inside out

March 20, 2006

She IS alive. Breathe easy. So maybe mopeds, foam, chariot races, and dogshit are not the ONLY things that can slow me down. The silence of my blog has been mainly due to the fact that a couple of weeks ago I was struck down with my first bout of proper South American jungle fever. In retrospect, I actually think it might have been a little impressive that it only took me a month to get properly flogged with dysentery but it ravaged me completely for three or four days and hence there was very little to report from here at the time. Now it feels that I have neglected the blog for so long that I will never have the time or energy to report everything so I am making a silent promise to get back into my in-depth coverage.

One fateful Thursday night I had a slice of pizza and a nice cold beer while Paul was teaching and went to bed happy as a little chappy. When I woke up in the middle of the night it felt like my intestines were going through a spin cycle and my body could not evacuate its contents fast enough (charming, I know). I had scheduled an interview on Friday for a teaching job and had to miss it. Paul, bless him, called them and told them I was ferociously ill and I rescheduled the appointment for Monday. When Monday rolled around I was still doubled over with stomach pain and hadn’t eaten since Thursday night so I promptly missed the second scheduled interview. Job prospect number one seemed to be down the tubes. I spent most of that weekend in bed watching BAD television and checking out the Oscars for the first time in a few years. Dolly Parton: Why, oh why?

There is something so horrible about being sick away from home. I think I’ve just spent so much of my life sick or in pain that at this point I am actually getting more and more intolerant. You’d think after no less than seven surgeries and thirteen spinal taps that a girl would be a tough little nugget and ready to tackle anything, but actually the opposite is true. When I stub my toe, I cry. When I get the flu I roll around in bed praying for death. When I have a cold I drug myself senseless with every crumby over-the-counter remedy that the FDA will allow. Pain and sickness are two things that I just absolutely cannot stand. I will not tolerate them, I can’t put up with them. I am sure I can be a little bit of a testy patient. Paul was patient with me for as long as possible and then I think kind of gave up feeling sorry for me and substituted that for the “suck it up, meat!” healing method. It was some tough times. Now I am feeling better and eating again and really I think I just had the best diet South America has to offer because I must have lost six pounds in a mere few days.

I do recommend keeping a doctor in your family because my lowest moment came in floods of tears on the phone with Doctor Lynnabelle talking me down from the ledge and assuring me that everything would be ok. She told me some things to pick up at the Pharmacy so I left the house on Sunday evening and staggered (quite literally) to the closest drug store. I was in a sickness haze, totally weakened from not eating, barely able to stand up and sweating feverishly when I realized I had two boxes in my hand one of which contained a laxative and the other containing a non-laxative and I had absolutely no idea which was which. I nearly cried. I was too exhausted to even try to ask the pharmacist for help. These are the moments when I want to be at home on my couch with my Mum’s lentil soup and a stack of DVD’s from Blockbuster. No such luck. One of the cool things about living in Microcentro is the buzz. I mean the streets are full of neon signs and absolutely teeming with people at all hours. But when you are sick as a dog, and stagger out of your house with people knocking into you and hustling you out of the way and the lights and sounds are just a sensory nightmare… things get a little more difficult. Anyway I have broken the sickness seal and will surely do better handling the pharmacy next time.

During my brush with death Paul went out to watch some of the Buenos Aires Tango Festival (which I managed to miss in its entirety) with Emil and Dayna, which he said was pretty fun. Carnival was raging on last week complete with drumming and (yes!) enough foam to blanket Texas. My Spanish class was coming up at UBA and Paul was gently harassing me to study for the placement test. I have been spending most of my time in the computer store working on a website translation. Three siblings own our apartment and one of the sisters has a boyfriend who works for a fancy stable and horse-breeding company. They have a Spanish website which they would like to be available in English as well. Paul was thinking how much to charge them for this service and I offered to do it for free. I figured we kind of owe them for helping us get shot of the agency fees for the apartment and all of that. Now I kind of think, “Good lord, what have I gotten myself into?!” So I have been hours and hours slogging through this translation, which is going more or less well but very, very slowly. I also run into difficulties with translations of horse-related words that I don’t even know in English and wouldn’t know unless I was a horse trainer, breeder, stable boy, etc. It’s tough but Paul is proofreading what I have done which will help. We even braved working on a section of it together and we both walked out relatively unscathed. Miracle! We got an email from Alexia yesterday thanking us for working on it. Her boyfriend apparently told her that he could not accept the work for free and instead we would be invited to an asado with them, which to me sounds a lot better than money right now.

Things are slowly starting to work. After a month of promises, the cleaning lady has finally arrived which is so groovy. Once a week the house is going to be cleaned and our laundry will be taken and changed for us. Such things are an amazing luxury for me who still struggles with not having a panic attack when buying stamps. We also finally got cable TV which I am struggling to avoid but it’s so difficult when the man comes to install it and the first thing you see when you switch it on is ‘The Office’ on BBC World. Yessssssssssssss. It was a blessing to have when I was feeling too sick and pathetic to better myself with reading. We are also allegedly getting Internet service in the apartment very soon and that will be the biggest luxury of all. Just think, I can wile away the hours downloading episodes of ‘Lost’ without dragging my computer around town. SWEET!

This entry is a little fractured. I spent a week in bed trying to recover and then a week that I really didn’t stop trying to make up for it. We went to a free concert by a famous Tango singer who won a Latin Grammy. Her name was Maria Volente and the intimate concert was so beautiful. We finally took a guided tour of the Teatro Colon which was so amazing that it was only mildly dampened for me by having to take the English tour with a bunch of American lobsters asking asinine questions almost endlessly.

The greatest event recently was a brief jaunt to Mar Del Plata which is a beach town 5 and a half hours South of Buenos Aires by bus. It is mainly a beach resort town and reminded me of my visit to Mazatlan in Mexico. The guidebook warned that from January to March the place is stowed with “sun frazzled porteños” and they really were not kidding. The beaches are beautiful and cascading and the reefs keep the waves pounding but the crowds are shoulder to shoulder. It didn’t bother me much at all. I spent a few hours of absolute bliss on the beach and tumbling around in the waves. I miss the beach. I miss swimming more than anything. I was so excited to bask and play in the water that I forgot to put sunscreen on my legs and after an hour of laying in the hot sand, emerged with a perfect Scottish, whitey, tomato-red sunburn that still hasn’t really stopped hurting. As well as some quality time in the sand, we walked a kilometer or so out of downtown Mar Del Plata to the port. We got there right at 5pm which was perfect time to watch the fishermen unloading their catch. The place reeked and the men were loud and colorful. I love fishing ports. As well as a giant statue of “Santa Domingo” (which is so big it must be visible from the moon), the port boasts a colony of sea lions, entirely male, which you can approach within a meter. Some even get so frisky that they cruise onto the sidewalk where the fisherman toss them a few pieces of the catch, if they are so lucky. Just past the boys are a collection of shipwrecks. Literally, half-submerged, rotten, half-boats many of which are half submerged as if being pulled slowly over the coarse of some years straight down to the depths of hell. This is clearly where the boats around here come to die. Anyway, they provided some great photo opportunities for this gringa.

This morning my class started and it seems like it will be very slow moving but extremely useful. I already felt pushed to speak more than I would usually dare and this, above all things, will be very, very good for me. I learned some cool words too which I have to get to writing down. I have been tentatively poking my resume out there for the Buenos Aires world to see but nothing interesting happening yet. I am still trudging through the website translation (hoping to finish as soon as possible) and may start tutoring a girl in English and helping her prepare her college application essays. Life is so sweet sometimes. I feel so great today. I have a class, I feel like I am learning a lot. I have a wonderful partner. Things feel good. There are moments of overwhelming, paralyizing fear, self-doubt, even self-hatred. I often feel lazy, fat, insignificant, stupid, and completely worthless but I’m not used to things happening so slowly when they happen so fast for others. I suppose a lot of those moments are because I want to learn Spanish NOW and I want to make friends NOW and I want to see all the art NOW and I want to read ten more books NOW. I need to relax and let things move slowly but, like I said, I’m not used to it and while I can be very patient with others, I am never, ever patient or understand with myself. So I have a good list of things to work on.

My friend Sarah arrived on Thursday. Sarah is a friend from High School that (by total coincidence) is also planning on living and working here for a time. I finally got to see her when we arrived home from Mar Del Plata. It was such a joy to see her and talk to her and feel that I have a friend close by. It’s also funny how in one moment I am assuring her that she will find her way around easily and the next moment I am feeling pangs of jealousy that she has already cast a web of new friends and experiences around herself. Maybe I have too and I just don’t feel it but I think these things have come much harder to me this time than they did in London or on other adventures. I want to be better at this so badly. I want to move in the world with a brave face and fearless spirit. I want to visit Thailand, Patagonia, Spain, Africa… and I want my feet to be more wandering. At any rate, I am so glad that Sarah is here and so settled in after a few short days.

I miss home sometimes. I miss tampons with applicators. I miss PG Tips. I miss Mexican Fresh burritos. I miss all burritos. Shit, at this point I miss Taco Bell. I miss my family and my cat. I miss the farmer’s market. I miss TiVo (oh GOD how I miss TiVo). I miss having friends around when I need them. I miss my friends who would drop by my apartment if they were in the neighborhood. I miss my apartment. I miss the smell of the granite in my parents’ new kitchen. I miss tripping over my dad’s shoes, which are never anywhere but right in front of the couch where someone is bound to trip on them. I miss calling my sister on speed dial whenever I laugh out loud at something. I miss laughing out loud. I miss having something to work very hard at. I miss feeling like I had a direction even though in Santa Barbara I equally had none. I miss Cadbury Eggs. I miss feeling confident. I miss feeling that I have purpose. I miss feeling that I’m not, but that I could be, working toward something wonderful. I miss the importance of people telling you that you are something when you feel like nothing. I miss the sunsets.

That being said, there are so many things that I already feel that I will miss about Buenos Aires when, and if, I leave. I am trying so hard to capture them and savor them while I am here. I am trying to convey here is this verbal outpour of nonsense that despite all the things I miss that there are real, true joys that are keeping me here.

More than anything I am sorry for the long silence for any who bother to look at this page.The photos are Paul wandering around the only photographable part of the Teatro Colon and all the wonders of Mar Del Plata that I described in haste. I hope you enjoy the photos and at least a little of the babble. You might even miss it when it’s gone.