a lot to me.
P.S. Please all wish Cecilia good luck as she has her final interview in June for a job with Lufthansa that will allow her to more easily travel the world and Denver, Colorado in particular so she can come visit.
My first year on the job was an adjustment. I was an awkward teen and utterly lacking common sense. So dealing with and responding to basic social and other challenges was something that I had to learn explicitly instead of just getting it. I also found it hard to swallow my pride all the time and I was a 5 on a scale of 10 in terms of my ability to kiss ass. In short, it was a role that I was not made for.
At the same time I got the job, my friend Mike started caddying far away at another country club. He had been my closest friend and had also been in contention for the caddymaster job. But Mike had a problem with theft and dishonesty that no one could prove outright, but that many sensed. So when Mike saw the writing on the wall (so to speak) he left to caddy elsewhere. And I was suddenly without my closest friend.
As top caddy-I was very proud-I began to feel a sort of captains or leaders isolation, in which a leader feels lonely because he has to isolate himself from his crew in order to maintain a certain distance and level of respect. On top of that, I was still a kid and all of a sudden I had to act semi-responsible and it wasn't fun.
Caddy school took place in mid to late April. A group of 40-50 kids from local schools showed up. I knew that only 5-10 of them would ever last until the end of the summer. The rest would loop once or twice and then never come back. One who showed up was named Kevin Ostrowski. I knew of him from elementary school. A loud, brash, obnoxious, irreverant, impulsive piece of work. He was everything I didn't want to be. And he thought he was going to caddy.
Caddying is all about self discipline, patience, control, politeness, attention, and keen observation-All the things that Kevin lacked. I did not want him caddying. I didn't want to be responsible for him. I didn't want him anywhere near me. I was going to make it super hard for him to pass his test.
As is the case with the universe....Kevin was the first to take the test. As also is the case with the universe. Kevin didn't miss any questions. The first day he was allowed to come to caddy, he was there bright and early, waiting for me to open up the pro-shop and bagroom. I nodded to acknowledge his presence and hoped that I could find him a loop quickly so that he would be out of my sight. Luckily, the club president showed up and in a request that was unusual for him, asked for a caddy. And so I sent Kevin out with his first loop.
Kevin was not made to caddy or to work much in general. His first bag was mammoth and the man for whom he was carrying it was old and not a great golfer. It must have been a miserable first loop.
When it was over, I heard Kevin say something I've never heard any caddy say, especially not to the club president: 'Old man, you better give me a lot of money because this bag is huge and that wasn't easy'. I couldn't believe it. Stunned. I didn't know how to respond. Would I be fired because I had hired this kid, knowing full well that he was a train wreck waiting to happen on his first loop. But what happened was....nothing. I don't know if the president didn't hear him or just didn't care or liked Kevin's attitude or what. But he simply laughed, gave Kevin 13 or so dollars (which is what he gave everyone at the time for 18 holes) and left.
I was shocked that he had gotten away with it. Appalled. But a part of me was also envious. A part of me thought it was hilarious what he'd done. He was everything that I wasn't, but maybe I did want to be a bit.
So I never did say anything to Kevin about what he said to the club president, nor did I punish him in any way. I think I wanted to see it happen again. He was entertaining. But I never acknowledged that I got a kick out of what he did. Instead, I was extra hard on and made a special effort to ignore him.
Even so, Kevin kept coming back. Again and again. Every morning there waiting. Every morning, I sighed as I walked up the path to the caddyshack, wondering why me? Why did this obnoxious kid have to be there every morning for me to put up with? He talked my ear off. Asked constant questions. Made stupid jokes. Wasn't terribly interested in caddying. Harrased the girls in the snackbar. Harrased the lifeguards. Swung every members' club he could get his hands on. And followed me everywhere.
By August, I had accepted his presence and his help. One night, while he was helping me pick up the driving range and the sun was setting, he said to me, 'Pat, wouldn't you probably say that I'm your best friend?'
I thought about it.... And he was right. I murmured, 'I guess so'. This guy who a few months back I had hated had quickly developed from my worst nightmare to my best friend by sheer force of day to day companionship and loyalty. And he did crazy stuff that I wish I could have gotten away with. I laughed. He did more crazy stuff. And we worked well together.
So I went from a lonely angsty teen to a happy and sometimes brooding teen. All because of my new best friend.
In Buenos Aires, I had a similar experience. In my final year in Columbus I had more or less drifted apart from my Ohio friends. I was working all the time in 4-5 jobs depending on the season and when I wasn't working I was chatting on the internet with my Argentine friends. I had lost the habit of meeting up and hanging out with people in general. When I moved to Buenos Aires things didn't change, even though I had cultivated a number of quality friendships there.
In Buenos Aires, the full force of having been dropped like a cigarette butt by my modelesque Patagonian ex-girlfriend hit me. She did not come back, wasn't interested in talking, and more or less wanted nothing to do with me. So I did what I do best. I buried myself in learning and doing my 4 new jobs. And I spent the rest of my time in my apartment reading, cooking, and occasionally writing. I rarely hung out with my Argentine friends and lived out a somewhat mechanized existence.
While most of my friends became accustomed to my excuses for why I couldn't hang out and stopped trying, one friend persevered, wouldn't give up. She kept calling and texting and calling and texting......Until I finally started accepting. At first because I had turned her down so many times before and I felt guilty. It wasn't her that I didn't want to see. I just didn't want to be out of the comfort and safety of my apartment and I was down and sulking and didn't want to be around anyone.
When I first started accepting Cecilia's offers to hang out, I would greet her reluctantly and would have to force myself to engage in conversation. I yearned to look at the time and calculated in my head how much longer I would have to hang out before I could justify leaving. I only accepted invitations on my terms. We would do exactly what I wanted to do, whether it was eating at my favorite parilla, practicing giving my tour, watching a movie I wanted to see, or going to a museum I wanted to go to. Cecilia was game for whatever and whenever, even though she had to travel and 2 hours round trip to see me.
Sunday was our day to hang out and it became the staple activity of my weekly schedule, my one surebet friend interaction per week. And for Ceci it was the same. She was so loyal to our Sundays that she even came back the week after she had been attacked and robbed while returning from one of our Sunday night parilla outings. When I found out what had happened I felt a mix of guilt and shame for letting her return so late without offering my futon, mixed with genuine concern for my friend and anger at the attackers, something I honestly wasn't expecting to feel. It had been difficult to allow myself to care deeply for anyone outside of family members again. I suffered from a lack of trust and a fear of being hurt. But somehow Cecilia had worked her way into my well guarded heart.
I remember the one night over the Argentine summer in January or February when I had gone from seeing Cecilia in a mechanical way to being genuinely happy to see my friend. I was walking to the Patio Bulrich Mall to see a movie with her (As always with a 2x1 pass that I had saved from the subway) and when I saw her from a distance an involuntary smile formed across my face and I threw my hands up to signal to her that I had arrived. My friend was waiting for me. By sheer force of loyalty, consistency, and putting up with a boring, cynical, ultra-grumpy, and often-times critical me, she had become my best friend. I don't know why she kept calling. I don't know what she saw in the pathetic shell that I was then. But she stuck around and now I care about her almost as one of my family.
Part of my getting better I owe to Cecilia getting me out of my apartment. The other part was likely the passage of time, active reflection, and swimming. She helped me to trust again even when I was convinced that I could trust no one in Buenos Aires. She's as honest and trustworthy as anyone I know.
I should point out as well that Cecilia wasn't as hard a sell as my old best friend (and still good friend) Kevin. Cecilia is trilingual (English, Spanish, and German). She works 6 days a week, from 9am-9pm using all 3 languages in her jobs, she spent a year studying in Germany, she's even tempered, she has good social skills, is super easy to get along with, and she's pretty. Why she wanted to be friends with me even throughout the dark self-pity days is a wonder.
When I leave in 20 days I will miss Cecilia very much. Sundays will never be the same. Who will amble through museums with me, accompany me for parilla, go out for late movies and ice cream afterwards, force me to go dancing de vez en cuando, introduce me to new Latin music, let me practice my tours on her, walk all over town with me even though she doesn't have the right shoes, take long bus rides out to street fairs, or simply put up with me in general???
I only hope that our friendship continues in some capacity after I leave. Cecilia has become something like the little sister I never had. And as much as she hates when I say that, it means a lot to me.
P.S. Please all wish Cecilia good luck as she has her final interview in June for a job with Lufthansa that will allow her to more easily travel the world and Denver, Colorado in particular so she can come visit.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Cordoba II
We woke late after a good nights sleep and took a long breakfast out on our giant porch. Afterwards, we headed out to spend the day in La Cumbrecita. La Cumbrecita is a small town at the foot of the Sierras de Cordoba (Smaller Cordoba mountains). No cars are allowed in La Cumbrecita which makes it comfortable to walk around without having to worry about being run down (a beautiful thing in light of its opposite in Buenos Aires). Unfortunately, the area has turned into a bit of a tourist trap. While it was once a village where a number of Germans settled after WWII, it is now inhabited Argentine entrepreneurs looking to make a buck off of small time tourism. Which is not to say that the area still isn't pretty. There are beautiful trails leading up into pristine mountains, bakeries that sell Stollen and other German treats, hotels that look like Swiss Chalets, and the people seem genuinely nice. All in all, it made for a pleasant day of ambling around, talking, enjoying the changing leaves, and hiking out to a beautiful waterfall.
La Cumbrecita was my chance to catch up with Dave. Dave was my professor, mentor, and close friend, but we more or less lost contact when he moved out to Los Angeles. Dave and I have great conversations and it's our talks that I've missed the most. In La Cumbrecita, we were able to start catching up in an ideal fall setting, much like the setting in Oxford, Ohio where we spent years rock climbing, running, playing frisbee golf, cooking dinner, and watching scary movies. I felt in my element doing what I love, hiking around in a beautiful setting while carrying on deep and meaningful conversation.
We ended the day by buying gifts of German sweet bread and chocolates for Marcelo's friends and family and afterwards took tea and coffee at a cozy faux German cafe. At the cafe, Marcelo and I carried on what has been a continuing errr friendly debate about Buenos Aires.
It all started on our first day in Cordoba on a hike outside of our cabin. I believe Marcelo asked me if it had been easy to find work in Buenos Aires. I think I responded that yes it had been easy and easy as well to get more work as I proved myself to my initial clients. I believe Marcelo asked why. And this is where I started running my mouth. This is where I should have just said, 'I don't know. I guess I'm just lucky.'
Instead, in keeping with the theme of needing to express myself and my feelings and making bold assertions based on my experiences-instead of telling people what they want to hear-I vomited a few crude thoughts about Buenos Aires. I think too, that I wanted to argue with someone about BA. With the exception of a few, I don't know most of my friends well enough to have a frank discussion about my observations of Buenos Aires. The problem is that nearly every Porteno to whom I've expressed my honest opinions of Buenos Aires has appeared hurt or turned defensive, however diplomatic I try to be. Sometimes they don't disapprove outright but instead through silence, if not a pained or frustrated face. So typically, I keep my mouth shut. But I knew with Marcelo that we could argue about this and could still be friends afterwards. So maybe that's why I took the liberty of going down the path of conflict with him.
When Marcelo asked why it was easy to get work in Buenos Aires, I said something to the effect of, 'I think that just because I follow the basic good business practices of the United States, it sets me apart from the average Argentine worker. That is, I come to work on time, I answer people's emails and calls promptly, I'm prepared, I try to have good customer service, I'm dependable, and I work hard'. Cue volcano erupting. Face anger red. Steam exiting ears. Sirens of intense Argentine national pride blaring from the tops of the Sierras! Cue me, gulping, realizing that I'd just intentionally stepped in the biggest and foulest pile of dog caca known to Buenos Aires sidewalks. And I would spend the rest of the trip and more stepping deeper....and deeper.... and then trying to clean it all off.
Game on.
I won't try to use exact quotes from here on out. It would be dishonest and I want to stay friends with Marcelo (As opposed to having fun misquoting him). The best I can do is give a summary of what was said.
Basically, Marcelo disagreed with me vehemently. He believes that Argentinians are very hard workers with good customer service skills. The concession he made was that Argentinians have a problem with being on-time. But as far as the rest was concerned, he was convinced that I was full of it.
To make my point, I cited my experience with my internet and cable service providers. How at one point after going without service for 2 weeks, having 2 separate technicians come to my apartment and then tell me they couldn't fix the problem, calling the office 5 times, and then going to the office two times, I was finally able to find one person who was able to solve what was a very elementary problem. This is not to mention the attitude I was given when I tried to get help at the office and the fact that the technicians made a huge mess of my apartment and one of them wound up playing solitaire on my computer when he couldn't fix the internet issue.
Marcelo's argument against these types of arguements was three fold: A. He has had more problems in the United States with customer service than in Argentina. B. I was generalizing based on one bad experience. C. He almost always had positive experiences with customer service in Argentina and was almost always able to procure a discount our something free as a result of his inconvenience.
I didn't buy it. I brought up another example of how when my wooden safety and sound buffering curtains broke I called 4 guys. 3 told me they would either call me back or come to fix my curtains and none of them showed up or called me back. It was only on the 4th try that I found someone who responded quickly and acted like he was interested in the fairly lucrative job that I was offering. (This guy is now my friend and English student, Esteban)
Again, Marcelo claimed that I was generalizing based on my limited experience. I went on to cite example after example of what I consider being mistreated by people from whom I've bought things in Buenos Aires, whether it be at the Fish Monger where a woman knocked on my head like Bif in Back to the Future when I didn't respond immediately to her question or at my gym where almost every morning the woman whose sole job it is to buzz me through the turnstyle always makes me wait until she's done texting or talking with a friend on the phone before she begrudgingly acknowledges me and presses the button to let me in (usually takes a minute or two or three). I pointed out how different people were on my recent trip home, how I thought people in the US were kidding becasue they seemed so nice in comparison to how I'm treated in Buenos Aires.
Marcelo countered with his own instances of mistreatment in Los Angeles and again told me that I was generalizing and that he hadn't had any of the types of experiences I'd had.
At one point, I realized that I didn't know if I truly believed everything I was saying to the extent that I was forcing it or if it was more that I had just become super defensive and was basically in a verbal fight. That is, whether I truly cared or not had gone out the window and instead it was all about defending myself from and then defeating my opponent.
Or maybe I did in fact feel very strongly about what I was saying, that it was important to me to have my version of reality validated. And when Marcelo challenged me so strongly, my sense of my Argentina experience had been challenged and instead of accommodating his opinions, I wanted to defend my own. It takes energy to change, to accept and accomodate differences into your worldview. And it's a challenge to the identity, since perception is part of identity.
When someone tells you that you're view of reality is much different than the truth, it's unsettling, shakes you up, and makes you wonder if much of anything you perceive is real. On top of all this, I had a vested interest in my criticisms of Buenos Aires. For one, I'm leaving and I've chosen to leave partly based on my view that it's a stressful and often times mean city. If I can't hold onto this view, then how do I explain yet another move to myself? Another issue is that I had a very serious relationship with a woman here that didn't work out. And I've needed for some ridiculous reason to dislike the entire city as a means of dealing with the breakup. Because I fell in love with the city at the same time as I fell in love with her. The two in my mind are kind of inseparable.
The argument morphed into a much more general one. Me: Buenos Aires Bad! Marcelo: Buenos Aires Good! I was convinced that the root of Marcelo's what I consider to be defensive posture was mostly the result of his national pride. And Argentine national pride is something I don't understand. In my opinion, it's been about as useless as US national pride. It's akin to the pride that people show for their favorite Sports team and rarely translates to progress. I also think nationalism in general is ridiculous. The idea that we should be proud of the country we live in. Why? What purpose does it serve? If anything, we should consider ourselves Team World. Borders are arbitrary lines that we imposed on the world. But the laws of nature and physics and the universe know no borders. And the longer that we feel the need to focus on national pride, the longer it will take to address the world's problems.
So in a sense, someone getting upset at my criticisms of THEIR Argentina is upsetting to me. In truth, Argentina is no more theirs than the US is mine as the world is humans. That we feel a sense of posession or attachment to pieces of land that we have claimed as our own seems a bit childish and egocentric.
Off my soap box....Anyhow, Marcelo claimed that it wasn't just about his pride for Argentina, that he defends any country or place or people that others try to unfairly generalize. And I have to agree that he's right about that.... But I countered anyway with the fact that a lot of my job as a psychologist is to make generalizations based on observations. I agree that it's a fine line to walk when you are making generalizations, but that if we are afraid to make them, we are denying the information that our senses and our brains give us and trading it for fear of offending someone. On top of that, we are ignoring valuable knowledge that can help us understand one another better. Again, this is against my recent self development of trying not to tell people what they want to hear and instead expressing what I think, observe, and feel.
The end of our initial argument came when we compromised on wording. Marcelo pointed out that he wouldn't have come back at me swinging if I hadn't stated my opinions so crudely, if I had instead said that 'Based on my limited experience in Argentina' or 'It has been my own personal experience in Buenos Aires that'. Instead, I said, 'I think that this is the way it is'. I wanted to respond initially that it is assumed that I am sharing my peronal perspective and not Encyclopedic fact when I say 'I think'. But, for the sake of putting the arguement to rest and in the spirit of compromise, I admitted that I stated my opinions carelessly and even in a mean way. And so fizzled out the fireworks of the first show.
Only to be reignited in the cafe in La Cumbrecita at the end of the day. Here's how it went down.
Nidia and Marcelo were excited about getting some type of torta or cake at the cafe. Upon asking for a specific type of cake, the waiter replied that they didn't have that type of cake. Marcelo then asked for another type of cake. The waiter again said that they didn't have that type of cake either. Nidia asked what they did have. The waiter responded somewhat testily that the woman who made all the cakes was sick and that they didn't have any except for chocolate. The waiter's responses seemed rude in general, like he was upset with us for even asking about the cakes or being in the cafe for that matter or having to deal with us. The way that he said 'No' really grated on me. I was a waiter and never treated people like that, even on my worst days in my worst moods. But this was exactly what I was talking about in terms of the customer service in Buenos Aires.
With my foot still in dodo, I decided to go ahead and sit in it. The words drool drivelled from the corners of my mouth about how this type of treatment was typical of my customer service issues with Buenos Aires. Then I followed it up by saying that I didn't know whether it was simply a cultural difference or a difference in my understanding of the language, but that from my perspective the waiter seemed rude. My point being that mabye Argentines are used to talking to each other in that way and it's not considered rude at all. It could easily have been chalked up to my different cultural upbringing.
Marcelo wasn't having it. It had nothing to do with cultural differences. It was instead again that I was generalizing one negative experience on the rest of Argentina. He first defended the behavior of the waiter, saying that the waiter's handling of the situation was justified and understandable, that under the circumstances it was ok for a restaurant specializing in cakes to be out of all of their cakes but one. He went on to point out an issue he has in the United States with treatment at restaurants. Marcelo still tends to eat at the Argentine hour, 10-11 pm or later, when he goes out to dinner. As a result, he typically has to call restaurants in LA to be sure they'll be open until 10pm. Often, he says he will call a restaurant to be sure they're open until that time and they wind up not being open when he gets there, even though they say they'll be open.
I agreed with him that while this is definitely wrong, it is understandable if there are no other people in the restaurant and the restaurant is losing money by being open for just two people. On top of that, almost no one in the US eats so late so it doesn't make sense to stay open so late. I went on to point out how our separate defenses were likely based on our cultural biases and upbringings. Not being open late makes all the sense in the world to someone raised in a culture where they eat dinner between 6-7. Not having certain foods advertised on a menu makes sense to someone raised in a country where it is common for restaurants to be out of or not have on that day items that are listed on the menu. Regardless, Marcelo was not satisfied.
He brought up again my poorly worded opinions about Argentine workers. And I brought up again his defensiveness and unwillingness to compromise and before I knew it we were practically shouting at one another and people in the restaurant were looking at us. At one point, the waiter, who may have been shocked and shaken out of his bad mood by our ferocity, came over to apologize about them not having any cakes (which Marcelo used as further evidence that I was more or less wrong in my generalization). But at that point, it wasn't about the waiter anymore, it was a primitive verbal brawl going from Spanish to English and back.
I can't say that there was any clear resolution to this particular argument. It was Mothers' Day and I needed to call my mom before the call center closed up. And our tea and coffee were done and we had overstayed our welcome in the little cakeless faux German cake cafe.
The end of the argument came down to me claiming that maybe I didn't even believe what I was saying but that I became super defensive when I felt that Marcelo was yelling at me. I told him in shaky Spanish that I don't like when people yell at me. He responded suddenly and caringly that he didn't feel that he was yelling, that to him this was a normal conversation, the type he has often. He then conceeded to have possibly gone from 0-100 in a second and that what seems like yelling to people in the US is a normal conversation level to Latinos.
There were less heated arguments the following day on the long drive back to downtown Cordoba. Marcelo expressed sincerely how bad he felt that I hadn't enjoyed my experience in Buenos Aires and that he wished I had instead stayed in Cordoba. I think he took my dislike and my negative experiences personally. I tried to tell him that he didn't have to take it personally, that it wasn't his fault, that he was in no way responsible for anything bad that had happened to me in Buenos Aires. I also explained to him that I didn't just hate Buenos Aires, that I both love and hate it. I also told him as I've expressed many times in my blog how important a learning experience living in Buenos Aires has been. I would have been more comfortable and happy in Cordoba but I wouldn't have learned nearly as much.
In the end, as I process our arguments, discussions, and disagreements, I see them in the context of the evolving me, the one who now expresses himself instead of telling people what they want to hear. And the result sometimes is the aforementioned. If you stick to your guns, you conflict and you'd better be ready for it. And you'd also better be ready for some damage or distancing from the person with whom you have conflicted. I think it can bring you closer, ideally, but it can also push you apart. And I don't think I know yet how to get closer with someone via conflict. But I'd really like to figure it out.
I guess one question that emerges from this trial of new behavior is, do I feel differently after having held my ground and supporting my view of reality? The answer is that I'm not entirely sure. I think one thing I may feel is a little reluctant to share the brute force of my crude opinions. I honestly don't like the way it makes you feel in the end, like you've showed someone a part of yourself better left escondido. On the other hand, I also feel a clearer sense of definition between my worldview and Marcelo's. The argument drew clear boundaries around us and made me understand and see myself and Marcelo better. In the past, when I simply went along with the opinions of others, I felt more formless, shapeless, without value, weak. And this firmer shape I think is something I need right now, something essential to knowing and being myself, which I think is one key to being at peace or harmony with the world.
La Cumbrecita was my chance to catch up with Dave. Dave was my professor, mentor, and close friend, but we more or less lost contact when he moved out to Los Angeles. Dave and I have great conversations and it's our talks that I've missed the most. In La Cumbrecita, we were able to start catching up in an ideal fall setting, much like the setting in Oxford, Ohio where we spent years rock climbing, running, playing frisbee golf, cooking dinner, and watching scary movies. I felt in my element doing what I love, hiking around in a beautiful setting while carrying on deep and meaningful conversation.
We ended the day by buying gifts of German sweet bread and chocolates for Marcelo's friends and family and afterwards took tea and coffee at a cozy faux German cafe. At the cafe, Marcelo and I carried on what has been a continuing errr friendly debate about Buenos Aires.
It all started on our first day in Cordoba on a hike outside of our cabin. I believe Marcelo asked me if it had been easy to find work in Buenos Aires. I think I responded that yes it had been easy and easy as well to get more work as I proved myself to my initial clients. I believe Marcelo asked why. And this is where I started running my mouth. This is where I should have just said, 'I don't know. I guess I'm just lucky.'
Instead, in keeping with the theme of needing to express myself and my feelings and making bold assertions based on my experiences-instead of telling people what they want to hear-I vomited a few crude thoughts about Buenos Aires. I think too, that I wanted to argue with someone about BA. With the exception of a few, I don't know most of my friends well enough to have a frank discussion about my observations of Buenos Aires. The problem is that nearly every Porteno to whom I've expressed my honest opinions of Buenos Aires has appeared hurt or turned defensive, however diplomatic I try to be. Sometimes they don't disapprove outright but instead through silence, if not a pained or frustrated face. So typically, I keep my mouth shut. But I knew with Marcelo that we could argue about this and could still be friends afterwards. So maybe that's why I took the liberty of going down the path of conflict with him.
When Marcelo asked why it was easy to get work in Buenos Aires, I said something to the effect of, 'I think that just because I follow the basic good business practices of the United States, it sets me apart from the average Argentine worker. That is, I come to work on time, I answer people's emails and calls promptly, I'm prepared, I try to have good customer service, I'm dependable, and I work hard'. Cue volcano erupting. Face anger red. Steam exiting ears. Sirens of intense Argentine national pride blaring from the tops of the Sierras! Cue me, gulping, realizing that I'd just intentionally stepped in the biggest and foulest pile of dog caca known to Buenos Aires sidewalks. And I would spend the rest of the trip and more stepping deeper....and deeper.... and then trying to clean it all off.
Game on.
I won't try to use exact quotes from here on out. It would be dishonest and I want to stay friends with Marcelo (As opposed to having fun misquoting him). The best I can do is give a summary of what was said.
Basically, Marcelo disagreed with me vehemently. He believes that Argentinians are very hard workers with good customer service skills. The concession he made was that Argentinians have a problem with being on-time. But as far as the rest was concerned, he was convinced that I was full of it.
To make my point, I cited my experience with my internet and cable service providers. How at one point after going without service for 2 weeks, having 2 separate technicians come to my apartment and then tell me they couldn't fix the problem, calling the office 5 times, and then going to the office two times, I was finally able to find one person who was able to solve what was a very elementary problem. This is not to mention the attitude I was given when I tried to get help at the office and the fact that the technicians made a huge mess of my apartment and one of them wound up playing solitaire on my computer when he couldn't fix the internet issue.
Marcelo's argument against these types of arguements was three fold: A. He has had more problems in the United States with customer service than in Argentina. B. I was generalizing based on one bad experience. C. He almost always had positive experiences with customer service in Argentina and was almost always able to procure a discount our something free as a result of his inconvenience.
I didn't buy it. I brought up another example of how when my wooden safety and sound buffering curtains broke I called 4 guys. 3 told me they would either call me back or come to fix my curtains and none of them showed up or called me back. It was only on the 4th try that I found someone who responded quickly and acted like he was interested in the fairly lucrative job that I was offering. (This guy is now my friend and English student, Esteban)
Again, Marcelo claimed that I was generalizing based on my limited experience. I went on to cite example after example of what I consider being mistreated by people from whom I've bought things in Buenos Aires, whether it be at the Fish Monger where a woman knocked on my head like Bif in Back to the Future when I didn't respond immediately to her question or at my gym where almost every morning the woman whose sole job it is to buzz me through the turnstyle always makes me wait until she's done texting or talking with a friend on the phone before she begrudgingly acknowledges me and presses the button to let me in (usually takes a minute or two or three). I pointed out how different people were on my recent trip home, how I thought people in the US were kidding becasue they seemed so nice in comparison to how I'm treated in Buenos Aires.
Marcelo countered with his own instances of mistreatment in Los Angeles and again told me that I was generalizing and that he hadn't had any of the types of experiences I'd had.
At one point, I realized that I didn't know if I truly believed everything I was saying to the extent that I was forcing it or if it was more that I had just become super defensive and was basically in a verbal fight. That is, whether I truly cared or not had gone out the window and instead it was all about defending myself from and then defeating my opponent.
Or maybe I did in fact feel very strongly about what I was saying, that it was important to me to have my version of reality validated. And when Marcelo challenged me so strongly, my sense of my Argentina experience had been challenged and instead of accommodating his opinions, I wanted to defend my own. It takes energy to change, to accept and accomodate differences into your worldview. And it's a challenge to the identity, since perception is part of identity.
When someone tells you that you're view of reality is much different than the truth, it's unsettling, shakes you up, and makes you wonder if much of anything you perceive is real. On top of all this, I had a vested interest in my criticisms of Buenos Aires. For one, I'm leaving and I've chosen to leave partly based on my view that it's a stressful and often times mean city. If I can't hold onto this view, then how do I explain yet another move to myself? Another issue is that I had a very serious relationship with a woman here that didn't work out. And I've needed for some ridiculous reason to dislike the entire city as a means of dealing with the breakup. Because I fell in love with the city at the same time as I fell in love with her. The two in my mind are kind of inseparable.
The argument morphed into a much more general one. Me: Buenos Aires Bad! Marcelo: Buenos Aires Good! I was convinced that the root of Marcelo's what I consider to be defensive posture was mostly the result of his national pride. And Argentine national pride is something I don't understand. In my opinion, it's been about as useless as US national pride. It's akin to the pride that people show for their favorite Sports team and rarely translates to progress. I also think nationalism in general is ridiculous. The idea that we should be proud of the country we live in. Why? What purpose does it serve? If anything, we should consider ourselves Team World. Borders are arbitrary lines that we imposed on the world. But the laws of nature and physics and the universe know no borders. And the longer that we feel the need to focus on national pride, the longer it will take to address the world's problems.
So in a sense, someone getting upset at my criticisms of THEIR Argentina is upsetting to me. In truth, Argentina is no more theirs than the US is mine as the world is humans. That we feel a sense of posession or attachment to pieces of land that we have claimed as our own seems a bit childish and egocentric.
Off my soap box....Anyhow, Marcelo claimed that it wasn't just about his pride for Argentina, that he defends any country or place or people that others try to unfairly generalize. And I have to agree that he's right about that.... But I countered anyway with the fact that a lot of my job as a psychologist is to make generalizations based on observations. I agree that it's a fine line to walk when you are making generalizations, but that if we are afraid to make them, we are denying the information that our senses and our brains give us and trading it for fear of offending someone. On top of that, we are ignoring valuable knowledge that can help us understand one another better. Again, this is against my recent self development of trying not to tell people what they want to hear and instead expressing what I think, observe, and feel.
The end of our initial argument came when we compromised on wording. Marcelo pointed out that he wouldn't have come back at me swinging if I hadn't stated my opinions so crudely, if I had instead said that 'Based on my limited experience in Argentina' or 'It has been my own personal experience in Buenos Aires that'. Instead, I said, 'I think that this is the way it is'. I wanted to respond initially that it is assumed that I am sharing my peronal perspective and not Encyclopedic fact when I say 'I think'. But, for the sake of putting the arguement to rest and in the spirit of compromise, I admitted that I stated my opinions carelessly and even in a mean way. And so fizzled out the fireworks of the first show.
Only to be reignited in the cafe in La Cumbrecita at the end of the day. Here's how it went down.
Nidia and Marcelo were excited about getting some type of torta or cake at the cafe. Upon asking for a specific type of cake, the waiter replied that they didn't have that type of cake. Marcelo then asked for another type of cake. The waiter again said that they didn't have that type of cake either. Nidia asked what they did have. The waiter responded somewhat testily that the woman who made all the cakes was sick and that they didn't have any except for chocolate. The waiter's responses seemed rude in general, like he was upset with us for even asking about the cakes or being in the cafe for that matter or having to deal with us. The way that he said 'No' really grated on me. I was a waiter and never treated people like that, even on my worst days in my worst moods. But this was exactly what I was talking about in terms of the customer service in Buenos Aires.
With my foot still in dodo, I decided to go ahead and sit in it. The words drool drivelled from the corners of my mouth about how this type of treatment was typical of my customer service issues with Buenos Aires. Then I followed it up by saying that I didn't know whether it was simply a cultural difference or a difference in my understanding of the language, but that from my perspective the waiter seemed rude. My point being that mabye Argentines are used to talking to each other in that way and it's not considered rude at all. It could easily have been chalked up to my different cultural upbringing.
Marcelo wasn't having it. It had nothing to do with cultural differences. It was instead again that I was generalizing one negative experience on the rest of Argentina. He first defended the behavior of the waiter, saying that the waiter's handling of the situation was justified and understandable, that under the circumstances it was ok for a restaurant specializing in cakes to be out of all of their cakes but one. He went on to point out an issue he has in the United States with treatment at restaurants. Marcelo still tends to eat at the Argentine hour, 10-11 pm or later, when he goes out to dinner. As a result, he typically has to call restaurants in LA to be sure they'll be open until 10pm. Often, he says he will call a restaurant to be sure they're open until that time and they wind up not being open when he gets there, even though they say they'll be open.
I agreed with him that while this is definitely wrong, it is understandable if there are no other people in the restaurant and the restaurant is losing money by being open for just two people. On top of that, almost no one in the US eats so late so it doesn't make sense to stay open so late. I went on to point out how our separate defenses were likely based on our cultural biases and upbringings. Not being open late makes all the sense in the world to someone raised in a culture where they eat dinner between 6-7. Not having certain foods advertised on a menu makes sense to someone raised in a country where it is common for restaurants to be out of or not have on that day items that are listed on the menu. Regardless, Marcelo was not satisfied.
He brought up again my poorly worded opinions about Argentine workers. And I brought up again his defensiveness and unwillingness to compromise and before I knew it we were practically shouting at one another and people in the restaurant were looking at us. At one point, the waiter, who may have been shocked and shaken out of his bad mood by our ferocity, came over to apologize about them not having any cakes (which Marcelo used as further evidence that I was more or less wrong in my generalization). But at that point, it wasn't about the waiter anymore, it was a primitive verbal brawl going from Spanish to English and back.
I can't say that there was any clear resolution to this particular argument. It was Mothers' Day and I needed to call my mom before the call center closed up. And our tea and coffee were done and we had overstayed our welcome in the little cakeless faux German cake cafe.
The end of the argument came down to me claiming that maybe I didn't even believe what I was saying but that I became super defensive when I felt that Marcelo was yelling at me. I told him in shaky Spanish that I don't like when people yell at me. He responded suddenly and caringly that he didn't feel that he was yelling, that to him this was a normal conversation, the type he has often. He then conceeded to have possibly gone from 0-100 in a second and that what seems like yelling to people in the US is a normal conversation level to Latinos.
There were less heated arguments the following day on the long drive back to downtown Cordoba. Marcelo expressed sincerely how bad he felt that I hadn't enjoyed my experience in Buenos Aires and that he wished I had instead stayed in Cordoba. I think he took my dislike and my negative experiences personally. I tried to tell him that he didn't have to take it personally, that it wasn't his fault, that he was in no way responsible for anything bad that had happened to me in Buenos Aires. I also explained to him that I didn't just hate Buenos Aires, that I both love and hate it. I also told him as I've expressed many times in my blog how important a learning experience living in Buenos Aires has been. I would have been more comfortable and happy in Cordoba but I wouldn't have learned nearly as much.
In the end, as I process our arguments, discussions, and disagreements, I see them in the context of the evolving me, the one who now expresses himself instead of telling people what they want to hear. And the result sometimes is the aforementioned. If you stick to your guns, you conflict and you'd better be ready for it. And you'd also better be ready for some damage or distancing from the person with whom you have conflicted. I think it can bring you closer, ideally, but it can also push you apart. And I don't think I know yet how to get closer with someone via conflict. But I'd really like to figure it out.
I guess one question that emerges from this trial of new behavior is, do I feel differently after having held my ground and supporting my view of reality? The answer is that I'm not entirely sure. I think one thing I may feel is a little reluctant to share the brute force of my crude opinions. I honestly don't like the way it makes you feel in the end, like you've showed someone a part of yourself better left escondido. On the other hand, I also feel a clearer sense of definition between my worldview and Marcelo's. The argument drew clear boundaries around us and made me understand and see myself and Marcelo better. In the past, when I simply went along with the opinions of others, I felt more formless, shapeless, without value, weak. And this firmer shape I think is something I need right now, something essential to knowing and being myself, which I think is one key to being at peace or harmony with the world.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Cordoba
I returned to Cordoba recently to spend a long weekend with my friends Marcelo, Dave, and Nidia. Marcelo is originally from Cordoba but currently living and working as a screenwriter in LA. Dave is my long time friend and former professor of creative writing from Miami University, also now a screenwriter in LA. And Nidia is Marcelo's friend from Cordoba and the owner of a pair of great vegetarian restaurants.
It was a great trip and made me realize that I would have been much more comfortable had I chosen to live my year in Cordoba instead of BA. Cordoba is the 2nd largest city in Argentina, but much much smaller than BA. For me, the best things about Cordoba are that the people seem more kind, the pace of life is less frenetic, you can see the sierras (small mountains) from Downtown, and you can get out of the city to a great natural setting in 30 minutes to an hour by car.
Granted, I wouldn't have learned nearly as much by living in Cordoba. Being comfortable, in my experience, rarely equals learning. But I think I probably would have been more happy and more connected as opposed to a bit intimidated and overwhelmed. Buenos Aires is a place where you kind of always have to be on your game. That is, once you hit the streets, you start moving quickly and must cut through the noisy symphony of vehicles while simultaneously dodging people, taxis, buses, and cars. A lot of times, I don't leave my apartment because I don't want to or am not ready to deal with it all. I never really had that feeling in Cordoba, although downtown can be a little crazy around la hora peco.
My recent trip to Cordoba started with an overnight bus ride from Buenos Aires. The overnight bus experience is unique. I don't like it. But I respect the heck out of the idea of multi-tasking while you sleep. No time wasted. In Buenos Aires, it's a way of life to take overnight trips on comfortable, double decker, plush leather seat touring buses. The prices are extremely reasonable and for a small fee, you can upgrade to a service that includes a 3 or 4 course meal including after dinner drinks.
Once you're on the bus, it's great. You take your shoes off, put your earplugs in, turn the lights out, pull up your blanket, adjust your pillow against the window, and put your seat back all the way (sometimes they go all the way flat). Listo, you go to sleep and wake up at your destination. But before you're on the bus, especially if you're cheap like me, it takes a little more gumption. You leave your apartment in the middle of the night, catch the 152 bus on Santa Fe to Retiro, walk quickly through the 3rd worldish mess that is Retiro Station and then make your way to the Estacion del Omnibus. At that point, you must wait for your bus to pull into 1 of 13 or so parking places. So you're on your toes, walking back and forth from the different parking places as different buses pull in. And even if you think you have the right bus, you have to ask because the same company often makes multiple trips to the same location at the same time. You must also listen closely to the loudspeaker that announces the different buses pulling into the station. Once you find the right bus, you jump in line and try to get into the paradise of the interior as soon as possible because standing in the exhaust filled loading area is nothing if not nauseating.
The trip to Cordoba is about 9-10 hours by bus. I was going not to Cordoba but to a small town called La Cumbrecita a little further West that took about 12 hours total to get to and required a connection in a town called Villa General Belgrano. The trip was relatively comfortable and despite waking up periodically through the night, I was able to get a few hours of decent sleep.
In Villa General Belgrano, I made my connection just in time, as we arrived an hour later than schedule. My bus drivers took the liberty to take long smoke/mate' breaks at every stop along the twisting route. At one point, I asked the drivers of the bus to call ahead to have them hold my bus so that I could be sure to make my connection to La Cumbrecita. Luckily, soon after asking, the bus pulled into the station and I had just enough time to jump off, buy my ticket, and jump on another bus just as it was pulling out.
The bus to La Cumbrecita dropped me off not in La Cumbrecita but instead at the entrance to a Hotel called Hosteria La Demonda. When the driver pointed to my stop, I hesitated before getting off. I was in the middle of nowhere on a dusty road, not at the lobby of a comfortable hotel. The stop was at the sign for the estancia but the estancia was much further up its own stoney road. The area was barren and I hoped that Marcelo, Dave, and Nidia would be there soon to pick me up. If not, it was going to be a long day in the middle of nowhere after having spent 12 hours on buses through the night to get there.
Soon after getting off the bus, I got a call from Marcelo telling me that they were lost. I tried not to answer testily, or to show the tiredness in my voice. I told them that I'd be waiting at the sign to the estancia and that I would keep an eye out on the main road for them.
So I hopped onto the broken stone structure that once held the sign to the estancia. There, I wedged my back against some rocks and pulled out a book to read while I waited. 30-40 minutes passed when finally I heard a shout and then saw a small white VW Gol driving slowly up the path from the Estancia, the opposite direction from which I expected them. I was greeted with hugs all around and I quickly jumped in the car so that we could get on with our plans for the day. In any case, I hadn't seen these guys for years and it was pretty cool to be reuniting in the middle of Argentina.
We drove to a small almacen or general store to stock up on food. Our stop at the store must have been like winning a small lottery for the owner of the almacen. Every one of us on the trip is a foodie and we spent far more than necessary to assure that we didn't go without for the next few days.
On the trip back to our cabin, I saw why it took so long picking me up. The road back to our cabin was awful: steep, narrow, muddy in some parts, and dangerously stoney. There were 3 different points at which 3 of us had to get out of the car so that the car could go down a hill and not have its underbelly torn up by jagged rocks protruding from the road. The 1-2 mile trip took at least 30 minutes and required considerable energy to help our driver, Nidia, navigate the path.
Marcelo had picked out the cabin and I had no idea what to expect. When I arrived, I was astounded by the size of the place. It was more than a cabin, it was a big luxury house in the woods. There were three bedrooms, 3 large full bathrooms, stone and hardwood floors throughout, spa showers, a giant jacuzzi with a huge picture window, a large kitchen, a living room with vaulted ceilings and a huge fireplace, and a large deck with a beautiful grill and a huge wooden table and benches with a beautiful view to the surrounding mountains. The only really weird thing was that all of the furniture was made out of stretched cowhide and gnarly old tree branches. The furniture must have cost a fortune, but it was uncomfortable and unsettling, even for a guy who likes to eat cow as much as I do. Nevertheless, the place was great, in terms of its brute force in quality building materials, appliances, and luxuries. I honestly couldn't have imagined staying at a nicer place.
It turns out that Marcelo was trying to get us a cabin from an adjoining group of cabins but they wound up being too expensive and included meals in the price. We wanted to cook on our own and didn't want to pay that much. So, the owner of the adjoining cabins gave Marcelo the number to a family who had land nearby and an extra cabin on that land for rent. Jackpot. The price was right and the cabin was amazing and plenty spacious for the 4 of us.
It turns out that the couple who rented us the cabin is originally from Atlanta. The father had been raised in Argentina but become a heart surgeon in the states and the mother had been the CFO of a large hospital in Atlanta. They were both retired and had moved back to Cordoba and while they lived in the city during the week, they spent a few weekends a month on this patch of beautifully wooded land just outside of La Cumbrecita. On their land, they built an amazing house for themselves, a house for the father's sister to stay in (the house we had rented), a kids play house (Like a Hobbit hole), a chapel, a soccer field, and a caretakers house. All of the construction was top quality and it was obvious that someone had taken great care in the planning and upkeep of the place.
We were only the 2nd group to have rented the cabin meant for the father's sister who in the end rarely made it out to the house. So, the couple decided to rent it out when they could. They also used the home for music camps in the summer.
Our first night became extremely interesting when after a hike to a nearby stream we encountered the family walking our way with horses in tow. There were 3 fraternal twin boys, a 50 something heavy-set but jolly looking man, and a 50 something fit blond haired woman (an Atlanta native as it turns out). After the introductions, they showed us around the property and explained the aformentioned details. The kids seemed well behaved, mature, and fun. The parents seemed kind and eccentric. I kept trying to peg this family, to better understand them, but they were too complex for a simple explanation.
They lead us back to their own lavish cabin for a tour and snacks. Their weekend place is like something out of Mountain Living magazine or Architecture Digest of La Pampa: Top of the line appliances, flat panel TVs, amazing wooden countertops and tables, a packed wine cellar, and a covered deck with a huge grill as well as a special Chilean convection-type oven alongside it. Basically it was a rustic looking place with all of the most modern conveniences. The place was amazing and I suggested to them that they send pictures of their entire complex to a magazine in the states. They had clearly put a ton of thought and more money than I will likely see in my lifetime into their weekend getaway.
After the tour of the house and a more getting to know you, we were invited to a dinner of fresh lamb cooked in the special Chilean oven that the father wanted to show off. At first, Marcelo being polite and reasonable said 'no no'. I quickly countered with 'yes yes!'. A mistake.
What can I say? I am a lamb fanatic and these people seemed genuinely interesting and nice. And I love lamb and the idea of cooking it in this special oven truly excited me. We talked a bit more, reluctantly but excitedly accepted their dinner offer, and then headed back to our cabin to clean up and shower before dinner. On the way back up to our cabin in the dark, Dave and I talked about how complex and interesting the family was. We were cautiously optimistic that we had found truly cool people and were excited about getting to know them better at dinner. I even remarked to Dave that I thought it was about to be one of the best days of my life...staying at an awesome cabin in an amazing location and cooking up fresh lamb while meeting really cool new people. To me it doesn't get any better. I like pointing out when life is really good and then taking time to chew on it, savor it, and file the memory away for later.
While I cleaned up, Marcelo and Nidia went off to buy desert from the restaurant at the adjacent cabins. Marcelo, always the proper guest, didn't want to come to dinner empty handed and wound up spending a fortune on creme brule type custards as well as chocolate lava cakes with fresh fruit sauce.
We walked down to their cabin in the now pitch black and could smell the roasting lamb smoke pouring out of the cracks in the house. My mouth watered in anticipation and maybe clouded my better judgement or perception as we encountered the first odd happening of the night.
#1: As we walked in the door, the father and the boys were ready for us and greeted us by playing a piece of classical music. The father and two boys on violin and one boy playing piano. The boys were not bad, but the father was swaying intensely, barking out orders to the boys, and playing poorly. Dave looked at me in a way that through the years I have come to understand means a cross between alarm and humor. I didn't much notice. I was more interested in the coming lamb and thought that the recital was more of an eccentricity than something part of a larger odd whole.
As we sat down to dinner, I scouted out the perfect piece of lamb for myself and grabbed a bit of calabaza and salad to accompany. I liked my lips and waited until everyone sat down so that I could tear into my piece. I wound up getting the kidney and various other meaty pieces. The kidney of lamb is delicious and fatty, surely a cholesterol bomb, but one that makes you happy as it kills you. I ate it first and as my eyes rolled into the back of my head noticed that I was very cold. For some reason, the room we were in was so cold that I think I could see my breath. I hugged myself for warmth in between stuffing lamb and salad in my mouth.
The lamb was definitely good, but not the best I'd ever had. The best I've had was in Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego all you can eat lamb. Incredible stuff that I'm not sure will ever be matched unless I travel to New Zealand. In any case, I was satisfied enough and ready to concentrate on engaging conversation that luckily Marcelo, the proper guest, had maintained while the rest of us were concentrating on our food.
Weird happening #2:
Marcelo noticed that all the kids had left the table and gone upstairs. He asked what they were up to and the father said, 'They're watching Bill O'Reilly''.
Dave glanced over to me and I did not meet his glance because I knew that I'd bust out laughing if I had. First of all, why were 8 year old kids watching Bill O'Reilly? Second, who has Bill O'Reilly beamed in via Satellite in the middle of the Argentine countryside? Finally, why would anyone watch Bill O'Reilly to begin with??
We were 4 very progressive/liberal whatever you want to label us guests and we were at a dinner table with a family so conservative that the children had left the dinner table to go watch Bill O'Reilly who had been beamed in to their weekend cabin in BFE Argentina. Why weren't the kids watching Disney or heck, even Nickalodean or some type of Yugioh cartoon. Bill O'Reilly? At age 8?
More importantly, what had we gotten ourselves into? We had the rest of the Argentine evening (which can be very long) to talk to these people with whom we likely had very little/nothing in common. Suddenly, we had a structure for understanding them, an organization into which we could fit the pieces to make sense of it all.
After telling us that the kids were watching Bill O'Reilly, the father went on to talk about how he is a conservative Republican who voted for Bush in both elections and who votes his pocketbook, but who is upset that he lost a ton in the stock market during the financial crisis that took place during Bush's presidency.
As the father drank more and more wine, he talked more and more about his political beliefs which made less and less sense as he tried both to be diplomatic, but convicted at the same time which more than anything confused us and made us think that he was just trying to act moderate because he knew we were all lefties.
At one point, I was shivering so badly that I had to get up to stand at the other side of the room in front of the fireplace. The mother, while also conservative but sparingly sober and reasonable, followed me and we had a polite conversation about her kids' education in Cordoba. The rest of the group followed us and sat around the fireplace where the conversation continued.
We felt trapped. The father had become more or less drunk and was talking non-stop, a litany of nonsensical opinions, each one trailing off into a mumbling mess. We had become his captive audience, obligated to listen to him wax drunken about whatever subject came to mind. We had accepted dinner and hospitality and now had to listen to this guy for the rest of the night until we could find a segue to escape.
We wound up leaving as the fire burned down to embers and the conversation finally hit a slight lull. Marcelo, ever the savor, used it as an opportunity to move us towards the door and we cordially said our thank yous, goodnights, we'll stay in touchs, and out into the night to wash ourselves clean of it all.
Back at our cabin, we tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together to understand the family, to draw up a character sketch, to have group therapy before being haunted in our dreams by what had turned out to be an odd and uncomfortable experience.
Here's what we gathered. The father was a heart surgeon who was collecting disability and insurance for arthritis in his hands. He had taken out all kinds of expensive policies in case of this and was now collecting on it as arthritis had developed in his hands. The mother had retired from her job as a hospital administrator. The kids were the result of invitro fertilization and the father had built a chapel on their weekend property to 'some God' in thanks for the children. The family had a ridiculously expensive RV in the US as well as rental properties in Chile, a house in Miami, an apartment in Atlanta, and property in San Diego. They spent most of the year in their house in the most exclusive neighborhood in Cordoba, but travelled back and forth frequently to Atlanta to see the wife's side of the family. The parents, both now retired, were spending their days on eccentric projects like building up their weekend compound, organizing music camps, collecting and drinking wine, taking music lessons, cooking, surfing the internet, and watching Fox News. The father was drinking too much and lonely and in need of people to listen to him. He has poor social skills and invites people over for opulent dinners so that he can get comfortable, drink, and then say whatever he wants to his captive audience. The wife is smart, rational, and diplomatic. She probably doesn't have to stay with the husband as he slides downhill, but does so for the 3 kids and because of all of the projects the two of them are involved in. In any case, her husband seemed to make her feel uncomfortable and it was our sense that she could have done much better. The kids seemed kind, adult-like, mature, disciplined, and fun. It was a shame that they had been indoctrinated into loving O'Reilly to please their father.
In short, we gathered that the family was eccentric, wealthy, and conservative. Almost Libertarian, needing complete freedom, the ability to do anything and go anywhere whenever they wanted. The father had prodigious amounts of energy, money, time, and intelligence, but few social skills. He had projects going constantly and was restless, in need of new challenges and in the absence of his work, had created challenges where there were none. And now, because of his lack of structure had maybe started drinking and eating too much and because he was not interacting intelligently with many people had lost any sort of rhetorical edge he once possessed.
And we had unwittingly fallen into this situation, the guests of a lonely Libertarian/eccentric family that didn't quite know what they were doing in Argentina and despite their homes all over the world weren't ready to settle anywhere, even though they had spent millions of dollars and years in planning and developing their properties.
More on our next day in Cordoba in the following post.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Charity as Cure All
I met someone during my first trip to Buenos Aires whose world view was, at the time, exactly opposite mine. Without exaggerating, she felt almost no responsibility to anyone or anything. She believed her mission in life was to pursue her own happiness.
Her beliefs both enraged and intrigued me and she effectively shook my worldview to the core. Her analytical mind tore down my somewhat shallow and cliched beliefs and made me feel stupid for caring.
Allow me to elaborate on who I was when I met her...At the time, I was heavily involved in volunteering for progressive political causes. I co-directed a campaign for Ohio Representative, made door-to-door pleas, annoyed more independents via phone than I can remember, gave financial contributions, wrote letters to the editor of Ohio newspapers, blogged, and even refused to buy anything from companies that financially supported the Bush administration.
I felt that fighting the Bush Administration and its supporters was my obligation as a citizen and I took it way seriously. Since the start of graduate school, I remember having a seething anger towards Bush and his chronies. I saw clearly that we had been lied into invading Iraq. He used our need for vengence after 911 to carry out a neoconservative agenda (pre 911) of invading Iraq and turning the Middle East into a Capitalist/Democratic dream in the desert. For anyone who was paying attention, there was never a substantial connection between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Neither was there any reliable evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration seemed to be against everything I held dear. Bush slashed EPA funding, weakened every environmental regulation he could get his hands on, gave the rich gigantic tax cut after tax cut, and thoughtlessly and carelessly signed No Child Left Behind into law.
To me, Bush was the classic rich grinning villain and before I knew it, I was attributing any and all anger, unhappiness, depression, or negative thought to him. It was all his fault.
Granted, if anyone deserved it, it was Bush. In 8 years, he and his buddies trashed our country as if it were his college frat house on a Saturday night. His actions affected me personally, my family, my job, not to mention my country.
However, as I look back on it, Bush was only part of it. Sure, he upset me directly and made my day to day life unhappier than it would have been otherwise. But there was more to it. I had allowed myself to scapegoat all of my negativity to the Bush administration. Dare I say it, it wasn't all their fault.
During graduate school up until my trip to Argentina (7 or so years), I incurred a number of physical stress related maladies. Most of these maladies I attributed to stress caused from my frustration with living in Bush's world. It started with heart palpitations then turned into serious heartburn then gastritis then other more serious digestive disorders. As I look back on this history of stress related issues, it's obvious that the physical manifestion of my opposition to the Bush Administration was anything but normal. I had good reason to be upset, but to the extent that it affected my health and resulted in doctors visits and prescription medication?
I have come to realize that I was either extremely passionate and idealistic about my beliefs or there was something else going on with me. I was outletting my negative emotions on Bush, letting hidden and unrelated issues feed on and combine with anger towards him.
I don't want to completely absolve Bush. His actions were a big part of it. I'm sure of it because I felt much more at peace once the Democrats took back the Senate and House in 2006. And now that Obama is President, it's like Soma for me, dreamy bliss, a warm bath with a New Yorker magazine for me to read as I soak.
But part of it too was something else. Physical manifestations and the angry responses I had toward Bush were simply not normal. The ways I responded and the amount of vitriol I had were I think the products of something else that I wasn't dealing with. I know it because while I now feel pacified by Obama and the direction of our country, many of the same feelings I had during the reign of Bush still exist. Only now I've had to look for different scapegoats. That is, kicking Bush and his bums out didn't fully cure me as I had thought it would. Many of my responses and intensity and negativity still remain and I think that I outlet them now on anyone by whom I feel rejected.
So I guess the lesson is that scapegoating my feelings on a worthy evil, while not the worst practice, does not cure or address the root of my problems.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who provided an eloquent and illuminating example, suggeting that some doctors spend years in Africa treating AIDS patients and doing great work and yet in that time never address their own suffering.
That is, some people engage in charity or worthy causes as a means of curing their own suffering. In the end, they may receive some therapeutic benefit, but never really address the root of their unhappiness or guilt or whatever's eating them. Their choice in charity is a stab in the dark, a drastic step in an attempt to cure a suffering soul. Often these charitable acts-however worthy- don't match up with the true needs of the individual.
And so I've been thinking...About all the other people who outlet feelings and energy caused by hidden issues onto unrelated factors such as their jobs, family, spouses, sports teams, politics, traffic, children, pets... They've convinced themselves that the way they feel is justified by something imperfect in their environment. Some people choose charity and volunteering or exercise while others choose... more dangerously and blame the people closest to them. Put simply, when we feel a certain way, we look to an easy target to justify why we feel the way we do.
Sometimes easy targets are right on. Lack of sleep, changes in weather, allergies. All these factors can ruin a day and make us feel lousy. But if the problem is more chronic and spans through everyday environmental changes, we look to something more stable in our lives to justify our anger, our guilt, our fear etc.
I think in general, it's true that liberals tend to me more depressed, unhappy. They use all the problems in the world to justify their general and vague unhappiness. A liberal might think...Surely I feel terrible today because the polar ice caps are melting and the polar bears are drowning. Ok, I agree, that's terrible and for a sensitive person, the idea could cause some amount of emotional trauma. Regardless, it's still an abstract concept by which few people are directly affected. What's more likely is that someone attaches unhappiness they already have and exacerbates it with news like this.
On the other hand, I think, generally speaking, Republicans are angry, angrier and meaner sometimes than I was on the left. I think they use the 'Bleeding heart' mentality of liberals as justification for their anger and fears. One need only listen to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage and the people who call in to get a sense of the way in which they are justifying their anger with the mere existence of Hillary Clinton and gay marriage. I have no idea why or how you could justify your anger with Hillary Clinton. Ok, she's an ambitious woman and maybe part of her staying with Bill was to further her own political ambitions. I still don't think that's enough to justify any substantial amount of anger. And gay marriage. Really? I've never heard a reasonable argument against it, other than it's something different than what people are used to, and people are afraid of change. Does two people who love each other and want to get married really justify seething anger? Anyhow, my political leanings are clear enough.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is an extension of previous posts about self discovery. I think that only through learning about ourselves, facing our pasts, and getting to the core of issues are we able to begin to find peace and I suppose 'relieve our suffering'. I think people, including myself, who take wild thrusts into politics or other worthy causes are mostly picking charities at random, maybe ones that other people have told them that they should care about or that will change their lives and make them happier.
The world is probably a better place as a result of this behavior. In the end, however, people who engage in random charity as a means of dealing with their problems and feeling better could likely have better eased their suffering through Prozac.
I'm guessing that true therapeutic value and nourishment for the soul come instead from a deep knowledge of ourselves and our pasts, followed up by appropriate behavioral responses, whether that means some type of deliberate charitable act or simple lifestyle changes that benefit no one but ourselves.
So I find myself now not as angry with Bush and the Republicans. Don't get me wrong. I still get upset when they mindlessly oppose Obama in lock step, even though he has made genuine strides to compromise, reach across the aisle, and appoint Republicans into positions of power and prominence. But I'm beginning to realize that maybe some of the things that used to upset me aren't issues that I really truly care about. Instead, maybe I was justifying my anger and unhappiness with those issues.
The woman I met during my first trip to BA shook my moral etchasketch. I still don't agree with her way of thinking or behaving and I'm not sure if she knows herself enough to be convicted in this extremely egocentric forma de ser. But she did have the effect of shaking up my identity and getting me to realize that I didn't really care as much about some issues as I thought.
So for a good part of my over year long stay in Buenos Aires, I've felt a general apathy and malaise that I haven't experienced in a long time. To some degree, I have been rebuilding my moral framework, deciding what was truly important to me versus what I had decided to use as a scapegoat for my emotions. And in the meantime, there has existed a vacuum, an empty and kind of sad space where my activism and passion used to be.
These days, I'm happy to say, my passion for certain issues is returning as I begin to learn more about myself. But I think what's more important at the moment, before the step of action and advocacy, is to continue to explore why my physical and emotional responses in the past have been out of line with reality.
Her beliefs both enraged and intrigued me and she effectively shook my worldview to the core. Her analytical mind tore down my somewhat shallow and cliched beliefs and made me feel stupid for caring.
Allow me to elaborate on who I was when I met her...At the time, I was heavily involved in volunteering for progressive political causes. I co-directed a campaign for Ohio Representative, made door-to-door pleas, annoyed more independents via phone than I can remember, gave financial contributions, wrote letters to the editor of Ohio newspapers, blogged, and even refused to buy anything from companies that financially supported the Bush administration.
I felt that fighting the Bush Administration and its supporters was my obligation as a citizen and I took it way seriously. Since the start of graduate school, I remember having a seething anger towards Bush and his chronies. I saw clearly that we had been lied into invading Iraq. He used our need for vengence after 911 to carry out a neoconservative agenda (pre 911) of invading Iraq and turning the Middle East into a Capitalist/Democratic dream in the desert. For anyone who was paying attention, there was never a substantial connection between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Neither was there any reliable evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration seemed to be against everything I held dear. Bush slashed EPA funding, weakened every environmental regulation he could get his hands on, gave the rich gigantic tax cut after tax cut, and thoughtlessly and carelessly signed No Child Left Behind into law.
To me, Bush was the classic rich grinning villain and before I knew it, I was attributing any and all anger, unhappiness, depression, or negative thought to him. It was all his fault.
Granted, if anyone deserved it, it was Bush. In 8 years, he and his buddies trashed our country as if it were his college frat house on a Saturday night. His actions affected me personally, my family, my job, not to mention my country.
However, as I look back on it, Bush was only part of it. Sure, he upset me directly and made my day to day life unhappier than it would have been otherwise. But there was more to it. I had allowed myself to scapegoat all of my negativity to the Bush administration. Dare I say it, it wasn't all their fault.
During graduate school up until my trip to Argentina (7 or so years), I incurred a number of physical stress related maladies. Most of these maladies I attributed to stress caused from my frustration with living in Bush's world. It started with heart palpitations then turned into serious heartburn then gastritis then other more serious digestive disorders. As I look back on this history of stress related issues, it's obvious that the physical manifestion of my opposition to the Bush Administration was anything but normal. I had good reason to be upset, but to the extent that it affected my health and resulted in doctors visits and prescription medication?
I have come to realize that I was either extremely passionate and idealistic about my beliefs or there was something else going on with me. I was outletting my negative emotions on Bush, letting hidden and unrelated issues feed on and combine with anger towards him.
I don't want to completely absolve Bush. His actions were a big part of it. I'm sure of it because I felt much more at peace once the Democrats took back the Senate and House in 2006. And now that Obama is President, it's like Soma for me, dreamy bliss, a warm bath with a New Yorker magazine for me to read as I soak.
But part of it too was something else. Physical manifestations and the angry responses I had toward Bush were simply not normal. The ways I responded and the amount of vitriol I had were I think the products of something else that I wasn't dealing with. I know it because while I now feel pacified by Obama and the direction of our country, many of the same feelings I had during the reign of Bush still exist. Only now I've had to look for different scapegoats. That is, kicking Bush and his bums out didn't fully cure me as I had thought it would. Many of my responses and intensity and negativity still remain and I think that I outlet them now on anyone by whom I feel rejected.
So I guess the lesson is that scapegoating my feelings on a worthy evil, while not the worst practice, does not cure or address the root of my problems.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who provided an eloquent and illuminating example, suggeting that some doctors spend years in Africa treating AIDS patients and doing great work and yet in that time never address their own suffering.
That is, some people engage in charity or worthy causes as a means of curing their own suffering. In the end, they may receive some therapeutic benefit, but never really address the root of their unhappiness or guilt or whatever's eating them. Their choice in charity is a stab in the dark, a drastic step in an attempt to cure a suffering soul. Often these charitable acts-however worthy- don't match up with the true needs of the individual.
And so I've been thinking...About all the other people who outlet feelings and energy caused by hidden issues onto unrelated factors such as their jobs, family, spouses, sports teams, politics, traffic, children, pets... They've convinced themselves that the way they feel is justified by something imperfect in their environment. Some people choose charity and volunteering or exercise while others choose... more dangerously and blame the people closest to them. Put simply, when we feel a certain way, we look to an easy target to justify why we feel the way we do.
Sometimes easy targets are right on. Lack of sleep, changes in weather, allergies. All these factors can ruin a day and make us feel lousy. But if the problem is more chronic and spans through everyday environmental changes, we look to something more stable in our lives to justify our anger, our guilt, our fear etc.
I think in general, it's true that liberals tend to me more depressed, unhappy. They use all the problems in the world to justify their general and vague unhappiness. A liberal might think...Surely I feel terrible today because the polar ice caps are melting and the polar bears are drowning. Ok, I agree, that's terrible and for a sensitive person, the idea could cause some amount of emotional trauma. Regardless, it's still an abstract concept by which few people are directly affected. What's more likely is that someone attaches unhappiness they already have and exacerbates it with news like this.
On the other hand, I think, generally speaking, Republicans are angry, angrier and meaner sometimes than I was on the left. I think they use the 'Bleeding heart' mentality of liberals as justification for their anger and fears. One need only listen to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage and the people who call in to get a sense of the way in which they are justifying their anger with the mere existence of Hillary Clinton and gay marriage. I have no idea why or how you could justify your anger with Hillary Clinton. Ok, she's an ambitious woman and maybe part of her staying with Bill was to further her own political ambitions. I still don't think that's enough to justify any substantial amount of anger. And gay marriage. Really? I've never heard a reasonable argument against it, other than it's something different than what people are used to, and people are afraid of change. Does two people who love each other and want to get married really justify seething anger? Anyhow, my political leanings are clear enough.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is an extension of previous posts about self discovery. I think that only through learning about ourselves, facing our pasts, and getting to the core of issues are we able to begin to find peace and I suppose 'relieve our suffering'. I think people, including myself, who take wild thrusts into politics or other worthy causes are mostly picking charities at random, maybe ones that other people have told them that they should care about or that will change their lives and make them happier.
The world is probably a better place as a result of this behavior. In the end, however, people who engage in random charity as a means of dealing with their problems and feeling better could likely have better eased their suffering through Prozac.
I'm guessing that true therapeutic value and nourishment for the soul come instead from a deep knowledge of ourselves and our pasts, followed up by appropriate behavioral responses, whether that means some type of deliberate charitable act or simple lifestyle changes that benefit no one but ourselves.
So I find myself now not as angry with Bush and the Republicans. Don't get me wrong. I still get upset when they mindlessly oppose Obama in lock step, even though he has made genuine strides to compromise, reach across the aisle, and appoint Republicans into positions of power and prominence. But I'm beginning to realize that maybe some of the things that used to upset me aren't issues that I really truly care about. Instead, maybe I was justifying my anger and unhappiness with those issues.
The woman I met during my first trip to BA shook my moral etchasketch. I still don't agree with her way of thinking or behaving and I'm not sure if she knows herself enough to be convicted in this extremely egocentric forma de ser. But she did have the effect of shaking up my identity and getting me to realize that I didn't really care as much about some issues as I thought.
So for a good part of my over year long stay in Buenos Aires, I've felt a general apathy and malaise that I haven't experienced in a long time. To some degree, I have been rebuilding my moral framework, deciding what was truly important to me versus what I had decided to use as a scapegoat for my emotions. And in the meantime, there has existed a vacuum, an empty and kind of sad space where my activism and passion used to be.
These days, I'm happy to say, my passion for certain issues is returning as I begin to learn more about myself. But I think what's more important at the moment, before the step of action and advocacy, is to continue to explore why my physical and emotional responses in the past have been out of line with reality.
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