serious business

the end of the world

2012-01-03T21:09:00.002-03:00

Sometimes I feel like the only thing that can light a fire under my ass--ever since I quit acts of risk and desperation--is the idea of certain doom. I get the most motivated to write and create when I think of my mortality and how I would like to leave something behind for my not-yet-conceived children to perhaps learn from should I unexpectedly die and leave them motherless.

In some ways, 2011 was an exercise in minimal survival, and in other ways a feast of excess. On one end, my pay stubs from the fiscal year amounted to $200, an amount that I could have smoked away in two weeks, had I not quit smoking. And on the other end, Marido and I spent the entire last month of the year wandering around in Asia, feeling like the most overprivileged people on the planet. In between that last January paycheck and a New Year rung in on the sofa, recovering from colds and jet lag, there has been lots of failure, lots of struggle, lots of change, but also a lot of love, all of which I am extremely grateful for.

The thought that always lingers in my mind when visiting any developing nation is how incredibly hard people work to make ends meet. The sight of people in uncomfortable positions engaged in manual, repetitive, or dangerous labor--particularly the elderly--always provokes my guilt reflex, and I can only imagine what kind of doughy, incidentally lucky person they see when they cross paths with me. In Asia, the feeling is even stranger, because I always imagine there to be some kind of shock at the thought that one of them--once removed--could very well be me. I smile a lot and tip generously, probably just adding to the idea that I'm completely alien and oblivious. I treated my battered body midway through the trip to a $5/hour massage, pounded and kneaded by two Vietnamese girls around my age. "Where are you from?" One asked me. "You look like me."

Returning to my life in San Francisco is equally jarring, with no work to return to, but a certain role that I have settled into, a role of loving and being loved, and working to no avail. I have to play this mind game with myself that involves ricocheting between poles of best- and worst-case scenarios: that I will publish, and that I will die.

Happy New Year.

chapters

2011-09-12T21:25:00.005-03:00

I finished a journal today, which is always a moment of reflection. One of my roommates in Buenos Aires gave me the journal, a tad water-damaged, salvaged from her office. It is yellow with white flowers on it, and the elastic holding it shut broke off months ago. I started writing in it a year ago. It's small; I didn't expect it to last me a year, but I guess my thoughts have been sort of repetitive and scattered, two things that don't lead to good journal-writing, or good writing at all.

The news from this front is that I came to a realization that I was torturing myself for no reason. I would spend hours every day, every week, looking for work that I didn't want, fretting when I didn't get it, and polishing the fragments of my self-esteem that I stumbled over every morning. I introduced myself to people as "unemployed." I felt sad. Sometimes I would get really into writing something, and then I would stop and feel bad, because I was wasting time pursuing a fantastical dream and not looking for real-life work. All around me, people were working.

I hit another milestone in my life journal, that of having been back in San Francisco for a year. Someone asked me, "What have you been doing all year?" I've been ironing out the fine points of a relationship. I've been looking for work. I've been baking cookies. I've been growing tomatoes. I gained a few pounds, then lost them. I'm battling with poison oak. I thought, "Man, if only I'd known that I was going to be here a whole year...I would have buckled down, written, not worried about finding a job at all. I'm not starving or anything; I'm lucky. I have savings and a boyfriend who supports me and by golly, I haven't done anything to either deserve it or take advantage of it." Instead, it was like a year of banging my head against a wall.

I took a breath and looked up; I stopped waiting for something to happen. I quit looking for work. I salaried myself out of my savings outright, for the rest of the year. I left the cycle of despair that is job-hunting, and I am writing. I am happy. For now, life is good.

high-brow literature

2011-06-20T22:07:00.004-03:00

Last week, I found myself at a delightful wedding on Cape Cod filled with friends and strangers. And as it is with strangers and small talk, a lot of my conversations went like this:

Friend's Uncle's Business Partner: So, what do you do?

Serious Business: I'm a writer.

FUBP: Yeah? What kind of writing do you do?

SB: Freelance.

FUBP: Right, okay. But...what kind?

SB: Well, okay, I've been writing fiction-for-hire lately.

FUBP: What kind of fiction?

SB: Romance.

FUBP: Oh. Really...!

Somehow, I really had it in my head that I would somehow be able to avoid talking about what I've been doing. But there were a few problems with this thought: 1) I didn't have a good story concocted, 2) The evasion was for their sake and not mine, so I didn't really take it too seriously, and 3) I'm just not a good liar. I do sometimes leave tiny pieces out. For instance, if it was an old friend I was talking to and not a Friend's Uncle's Business Partner, I would just tell them straight up that I'm writing specifically for a sub-category of romance called Erotic Romance. Basically, my rules for disclosure are against anyone whose first reaction would include "Oh." In general, this is anyone related to me, anyone whose children I know, and people who I still think could potentially employ me.

Here's the book on Amazon. It is called 'Mexican Flames.' My editor wanted to call it 'Mexican Heat,' but it turns out there is a gay erotica book that already goes by that name.

Let me tell you a little about this book.
1) It is an e-book only. No trees were sacrificed to deliver this piece of high-brow literature to the world

2) Because it is an e-book, it has been designed to be read on e-readers. As such, it is short, and it is illustrated. ILLUSTRATED. (not by me). The funny part about this is that the book is 12 chapters, and we had agreed on around 4-8 illustrations. However, if you download the free sample chapter, you'll see that there are four illustrations IN THE FIRST CHAPTER. I have yet to download the full book myself, because two chapters are just sex, and I am scared to see those illustrated. In watercolor.

3)Did I mention that the title of the book is 'Mexican Flames?'

4)Jeremy Piven is in it.

5)This is Book One of a series. My editor-cousin wants to call the second one 'Canadian Flames.' Discuss.

old chinese ladies

2011-06-13T18:56:00.004-03:00

This morning I was jogging home when I saw a short person clad in black, wearing a hat, pushing a metal shopper up the sloped sidewalk of Hyde Street. The shopper was piled so high with trash bags that they obscured the view of the tiny person pushing it. I'm not a very fast jogger (particularly when going uphill), but they were moving very slow, so it was just a few seconds later that I caught up with this slow-mover. Without really thinking, I cast a quick sideways glance as I made to pass them, and I was horrified to see that it was my grandmother.

Okay, it wasn't really my grandmother. My only living grandparent lives with full-time assistance in Singapore, so this tiny woman pushing this cart of recycling up this was definitely not her. But every time I see an old Asian person digging for a living, my heart buckles in my chest. Seeing as how I live next to Chinatown, you'd think I would be used to this, but no. Because every old person collecting cans to survive makes me see my parents, and even myself, and I always wonder what has gone wrong if an old woman is out struggling to push a cart of recycling up a hill by herself at eight in the morning. I usually stop and ask the women if they need help, and usually they say no. But this woman allowed me to grasp the handles of her cart and maneuver it up the hill. It was ridiculously heavy.

"You're very strong!" I told her.

"I'm 84 years old," she said. I'm not sure if she told me that because she was proud that she was still going at 84...or if she was explaining why she was now too weak to make it up the hill.

Part of me wants to believe that these women do not really need to be collecting cans. There are two poles of old Chinese ladies--those that expect to be treated like empresses of miniature empires (which many of them are). These ladies will expect all their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fall all over themselves so that they won't have to lift a finger, ever, as a sign of respect for their old age and for their matriarchal position. Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are the scrappy women who believe that idleness and privilege are the worst of all traits, and they will be out collecting cans even if they live in a mansion with their eldest son, the doctor, and his wife, the lawyer. These kind of women cannot sit still because they need to feel like they are constantly providing whatever they can to the family. I prefer to think that these women belong to this latter camp, because it is a lot more comforting to believe this than to imagine that just a few blocks away from me, people are living in poverty, or that this woman's family has deserted her and that nobody is taking care of her in her old age.

That just kills me. It made me want to adopt her and bring her home with me, sit her on the sofa, and buy her a television so she could watch soap operas all day.

Related: If You Think Things Suck Now, Just Wait Til You're Old and Poor

and that was april.

2011-05-05T19:25:00.002-03:00

April was the month that I hardly wrote anything at all. The one blog post I seriously considered was negged by Marido as an over-share (sorry!) and the fact that I am counting a blog post as writing at all just goes to prove my theory that April Is The Most Unproductive Month. Period.

More than once, I sat down to clear my head by writing and what poured out of me was hauntingly dull and familiar, bitchings about my lack of employment, the feeling that my life is getting away from me, watching everyone around me couple off, get serious, make plans that increasingly don't involve me. I didn't even have to think about what I was writing, because it's a script that has played out what seems like every other year. But I don't stop and think about these things as much anymore because they're boring, and I know they will pass. This week I received one baby shower and three wedding invitations in the mail, and last week two of my good friends got engaged. I wonder what goes through your head when actually sit down and commit yourself to something, to someone, and then I realize that it's not one moment, it's a series of moments, the way I commit myself to writing a novel, as crappy as it might turn out. It's not like one day you say, "I'm going to write a novel." It's a decision you make every day, and some days are better than others.

Today Marido and I are celebrating 11 months to the day we met. 11 months! That's not even a year, pssh. It is so unbelievable to me that I just have to think about it all the time. It's wonderful to be in such a great relationship with a man who encourages me and believes in me and who doesn't doubt that we can do anything together. Anything.

It's funny to feel like I have things in working order in a relationship, where we can talk through things and feel, in the end, that we are in it for the long haul. I suppose that is what marriage feels like, and instead of thinking every time we have a fight "This is it, he's done with me," or, conversely, "This is it, I can't take it anymore," you just say to yourself, "Let's get through this." I think we are playing more of the latter than the former lately, and it feels good. We still fight and get our feelings hurt just because we are such different people, but after all this time we are still trying, and that's how we got here. I am really amazed by it all. If we are writing a story together, it has been pretty interesting thus far. I like the character development and suspense: what will they do next? Lately we are thinking of starting a photography business together.

It's been almost three years since I've had a salary now. I am used to the dejection now, and am just seeing that yes, it really is harder to get a job the longer you've been unemployed--and the older you get. Most agencies don't really see "writer" as a job at all, and so it is becoming even more important that I succeed as one. I think novelists have to nurture a kind of tenacity that is cyclical and long-term. Last year, in April, I was having my typical Most Unproductive Month, so I went to Singapore to watch my grandmother die and then spent a week in Chicago meditating on the fact that I would not allow myself to be a failure. When I returned to Buenos Aires in May, I tumbled into the most explosive month: I finished my novel, sold my first "big" story in months, and then a few weeks later I met Marido.

Well, now it's May again, and I am so primed for amazing things to happen. I am writing again, my tomato plants are growing growing growing before my eyes, and in a few weeks Marido and I are going to bliss out on the beaches of Baja. Get ready! I'm ready.

celebrations

2011-03-28T21:21:00.005-03:00

My twenties were all about big birthdays. I liked to have big parties, excuses to invite everyone I knew and drink (even) more than usual since everyone is buying you drinks. The birthday party is the day where everyone shows up, even if it's just for a drink, because it's your birthday. You are surrounded by all these people you love and it's just magical! It's the high school equivalent of having your locker decorated so everyone knows you have friends who spent time cutting out letters of your name and coming to school fifteen minutes earlier to paste them on your locker, along with cutouts of Jared Leto and Mylar balloons tied to the handle.

My 29th birthday was an odd party in the middle of sobriety and following a life-changing week in the desert, and I remember spending most of my party feeling anxious and waiting for the peripheral invitees to leave so I could spend quality time with the besties.

Last year, I spent my 30th birthday in the middle of nowhere by myself, and I sort of figured it would pretty much signal the end of birthdays for me. It's a different sort of celebration to have a birthday by yourself, where nobody can reach you with wishes, there's no cake, no candles, and the little part of you that misses that gets tamped down by the part of you that realizes you truly don't need that shit to feel festive.

This year, I sort of thought I would have a big party to celebrate being back in San Francisco, but my family showed up and then the idea of a party a week later sounded so silly that I might as well wait for next year, or at least an occasion where something cool is being celebrated--like, hopefully, the "publication" of my first e-book, which should be soon. I thought it would be more fun to have some sort of accomplishment to celebrate, because I'm really tired of alternately bitching about or avoiding the topic of my employment status.

But I've realized that the birthday party isn't just about making the birthday person feel loved and happy, it's a time for your buddies to feel good about being your buddy. You show up, you give love, and this makes you happy for being the good friend who shows up to the party. And having a birthday party, I've realized, is also a way to remind people it's your birthday so they can wish you a happy birthday and not feel like a dick later for forgetting. Without the birthday party reminder, I've realized, people forget and then they panic and wonder how to make it up to you. But you don't have to make it up; it's not a big deal. Birthday wishes are still nice a week or a month later. It's not about the date, it's about the hugs and kisses and gratefulness to not have died yet.

Besides, I still don't know the birthday of my friend J, and I've known her since we were five years old. I was her maid of honor. So there. And let's have a party, just to have a party. It can be a celebration of anything, and yes, it can still involve Mylar balloons and cutouts of Jared Leto.

D-FENS

2011-03-17T23:20:00.004-03:00

I'm not having the best month. It's raining; my skin is a mess; I didn't convert either of my two interviews into job offers; I also lost two freelance gigs this week to more qualified people--one photographer, one writer. I also wrote two serious blog posts, one about being a stay-at-home girlfriend, and the other about racism, and then decided that I would rather not publish any more thoughts on these topics, no matter how eloquently stated mine might be.

I got surprisingly pissed at someone's comments on my blog recently. I think if I were in a better mood, I wouldn't have cared. But despite the fact that I am surrounded by love and opportunity and recently signed a little publishing contract, my self-esteem is suffering--maybe because I'm online too much lately. I don't like being on the defensive, and I realize that is just how I feel lately. There was all this backlash against the whole stay-at-home girlfriend thing, and then all of this hate over racism, and then people telling me I'm just not good enough for whatever it is they want. I don't like defending myself on other people's terms. I don't like trying to prove that I can do a job, that it's okay if I don't have a paycheck for a little while, that it's okay if I'm Asian, that it's okay if I just need to fucken mellow out and bake cookies for a while in my sweatpants. I got all sorts of vitriolic over both hating and defending my way of life, and then I realized I don't have to. And the reason why I feel so defensive is because I spend too much time online reading people's opinions. I mean, some asshole yelled "Chinaman!" at me this week. Yesterday, some guy commanded me to "Smile!" when I passed him in the street. I wanted to react shrilly to both of them, but I let both moments pass me by. It is one thing to give one-sided commentary, and another thing to invite discussion. And I did not want to have discussions with either of these people.

Anyhow, I want to be done feeling defensive and stuck, so I'm just going to be done. I started writing a new novel this week, and I am happy with it. I also know that the reason why I get stressed about money is that it is yet another thing that I try to force myself to care about in order to be "responsible" (like a job!) but that ultimately, I'll have it when I need it, and as long as I don't worry about it, it doesn't really bother me.

Also, I'm glad to be with a guy who I think is getting used to me, so much so that last night when I burst out "Sometimes I don't think you even WANT kids!" he hardly batted an eye. That, and he still wants to quit his plum job to spend six-plus months with me in a van, driving south.

improvising

2011-03-08T21:01:00.003-03:00

Last week I wrote about change and how good it is, how it keeps our minds agile and ready for what devil may come. But today I want to write about the flipside of so much change, where so much is uncertain that you end up doing the same thing every day.

A lot of people experience "travel fatigue," where they stop absorbing new experience after a long period of time on the road. That is when you feel like a homeless person instead of a tourist, and all you can focus on is getting a cup of coffee, resting your feet on a sunny bench, and finding a clean place to go to the bathroom. Inevitably, you start to think to yourself that every place is the same--and why the hell do you need a clean place to go the bathroom, anyway? Isn't that counterintuitive?

I'm having another one of my many days of frustration at being an un-salaried worker. I spent another day hustling, trying to simultaneously research something and sell myself, and although the prospect of getting this plum assignment is pretty exciting, I have to admit that part of me feels like I'm wasting my time; I'm not going to get it. The other part of me says "Not with that attitude you won't!" My second-grade teacher would be proud.

I am still not used to the ups and downs of freelancing. I was sort of relieved when I didn't get called back for a second interview at The Perfect Job For Me, since that would have led to, you know, me...working in an office. I guess it was really The Perfect Job For My Skill Set, and not Me per se...but being offered the position would have been good for my self-esteem, which always suffers when nothing is happening. These are the days when I feel like, in foregoing a traditional job because of fear of routine, I end up doing the same thing every day: freaking out, scattershot research that leads to dead ends, half-assed attempts at self-representing, baking cookies. In the end, it feels like trying to find a kernel of corn in a swimming pool by scooping out cups of water and then throwing them back in.

I think I need some popcorn. Where the hell did that analogy come from?

hare-brained

2011-03-02T14:22:00.004-03:00

It is now the Year of the Hare. According to Chinese astrologists, it will be a calm year following the Tiger's year of turmoil. Hooray...?

But I prefer to think of it as a year not of the hare, but of the jackrabbit. We saw these in the desert last week and I can't stop thinking of them. They blend in to their desert surroundings, their gigantic ears standing on alert like tall radars. At the slightest detection of trouble--or opportunity--they take swift action. I am thinking of this year as a resting time, too, but resting with the notion that at any moment, we could take swift action. We can be like the hawks, opportunely waiting our moment for the right current of air to take us away.

Marido is out of town. I miss him in all the usual ways--out of comfort, out of desire, out of excitement...but I also miss him in an unexpected way that I think has something to do with his existence being a new sign that things are different now.

Although I miss him intensely, I am glad that we have some time apart to break up the routine. It is not just the routine of the everyday activities that is nice to escape, but the mental patterns you become accustomed to regarding someone's role in your life. With Marido so far away, I am reminded of our physical language, how we support each other daily, but also his overall role for me as a man who has encouraged me to pursue what I love (like writing) and change what I don't (like smoking).

As we know, our minds both seek and create patterns, which in turn give us stability, logic, and form foundations for seeking extended truths and higher-level problem-solving. It is because we can accept the physical realm that we can build skyscrapers, that when we fall asleep at night we can trust that we will wake up in the same place.

Sometimes our reliance on patterns can work against us, though, creating limitations of the imagination rather than platforms for expansion. I think that this happens when people get depressed, anxious, or fearful--our minds attach to a mental conception as tightly as it attaches to the physical world. We see ourselves as inflexible beings, incapable of change.

But change happens. We can resist it, but we miss out on a lot. It's like refusing to enjoy a comedy, just because we were expecting an action flick. Adaptation is more than adopting new survival skills to a changing environment, it's recognizing when we need to change our environments ourselves and knowing when the moment is right to do so.

If this is the year of waiting, I am glad to be waiting it out with Marido. And when the time comes to take action, I hope we will be ready. I think we will be.

resistance is futile

2011-02-18T16:27:00.008-03:00

First off, movies. Saw two great ones this week:

The Man From Earth is a heady piece, the final work of noted sci-fi writer Jerome Bixby, who wrote some of the most beloved installments of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. It all takes place in one room, making me think it would be perfect for a stage adaptation.

Mary and Max is a claymation loosely based on a true story of a pen-friendship between a young Australian girl and an old guy in New York with Aspberger's Syndrome. It was silly, funny, emotional, and altogether awesome. I can only watch movies with compartmentalized sadness these days, and my crying in this movie was limited to two brief moments.

With the rain, I am in full-on hibernation mode. I leave the house for about an hour each day, to exercise or run errands. When I'm hibernating, I like to cook and eat. And eat. And cook. And cook and eat some more. But being inside doesn't mean things can't be exciting! I keep things fresh by eating expired food. I think of it as an in-house consumer challenge. I really broke some personal records this week, eating yogurt that expired in November and canned beans that were, by Marido's estimate, "at least five years old." I cooked them first. I also pickled vegetables.

I've been sleeping deeply, with vivid dreams, averaging nine hours a night. I never thought I could sleep so much. And despite the nothingness-quality to my days lately, the sleep is not a depressing, escape-style sleep, where you wake up groggy and confused. I wake up feeling refreshed. This is a new thing for me.

Earlier in the week, I felt depressed. I weathered another lukewarm job interview wearing my newly purchased adult clothes. Following last week's interview, I went to Macy's to use the bathroom and, catching a sideways glimpse of myself in a mirror, mistook myself for a salesgirl. Further proving to the world that I am not cut out for corporate (or in this case, nonprofit--) America, I was able to bring up both drugs and incest at my interview this week.

Sometimes the days seem so thoroughly bland that I get extremely disoriented, as though I am in an all-white space with no walls, no ceiling, just your feet touching the white floor. The fact that it is white is important: it doesn't feel oppressive or claustrophobic--in fact, it is infinite, endless. The routine sometimes gives me a somewhat euphoric feeling. In the evening, when Marido comes home, I like to put my head on his lap and just experience his warmth and life. After a long day of me rolling around in these three rooms with only the ants for company, his presence can feel overwhelming--but in a good way. Things feel meditative lately: peaceful, happy.

Related: A Life Less Ordinary with Ewan McGregor, Cameron Diaz

advice

2011-02-08T21:58:00.004-03:00

The email I sent to my friend today:

Hey C,

congrats on the packers' win! Must have been a helluva weekend for
you. And I bet you were both happy to be able to drink...and then oh
yeah, the hangover. that is always great.

how are things coming along? i like to hear about what you are up to.
i have realized that i just don't understand social media. like i have
accounts on facebook and twitter, which is pretty much all i can
handle, but i never seem to get any news out of them. I want to get
better at it but it overwhelms me, so I just resort back to primitive
one-on-one emails and such.

i am trying to get better at social media too because I am about to
e-publish something completely ridiculous, and I want to get the word
out. I wonder if you have any advice for me on how to build a
following, and how to get the word out without being annoying. then
again i'm not even sure that i want it really publicized.

OK jeez, i'll just tell you what it is. I'm writing ROMANCE. that's
right. my cousin approached me about providing content for this
e-publishing start up and i kind of just tossed the idea out there, as
a joke, because i refused to write what he inittially proposed. now
i'm staring at this contract and i wrote my first sex scene today and
in less than a month--depending on how the illustration team goes
(yes, ILLUSTRATIONS, it is all really weird) i am going to have
something published online for which I get 50% of royalties. it could
be nothing, but it could be a big deal, seeing as the romance novel
market is really big. we've created a character destined for serial
greatness, sort of modeled after the comic Brenda Starr (you're from
the midwest so I figure you would know?---the redheaded girl reporter
who goes out and has romances with men who wear eyepatches? yep!)
anyhow I have to admit I'm pretty uncomfortable/dazed by the whole
concept. I haven't told my folks yet and don't really want to (i even
feel weird telling you, how fucked up is that?). I am going to be
using a pen name. I am sort of worried about my family being really
upset about the material but at the same time I want people to buy the
book so I can join the ranks of the paid.

do you have any advice, things you learned from promoting [your magazine] and such?

s

recidivism

2011-02-02T22:52:00.005-03:00

I like this word, "recidivism." I looked it up to see what it meant, and it means "a repeat offender," and be used both as a noun and an adjective. I don't know why it popped into my head, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is Groundhog Day.

Marido and I have been at each others' throats this week. I blame it on not enough sex and too much time on my hands. This week we have argued about (a) god, (b) astrology, and (c) Shepard Fairey. Neither of us believe in these things--particularly the Shepard Fairey--but we argued until both of us were pissed off.

I said some things to him the other night that felt like a breakup; it was like a reversal of what happened in November, when he said some things to me that felt like a breakup. It is hard to be happy and comfortable in a relationship when you're constantly feeling like the other person is going to break up with you. I hope we can get through this. I don't know what to do about it. I don't like it.

Yesterday I went out with a friend I've known for a long time, and I was asking him for his unbiased opinion on the situation. He doesn't know Marido and I haven't spoken to him in more than a year. He basically repeated back to me what I had said to him, and somehow it made all the difference in the world. I suddenly understood that I was unhappy and uncertain, and was transferring all of my dissatisfaction with the world onto him--just the way I had done with Ex many years ago. It's not so much blame, it's just exerting some semblance of control over what is the most obvious and important to you.

It's not Marido that I'm mad at, it's other things. It's my lack of direction, it's my frustration with this joblessness. It's the feeling that my life is going places and I don't know how or where to fit in, if I should try to steer things in an arbitrary direction or just see where they go? These questions are hard enough with a career, but what about with another person? I suddenly felt like I was carrying his expectations as well as mine. I didn't know if I could do that. I resented his perceived expectations on top of mine. I began to feel contemptuous toward him, and I wanted things to end.

It's never easy to know when you are ending a bad relationship or bailing out of a perfectly good one that has just fallen on rough times. But Karim asked me to think about the good relationships I know and what defines them, and I think it's an ability to grow together, even when things are hard--not only to support someone else when they are feeling down, but to be supported yourself when you are down.

That, for me, is hard. I don't like anyone to see me when I'm down. I'd rather leave and be down by myself than be a burden on someone else.

Karim also said to me last night: nobody ever said relationships were easy.

employability

2011-01-26T21:56:00.004-03:00

I'm still looking for a job. The odds of finding a job in the Bay Area seem pretty good at first glance, since there are approximately 500 new job postings every day on craigslist. But, upon further inspection, of the 500 new jobs listed:

-150 are for Java/PHP/Linux developers, none of whom are actually looking for a job
-75 are paid studies for (a) crack addicts, (b) migraine sufferers, (c) mommy bloggers
-50 are ****DO YOU LOVE THE ENVIRONMENT????**** street canvassing jobs
-another 50 are not actually anywhere in San Francisco, but are telecommuting positions for shady startups that pay on "commission"
-30 are for extremely specific positions like "Cantonese-speaking Paraplegic Paralegal" or "Queer-friendly Attack on Mars Pinball Technician with 1985 Ford F150 Pickup"
-20 are for upper management positions
-100 are for service industry positions, of which half are for bartenders/servers with "fine-dining experience"

The remaining 25 positions are various office positions that I could be qualified for, depending on which areas of my resume I feel like padding.

This morning I attended an "open interview" session at a cafe downtown for which I'd received a call-back from an application I submitted one or two weeks ago. I filled out a three-page application that didn't contain any information they didn't already have on my resume (except my shitty handwriting), and waited alongside seven other women, half of whom were dressed in SUITS. After waiting for almost an hour, the owner came out, asked me my name, paperclipped my written application to my email that she'd printed out, and told me today was purely a "matching faces to names" day and that, if selected, I would be called back the following week for a second round of time-wasting!

Related:
Stuff Unemployed People Like

faking it

2011-01-18T21:58:00.003-03:00

Sunday afternoon, Older Brother's pet bird flew away while his cage was being cleaned. He's a three-year-old African Gray parrot--a bird that can actually be quite charming and snuggly. For a bird. I talked to Older Brother and his wife just an hour or so after this happened, and they had already given the bird up for dead. They wandered the neighborhood looking for it for a while but, given that the bird had never been outside before, and given the prevalence of bird-eating wildlife in the area, they put his overnight chances of survival or finding his way home at approximately zero percent.

Marido and I visited them the following evening for dinner, and the mealtime conversation took their natural turn of Older Brother orating on a variety of "family-friendly" topics like affirmative action, genocide, and organized religion. Whenever this happens, I get vaguely queasy and stop breathing. Not only is it really unpleasant to sit through these pointless stands, but I hate the way he talks to me if I ever try to question his point of view. That said, I get the feeling he saves these specially pleasant conversations for family, the only safe haven where he can say anything he wants without anyone hating him.

After dinner, he asked me if Marido and I wouldn't mind posting some of his Lost Bird signs he'd printed on the mailboxes in the subdivision. I suggested we all take a walk together, seeing as I don't know the exact locations of said mailboxes, and perhaps we could actually take the time to look for the bird once again. The night before, every time I woke up I couldn't help but think of how scared and cold the poor thing must have been, if indeed he were still alive.

Once outside, I realized just how improbable it was that we were going to find the bird. It was completely dark, and with the airplanes passing intermittently overhead, it was difficult to hear much of anything. After emitting his bird whistle every few moments, we would sometimes hear a tiny sound in the distance--but it was hard to tell if the noise was a bird, or what direction it was coming from. We trudged around the neighborhood grimly, coaxing each other along.

Older Brother and his wife aren't doing so well lately. The two of them have no kids, few common interests, and treat each other increasingly poorly. However, they are also incredibly loyal to each other. It's quite unpleasant to be around them, but I am trying to spend more time with them so that maybe I can help them somehow. My sister-in-law specifically asked for my help, and I'm not sure what to do, but I figured just being there would be a start. Trudging around in the darkness, I couldn't help but feel that this was going to be the last fucking straw between them. I began to understand, sort of, what it felt like to be my Older Brother--being pulled around this subdivision in the darkness, grudgingly seeking something that he didn't even believe was still alive. I also began to understand what it was like being my sister-in-law, and constantly dealing Older Brother's negativity. I began to resent him for not being more supportive and hopeful in looking for the lost bird, and I also began to feel like it truly was a lost cause. I was on the edge of giving in to Older Brother's idea of going inside, drinking scotch, and forgetting the bird ever existed.

Then something sort of amazing happened. We were dragging our heels down an alley of garages, and Older Brother would reluctantly call for the bird at my or his wife's insistence, and suddenly we heard a distinctly pet bird-like noise that couldn't be mistaken for some far-off hawk, an electronic blip, or otherwise. He called again, and the bird called back. Or, rather--he meowed, like a cat. That's the kind of bird he is. We surrounded a bush between two houses and found the shivering bird stuck in a pile of branches. It was something like a miracle to find that little guy mewing in that bush in that dark alley.

It just made me think that sometimes we do things that may seem like complete long shots, but we do them for a reason--just to go through the motions of something that we know is right, as futile as the may seem. Also, sometimes all you need to save a relationship--even if it is with a mewing bird--is a little effort and a little faith (of the non-religious kind).

resolve

2011-01-11T23:27:00.004-03:00

Shortly after making my new year's resolutions last year, I had a personal crisis following a night with a friend, two Germans, and a plate full of blow. The fallout, I think, really weakened my resolve, and to pull myself out of that shame spiral, I had to rely on the two bad habits I was trying to break with my resolutions: sugar and sloth.

That was back in a time when I wrote more prolifically in this blog, a time when my life was filled with spectacular failures--universally entertaining because they typically involved some combination of sex, drugs, and idiocy. Things are different now. I am still dealing with failure on a daily basis, but the failures are a lot less interesting and really only deal with some combination of writing, unemployment and monogamy. The lack of dramatic failure is a welcome change, but it also leaves me feeling a little stagnant; I am used to confrontation as a vehicle for change and growth.

Sometimes I can be really hard on myself and then things get pretty dark. I have to force myself out and talk myself up like a kindergarten teacher. I list off all my recent endeavors, and try to frame them as positive, even if they were failures. Failures are the best kinds of learning experiences. If I don't have a lot of endeavors to tick off to myself, well, that's the problem right there: Not Doing Shit. So I resolve to do more shit, whether it's starting some new project, however large or small, or tackling a big, bad habit.

But making the same resolution I've made for the past ten years (gonna finish my novel) has become more depressing than inspiring. I have to finish this and move on just so I can begin making some new resolutions.

Anyhow, I just wanted to tell you Happy New Year and that dammit, this is going to be the best fucking year ever. It's going to be hard to be last year, but it's off to an even better start. Instead of being sort of desperate and alone in Argentina, I'm calm and in love and in San Francisco. And tonight I'm making soup.

xxxmas

2010-12-16T18:35:00.003-03:00

Did you know that the one movie that ALWAYS makes me cry is Elf with Will Ferrell? It's true. I have this incredibly soft spot for Christmas, and it sort of embarrasses me but I am trying to embrace it.

Every year, when December rolls around, I sort of think to myself, "I'm not going to do Christmas this year. Just not going to." And then, inevitably, at the very last minute I decide to bake a thousand cookies, send out cards, and knit scarves. It is this weird defect that I have. Like I want to resist the pull of Christmas, but I just can't.

Last weekend when Marido and I were driving on Highway 1, I saw a sign for Xmas Trees and for some reason, it looked pornographic and I wondered why we replace "Christ" for "X." If Christ=X, then shouldn't X-rated be Jesus-like? And shouldn't XXX be like TRIPLE CHRIST?

These are the things I think about at night.

untethered

2010-12-07T21:19:00.003-03:00

Do you remember tetherball?

Even for a playground sport, tetherball is completely inane. It is a ball. Attached to a pole. By a string. Because of its simplicity, too, I think it lends itself well to so many worldly metaphors. Life is like tetherball: the taller guy always wins, the endless pursuit of balls and poles, a game that just keeps going over and over and over. I don't know.

When we were thirteen, my friend Jennifer and I came up with 100 metaphors for Romeo and Juliet's doomed love affair. I don't remember why, exactly--maybe just to flex our infinite creative sides, or perhaps to prove that Shakespeare wasn't really all that complex and deep.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that when life gets really overwhelming and/or confusing, it is always nice to try and reduce the clutter down to a simple metaphor or even a lovely cliché. It just seems so much more manageable. I could really use something like that right now. Maybe it is as simple as: the end of the year is always a time for reflection.

It's December!

boiled amphibians

2010-11-29T14:11:00.006-03:00

I'm happy that November is over, aren't you? It wasn't the easiest of months for me. But now that it's December again, I can celebrate little anniversaries. Like it's been a year since I left for Argentina. It's (almost) been six months since I met Marido. And it's been two months since I quit smoking--all reasons to celebrate.

Everyone I know seems to be struggling with their relationships. Relationships are always complex and interesting, but lately they seem to be taking more from us than giving, which I suppose is only normal during the jolliest time of year. Things with me and Marido have been no exception. I really thought we were over, but we aren't.

I think this conversation sums it all up:

ME: I think we have communication problems. It's obvious to me that you've been unhappy for more a little while, but you insist nothing is wrong. Then all of a sudden one day you say you don't want to spend the holidays with me, can't live with me, and don't see a future for us. Of course I freaked out and thought you were breaking up with me. It was the most you'd said in a month. Why didn't you say anything before?

(long, thoughtful pause)

MARIDO: Well, it is like boiling a frog.

(Figuring this is some sort of cultural thing, I wait for him to continue. But instead there is an even longer pause during which I stare at him wondering if he is making an ill-timed joke about our communication problems, or if he is just insane.)

ME: Um, boiling a frog? I don't understand. You're going to have to explain that to me.

MARIDO: (genuinely surprised) Really?

I've never heard of this allusion, but it apparently is so widespread that Little Brother understood it immediately (of course) and it has its own Wikipedia entry. If you're too lazy to click the link, the "boiling a frog" reference is an allusion to the myth that if you place a frog in a pot of temperate water and then slowly bring it to a boil, it will not react to the gradual rise in temperature and boil to death; whereas if you place a frog in boiling water, it will jump out and save itself. Whether or not it's true, this idea is a reference to people's abilities to tolerate extreme circumstances when subjected to them gradually.

Classic hilarity!

Anyhow, it's obvious we need to communicate a little better. Last week was pretty fucking dicey, and I packed up all of my stuff and came home, unsure of whether or not I would return. It is a hard thing to have my confidence in a relationship shaken, when I see that as mainly what keeps me attached to someone--my belief that they will love me and protect me and be a new source of awesomeness, not a source of infinite strife, and vice-versa. I want to make Marido happier by amazing him with love and people and new possibilities for adventure. I don't want to make him feel like a boiled frog!

When I left San Francisco, I was unsure of if we were boiling each other or making each others' lives better. Our lives have changed a lot with the addition of each other. We are both intense people and diametrically opposed in a lot of ways. My first step after leaving San Francisco was to consider whether I wanted to ask him to come to Chicago for Thanksgiving (as planned), because it meant a lot to me, or if he should hang back in San Francisco for a breather (as we both knew would be beneficial in other ways). While discussing this with my mother, he texted to tell me he would still come, if I wanted him to. It meant the world to me that he came.

I love Thanksgiving. This year, I am especially thankful for:

1) Delicious food (no boiled frogs!), particularly pie, ice cream, and turkey;
2) the miracle of aviation;
3) my friends, who amaze me with their patience, wisdom, and incredibly diverse range of relevant advice;
4) my family, who sometimes bring out the worst in me but love me anyway;
5) love in general, its resilience, its optimism, how it makes everything and everyone better;
6) Marido, for believing in us, for continuing to make memories with me, for giving me keys to come back to San Francisco, for destroying a dictionary to send me a love letter, for his pasta carbonara, and for his little-boy smile which makes me believe that we will grow old together;
7) the ability to step back and see where improvements can be made in one's life;
8) the ability to make those improvements with the help of all of the above.

I'm excited for my New Year's resolutions this year. Aren't you?

heart::broken

2010-11-18T15:42:00.004-03:00

noted

2010-11-15T18:56:00.006-03:00

Lessons learned these past two weeks:

Filed under Cooking:
Fried garlic is the perfect topping to many savory food items. Purple cabbage and apples keep for a long time. If you cover a rack of ribs in barbecue sauce and then throw it in the oven at 250 for 3 hours, the result is DELICOUSNESS. Artichokes are sort of a bitch to prepare, and their deliciousness is mostly derived from butter and garlic, negating most of their healthy properties as a vegetable.

Filed under California:
Even property 150 miles away from San Francisco without water or gas hookups is expensive. The further north you go, the more delicious the beer. Biking north into Sausalito is mostly downhill. You can purchase cocktails on the ferry. The town of Sea Ranch, though nestled on a beautiful stretch of the Pacific and purportedly full of hippies, appears to be uniformly oppressive, at least from an architectural standpoint.

Filed under Relationships:
Passion and dedication are interdependent. It is always better to be appreciated than tolerated--but if you can be happy alongside someone else, that is just as good; if you can't, it's worse than not being tolerated at all. Everything important about relationships can be traced back to the movie Say Anything. Everything else is petty fluff.

Filed under Writing:
Graham Greene is surprisingly funny. Alberto Moravia will consume most of my life for the next few months. Abebooks is a great source to get used books for cheap. Computer games and great writing do not mix.

Filed under Miscellany:
Peanut butter and birdseed alone will not self-adhere and dry into a molded form.

treading water with guns

2010-11-03T13:55:00.000-03:00

This photo is from a story about training police officers in Missouri to wrestle with criminals in the water.

Last week was a really hard week. My PMS was compounded by a severe lack of nicotine, and I felt like a failed human being and especially a failed friend, which is usually the most solid thing I have going for me. But yesterday that all went away, and left me feeling so liberated that I confronted my old novel. I "finished" the novel before leaving Argentina, but am not satisfied with it. It has been giving me heartache like an ex-lover who lives across the street and plays terrible music through his open windows all day long. I try to ignore it and chalk it up to failure/learning experience, but it is impossible not to sing along with the sappy lyrics.

Well, I let the novel sit for four weeks and then I started revisions. Only they are not revisions; it is a big 'ol rewrite, which sounds completely crazy and daunting but it is exciting more than anything else. I thought I would just give up on it because I lost faith in it, but now I think I can save it. Maybe I am just wasting my time betting on a dead horse, but it is *my* dead horse and you can't really reason with sentimentality.

It is one thing to tread water...and another thing to tread water WITH GUNS.

engendering anxiety

2010-10-25T15:14:00.003-03:00

The only thing that would make me love this image by Laurence Winram more would be if some (or all) of the figures were women.

What makes it so superb to me is how much I identify with the man in white. I think this image illustrates what it feels like for me to be (slowly) chasing a dream. It is also what it feels like to be falling in love which, for a lot of people, is part of the overall dream.

At the moment, I am feeling probably the most secure I have ever felt in my entire life. This isn't saying much since I have lived most of my life harboring a feeling of impermanence and/or imminent doom. But I am with a man I love and trust, and I spend my days sitting in his/our apartment, reading and writing and thinking. It is just like what I was doing in Buenos Aires, only I am not crushingly alone and isolated by my linguistic incompetence.

It is blissful and liberating, and my frontal lobe feels like this man in white, shining bright and smiling. If I keep my face forward, I stroll through this Irish valley of green grasses, lit by the soft light of the northern hemisphere in the early spring, and all I see are possibilities.

But optimism doesn't come naturally to me. Every third moment of the day, I cast a backward glance and see these tuxedoed specters of every imaginable kind of failure. They're dumb and cowardly and only rarely do they come close enough to me to scratch me, but they are always there, looking all haughty and menacing.

welcome home

2010-10-08T16:57:00.004-03:00

When I first moved to San Francisco, I was 20 years old. This was almost ten years ago. I was, sadly, sad. I felt defeated and defective and I was realizing that a lot of things I thought I understood--like friendship, love, and personal ambition--were things that I couldn't even describe. I had barely any sense of well-being left in me, just a residual sense of self-preservation. For the first two years here, I pretty much just smoked pot and stared at the ocean and wondered if I would ever not be sad.

When I left San Francisco three years ago for New York, I kind of thought I would come back--but in this vague, hopeful way that existed mostly so I wouldn't feel so bad about leaving the place where I had learned to be happy. I knew that I would visit, but I didn't believe that I would ever live in San Francisco ever again.

Well, I'm back. I packed two bags full of clothes, got on an airplane, and now I am spending my hours writing in front of the same laptop with a different view. I have been back so many times that it will take some time before I feel like I am really back, and until then I am wandering about with the familiar sensation that I am neither here nor there.

I am working on my second book, which is a completely self-involved account of these last two years of my life. For the first time, I feel like I have something to share with people that would be best put in book form. It is a strange thought to feel like you have something deeply personal that is possibly entertaining enough to be worthy of sharing with the general public. But it is not pure entertainment. This book is really all about why it feels different to be in San Francisco this time around. It is about the things that have happened over the past few years, and how those things have changed me so much that I can come back to the same city with the same people and the same weather and feel as though I am in a completely different place altogether.

I wonder how long I will be here. The first time I came to San Francisco, I thought it would be for two or three years, and it ended up being seven.

tunnel vision

2010-10-05T08:07:00.001-03:00

Last weekend I told someone I was moving back to San Francisco. She said, "That's so cool!"

I said, "Yeah!"

And then she said, "Did you get a job there?"

And I said, "....no...." in this dull, heavy voice that made it sound as though I had never thought about what it meant to move to one of the most expensive cities in America without a job. For a moment I felt like a jackalope, but it didn't last very long, because whoever heard of a lovesick jackalope?

I identify with the jackalope. It is mythical but it sort of exists just because we think of it. It seems fierce with those outrageous antlers and its serious look, but then you realize it is just a bunny. A bunny! His neck probably hurts from holding up those antlers. Picture it trying to gore something! Ridiculous. It would probably feel like a tickle-massage And then you think, "Why am I wondering about the goring capabilities of a creature that doesn't even exist?

Anyhow, I often feel like a creature that people find mythically interesting until they discover I am just a bunny with fake antlers. Sometimes people seem impressed with what they perceive as bravery in me, but then they realize that my bravery is actually composed of delusions (50%), ignorance (30%), and stubborn hope (5%) than actual courage (15%).

Depending on what the situation is, the delusions can turn out to be very true (e.g., moving to a Spanish-speaking country will be good for the linguistic center of my brain) or false (e.g., freelancing will force me to be more disciplined).

The ignorance part is actually very closely related to the delusions and stubborn hope, because I am usually ill-prepared for most things, which allows me to think that everything will be great (e.g., a Master's degree will save me from a future of mind-numbing office work!)

This life move feels different from all the other ones, which did require some courage. This move isn't an escape, or career-related, or because I was done with one place or wanted to see another. This move is because I am in love. And after the initial courage required to fall in love, moving to be with someone you love is like eating when you're hungry.

Yet, just because this is predicated on love doesn't mean it is still not based mostly on delusion (50%). I have complete Tunnel-o-Love-o-Vision at the moment, but what will materialize at the end of the tunnel? I'm moving in with this darling man I met four months ago today. How could that possibly be a bad idea?

I think the rest of the thrust here goes straight to stubborn hope (30%), life experience (15%) and instinct (5%). I strangely enough have almost no anxieties about this move; I am just excited to see Marido. Well, with modern technology I have been seeing him almost every day. So I must be excited about something else...

circling

2010-09-28T18:06:00.002-03:00

My tolerance for stress seems to have dropped dramatically. Yesterday I had to send in three cameras for repair: my camera, my back-up camera, and the camera I had borrowed while both of the other ones weren't working. And now all three of them are gone, and it made me feel sort of depressed. The silly thing is, I know you can't really get "depressed" over three cameras being in the shop; that's a gross misuse and exaggeration of the term. So either my life must be really good or I've forgotten what it means like to be depressed. Either way, it's clear that my threshold for pain has sunk incredibly low.

The other day I was the recipient of second-hand stress and it led to a weekend of smoking. I've since gotten back on the wagon, but I think that the little retreat back into nicotine-land hit deeper than I expected. For one thing, I sat down to write this post about writing and how I have been struggling to find an agent and instead I have ended up writing about smoking and all the excuses I have for smoking. Like massive equipment fails and being unable to live up to expectations, your own or those of commercially-minded literary agents.

Like the people I most admire in my life, I secretly believe that I can achieve most anything I put my mind to. The biggest setback for me is that I get quickly disenchanted with many things I want, and decide they are not worth my efforts--like making lots of money, running a marathon, and holding any kind of public office. I was a little worried that this growing disenchantment with an increasing number of things was more of a sign of failure and defensiveness than actual cynicism and maturation of tastes. I thought I would become all down-and-out about the publishing industry, but instead I am just becoming more determined to figure out how to do this. It is both discouraging and encouraging at the same time.

the waiting game

2010-09-22T00:19:00.003-03:00

I have only three things on my mind this month: (not) smoking, (being away from) Marido, and (being frustrated with) my book.

Time moves very slowly when you begin to either measure it or stop measuring it. This month I am trying to do both, which is making it feel like time is standing still.

I am playing the waiting game of passing four weeks while being in love with someone who is approximately 1,900 miles away. It is not so bad because I know that I will see him, and that the wait is officially half over. And while we wait, we are both okay with acting like lovesick adolescents, which also helps. It would be another thing entirely if we were trying to be stoic about it.

The other part of the waiting game is the not smoking, which is strange because waiting and smoking go very well together. And time seems to be going very slowly because of that, too. But it is pointless to count how long I have gone without smoking, because that seems to indicate that at a certain time, I can smoke again. And the point of quitting is that you suddenly begin a new era that is infinite, the era where you do not smoke...ever.

And in the meanwhile, I am supposed to be working on my book, but all I can do is sit around and think about the missing morning cigarette, the missing afternoon cigarette, the missing evening cigarette, and missing Querido.

It is entirely annoying, and does not make for very inspired writing...as you can see.

evolution and devolution

2010-09-14T15:29:00.005-03:00

Something has been happening to my body lately, and I am wondering if any other gals out there have ever experienced the same thing.

My periods have always been very regular and pretty fast: 23-day cycles, sometimes less. It sucks bleeding so much and so often, but one thing that is good that I always know pretty quickly that I am not pregnant, and the window for impregnating me is pretty slim. But ever since I met Marido, the cycles have been getting longer and longer. I have only known him for a little over three months, but my last cycle was 32 days, meaning that each cycle added almost 3 days. This has been throwing me off, but I sort of chalked it up to all the moving around I've been doing. Then this morning I was jogging and trying to coax myself into believing that oxygen is a suitable substitute for nicotine and thinking that I can't believe it's already been a week since I stopped. A week, just like that! I have started to think about how stupid it is to quit smoking. Yesterday two of my parents' friends died in unrelated events. They were both health freaks, and younger than my parents. If I could just drop dead tomorrow, why not smoke? Ordinarily I would cave into these bursts of withdrawal-reasoning. But somehow I have made it through this first smokeless week pretty painlessly, mostly by concentrating how much I miss Marido, which is so much worse than missing smoking. And instead of wanting to smoke to cope with missing him, I am just...jogging and drinking water--which has never really worked before, especially with the I-can-easily-justify-smoking thoughts. And while I was jogging, I remembered my friend Z who told me she quit when she got pregnant and it was not a big deal at all.

Suddenly it occured to me that maybe my body wants to be pregnant. Is it because I am in love? I feel like my body is increasing my chances of getting pregnant by prolonging my cycles. And the relative ease with which I stopped smoking this week also feels like another way my body is whispering "Baby me!" This worries me deeply. I am not on birth control and have not been for about five years. I don't want to go back on it, but I also don't want to be pregnant right now, and since I have never been pregnant before, I feel like I am nearing the end of using up all of my odds. Who knows, maybe my uterus is bouncing around seven eggs at a time now. It is probably like a multiball pinball experience in there right now. Is this what my biology is up to? Even though I am making myself healthier, my body's seeming desperation to pass on my DNA is making me feel like I'm nearing the end of my life span.

But I don't want to procreate at the moment, because I have other things to do--the biggest one being getting rid of this goddamn novel. I have been working on my completed novel, by un-completing it. I am not sure if this is a good idea. I feel like I am making it better, but at the same time I kind of just want to seal it up, let it go, and continue sending out pitches. The more I work on it, the less I like it. I really need another good editor to look at it and tell me exactly what it needs. But I keep cutting things and adding things and I am reminded of these cherry-orange-walnut muffins I made last week, and how long it took me to make them with all of these special ingredients like almond paste (which I made) and orange juice (which I squeezed and zested). The muffins were fucking terrible. And then a few days later I made blueberry muffins with about seventeen less ingredients and they were delicious.

But, artistic integrity aside, what I really need to do is sell this goddamn thing. It might not be the best it could be, but I think it is publishable. And I think this because I have read some terrible books in my life. On the other hand, I definitely don't want to add to the pile of awful published jetsam out there.

Who am I kidding? Being published in any form would be so awesome that I can't even think about it. Maybe that is why I keep revising--so I don't have to think about the publishing aspect.

cigarette cigarette cigarette

2010-09-09T19:55:00.002-03:00

How many times do you have to do something before you A) stop trying or B) do it for REAL? I was thinking that today when talking to my friend who is maybe trying to break up with her boyfriend. And also with me and smoking. I sort of quit quitting a few years ago. It was getting to be bad for my self-esteem. Yet here I am, 2 days in again, and all I can think is "This is good for me cigarette cigarette cigarette because I was getting all out of shape and wheezy and cigarette cigarette cigarette will make this better."

This time I am doing it cold turkey. No patches, no gum, just me and my bitchiness locked in my house for three days.

I am okay with the withdrawal headache. I am okay with hacking up gross shit for three days. I am even okay with the constipation, constant thirst, and munchies. What I'm not okay with is the weird mind games that start playing out during the Critical Time when Logic and Addiction collide. That is a truly frightening battlefield. I basically have to not listen to anything that is happening in my brain for the next few days, things like "You would probably die from something else anyway, like a car accident," "Do you really want to never smoke ever again?" and "Even though your risk for lung cancer is tripling, it is still relatively small." No, it is best to just loop the quit mantra in my brain. The quit mantra, by the way, is: I don't need to smoke. This craving will pass. And until it does, I will not smoke.

But talking about quitting is boring. Lately I would rather talk about love, since I am in love, and somehow being in love makes quitting not such a big deal. It actually feels very selfish to quit, because part of me is just hoping that I will live longer so I can be in love longer. That should be reward enough, but actually I need some intermediary reward. In the past I have liked to buy myself nice things for achieving quit goals--a nice jacket, a nice pair of boots--but then I start smoking again as soon as I have my coveted object.

Changing your life is hard. But I look at the people in my life who are going out of their comfort zones and I feel inspired. And thirsty. Very goddamn thirsty.

the score

2010-09-02T12:34:00.004-03:00

I am back in the Middle West. The summer is ending, the driveway is covered in leaves, and every morning I awake to the sounds of lawnmowers, the lack of Marido, and the somewhat panicky thought "What now?"

But I don't want to panic. Panic and anxiety are gifts that I don't open anymore, and so instead I concentrate on how every thing that seems wrong is actually right. It is an exercise in happiness, really. I started to think about this when I was listening to various people complain about forms of ownership--making renovations, moving, all these inconveniences, and it seemed to me that the real thing that was being lost was that they have this beautiful thing that they wanted. For me, I don't have a home, but I had been stressing over how to take care of this new thing that I had acquired, and stressing over the maintenance was obscuring the fact that I am in love, which is a great thing, and not something to be taken lightly. Even the days when we are apart are good days.

Marido and I continued along our particular accelerated course, which is possible due to advanced experience and exceptional communication skills, mostly on his part. He really is a divine beast. And I was able to articulate some things to him, some things that probably surprised both of us, about what I need and what I expect and what is really unimportant to me. It was terribly unromantic, really. We talked about things like finances and sex and monogamy and timing, and although it was kind of a buzzkill, it was also really great to have everything everything EVERYTHING out in the open. And when you think about it, what is more romantic than wanting to be intimate with someone, not wanting to misconstrue anything, and entering from a place of reality rather than a place of false hope?

Then again, being in love is so weird. It does feel unreal. At times it does feel completely false because it is so shiny and unexpected that it seems too good to be true. It also feels mildly addictive, because yesterday (our first day apart in about a month) we both reported headaches. I wanted to write yesterday, but really I just milled around silently and thought about him and anticipated his arrival here tomorrow. It all makes me feel very dumb and mouth-breathy. I think my biggest challenge with him will be not to turn into a drooling pile of mush in his presence.

I haven't been in love like this for a long time. I hope it never ends.

caffeinated and weary

2010-08-16T16:48:00.002-03:00

It was a beautiful weekend in San Francisco, filled with friends, surprise guests, and gazing into the loving eyes of Marido. I have been drinking a ton of booze and coffee in true SF form, and now all I really want is to sleep for three days. But at the same time, I just want to be constantly talking to the people who know me best, and to ask them:

What should I do?

I have been pitching back and forth between Back With a Vengeance and This Place Will Kill Me. Sometimes I look around me and think I'd have to be fucking insane to not want to settle in here for a bit, be with this Man I met, and some of the people who are most important to me in this world. And then there is this part of me this is thrashing around in my gut, kicking wildly against this proposition and whispering in my ear that the Beautiful Unknown awaits for me far away from the Bay.

When I was back in the midwest last week, I hung out with the family dog, the happiest little girl on earth. Seven years old now, she is still smiles and licks and excitement, but she doesn't like to go on walks in the neighborhood anymore, and when visitors leave she gets depressed. My mother told me that she seems bored going on walks now, and the only time she gets really excited is when the sound of jangling keys promises a car ride somewhere.

I have been thinking a lot about her this week, and how I would like to kidnap her and take her places, just to see that crazy spark in her that I always adored and envied, that joy she had that was infectious and and exhausting that I thought would never die. I never thought I'd say this, but I think life is too short to just be content. Maybe I have too much; maybe I'm addicted to suffering; maybe I thrive on extremes; maybe I am afraid of the responsibility of this new acquisition--Marido's heart. But in my clearest moments, I can't explain why I just want to be far away from everything I know and love. I am willing to suffer for six months to have two months of bliss.

I have a very bad feeling that I am going to break this man's heart.

falling in love and letting go

2010-08-12T15:40:00.003-03:00

I am in San Francisco. It has been an intense week. Aside from a terrible attack of the giggles at the altar during a supremely Catholic ceremony, the wedding was enjoyable, beautiful. I reunited with Marido and he was the Best Date Ever. He chauffered me and the bride around town, entertained himself while I attended to maid of honor duties, and looked absolutely handsome in his suit. He even endured dim sum the following day with 15 members of my family.

Following the wedding, I plunged myself into his life, his apartment, his neighborhood, which is in Nob Hill, an area of San Francisco that is so foreign to me that it is like I am in a different city. It is the same buildings, the same street names, the same fog and coffee and sidewalks and gait--but it is different enough to feel entirely surreal. There's little chance of me running into anyone I know here. The people dress a little differently, the views are different, the streets are steeper, and there are tourists hanging off the cable car that passes in front of his building. I am also carrying around this feeling in my body, this feeling of love that makes everything feel so new and different, almost frightening. I feel like a stranger in my own body, in my own town.

Several times a day I pass by a place so full of memories that I feel as though I am in a dream. Marido lives two blocks away from the bar where I spent my 21st birthday, two months after I first moved to California. I had my wallet stolen that night. It was sad, lonely. We ate hamburgers across the street from the place where Ex bought his last motorcycle, a motorcycle he pointedly purchased with footpegs so he could carry me around town. And last night we went to the bar we used to go to every week, a shitty, homey place where we used the floor as an ashtray, picked up sleazy lovers, blew coke in the bathroom. It now has wood-paneled walls, burn-free furniture, and it is the same owner and bartender pouring me cocktails--only he's wearing a black satin vest and telling me, "We're not kids in tee-shirts and sneakers anymore. We needed a grown-up bar." And grown-ups smoke outside.

Marido told me yesterday that he loves me. You know what I said back? I said, "Thank you."

I love him too; it is obvious in everything I think and say and do. But I opened my mouth to reciprocate and was filled with panic that voicing my love meant committing myself to things I didn't know that I could handle. I tell my friends I love them constantly, and this is because I know that I can and will always be there for them. I didn't know if I could commit myself to what he wants from me. But I am going to try. I have never been with a man like him before, simultaneously a quirky, solitary, wise old man and a wide-eyed, innocent boy.

When I returned *home* to his arms last night, he told me he was nervous about me seeing Joe today. I am nervous, too. I didn't want to talk about it, but Marido has a slight jealousy that I think is easily tempered with kisses. I probably shouldn't have told him about Joe in the first place, but we are in this strange tell-all mode, and I thought he would be happy to hear that I'm relinquishing my favorite lover for our fidelity.

But he was still nervous. He thought that Joe would try and seduce me. I told him he didn't know Joe. Joe respects me, and would never try to coerce me into something I didn't fully want. "When I tell him I've met someone," I said. "I know exactly what he will say. He'll say, 'That's great. I'm really happy for you.'" And when I said this, I unexpectedly started to cry, which alarmed Marido and myself. I have been so emotional lately. I feel weak. I never used to be like this, so prone to have my emotions completely overwhelm me so suddenly.

He asked me why I was crying, if I was so sad to give up my lover if I still knew he would remain my friend. I suppose I know that he'll be disappointed, and you know I hate disappointing people. And yes, although I value our friendship tremendously, I am sad to lose my lover. I suppose a childish part of me wants to have them both.

I am going to see him in a few hours. I am so nervous. I know it will be fine, but that isn't going to stop me from smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.

double re-entry

2010-08-05T01:48:00.001-03:00

It has been an uneventful week at my parents' house. In-between napping and eating, I occasionally reflected upon this seemingly hapless string of wanderings that I currently call my life. Buenos Aires seems like a dream to me, although every time it starts to rain I have a compulsion to run to the terrace to take down my laundry.

If someone had told me fifteen years ago, when I was learning to drive, that in another fifteen years time I would be unemployed, unmarried, and spending large segments of time in the same bedroom I was in then, I probably would have killed myself. But I think I failed to see the possibilities in this arrangement. It just takes a lot more self-motivation to get things done. Or to get dressed in the morning.

Tomorrow I am going to San Francisco, and of course I couldn't be happier. I am excited to see my friends, to hug them and hear their voices and to walk with them on the sidewalks, sit with them in the parks, to have the long silences of observation and nothingness that aren't so doable over our dozen forms of digital communication. I want to shower them with endless love and hear their stories and thoughts on what has changed since I last saw them. I'm excited to tell them what I have learned about time and people and to learn from them about how they are balancing their lives and growing and changing within San Francisco, something I never quite learned how to do.

I also know that this trip will different than other returns, because on Friday I will be reunited with Marido, a long-awaited reunion after almost three weeks apart since our honeymoon in Spain. With all of the intense (yet measured) emails, video talks, and even (*gasp!*) phone calls, we have a lot of hopes riding on the next few weeks--not just in terms of fun, but also in deciding our next steps in remaining in each others' lives beyond this second honeymoon.

It is a lot of pressure, but it is also very exciting.

final compulsive post from the greatest place on earth

2010-07-28T13:20:00.002-03:00

Don't you love it when your mp3 player is on shuffle and it seems to pick the perfect songs for your mood--songs you didn't even know you had? I sure do.

I'm bidding Buenos Aires good-bye in just a few hours. It is sad and stressful and I am terribly anxious about re-entering the English-speaking world. For the past nine months, I have largely been answering to nobody but myself. There have been few questions for me to deal with here, only what I want to do each day. Many days I did nothing. And many days I did exactly what I wanted to do. It has been such an amazing and refreshing experience that I just want to keep doing it again and again and again.

I am ready to leave, though. I am ready for something new. Maybe Marido is part of this something new. Today we were wondering for a bit if we are more in love with the romance of us than us in reality. Of course, this is one of the billion thoughts that has crossed my mind, and one of the thousand that has lingered and returned. But what I have to keep reminding myself is that, like leaving Buenos Aires itself, some situations may seem unreal...but they are just as real as anything, whether we planned for them or not.

Hasta luego, Buenos Aires. Thank you for being so good to me. Thank you for depositing me in this wonderful house with these beautiful people. Thank you for challenging me, and thank you for your patience, your time, and your comforts. I hope we'll meet again.

love and boringness and moving

2010-07-25T18:19:00.006-03:00

It is a cold and drizzly Sunday in Buenos Aires, and I actually left the house to go about my day, and retreated home after about 100 meters, where I have spent the day eating popcorn and day-old facturas filled with dulce de leche.

I am in love, and part of me hates it. I hate the fact that last night my roommate had to practically beg me to go to a party with her because I kind of didn't see the point of going out if I wasn't going to pick up boys. I hate the fact that I was sniffly today and didn't want to tell Marido that it was because I did a bunch of coke last night. I hate the fact that I am perfectly sated to lie in bed and just think of him, or to spend an hour cooing with him over video chat. I hate the fact that I feel stupid and boring but I don't care because I am in love. I hate that I cannot work, cannot write, because the only thing going through my mind is: Aww! He's so sweet! Twelve more days until I see him again!

It has been a rather intense week apart since we parted ways at the Madrid Airport. Somehow we became absorbed into an email exchange this week that involved the words "sex" and "marriage" and "long-distance" and "non-exclusive," all terribly heavy things to be floated through Gmail with a person you met about oh, six weeks ago. But as intense and sort of unwanted as the emails were, I'm glad they happened. I feel as though we are on the same page, and this is a new feeling for me. We are in love and trying to be responsible and respectful with ourselves and the other. Even though we feel like breathless teenagers, we also feel very wise. It is exciting but also boring. I like you? You like me? Great! Great! Okay, great. Now what?

Well, the 'now what' part is actually a big deal in this case, seeing as I currently live about 6500 miles away from him. 'Currently' being the operative word, of course. That status is going to change in three short days. Then, I don't know. He's formally invited me to crash with him for the entire month of August that I'm in SF, and that sounds both lovely and crazy. Not crazier than going to Spain with him, but close. I know I've joked that he's my Marido since the day we met, but...I can't help but feel like I'm just getting caught up in this delirium. He's already booked a flight to come to see me in Chicago the following weekend. And instead of feeling overwhelmed by all of this, I am fanatically thrilled. Great! Great! Great! Snooze.

I find myself constantly thinking, "Is this really happening? I need a nap."

what to say

2010-07-21T17:00:00.003-03:00

The day of my last post, Marido and I left Navarra and went to the coast. I think all the togetherness was wearing on me, because as soon as we got there, I left him in the pensión and went to work on my article, which was sort of a pointless thing to do on a Sunday afternoon in Spain, because everything was closed. I took a breather in the plaza and tried to soothe my nerves and to coax myself into the loving place where Marido seemed to be, mentally, and that I seemed to be dancing around like a scared bird.

When Marido showed up to meet me, he had some bad news. He'd gotten word--through Facebook, of all things--that his mother was in a coma.

We had a less-than-pleasant evening, where I tried to take care of him the best I could. But when you don't know someone very well, you don't know how they react to stress and what helps them. We talked it through a bit, but it was a rough night where we sort of hated each other and felt helpless. While we didn't fight, there was a moment where I sat on a street corner and cried because I didn't know what to do but I was sure that I wasn't making things better and was actually adding to his stress just by being there. When you are exhausted and stressed out, the last thing you want to do is worry about how your date is doing. His mother died the next day.

I suppose many people would define this as when the honeymoon ended, but with the uncertainty gone and the finality of death, we were able to mourn for a while and carry on. He wasn´t expected to return to Argentina for the cremation, and he was at peace with things, so we moved on. This would seem callous to a lot of people, but maybe this is just another reason why Marido and I get on so well. We have similar attitudes toward a lot of things in life, and death is one of them.

The rest of the honeymoon progressed without incident, so much so that there is little to report. We motored around and observed each other as closely as we observed the countryside and the people. But while Marido poured his heart out to me about how he felt, I kept my cards very close to my chest, so close that he kept asking me what I was thinking and why I wouldn´t tell him. The truth is that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about Ex and Joe, and during almost every night I dreamed of Ex. That is not something you want to tell your new boyfriend on your faux-honeymoon in Spain. Whenever he asked me what I was thinking, I didn't really know what to say.

Something amazing about Marido is that he is extremely open. He would explain everything--from why he likes me so much to why he was changing lanes. This could be tiresome to some, but for someone like me it is kind of perfect, because I never have to wonder what he´s thinking. It´s too bad that I can´t really return the favor at the moment, but I am doing the best I can. At times I felt pressured to echo some of the sentiments he was expressing, but it is a little fast for me. I am surprised I even let him hold my hand.

I adore this man and I miss him, but I am glad we have this time apart now to slow it down a little. I actually think that my heart is full and I have to let go of some people before I can be in love with him. Surprisingly, the person I have to let go of is Joe. When I go to see Joe in San Francisco, I can't have sex with him, and this makes me sad, because that is something we do very well together. The thought of seeing him and telling him I can´t or won´t sleep with him any more makes me terribly sad. I thought of this on the honeymoon, that this is not something I could do with a clear conscience, even though I slept around when I was with Joe. And it's not just the sex. I was always waiting for the moment to be in love with Joe, to admit that I was in love with him.

Timing is funny like that. It´s not just timing, of course. There are other aspects of Marido that have landed us together in a way that never worked out for me and Joe. And while I spend nights gflirting with Marido, I feel ready to give up others to be with him, but it is still sad. I know that Joe will be sad, too. And this whole time, I thought the reason we weren´t committed to each other was so we could avoid being sad. And here it is. Again.

Any advice on ending things with your favorite sex partner?

honeymooning

2010-07-11T03:43:00.002-03:00

It's been a week of honeymooning with Marido, and things have been so luscious and perfect that I am not quite sure where to begin. He met me at the airport in Madrid and has been driving me around Spain, France, the Basque Country, stopping in at cute town after cute town, lying on crowded beaches, winding our way through sunny fields and tree-filled mountains. He is doing all the driving because I don't know how to drive manual transmission cars.

We figured out that I met him on Madrid exactly a month after our first date, but with our schedules this is probably one of the longest fifth dates in history. It is completely overwhelming and I am often silent on our long drives, in awe of it all, disbelief. I think I would have an easier time understanding if something was wrong---if he was giving me creepy vibes or if he were a terrible lover or if we were constantly having communication breakdowns. But everything seems so natural and easy that instead I feel confused and vaguely panicky, like I must be missing something. Because what?the?fuck?is?going?on? How did I end up on this French beach with this impossibly charming man who somehow always knows the right thing to say? Has he been cyber-stalking me all of my life, preparing for this trip together, anticipating exactly what I love, what I want, what is important to me, and what will make me fall completely in love with him? It sure as hell seems like it.

Sometimes I look over at him and am filled with an incredible sensation of being completely safe and protected yet terrified like never before. The day before I left, I told my buddy B that I was sure I would fall in love this week, and here it is, happening. He said to me, "Falling in love isn't the hard part." And he's right, of course. We can love most anyone, but it's making it work that is hard. And when we begin to talk about the future, which we dabble in at times during our long drives, it fills me with fear. It's not as though I have any specific plans at all, but I was happy before I met Marido. I have plans to go to Mexico, and plans to go to Budapest, to take photos and write books and fall in love. And I'm scared that I will wander off with this man and forget all of these plans. Because I feel like he could ask me to go anywhere with him, and I would go. I mean, he did talk me into crossing the ocean to run with the bulls with him. On our second date.

loving it

2010-07-01T17:51:00.002-03:00

I'm back home in Buenos Aires but leaving Saturday for Madrid, where I will meet Marido at the airport.

I totally freaked out yesterday. I was tired but bursting with anticipation and I couldn't do anything but flail around in the whirlpool of anxiety and excitement. I just know that I am going to fall in love. I am like 85 percent there already. For some reason this made me very upset. I cried a few times this week when I thought about it. I don't know why, but I am terrified.

I sent an email to my girl, the bride-to-be, seeking some words of wisdom and she really came through for me. I was all upset and unsure and feeling sick. In addition to the teary eyes, I have had trouble eating this week. ME--the girl who wakes up in the middle of the night, hungry. But I was just sick at the thought that I might fall in love--for real in love, and that Marido could be the last man I love--either because I will love him forever, or he will hurt me really badly and I will never love again. But bride-to-be had some great words for me, about trusting your body and yourself. And she said: it's not your job to know what will happen, or to control what will happen.

It's not? Somehow, I thought it was. Really. But she's absolutely right. All the craziness has been me trying to anticipate what will happen and be ready for it. But that is not love, and that is not life. I need to love in the same way that I live...with gusto, and with the knowledge that I can handle anything that comes my way.

And now I am just giddy!

hot and cold

2010-06-27T18:10:00.003-03:00

I went to a party last night and there was this gorgeous Venezuelan boy with one of the sexiest accents imaginable. I was a little drunk and I really wanted to kiss him. Suddenly we had to leave and I was almost grateful, because I thought of Marido and how I'd like to kiss him the most.

I have one more long day of shooting and trekking tomorrow in Montevideo, and then I go home to Buenos Aires. I'm really looking forward to returning to my own freezing house and cooling my heels for a few days. Although this trip has been uncomfortable and a little bewildering, I am thankful for the work and have been experiencing this incredible feeling of wondering, wandering, and making things work. It is also a tremendous distraction from my pre-trip anxieties with Marido, which I am trying so hard not to obsess over.

I'm staying with a host I've couchsurfed with before, one of the nicest and most generous guys in all of Uruguay. And I feel like that says a lot, since I adore the Uruguayos. They are such a welcoming, caring people. I've been asking for quite a bit of assistance getting around town and reporting this guide, and most people are extremely helpful. On the bus yesterday to I don't even know where, the bus driver not only helped me to get where I was going, but inquired to where I was going afterward, and wrote directions for me as he drove, nearly swiping a parked car.

Being in town for the World Cup quarterfinals qualifying celebration was also a trip. Everyone headed downtown for the spontaneous celebration. It felt like they had won the title. As my host said, "People don't even care if they win. They will celebrate each victory because it could be the last." Thinking I could be Korean, people get grabbing and hugging me in the streets to console me and show solidarity. It was beautiful, and I was so glad to be here.

One of the strangest things about getting used to being alone is suddenly desiring the company of specific people, to whom I find myself constantly writing letters. It is like I cannot go a few days without writing to someone. When I am really happy, I miss people the most. I just want to share everything with my loved ones, but I am surrounded by strangers. Nice strangers, though.

this is what crazy looks like

2010-06-18T17:40:00.000-03:00

I am totally insane this week. I have not been able to sleep, but I don't feel tired or even irritated. I wonder if I am just not used to being this happy. It has been hard to breathe without the aid of cigarettes.

Marido returned to Buenos Aires a few days early so we have been hanging out a lot. I was very excited to see him, to see if I would still feel the same about him. I did. It is not the excitement of meeting someone totally new and strange and beautiful. It is the strange sensation of being with someone who seems to understand you completely, without really knowing anything about you. I don't really get it, but I don't know if there's really anything to get.

During lunch of our second date he asked me if I wanted to go to Spain with him. Of course I want to go to fucking Spain with him. But whether I can, that is another story. And whether I should--well, I don't really traffic in those terms anymore.

Basically, this is what my brain and blood and body has felt like for the past three weeks--

Of course I have reservations about going on an overseas trip with a man I have spent a total of like 12 hours with. I asked him, "Is that a good idea?" And he said, "If we don't do crazy things like go to Spain with someone you just met--who will?"

You can see why I like this guy. My finger is on the trigger. But I am nervous--not because I think anything bad will happen, but because I'm pretty sure if I do go, I will fall completely in love. What a terrifying notion. I wondered aloud what the chances are of him being totally psychotic and he said, "I think you are more likely to be psychotic than I am."

I also just turned my remaining 5 weeks in Buenos Aires to 4 weeks, because I have to go to Montevideo next week to shoot another story (or two, hopefully). Jumping a plane to Spain would cut the 4 weeks down to about 10 days. That is just weird. It is all so much to handle that all I can do is lie awake and think about it until the sun rises. And the thoughts start with, "I need to sell at least three stories in the next three weeks," and then end up with "Hm, perhaps you should get the elastic fixed on that cute black dress of yours."

I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I only feel partially in control.

planning for the future

2010-06-12T15:40:00.004-03:00

My computer is out of commission and I just wrote this long blog and then accidentally erased it because I´m not used to the foreign keyboards. It happened in an instant! Meh.

Anyhow, I was talking about all the dangerous thinking that´s been going on during the past extremely insomniatic two weeks. I´ve been in this utopic state of mind where I can do no wrong, and nothing bad can befall me, and so of course I´ve been entertaining all sorts of ideas that involve Djibouti, Dakar, Micronesia, Bucharest, Budapest, Macau. You know.

I was stressed out because I have six weeks left in Buenos Aires and a decision has to be made concerning my apartment--whether to sublet it, or to leave it completely--and I am terrible at making decisions more than a few weeks out. I have basically tabled my plans to return to San Francisco in the fall, seeing as that would doom me to a happy life surrounded by the people I love most, and decided to strike out into new territory. The two top contenders at the moment are Mexico City and Budapest. Dreaming about places I have no knowledge of is great company for insomnia. But I also took a long time puzzling over if I have totally forgotten how hard it was when I first moved here, deaf and dumb and lonely and wandering. Yet I haven´t forgotten. I suppose I am just so surprised that I found so much peace and happiness here, that I want to look for it everywhere.

There are plenty of people who can understand this point, of not wanting to just sit back and enjoy beautiful something they´ve discovered, and would much rather move onto the next heartbreaking challenge. I am just now beginning to get this. But with people, it seems, and looking for love--I´m not sure how similar these things are. It seems to me that looking for a perfect place to call your home is kind of like looking for your true love, and it is especially true when you think of it in terms of finding those perfect pieces and truly "settling down." I mentioned my Marido last week and I wasn´t kidding---I know I say that a lot---but what is up when you know you could be happy with someone and somehow just aren´t ready for it? What does that mean? That you prefer to be single? Or just that you love the thrill of the chase?

I have been looking for love for so long that I think I may have forgotten that there was a goal to all this dating...and it wasn´t just for free drinks.

it must be christmas

2010-06-06T20:55:00.004-03:00

The dinner with Dimples was absolutely perfect, and the fact that he didn't stay over didn't bother me at all. I don't want to deal with his complicated romantic situations, but I am okay with crushing on him as a friend. That is my greatest M.O.

Anyhow, things don't seem so serious when you have a Plan B, and last night I went out with this older guy (40) who contacted me last month. He's a photographer as well, and if anything, OKCupid has linked me up with several cool photographers down here. I also thought it would be refreshing to go out with a guy who (hopefully) would be old-school enough not to mention an ex-girlfriend on a first date. And older guys usually pay for dinner.

I was haggard by the time we met up. I was so high on life Friday night that I couldn't sleep until almost six a.m., and then spent Saturday stressing over my malfunctioning camera, and then lugging all of my gear around town, trying to finish this story. I didn't think I would be very good company, but stick a few drinks in me and I'm pretty good to go.

The only reservation I had about meeting up with this guy was that he is from Argentina, and my dating experiences with the porteños have been less than ideal. But he has been living in my beloved San Francisco for the past decade-and-a-half, so that was another plus. He turned out to hit all of the right notes with me. While there wasn't wild chemistry or crazy sparks, I felt really comfortable around him--maybe it was the fatigue, the whiskey, or maybe I have finally gotten the dating thing down. It was weird. We talked about a lot of things and it was like nothing really needed that much explaining--what I was doing down here, why he left Buenos Aires, why his marriage didn't work out--same wavelength all around. It was a completely different dynamic than the one I have with Dimples, who I just find fascinating because I don't understand him at all.

The 24 always figures into these stories. He was being a gentleman and didn't invite me over, so he walked me to the bus stop and waited with me. We waited and waited and waited and when we finally spied it cruising down the block, we said our goodbyes but then the bus just blew by without stopping. He asked me back to his place, and I said yes.

He's leaving for Spain in a few days, and I doubt I'll see him again before he leaves, but I promised to be in touch in San Francisco.

Oh, life. When you're in love, you're in love. With everything, everyone, all of it, more more more.

headates

2010-06-04T00:07:00.002-03:00

Today I met up with Dimples for lunch, our third lunch date. I'd called him yesterday to invite him over for a dinner party I thought we were having tomorrow night (turns out it's Sunday), and he said yes to that, and then invited me to lunch today. I can't figure this kid out at all. On the one hand, he's totally not interested...and then he wants to meet up two days in a row? I don't get him.

He's mentioned some ex-girlfriends. Now call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to that taboo of not bringing up exes on a first (or even second, come on) date. All these young lads seem to have no qualms about that. But today was exceptionally weird. He told me he was with a girl last night, but was into her friend, and blah blah blah. He was talking to me the way he would talk to his brother. Before I knew it, we were talking about an STD scare he had recently. This kind of shit I reserve for my closest friends. I had no idea how to respond to any of this because part of me is fascinated by it, and the other wonders "Why the fuck is he telling me this? And why do I still want to sleep with him?"

I do get him in some ways. I told him straight out I knew he was trying to get over someone, and this shocked him. When he mentioned going to a hospital for some reason, I said, "You thought you had herpes, didn't you." He said a lot of things, and it was pretty easy for me to piece things together. This is one of my specialty areas, seeing what people are really trying to say. But in the end, it I came home with the worst headache I've had since I thought I had dengue. My brain was just furiously trying to process all this shit. My roommate came home and I had to rehash everything through with her--how he talked about dating girls with borderline personality disorders, this 21-year-old he's infatuated with, as well as the 36-year-old pathological liar he practically allowed to move in with him here in Buenos Aires. Oh, and a girl he met at a party who flew from Japan to stay with him...and then he decided he couldn't stand her. But she was hot.

I tried to understand what he was telling me. Like I would ask him if he really thought it was a good idea to date sociopaths. Or if he really believed good sex alone could keep him intellectually satisfied for very long. But all this shit kept coming out. Mind you, this was our third time going out, and our other two lunches consisted mostly about talking about various Spanish phrases that we found interesting. The whole thing was so weird and maddening. Massive headache.

I kind of felt like he was trying to keep us on a buddy level. But on the other hand, one of the lessons I am constantly relearning in my thirty years of existence is that men always want sex. I put all the weird, un-matched pieces together in my head--the indifference, the sex tales, the juggling of ladies, yet the insistence to hang out--and none of it makes sense until I say "Oh, he just wants to let me know he's only interested in NSA sex. Because he's fucked up in this and this and this way."

And you know what, I'm okay with that. In fact, I think I had the same conversation with Joe in New York, only I was a lot more concise about it. My exact words were probably, "Don't expect anything more from me than this. I'm totally fucked up." And with that out in the open, everything was just hunky-dory from there on out.

Of course, I also just think that is the coward's way of saying, "I am hereby relinquishing all thoughtful matters to the custody of my genitals."

What a sad state of affairs. But I can dig it down here in the dirty south.

southern winter

2010-06-02T15:50:00.003-03:00

The onset of June shocks me. It is cold now in Buenos Aires--like San Francisco cold. My house isn't heated; the windows aren't insulated; I am cold. I've been here for six months now, save a few weeks here and there, and this too I find shocking. Not because it's been so long, but because I'm realizing that what makes a place your home isn't your level of comfort, or how many people you know, it's just your desire to call a place home. For now, this is home.

It was cold and rainy on Saturday night and I didn't feel all that great, but I ordered in anyhow--put a call in to my young lover, El Gengibre. We lay in my twin bed and watched low-quality movies that I'd downloaded on my laptop. It's the kind of thing I feel like you would do with someone you've known for a lot longer than two weeks, but I suppose being down here has done away with a lot of formalities. When I lived in New York, I felt like dating was all about creating an image of yourself that you then had the stress of living up to. But here we don't have such illusions of grandeur. Literally: Hey, this guy speaks my language. And suddenly you're comfortable enough to be bedfellows, dirty tissues and all. Not that I've ever been one for grandstanding, but the way I live down here...not so glamorous. Any one who sticks around for this with me, I feel, is kind of in the same mindset as me. So for now, we are just...keeping each other warm. The way that he holds me when we sleep feels far too intimate, but it is partially because our beds are so small. This forced intimacy can delude a person into thinking they are truly loved. But is it really delusional? Love is different when options are limited. You love the one you're with. Period.

It's too bad Dimples doesn't feel that way, but, eh. El Gengibre keeps me warm when I need him. And there is something very beautiful about that. And it is nice to have someone to make eggs for on a Sunday morning. No wonder it feels like home here.

hypermanic post numero tres

2010-05-21T23:46:00.003-03:00

I am absolutely crazy right now and I love it. I had another I LOVE BUENOS AIRES day, all sappy and beautiful in the taxi on my way downtown to help out my roommate. But I tell you: shit is coming together, and I am just high on possibility and excitement.

I sold a story yesterday. A story with photos! It's nothing earth-shattering, but it will be a nice spread in a glossy magazine--fingers crossed that the same thing doesn't go down as last time, where I wrote this huge story and then the editor disappeared. (Still trying to resolve that one, yuck.)

And I am still in love! My roommates are cracking me up. All they have to do is say the word DIMPLES and I go fucking berserker. It is just love itself that gets me. That feeling! Who knows if I'll actually see this boy again. I wonder how long this feeling can sustain itself. You'd think I'd know by now.

But the *best* part is that I have really been kicking it into gear with Secret Plan 437b, and it is coming together in such a haphazard, mystical way that I wonder if I'm being delusional. When I get like this, I just have to go with it, work with it. Because in a week, when the Dimples high wears off, and I start to get all salty and cynical about this supposed progress I've been making, it will be an entirely different story. And maybe that's my grandest hope--that it will be a different story soon. Something amazing. Working works! It actually does!

I think I learned a long time ago that happiness isn't having everything you want. And now I'm seeing that it isn't even knowing what you want. It's more like a combination of the two--plus seeing things you want that you didn't even know existed (but secretly hoped for).

Love from Buenos Aires
seriously.

being single means falling in love a lot

2010-05-20T14:58:00.004-03:00

YES it is my second post in two days, but I treat you to so much doom and gloom that I thought I might share my latest ascension into manic excitement.

WELCOME!

I went out with the most fucking adorable, dimpled Berkeley boy yesterday. Where do I find these boys? Well, he found me on the interwebz several weeks ago, hit me with the disclaimer "I'm not looking for a best friend or a girlfriend, but..." and then a chain of emails ensued. He is 25 years old.

We went out for lunch and chatted for three hours. I wore a new dress that made me feel pretty and he maintained this beautiful smile the entire time, but also was unable to really maintain eye contact with me, which could mean either "I'm not into you" or "you make me incredibly nervous," something that I can still never tell on a first date. Of course I always think it's the former, because I just don't think I'm very intimidating.

When we parted ways, I...almost...skipped. I know it seems like I fall in love every other week, but I think the last time I felt this way about a boy was with that Guy With Girlfriend in New York, well over a year ago. I certainly don't feel this way about my new 24-year-old lover. I really felt aglow and high and I wanted nothing but to smile at everyone, the same way he had smiled his way through lunch. That kind of happiness both puzzles and infects me.

I am fully aware of how fucking ridiculous I am, but I just.can't.help.falling.in.love. The flipside, of course, is that horrible feeling that you were just completely bowled over by someone who could give a shit about you, and that after three days of hoping to hear back from him, you will just be left with the sad thought that no one you like will ever like you back, because what is life if it is not unrequited love? And even after that vitriolic post yesterday about being single, the pursuit of love is really the biggest thrill of all, even if it is not, I repeat NOT, the gateway to the only known means of happiness. It just happens to be the most addictive.

I just want to see him again. Well, see him again, coerce him into falling in love with me, move back to SF together, and live happily ever after on Ocean Beach. Done.and.done.

unmarried and single

2010-05-19T11:22:00.003-03:00

Turning thirty hasn't been such a big deal since, well, I live in obscurity, a surreal place where few people call my lifestyle into question. But there certainly have been moments where my age and lifestyle don't quite seem to match up. These moments come when I pop onto Facebook and see another photo of a chubby baby blinking back at me, when I'm shopping for a dress to wear to a wedding, or when I'm shivering alone in my twin bed, thinking that I really need to buy a light bulb. Sometimes, everyone seems to be going somewhere else. It is like when you are walking down a crowded sidewalk and you seem to be the only one walking upstream, and you look across the street and everyone seems to be walking the same way. So you run across the street to change sides, and suddenly everything is---fuck, everything is the same.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in the Far East (as my Mom likes to call it), I was asked the following two questions in many iterations: Why aren't you married? Why don't you have kids?

Really, people? I would like to say that this was friendly family ribbing, but my family is really not that funny. I mean, what kind of answers do you expect here? These were also family members I haven't spoken to in at least five years, if not ten. How would they feel if I told them that my fiancé OD'd on Oxy, or that I was fucking STERILE? Because barring any sort of tragedy or lesser drama---I just broke up with someone, we're trying to have kids--the answer you inevitably get is quite boring. Because I certainly am not allowed to say that I'm trying to fuck at least fifty men before settling down, or that the idea of children is just that--an idea.

There was a Maureen Dowd column that ran yesterday called All the Single Ladies about the media frenzy surrounding Supreme Court nominee/single lady Ellen Kagan. And while it is a bit boring--because really, there's nothing that interesting about a woman being single OR married by itself--one commentor boiled it down quite nicely to say that this is all just the myth of the nuclear family being thrashed about in contemporary society. He or she went on to say that since more people spend more time at work than at home, perhaps it's more important to have a fulfilling job than an agreeable spouse.

One of the most interesting things I learned about Singapore is that they have a national dating service, free, government-sponsored. They, too, believe that strong nuclear families are not only the key to happiness, but a stable society. I mean, the notion of the family unit is how so much of our society is constructed: our taxes, our rights, health insurance, even the architecture of many homes. And in China, they have similar structures in place to secure happy families--after the earthquake left many widowed, they set up a matching system to help people remarry. (Read the Brook Larmer piece from the NY Times Magazine.)

Most of my friends are unmarried and/or single, even as we slip into our dirty thirties. Like I said, I only tend to give fleeting attention to these notions, but it is strange to have passed through two continents where the creation of the nuclear family is so central and unquestionably important, and another in which it is so central yet so singularly denied.

I want to be with someone. I really do. I may want children or I may not. But what I really would like, most of all, is for people to stop asking me why I am unmarried. Because really, the answer to why I am unmarried is that I AM NOT MARRIED. And the reason to why I am single is that YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.

Eh, maybe I am just feeling sore because of my young bedfellows. I slept with a 24-year-old the other night. We were walking through town, killing a bottle of 17-peso whiskey when he told me about this bingo parlor where the old folks go and I asked him if they gave out cool prizes. He said, "They probably give out Sensodyne toothpaste."

I use Sensodyne toothpaste. What? I have sensitive teeth.

friends without benefits

2010-05-16T14:48:00.005-03:00

I am back in Buenos Aires and it is suddenly chilly, dark. Everything seems different. I forgot to bring my flip-flops back with me, and you know what? I don't even need them anymore. Sad. But I kind of like it more. The weather is more like San Francisco now, and it is more conducive to work and less to sunbathing and siesta-ing to escape the heat.

I went out yesterday with a boy I met online. A boy--just a wee lass of 24, although he's almost a foot taller than me. We met for lunch and then ended up spending the entire day together. I guess we just felt instantly comfortable together--in that zone of mutual non-threatening perception. After lunch we went to a flea market, had a coffee, walked about, drank some wine at my house, then went off to see a movie, followed by late-night grub. Aside from some young-kid cockiness--which I no longer find very charming--I liked him fine. More as a friend, I suppose, than anything else, but I don't know.

After that period of extreme sluttery that opened the new year, it's now been about...four months since I've had sex. You'd think that I would have entertained this option last night, but I was too tired to even think about fucking, which made me feel restrained and wise in one moment, and then just...old. It was definitely the "right" decision--if there ever is such a thing--but on the bus home, all I could think about was the last awesome guy that I never slept with, and it dawned on me with all certainty that the more I like a guy, the less likely it is that I will ever sleep with him.

Can someone please tell me what this is all about? It's not about loss of respect or fear of commitment. The moment I have the feeling--however fleeting--that this guy is totally acceptable boyfriend material, I lose all sexual interest in him. This seems to explain my solid posse of male friends, none of which I have slept with. The fact that half of them are gay is entirely incidental.

Tonight I am going out with him again, and I swear it's anyone's guess what is going to go on in the veins connecting my brain to my vagina. Booze makes these things much clearer.

back to the future

2010-05-12T09:44:00.002-03:00

Physically and mentally in a billion places right now. This week found me having many serious conversations with my dog, Little Brother, parents.

Unsurprisingly, Little Brother's advice was the most useful. Maybe I listen to him more because I know exactly where his advice comes from; maybe he just knows how to talk to me better than anyone. In any case, I am being forced to admit that my attempt to simultaneously recharge, regroup, and pursue my dreams has not been as successful as I had hoped, and that it is time to re-evaluate my strategy and chart a different course. I am not giving up on myself, but it feels like it. I feel like I have failed in so many ways--to try hard enough, to come up with clear and reasonable goals, to do what I set out to do.

In some ways I blame it on Illinois. I never feel so lost and defeated as when I'm in Illinois. It's not a bad place, but something about it just says to me, "Welcome back, loser!"

Tomorrow I am going back to Argentina with a somewhat heavy heart, like I am just postponing the inevitable--because then I will be returning stateside to start Life Plan 898, but the plan doesn't yet exist, and it's anybody's guess what that will be. I keep waiting and looking out for plans and opportunities, seeking out what I think will be my next big thing, but the pattern that is emerging is just scattershot and schizophrenic, not exactly the stuff of employability.

I have started to plot a return to San Francisco, and am looking for work. It sounds dangerously like what I was doing oh, seven years ago, but with 25 pounds on my former self. Each of those pounds represents moments of celebration, intoxication, indulgence, laziness, and...storing up reserves for my future days of unemployment.

feels like home

2010-05-07T11:16:00.003-03:00

The two weeks in Asia turned out to be a good transition back for a week in the Chi. Singapore is homey while still being strange and exotic, and Chicago is just...homey. Strangely, it feels like I was just here last week even though it's been more than five months. It feels nice to be home with my parents and my dog, and part of me doesn't want to get back to Buenos Aires...yet.

The last week in Singapore was very exciting. I met up with a family friend who was in a sticky situation, and we played all week and went on a nice beach vacation for a few nights. It made me feel like a completely different person. I went from being the silent daughter to being the strong, older woman taking care of a friend, complete with tour-guidism, strategizing and dispensing of hard advice.

Being on three continents in three weeks makes me want to settle down, though I'm unsure of what that means. The need for stability is so vague that I'm not sure what form that would take. But all the girl talking reminds me that I desperately miss being in love, and I'm fairly certain that is a big part of the equation. I spent a large part of the past week talking about the highs and lows of my relationship with Ex, which made me both nostalgic and fearful for what is to come.

On the eve of my departure to Asia, I stayed up late with my roommates, feeling extremely apprehensive yet accepting. We are all in such loose situations that it feels like a strong gust of wind could just pick us up and disperse us in any number of directions. On the one hand, we are all ready for change and almost desirous of such a random change of course, but on the other hand we all wish we were motivated somehow on our own that we didn't have to wait for the tides to change for that to happen. We are all simultaneously waiting and seeking, and nervous to make any sort of proactive decision.

Someone asked me what I was up to lately and I answered that I had "just" graduated, but then I realized that "just" was a year ago. What have I been doing for the past year? When I think back on where I've been and what I've been doing, a dreamy feeling comes over me that is something like detached disbelief and suppressed longing. For all that I've been up to, I feel like I've yet to really get down to it. Something inside me is begging to say yes to the right question. Lately I've been saying yes to all these short-term tasks and really rising to the challenge, and I think I'm about to say yes to something else, something that I've never even considered before.

It is altogether terrifying and welcome.

death in paradise

2010-04-27T06:47:00.003-03:00

It has been a week. I don't even want to talk about it because it's been pretty stressful, but at the same time I HAVE TO. That is what I do.

I flew about 31 hours to get here from Buenos Aires. I watched the worst movie I've seen in a while--'Did you hear about the Morgans?' Wow, what a terrible fucking film. While I've never been a Sarah Jessica Parker hater, this movie really did it for me. The movie was so bad it made me hate Hugh Grant as well. And, oddly enough, the other couple in the movie is the cowboy from 'The Big Lebowski' and Doc’s girlfriend Clara from 'Back to the Future.'

But this really has nothing to do with anything. I suppose I just don't want to talk about the stuff that has mattered these past 10 days or so. Because that shit is just overwhelming. It is so overwhelming that I wonder if I have, in these days of wandering and isolation, forgotten how to deal with shit, so much so that everything is suddenly overwhelming. But that is not really anything to decide.

I am in Singapore for the second time in this blog’s two-year existence. I didn’t feel anxious about leaving until I started to pack my things, as usual, and suddenly I felt very homeless and worthless. It’s funny—I’ve always equated homelessness with two polar extremes of poor nomads and worldly globetrotters, but suddenly I understood that homelessness is actually just a feeling that you don’t belong anywhere.

Not belonging somewhere is a reason to leave a place. And wanting to go somewhere else—or being needed somewhere else—that is a reason to go to a place. The former is typically a reason for moving, and the latter a reason for traveling. It was relatively easy for me to leave the U.S. and now to leave South America for both these reasons.

It took me three long flights it took me to get here; I felt very anxious and useless for many hours. I guess that’s why I sat through all those movies. I had made a promise to my family that I would stay with grandmother as long as she needed assistance. I’d like to say that this was purely out of the goodness of my heart, but I’d chalk that up to Fundamental Attribution Error. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have a job or much of a plan much less an acceptable reason for existence, so the least I could do was to volunteer my services. When I made this offer, I meant to stick by it, but I was still nervous because I didn’t know what it would entail. A month? A year? I’m not big on committing myself to anything, but suddenly I had done it. I was terrified. There are many worse fates than taking care of your grandmother in Singapore, and I meditated on this thought in-between movie-watching.

My parents and I arrived in the middle of the night and in the morning we went to the hospital to see her. On the way there, we stopped to pick up my uncle. There is a bit of a story behind all of this that I will explain later, but let’s just say for now that I have not seen my uncle in about twenty years, and he didn’t say hello to me when he got in the car with me and my parents.

We arrived a little too early and a nurse was attempting to administer some sort of treatment to her, and asked my father and I to give her some room, leaving my uncle and mother there. Dad and I stood in the hallway and I cried. Dad was in shock, I think, because he couldn’t even put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. We both just kind of stood there, me struggling to pull tissues out of my purse and him just staring into a corner of his brain, searching for a solution. We’d been in the room with her for less than a minute, but we both knew that it was bad, much worse than we’d thought.

We stayed in the hospital all day, each of us searching for our own solutions in our selves and in the hospital staff. Mom and Dad are used to hospitals because they are doctors, and I am sort of used to them because of that. I have visited people in hospitals—people who may be uncomfortable but are recovering. I have never, though, sat with someone in such bad shape. She was struggling to breathe and couldn’t open her eyes because she was in so much pain. I held her hands—at first I was sort of holding her hands down to prevent her from clawing out her IV and breathing tube. She cursed me and wailed to her god for compassion. But when she removed her tube for the twentieth time, I didn’t struggle with her to put it back. It is ridiculous to fight with an 87-year-old woman who doesn’t want a tube in her nose. So I just rubbed her back and tried to cry as silently as possible. It is a bad feeling to know that someone you love is going to die. It is an even worse feeling to want someone you love to die as soon as possible because they are suffering so much.

My mother stayed with her through the night and my grandmother passed away in the morning. I was sleeping on the floor of my father’s room and I answered the phone, received the news, passed the phone to my father, and then went to the bathroom to get dressed. When I came out, I expected him to be fully dressed and on his cell phone. But Dad was sitting on the bed, his bare feet on the floor. I thought he was lost once again, in that corner of his brain where he goes to solve problems. But instead of springing to life when I told him we should get moving, he sat for a few moments longer, and I understood that he was experiencing something profound—my mother’s pain and a feeling of helplessness, two things which my father does not experience very often.

The sun had still not risen as we drove to the hospital in the dark. Dad gave me a charming yet totally unnecessary speech about death, something along the lines of “Death is a part of life; we have to be happy that she didn’t suffer; it is time to accept this and move forward.” Like I said, I am at peace with the idea of death, even my own. (I just don’t want to die in an airplane.) My mother takes care of people who are terminally ill, and I have absorbed her attitude toward death, which I agree with. When dealing with the terminally ill, families oftentimes prolong suffering in an effort to prolong life, which is not a good thing. I hope I don't die in a hospital. I hope that if something happens to me where I can't make decisions for myself, someone will pump me full of morphine and let me go peacefully. We can't live forever, but we do have some control over how we die. Dad ended his flowery speech with, “Seriously, when it’s my time to go, just pump me full of morphine, close the door, and walk away. No muss, no fuss.”

But no matter how unmussy or unfussy your death is, cleaning up after someone’s life is a different story. I didn't realize just how much stuff has to be attended to when someone dies. We contacted a funeral director, who swept in and asked us a million questions about religious rites, scheduling, caskets, cremation, all while the body of my grandmother was being prepared for the mortuary by two attendants wearing surgical masks. The following day was the wake, the next day was the cremation, and the next day we were cleaning out her apartment.

My grandmother was a bit of a head case. She was a hoarder. She kept every scrap of paper that came into her possession. In addition to boxes of receipts and newspaper clippings, her room contained jars filled with rocks, makeup bags stuffed with plastic bags, pantyhose from the 50s (still in the original packaging), about one hundred miniature locks with keys, decks of playing cards, dozens of umbrellas and fans, old calendars rolled up with mothballs. And for some reason, every item made of fabric--clothing, bags, etc--had at least one safety pin fastened to it. It was a bit disturbing. It makes me want to live a nomadic life and die, possession-less, on a raft in the ocean, just so nobody has to be bothered to clean up after me.

where's my freakout?

2010-04-17T16:43:00.003-03:00

So, a bunch of stuff happened this week and, as is my usual M.O., I guess I will just go through it chronologically.

The night before my friend left, we went out to dinner. There was a lull in the conversation during which I thought, "OK, I should tell him now how I feel..." It was all the shit that my Spanish-teacher-turned-psychotherapist and I had discussed--namely, that I like to ruin things before anyone else can, but that I still wanted to tell him that he is awesome! That's when he said, "I have a confession." My heart stopped. He continued, "My boss and I got hookers last night." Oh man, I could not stop laughing. Later that night, I ended up writing him a drunken note in Spanglish.

Way too early the next morning we went on a photo shoot together and it was amazing. I haven't done any abandoned or industrial photography since getting here, and he picked out a site that I'd actually noticed several weeks ago. The shoot was incredible; the photography was amazing, and then when we returned to the city center he had his camera stolen on a crowded subway car--containing my 8GB memory card with all of the photos that I'd lent him after he filled his own card. What a shitty fucking turn of events. My FC almost-love-affair had his Canon stolen as well when he was here a few weeks ago. I feel like it's just a matter of time before I get mine stolen as well. I did end up giving him the probably illegible note and then saying goodbye. I took the bus home and slept for the rest of the day.

I didn't have time to mourn the loss, though, because the day before, after the hooker confession, I'd talked to my parents about a family situation going down on the other side of the world. And tomorrow, I am flying out to the other side of the world to try and "help," i.e., I'm just going there for moral support. It is pretty much all I have to offer the world right now, so I didn't really think about it. I am a little nervous about it, because I also offered to stay out there as long as I am needed. I don't know what this will entail. I am now sitting in my room here in Buenos Aires and wondering how to prepare for this trip. Only now it is not about what possessions I bring with me, since I really don't have anything. It is more about what sort of expectations I bring with me mentally, and again, I can't bring much, since I don't really know what is happening. It would of course make sense to bring everything with me. But that makes me feel like I am not coming back, so I will probably just leave a random assortment of useless things and one important thing--my tripod.

I feel surprisingly calm, maybe because I haven't really had time to think about it. Whenever the anxiety rises up in me, I just say, "Ssshh, anxiety doesn't help. We have to go and just...be there." (like how we are a 'we?') Also I composed a three-page email to someone this morning and I guess it helped me to put my thoughts in order. Maybe I will post the email because it made me feel good about life. And shit, when you feel good about life, nothing is a really big deal.

tuesday fail

2010-04-13T17:03:00.003-03:00

Today I have been worthless. It is pretty much the same as yesterday, but the weather is a lot crappier. I stayed up late with a friend who is leaving Buenos Aires for good tomorrow. We climbed to the top of the water tank on top of his apartment building and drank Argentine wine until about three in the morning, enjoying the warm, quiet night.

I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but instead I just whined that I wished he weren't leaving. It would have been a good night for some kind of loving--a heartfelt confession, some raucous sex, or even just a night of sharing the same bed--but I couldn't go there. I was just sad, and I kept thinking how it was all my fault that we weren't lovers--because of that stupid first night where I got too drunk and ended up blowing coke and fucking someone else. The thought was too depressing. But it was a nice night, last night. We talked forever, and then I went to sleep--in his absent roommate's bed who is, incidentally, a guy I went on a date with several months ago. Total coincidence.

I woke up early this morning to the sounds of construction and was pretty confused as to where I was. I caught the bus in the rain and listened to Hot Chip's 'One Life Stand' on repeat on the ride home. Then I ate a bunch of food, watched some porn, and sulked. I've never watched porn before, really. I was trying to stream the movie 'Junebug,' which I thought would make me feel better. It is an excellent movie, about love and home and being there for people the best you can. But it wouldn't stream, so I ended up watching porn. One of the videos was really depressing. It had this young girl introduce herself in the beginning by saying, "I'm nineteen years old and I'm sooo excited because I'm going to do my first DP (double penetration) today! That's right! I'm going to have two cocks in me--one in my pussy and one in my ass! It's going to be soooo hot!" She flounced around for a while, all sassy-like, and then these two big guys came out and disrobed, one shoving his cock in her mouth while the other pounded her from behind. Then they would switch. One guy was really annoying. He kept calling her a slut and asking her if she liked it, to which she could only reply "Mmm!" in a really unconvincing fashion. She was gagging on dick, and the camera kept catching her frightened, miserable eyes. All of her "excitement" was gone and I just felt really sorry for her. I had to turn it off because it felt like I was watching her get raped.

I received an invitation in the mail today for my friend's wedding, the one where I am going to be the maid of honor. The invitation was really pretty. I thought about my friend who is leaving, and how easily I could marry him. I could. He is sweet and intelligent and incredibly thoughtful and socially conscious and has a great sense of humor--and even great style. I am supposed to see him one more time, the morning before he leaves. I can picture myself confessing to him that I would move up to Canada and marry him in a heartbeat. I think we would be good together. I imagined us cooking together and tickling babies and having a perfect little life together. But there is a really fucked up part of me that finds this idea so repulsive.

And I find myself stuck in that weird place I was last night on the rooftop with him, still wondering if I should tell him how I feel about him. I tried to purge it from my mind with all that horrible pornography and then a Coen Brothers film, but I keep thinking about it. I have never even kissed this boy. I don't know. I just see him as someone who is perfect and me as someone who is so fucking fucked up.

I am just not going to say anything. Maybe we'll meet again. And in the perfect future when we do meet again, I won't be so fucked up and commitment-phobic, and he'll be...still single.

more dating in BsAs

2010-04-12T13:45:00.004-03:00

Tomorrow I was supposed to return to the states, but I'm not! It is a funny feeling to make it to a deadline and realize how meaningless/arbitrary time is. I definitely cannot imagine leaving tomorrow. I went on a date last night who asked me where I am going when I go back to the states and it was a very profound question.

Actually, I went on two dates last night, accidentally. I have a hard time keeping track of days and made a date for 'Sunday' and then also for 'tomorrow'; they happened to be the same day. The dates were interesting. Both the guys were so soft-spoken that I kept having to lean in and say "What? What?" It made me feel like I was stupid and hard of hearing.

It is a bad idea to do dates back-to-back, even if you have enough time. As soon as I realized my mistake, I wanted to cancel one. It's just not fair and it's exhausting and by the second date I was already kind of drunk and sleepy. But the problem with online dating is that once you have made plans it is kind of difficult to break them at the last minute. That is also just poor form.

My first date was with a third-generation Argentine-Japanese boy. He was sweet. It was interesting to hear about his experiences as a minority here, things that I can obviously relate to. My second date was with a porteño who nicely took me to see a Romanian movie with both English and Spanish subtitles. It was called 'The Happiest Girl in the World' and it is not a good date movie. I think the movie was done as well as it could have been done, but I don't think it should have been a movie at all. Date #2 kind of weirded me out because he told me he couldn't stand it that people eat popcorn in movies. I thought, 'Oh god, one of these pretentious, humorless, must-focus-all-attention-on-the-CINEMA guys.' But afterward, we went to a great bar and had cocktails and somehow got to talking about a favorite bar we have in common, and how last weekend I bought some bad coke there and got so sick that I couldn't get out of bed until 6 pm the following day and had to puke in a plastic bag next to my bed.

Well, I think I omitted the last part. But he did tell me that the next time we go out, he'll make sure I don't get bad cocaine. Now there's a second date to look forward to.

la vida riquissima

2010-04-10T12:19:00.002-03:00

Yesterday I fell in love with Buenos Aires. I spent the morning writing, then went off to a Spanish lesson (after four months, I finally decided I needed a boost) and had a 4 pm lunch at this old-school restaurant filled with men of all ages in uniforms that made them look more like mechanics than restauranteurs. I enjoyed a large mug of café con leche and then went off to play piano at the cultural center where my roommate works, and ended up playing for almost two hours on this gritty old grand piano overlooking Avenida Callao, a bustling avenue. When I came out it was dark.

There is something about playing the piano that is extremely good for me. It makes me focus and listen and work. I found this great music store that sells their own crappy copies of classical sheet music--you know, with terrible page breaks and strange key signatures, but if you know the piece, it's okay. I start off by playing something new and easy, and then work into something harder. I have been trying to learn Beethoven's Pathétique and Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu forever. The second is very difficult. But here is a 7-year-old playing it:

Sigh. I have been intermittently trying to play this piece (and the Beethoven) since high school. Anyhow, I came out of the cultural center feeling a million fucking bucks and then returned home to celebrate my (new) roommate's birthday. And as I was seeking a bottle of champagne, I fell in love with life, with the city, and with everyone in it.

Hello, fall! It is a transitional period right now, to be sure. My handful of friends who were just here for the summer have left or are leaving soon, and it is the start of a new phase, I think. You know, the part where I suddenly start speaking fluent Spanish, fall in love with an Argentine, finish my novel (in English), and then of course leave it all and go back to the States.

Because, folks, that's (my) life. Although when I woke up this morning, this strange thought entered my head: I want a family and kids.

Whoa...wtf?!

on turning 30

2010-04-02T14:24:00.005-03:00

I had sort of a birthday fail and spent the day traveling, largely alone, in the middle of nowhere. There was a big chunk of the day where things were getting a little desperate and I was feeling like a lost, pathetic, idiot. Fortunately, I was able to pull myself out of that zone and give myself what I needed to rescue the day: a shower, a movie, a soda, a joint, some dinner...who says I don't know how to take care of myself?

Have you ever seen the movie Lars and the Real Girl? I liked it so much that I have probably mentioned it before. While I was coddling myself into a better state of mind, I found this movie on the television of my creepy but life-saving hotel and I lay in bed to watch it. There was a particularly poignant scene that was about growing up, "what it means to be a man." They concluded that becoming a man is about making decisions that aren't just about you.

It would have been easy to just let the day pass me by completely and it kind of did. I drank a liter of beer and ingested a huge sandwich composed of a flank steak, an omelet, cheese, ham, and, I think, another egg. I smoked cigarettes under the Pepsi sign of the restaurant in this small town and watched the townsfolk greet each other. I thought about the movie, about growing up, and how to grow up if you are by yourself. If you don't have a family to take care of and are kind of a drifter, it must be that you never truly grow up--or that growing up means finding your meaningful place in society. Which I have not done. I am a single, unemployed woman now in her early thirties. So hot, right?

Last night I went to party where I engaged in a pattern I am becoming used to now. I try to be social for a while, but then I get tired and bored, and kind of drift off on my own. It's the language thing that becomes tiring, that and the not understanding men here and feeling done with casual sex for...forever maybe. I had a dream about the party, a flashback to when I was dancing with a boy I should have dated but instead the first time I went out with him I did a bunch of coke and went home with someone else. I opened my eyes this morning and this thought crossed my mind: I am only attracted to men who expect nothing of me. It was such a weird thought to wake up with. I wondered why it was there.

Turning 30 is more than just brooding over the typical thoughts of some of the things that seem to make a person whole: a partner, a job, and a home. It is also a time to say, "Well, what kind of person do I want to be in this new decade?" Because really, by now, we are pretty much fully-formed beings with personalities and sufficient life experience to know ourselves. And with all that, what kind of person can we choose to be?

I would like to be a non-smoker. Not because I don't like smoking anymore, but because turning 30 was my ultimate deadline for quitting and I am so unbelievably addicted that the only thing to do is quit. I would also like to be thinner. And really, I would love to return "home" but I don't know where that is anymore. I would like to have a home, but that requires commitment. I am not sure what to do about that.

the perfect past

2010-03-24T13:00:00.003-03:00

Last night I tried to clean out my email, which says I have more than 1,000 unread messages. It took me to the strange place of 2004, when I first got my gmail account, and I was breaking up with my boyfriend, becoming an alcoholic slut, and trying to get my life back on track by leaving the comfortable womb of San Francisco and diving headfirst into grad school in New York. The emails were so schizophrenic---filled with so much grief and excitement, hyperactivity and insomnia. They made me extremely nostalgic for that time of my life. When I feel really lost and lonely and confused, I like to kick myself for ripping myself out of that situation where "everything" was so good.

Do you ever feel like maybe the best part of your life has already happened? I had that terrible feeling last night. Let me step back a second to say that I am not as miserable as I was in my last post, and that I have somewhat successfully coddled myself with the Hallmark encouragement phrases that "dreams take time" and "genius is 99 percent perspiration..." This isn't about feeling discouraged or disappointed anymore. It is more about feeling as though that combination of naivete, optimism and determination was the magical combination and that ever since then, things have definitely been awesome in different ways, but never again have I felt that excited about life and its possibilities. And this makes me a little sad.

Of course, we cannot retain innocent hope forever. Maybe I still experience joy and wonder and fear, but it is all couched in this underwhelming, familiar cynicism that seems to be telling me that all these emotions are somewhat deceptive. Before, the appearance of these emotions were signals to me that great change was underway. If I was scared shitless or raging uncomfortably on euphoria, I knew that something incredible was happening and I just had to hold on and soak it in. But now I find myself in these tenuous places constantly, and I have begun to see it as a sign of permanence rather than change. I don't feel like I will struggle through these nerve-wracking times and come out with answers anymore; I've been through this before and none of these things got resolved. Now the struggle is just a state of being.

I am embarrassed to admit that I still feel like I broke up with my Ex in the recent past, and that I will be stronger and smarter once I get over it. That was five years ago. As a writer, I naturally live somewhat in the past, trying to understand something in order to package it and present it in some kind of frame, some kind of context. But I think that has a detrimental effect on my life, because sometimes things can't be packaged and explained and the attempt to do so can prevent us from keeping pace with what the future brings us. It is one thing to want to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but another to become so fascinated by history that we forget to vote.

I don't really know what I'm saying. I know that there is no such thing as figuring things out once and for all, that tough decisions have to be made repeatedly, and that pursuing a problem-free existence is like trying to outrun your shadow. I also know that as shiny and happy as parts of my past may seem in photos and emails, the fact is that I wasn't content to stay wherever I was, which is why I am here---and it would be foolish to think I could have stayed there anyway. Things change. I guess I just like to be the one to incite the change, rather than have it forced upon me. I'm not one for regret, but I do wonder what it would have been like had I stayed with my job, my boyfriend. I wonder if I would have put on all this weight. Or maybe I would be dead by now. It's hard to say.

midlife crisis

2010-03-21T15:26:00.003-03:00

I spent the past four days sick in bed, streaming Spanish movies. Only I am too cheap to pay for them, so I would stream a movie for the alotted 74 minutes, and then I would have to wait an hour to finish the movie. Good thing I had nothing else to do.

I wasn't actually that sick, just a bad cold. But sometimes I look for an excuse to lay up and be worthless. Then last night I went and baby-sat my friends' three-week-old baby. I met him the day he was born, and hung out with him a week later, both times of which his eyes were mostly closed. Now they are open, and I cannot imagine what he is seeing--shapes, light. He has no emotions or thought, just perception. He hicupped for about an hour, like, eh. Every time I put him down he would start to make these fussy noises, so I picked him up and danced with him for a while. We listened to Patti Smith and Wilco and David Byrne and Mark Farina and I think he liked it. Then we sat down and I talked to him for a long time about what I wondered his life was going to be like, after being born in Argentina to two very chill parents who are fixing to take him and their dog off to Paris in a few months and then...where? The where seems to matter less and less these days. These are some of my best friends here and we are all the same, just ricocheting around, stopping just long enough to fall in love, eat a steak, squeeze out a kid.

I know I am turning 30 next week. I felt a midlife crisis coming on when I looked into the eyes of that baby, because I kept thinking this one sad thought to myself: I hope you can do better than I did. 'Did'--in the past tense, like my life is fucking over or something. And I am not big on regret, but hey, there it was. I blame it on this cold.

When they came back I walked over to the bar where my friend was DJing. I danced for an hour before I began feeling incredibly sick and tired, so I took the bus home. I thought of the baby, the dog, the music, the cute boys, and the enormous quantity of snot in my head that seemed to be blocking both my air passages and my optimism. And I let myself wonder again what the fuck I am doing here, and I began to get a little despondent. I still have a ticket back in a few weeks, a ticket back--to what? I planned on changing it. I think that being sick makes you want to be at home. But this is a word that has largely lost its meaning--home. Home is where my computer is, pretty much. And for now, that is here. I also said that I wasn't going "home" until I finished this novel that seemed close to completion when I got here, but is now looking like the ultimate fail. What do you do when your plans seem to be failing? Do you keep going, or do you move on? It was like this with Ex. I could have stayed, but I left. I don't regret it, but sometimes I think that was the beginning of the end of all faith I had in commitment to people, to plans.

Obviously, life is complicated and whether to keep going or to drop it depends on a lot of things--how much you want something, how much the game has changed since you started playing it, and what resources are available to you. This is the problem. Instead of actually doing anything, I am just thinking about it all the time. God, it's hard to be this fucking lazy.

heeding advice

2010-03-17T13:37:00.003-03:00

I listen to people. Sometimes more than myself. Yesterday I went on what was supposed to be an overnight trip with my FC love affair. It was a test trip to see if we could travel together to the desert soon. I was very conflicted about going with him, because he is way into me and I am not so much into him. But he's a nice, decent guy, and if he could stop touching me we could probably travel together and split costs.

Pricey tequila happened Monday night, which always brings out the let's-talk-dirt in me. I was with my young friend who was complaining about not being able to get laid and so I asked him how to deal with this FC who is not a love affair after all. I like to keep my options open, but I can see how that is confusing. You are always wondering--am I going to get laid with this person or not? Earlier in the evening I'd asked my friend what to do, and he advised me to just tell the FC straight up that I was not going to sleep with him. But the young guy laughed when I told him. He said, "Even if a girl tells me no, half the time we end up sleeping together anyway." I put up the standard disgusted-feminist facade for a second but then he asked me if I'd ever said no and then done it anyway, and it turns out that I'm not exactly advancing my cause here. But one of them was a gross situation where I was definitely taken advantage of and I guess the other times I just changed my mind or gave into persistence. Sometimes persistence can be flattering.

Anyhow, the moral of that conversation was that you can say no, and you can just not do it. It doesn't matter if you say no but don't take the steps to follow through. I can do this, but it is just harder if you are planning to share a bed with someone, particularly if you are of the popular male mindset than 'no' means 'wait for it...' In the end, my young friend echoed my friend P's sage advice: just don't do anything you're going to regret.

So I went to Tigre yesterday with the FC, trying to be open-minded. And as soon as he touched me I told him not to, and he largely respected that. Tigre was beautiful, but I felt a little stressed all day about what was being expected. It wasn't until nightfall that I fully understood that I didn't want to stay overnight. We had the hard conversation. And, yes, he told me I could still stay overnight without sex. But I have tried that before, and with guys that I don't know very well, it is just cheap talk. I'd like to judge every guy separately, but when the odds stack up like that, it is just foolishness to ignore the trend. I was exhausted but I went home, feeling incredibly shitty about everything. He had gotten a really nice hotel and I wanted to believe I could have enjoyed it with him, just as friends. But I was right about one thing--he thought the fact that we had kissed the other night meant we would definitely have sex if we shared a room. He came right out and said it; he was disappointed and being honest. I guess it wasn't clear to him that he had been coming on hard to me and while I hadn't reciprocated all that enthusiastically, I hadn't exactly pushed him away. But making out is one thing, fucking is another. Amiright?

My roommate has been stressed and sick the last week or so, and I am right there with him today with a terrible headache and a sore throat. Stress really fucks up your immune system. And I am confused as to why I wasn't into this guy. It feels like I am walking away from a fucking perfect love affair--temporary, traveling, foreign, sweet, tall, and financially able to pay for things like nice hotels and long lunches. But for some reason I just don't want anything to do with it.

the comfort of friends and strangers

2010-03-15T00:32:00.004-03:00

Sorry. I've been writing a lot this week. It is because I have been awake a lot, with my mind going like a loosed freight train downhill. Notice that things only go out of control DOWNHILL. Because, I suppose, if you lost your brakes going uphill, you would then be going downhill. That is physics, people.

I miss people a lot this week. Yesterday I thought I was cracking up and then I talked to Little Brother. Somehow he makes everything okay. Then I was saved by music, music that helped me sleep. There is this glorious photo site that I like full of people who are also photographers, who have lived in places that I have lived, and take me back to places I want to go, and places I have never been. One of the guys posted an album he recorded recently, when he was going crazy and also saved by his brother. I downloaded the album and fell asleep listening to it, a glorious 3 pm cradle-me-to-sleep nap.

It is not really music I think I would normally like, but I feel like I sort of know these people, their stories, and one of them sang me to sleep. I suppose it is the way people feel about celebrities, when they follow their lives and loves and careers but don't actually know them. I never understood those people until now. And now I am someone I don't understand. Because I will probably put on that very album and (hopefully) fall asleep listening to it again. The post isn't properly linked for permanent ever-ness, but for the moment you can find it here. It is the album Basketball by Pat Parra as well as a free download from Baby Dino called All Our Friends Are Dead, also very beautiful.

I have been kind of hiding out this weekend. I am on the fence about my latest love affair, and we are going on a trip this week. It is probably the worst idea ever. I am such a moody bitch. I asked him to go with me on this big road trip but am now having second thoughts because he seems way too into me. I foresee nights of me rejecting him. That is not the way I want to spend my 30th birthday. We are going to go on a test-drive one-night trip on Tuesday, and then I will decide what to do about it. I don't like the idea of me driving around the desert on my own, but I like the idea even less of my driving around the desert with a guy who won't give up on trying to fuck me. I really hate that feeling. It makes my skin crawl.

My relationship with the entire male sex seems to be become increasingly polarized. The more I hate them, the more they want me. And the more I want them, the less I like myself. My friend told me recently that she is terrified of sex. It is a funny thing for two equally promiscuous women to bond over. But I've been thinking about it a lot. I kind of thought that having sex with as many people as possible would get rid of my fear of sex, or at least reduce my discomfort with it. But I've really only come to one conclusion with sex--once you have sex with someone, one of you expects it at any given moment. And for me, the fear involves being put in a situation where you have to reject people constantly. It is better to just reject someone the first night and never have to do it again, or to just fuck complete strangers you will never see again, hence never reject again. Of course, then you only have sex with strangers, which is never as good as long-termers. But with long-termers, you have to deal with rejection of sex every once in a while, which I think so few of us know how to deal with. Certainly not me. I really don't know what to do about this. Some sort of strategy-change is needed. It probably involves drinking less than I do now as well as, I don't know, thinking differently. You know, being a different person.

It seems only fitting that today I got my first-ever message from a woman on my dating site, and that I was like, "Hell, yes."

I miss you guys so much. I have so many questions and misunderstandings and you have so many answers. Or, at least, hugs.

let's get physical

2010-03-12T14:41:00.004-03:00

I had a really weird night. I met up with my French-Canadian love affair in San Telmo and then I waited for the 24 for at least half an hour before hailing a cab. It is like a 25 peso cab ride to my house, but I am twenty times more likely to take a cab when it's late and I have a few drinks in me.

We were having the standard conversation that I am used to having: how's your night going, seems pretty busy/quiet tonight, what's going on? I'm from the States, been here for 3 months, working, you know. When we got close to my house, the driver asked me if I wanted to go on a little tour of the city, because I wasn't familiar with his barrio. It was just after 1 a.m. and I was a little sleepy, but I can never pass up an invitation like that. He shut off the meter and invited me up to the front seat.

I was a little leery of hopping up front after the leg-touching situation on Tuesday night, but like I said, I am trying to get over that shrill, pointless feminist in my mind screaming "DON'T TOUCH ME" when it appears to be harmless. So I got in the front and we drove around a bit. We eventually stopped at a gas station where you can buy illicit beers. He drove me past where he plays soccer, through a super tony suburb of Buenos Aires, and then we parked by the Rio Plata and drank beer and talked about life. I trusted him.

The weird part came, of course, when he started touching me. At first it was just my hair, which he found fun. And then he told me my shoulders were fucked up--which they are, from carrying around my behemouth camera all the time--and was kind of giving me a little shoulder massage, which I wasn't really into. But the whole time we are talking, and I don't feel unsafe because even though it is the wee hours, we are parked next to a police station and there are people outside, fishing for god knows what. I would not eat anything that even looked at the Rio Plata.

Anyhow it was obvious that I didn't want him to touch me, so he asked me what was the matter, and, remembering the experiences of this week, I tried really hard to articulate myself. I didn't want to offend him because I still don't understand the cultural norms around physical contact with strangers. So I told him that Chinese people aren't very physical, and even though I'm American, as a woman I don't feel particularly comfortable when men I don't know touch me. We had been talking about our families--his parents died when he was young--and he said that although Argentines are very touchy, he tends to be even more so, because he lacked physical contact growing up. He apologized profusely for making me feel uncomfortable. But then he wanted to know what happened if he put his hand on my leg--did that make me uncomfortable? What was I thinking? I said while the contact itself was not abhorrent, my Chinese-American-female mind was rejecting the pleasure receptors. Or something like that. He didn't speak a lick of English, so this was all being discussed in my really excellent Spanish.

In the end we hung out for three hours. It was kind of incredible. I know you all read my blog with a fine-toothed comb, so you remember clearly the episode where I was struggling to come to terms with my sexuality in a cafe with two young boys asking me if I liked it up the ass. This was kind of the same situation, where I was trying to confront something that has been puzzling me, and I'm pretty sure it is a combination of my personal hang-ups, confusion with the cultural context, and the language barrier.

It's true that I did not grow up in a physically affectionate family. For me physical contact is kind of forced, or just there when greeting or parting ways. The taxi driver articulated that I was the kind of person who only lets my hombre touch me. Not since I baby-sat for two little boys have I had so many people touch me--or so I thought. But then I thought about all the dates I have been on in the past few years, and how I get weirded out when certain people touch me. I'm not sure if there is any rhyme or reason around it. I definitely was not weirded out when Friend of Friend was macking on me, or when the French-Canadian reached for my hand last night. I wish I understood my reactions more, because they are so strong. I think that a lot of time I don't want the physical contact if I think it will put me in a conflict zone--like one caress could lead to me fighting off unwanted sex, dealing with rejection/slippery slope, or I am just physically repulsed.

I don't want things to be this complicated. I just want to figure out how to deal with men. But it is not like figuring out algebra; every situation is so different. Or maybe I am making it complicated. I don't know.

forced friendships and social norms

2010-03-11T00:36:00.006-03:00

Last night I had to struggle to go out. I was really tired--been riding the insomnia train again--and I was chilling at home, enjoying some whiskey and a nice joint with my roommate. But I had been invited out by some fellow urban Americans who are all here in Buenos Aires for an extended amount of time.

They're nice kids--and I say 'kids' because they have certain ways of making me feel all of the five years older that I am. It is nice to have a crew to hang out with. But it is obvious to me that we would not be friends back in New York, that they are only hanging out with me out of either A) obligation, or B) boredom with each other--perhaps some fine combination of the two. And I think these are the options because that is what I am doing with them, with the addition of C) masochism/self-improvement. Part of me hates being with them, because I act differently around them--the way you would around people you don't know very well but want to get along with, but also in a way that I find very troubling, where I try to play up the qualities I see in them that I don't admire but understand that they value: their obsession with being in-the-know, their careless spending habits, and their self-confidence, which I find both alluring and repulsive.

Maybe it is what makes me feel old. I feel like I was like that once, in some small way. Anyhow, I feel like they bring out small pieces of me that exist but I don't like to play up so much, and part of being around them is literally not buying into their scene completely, and consciously trying to be me instead of one of them. It always fascinates me when I find myself as the outsider in a group. A balancing act emerges of trying to observe and understand the dynamic, absorb yourself into it and taking part in the rituals, or standing apart completely. This is the story of my life, deciding how much of a participant I want to be. With these kids, I got so caught up in wanting to be accepted that I forgot that I have a choice of not even caring if I am accepted. Because I don't want to be accepted on those terms. Being with them also makes me feel like an insecure teenager. Sheesh.

So last night I declined dinner and thought I would just meet them at the bar, and forego the after-hours club as well. I'm having a cash-flow problem. I thought, "If I can't make it through the night on 34 pesos (about $8), I am hanging out with the wrong people." But I was in good spirits in the end, and accompanied them to the club, but was already out of money by the time we got there. Somehow we avoided the 20-peso entrance fee, but then I was convinced to split a table with bottle service. Ah, yes. Spending money I don't have. Well, the decision was made, and I danced and had fun. Then one of the boys tried to take me home. We had been dancing a little and making out, but I didn't want to sleep with him. I don't know what it is more awkward--hanging out with someone you slept with drunkenly, or hanging out with someone you rejected. I guess it depends on the person. I try to minimize awkwardness.

In the taxi home, I am pretty sure the cab driver used our conversation about the manual transmission as an excuse to touch my legs repeatedly when talking about which feet you use to work which pedal. The touching thing is something I never know how to handle. I'm okay with casual contact, but with men I can't help but feel like they are just being lecherous. When I was out with that old guy last week, he kept putting his hand on my back or on my arms and part of me wanted to freak out and scream "DON'T TOUCH ME!" But I feel like that would be inappropriate; people are just more touch-y here. But it's like the situation with the forced-friend, like the allowance of physical contact is a slippery slope. I am still negotiating all this social terrain. It is good stuff for sleepless nights.

resting syndrome

2010-03-01T17:20:00.005-03:00

So, we find ourselves in March. That is always a surprise. How did you like February? I thought it was okay. Another month with no work, just "work."

I have been Down South for three months now. There are many days like today when I don't leave my neighborhood, don't even want to. I am in that mode now where I don't feel the need to go anywhere. I thought that I would kick it in Buenos Aires for three months max, and then move on somewhere else. But I don't really want to anymore, so I'm not going to. I'm not used to this feeling; usually I am so restless. I bought a bunch of books.

After the horrible experience at last week's fashion show, I gave myself a breather and wondered really, what I needed to do. I get the feeling that I am going about this all wrong, that I am going in too many directions to make an honest effort at any one thing. Usually this doesn't bother me; it is kind of my approach to dating as well. It has its pros and cons. I just find it really difficult to specialize. Everyone says you have to make a commitment to one thing/person, to specialize in certain things. But I don't want to, and I don't know how. I guess I learned this week, that I am definitely not going to specialize in fashion. Fuck that.

This week I am biting the bullet and going after some copywriting work. Uggh, I know. But although my rent is miniscule, my belly demands to bed fed every few hours. I just hope it's not horrible.

I did, however, make a promise to myself to spend my 30th birthday in a place I'd never heard of before. I think I will get on a bus and go somewhere. I will have to figure that out; it's just a few weeks away. Maybe I will go to Tigre. I've heard good things...

bruising and schmoozing

2010-02-25T04:34:00.003-03:00

I had a crappy day. I am shooting/writing up fashion week and spent all day at the expo center, shooting and interviewing but mostly just standing in fucking line because I applied for a press credential too late. Live and learn. I have decided that I never want to shoot a big, corporate fashion event ever again. It was a lot of super pretentious people parading around, and instead of doing my usual "well aren't we special," I was ingratiating myself to them and taking their photos.

I was really excited about it at first, but today was so rough. I like pretty things as much as the next girl (and then some, even) but I don't think I want to put fashion on a pedestal. Expensive clothes should be a guilty pleasure, and not really advertised, particularly if you live in a city where people regularly knock on your day and ask you if have any old clothes to give them. Maybe that is just my neighborhood.

After that long day, I ran off to meet a guy who'd offered me a ride out to a fancy suburb of Buenos Aires to see this rock show. I posted on a message board to see if anyone wanted to go, and he said he did. I called him to set up a time and it turns out he is 65 years old. Why, why, why, as a 65-year-old man, would you think it is kosher to offer to take a 29-year-old woman to a PUNK ROCK SHOW? When I explained to him I didn't think he'd enjoy it, he was like, "No, it sounds fun. I'd really like to go." I didn't know how to say I didn't think that would be cool, so I just said...well, okay. If you're down, I'm down. I'm not ageist at all. My best friend here is 62. I don't go to punk rock shows with her, but hey, everyone is different. But I was also confused by it.

I thought maybe it would be cool. I showed up half an hour late because I don't have a watch and I assumed that fashion week was running on schedule, but it most certainly wasn't. We chatted pleasantly but a few moments into my return to non-bitter humanity with pizza and beer, I decided it was too late to go (it really was), and that I just wanted to go home instead. Also, I was really not entertained by the situation. I tried to be engaged, but he was just talking at me. I have noticed that Argentine men do that. They just talk, and talk, and talk, and you just sit there and smile. They like to talk about this country and the politics and such but they also do the Indian thing of talking about things they have no clue about with the utmost authority. For example, I saw these two guys jumping extremely high and doing tricks. They were wearing those jumpy-shoe things. It was pretty cool. I said, "Look at those guys jumping over there." And he said, with the utmost authority, "Ah, yes, they have a bungee board." What he meant was, a trampoline. I said, "No, they have special devices attached to them." And he tried to fucking argue with me! He couldn't even see them. I don't have patience for people like this. Particularly when they are more than twice my age. I then hated myself for not listening to my gut, because my gut tends to be ageist and racist and classist all those stereotypes that guts have. It is a lot of effort to be open-minded.

Working makes me feel better after social mishaps like that, even though it was all fine but skeezy in other ways. When I came home, I set to work processing my shitty photos that I shot from a mile away, and as I was walking down the stairs to put some water on for tea, I fucking slipped and fell and fucked my shit up bad. I am a bumbling fool who has broken her ankle walking before, but I have never fallen down stairs. It was scary. I thought I had broken something. And you know what? All I could think was, "Great, now I have to go back to fucking Fashion Week tomorrow with two broken fingers and a goddamn broken tailbone."

Nothing is actually broken, but I do have to go back to Fashion Week tomorrow. I think this is someone's way of laughing at me. You want it bad--like, real bad? Here, have a broken leg. That's right. Bet you don't think Fashion Week is such a hardship now, do you?

arbitrary sexual boundaries

2010-02-19T16:26:00.003-03:00

Sex is all over the place here in Buenos Aires. It is light and cavalier and expected. I am just now beginning to understand how sexually Puritanical America is, where things are changing but anything sexual takes on various connotations ranging from clinical to taboo. Things are different here. I've been with a lot of guys, but to me the sex is a lot less interesting than the way guys open up to you right before, during, or after getting laid.

Last week I went on a lunch date with this older German guy. He tried to take me home after lunch. I was incredibly attracted to him. He was very well spoken and interesting, and he made me feel like a person. What was strange was that he was really interested in my sexual history. I deflected his questions because I didn't feel comfortable discussing it with him over our first date, in a quiet cafe where everyone could hear you. What was also strange was that he seemed turned on by how many people I've been with, something that I've been feeling kind of ashamed of lately. The whole experience made me feel like a blushing virgin or something. I felt like I should have been able to have this conversation with him, as an adult. But I couldn't. I just lacked the sexual vocabulary, and the wherewithal to talk about sex naturally.

Then last night these two boys tried to take me to a hotel. I met them in the Plaza Serrano with a friend. We'd only just gotten our beer when the blonde said to me, "You want to fuck me, don't you?" I don't remember what I said. I think I said he was too young for me--20 years old. (A total lie, because I love all men, young and old alike.) He was very good-looking and intense, and his straight-forward manner of speaking made me think he was probably a serial killer. His gaze made me uncomfortable, but I tried to laugh it off. I said, "What about my friend?" And he said, "No, she's not interested in sex, but you are. I can see it in your face."

This shocked me. Earlier in the evening my friend said that she hadn't been around any cocaine in Buenos Aires, and I said that it was offered to me constantly, and that half of the guys I've been with here have plied me with a little bit of coke. I don't know what about me resonates with these types of guys and situations that she's not getting into, but I would like to know. The 20-year-old then proceeded to ask me how I liked it and, thinking back to my lunch date with the German, I tried to not back down from the conversation, to use it as a learning experience to employ a sexual vocabulary. I am not good at talking about sex, and I am not good at expressing what I am into or not into. I guess I just don't really know. With every guy it is different, so it is hard for me to make generalizations. Like I don't want to ask a guy to go down on me if he gives lousy head--and I don't want to give instructions to a guy I'll never see again. But seeing as how we were in a noisy, crowded place, and I was sufficiently liquored up, we talked about sex for quite some time. That's when he popped the idea of a threesome.

I have never been with two guys once. Three yes, with another girl...but that was different. It was more of an orgiastic playtime situation. I imagine just being one girl with two guys is really intense. The idea of it appealed to me, but the way the blonde was looking at me really creeped me out. And when he proposed a hotel, I was like, okay, let's go. Why the fuck not.

But then this voice of responsibility suddenly appeared. I am trying to be more responsible, partially because I am all alone here with no one looking out for me, and partially because I am turning 30 next month and I am sick of people telling me I don't seem that old. I think I seem young because I am lost and naive and still don't seem to know better than a 23-year-old. So I am taking baby steps towards being more responsible. Like this week I bought a white shirt, even though I don't think I'm responsible enough to own white clothing. And then instead of getting in the cab with the boys, I suddenly sidestepped them and took a cab home.

You know, I didn't feel as good about myself as I thought I would. It would have been a memorable experience. And he was right--I really did want to fuck him.

the voices in my head say to chill the fuck out. oh, and i love you.

2010-02-12T18:14:00.006-03:00

The 90-degree weather keeps on coming, and I am just cruising with it. Okay, so I allowed myself to suffer a bit, and then decided it was not getting me anywhere.

I thought about Detox Doc the other day, and how he would have coaxed me out of that bitter mood I was in. Sometimes you just resign yourself to a fate, you know? I had resigned myself to being lost and hot and miserable. I don't know why. But another take-away message from my State of New York-sponsored detox program is that guilt/suffering/certainties are gifts from Satan that you do not have to accept. So, no thanks, darling of the darkness: return to sender.

I slid into this world here with some totally random rules for myself that have been making my life unnecessarily difficult. Like I told myself I wouldn't socialize with English-speakers (so I could accelerate my Spanish learning), I wouldn't go out with boys (distractions!), and that I would really live within my means...a steady diet of cheese, salami, and sliced bread. I don't know why I thought I should come to Buenos Aires and live like a fucking nun. I guess that is just how I am. And every time I faltered on these rules, I would feel really bad about it. But then Detox Doc came to me in my insomniatic haze last night and spoke magical things to me, mainly calling me silly for placing these unrealistic--and sort of pointless--expectations on myself.

I sent him a Christmas postcard. But I don't think he got it. Out of the dozen postcards I sent, I have only heard that two made it through. One was to San Francisco and one was to Chicago. I think the NYC post office just dumped them in the East River, which sucks. They were damn good postcards, and rather expensive to send.

Anyhow. I'm relaxing my rules, relaxing myself, and all is so much better when I'm not constantly berating myself for being a failure. Okay, so I'm not exactly a huge success story. Living off your savings in a country with a favorable exchange rate is not go-getter material, particularly if you're not even 30 years old. But the phantom Detox Doc said to me last night, "Who are you comparing yourself with?" And I was like...um...you know, my friend Playboy who is like an international telecommunications consultant and just bought a fucking Ducati. In New York City. And then there's Girlfriend, who is moving in with her girlfriend, and finishing up her fifth year in her secure and satisfying teaching career. Or, Christ, my little brother, who owns his own place in Chicago and regularly makes payments to his 401K. I guess I'm just jealous of people who don't go through life feeling like they're constantly walking on the wrong side of the street.

But I have other heroes too. Like you and you and you. Let me digress for a second.

For a hot minute I was sure I was going to marry this Straightedge Vegan I met in Chicago. And barring the obvious inherent WTF? in that imaginary coupling, there is the feeling that when you make open-and-shut decisions like that in your life, you miss out on a lot of the tortuous angst that makes you the well-rounded, articulate individual who can get along at most dinner parties. What is a cocktail hour if we can't discuss some sort of existential crisis? My whole life seems to be about toeing the lines between creativity and criminality. I think that is why I don't have any friends who are doctors, lawyers, or accountants. I like to start with people from the netherworld of "Okay, people, where the hell are we and where are we going?" If both of these premises are understood, I really don't know where to go from there.

There are people in my life like Playboy and Girlfriend and Little Brother who have more solid ground than I do, but the reason why we can still relate is that they are constantly changing their footing. We are all antsy in our own ways. Some people are accepting--of their jobs, their cities, their friends, their lovers. They are into settling down in some ways. And then there are those of us who don't know the meaning of settling down, no matter how secure they may be. I am in awe of people who can commit to their careers, their partners, and their cities. But I know they have a lot to do with people like me who can't commit to a damn thing. This great American travel writer once said, "You can't shoot a cannon from a raft," or something like that. And it's so true...! But if you did try it, it would certainly be a hell of a ride.

summer of sweat

2010-02-09T21:29:00.003-03:00

Self-pity isn't attractive on anyone, and I think I got it all out of my system. Geez, sorry again for that terrible last absolution post! Confession, blogging, same difference? Ugh.

Anyhow, things have been rolling along here in Buenos Fucken' Aires. It finally stopped raining for a minute and today I strolled around and was struck by how normal everything feels here. I am sweaty in February, still don't know anyone here, and have just gotten used to going for a walk with a map and a dictionary. Okay, so I don't usually take the dictionary with me. But I should.

My folks got me on video chat again yesterday. I have talked to them more since I moved than ever before. I am online all the time now, toiling around with my little projects. They caught me in a bad mood yesterday. I was chasing down a paycheck that should have come in September and was all bitter about it. It's hard enough for me to get assignments, and it turns out it's even harder for me to get paid for them. Me Ma said to me, "Well, you've chosen a very difficult line of work." This just killed me. Maybe I just hear criticism and head-shaking in everything she says to me, but it came across as, "Jesus H Christ, you are so stupid. You could have done any number of things that would have paid you. I seem to remember you actually having a salary at one point. Why the hell you feel the need to make everything so difficult is just beyond my comprehension."

She didn't say it. There's definitely a part of her and Dad that think that, which is why I try to avoid bitching about these kinds of difficulties. But like I said, they caught me in a bad spot, and as soon as we started to talk about, I felt like a complete asshole. Like here I am trying to "make it as a writer," whatever the hell that means. I don't know the first thing about the business, other than that I need to be writing ten times more than I am, selling five times more, and collecting checks in a timely fashion. I feel a kinship with the people peddling crap like four pairs of socks and a plastic binder, or the people trying to pass along badly photocopied fliers for lawyers, call girls and chemistry lessons on the street corners. I used to look at them and think, "There's got to be a more efficient way to do this," and I would sidestep them precipitously. But lately I think, "God, I know what that feels like." You don't know who wants to buy your crap, and so you just do what you know how to do, which is to ask every goddamn person who wants it within reach. Lately I buy the lighters and tissues from the wanderers and I take every flyer that someone hands me and I look at it. I wonder if this is working.

I hope it is. When there's no security, I guess, all we can do is hope. And try to stay out of grim situations as best as possible.

evolution of a hangover

2010-02-05T18:05:00.009-03:00

Last night was a night that seemed totally fine. But the more I thought about it, the more unsavory it seems. This is happening to me a lot lately and I need to P&D (process and dissect, as the SF contingency would say) it to see what the fuck is going on.

This morning it took me about two hours to get home from last night's adventure zone. I asked a boy for the wrong bus, he put me on it going in the wrong direction, and then I ended up walking almost an hour even still. At first I felt fine. But then I started thinking, and this is how it went:

9 am: That was fun. I love boys.

9:30 am: I probably drank too much last night.

10 am: I can't believe that guy wanted to do anal this morning.

10:15 am: Why does every guy in Palermo roll with so much blow?

10:20 am: This happened a few weeks ago, too.

10:21 am: That's kind of gross. Meh.

10:37 am: I wonder if that guy thinks I'm some kind of coke whore, or if this is just the MO around here. Kind of seems like it. Is it the scene or is it me? I really can't tell.

10:59 am: You know, the night started out with me being on a sort of date with that other guy. He was sweet. I don't even remember how the second guy entered the picture. I know I wasn't rude about it. We parted amicably. But he probably thinks I am the worst person ever.

11 am: I am the worst person ever.

Does this mean that I think too much (in retrospect), or not enough (before doing something)? I tried to be gentle with myself this morning. I told myself that I am probably more lonely than I realize, and that I should stay out of Palermo. That, and maybe I should think about moving back to Soberland. This kind of shit never happens there.

I felt strangely absolved when Boy A (the boy with whom the evening had originated) called me out over gchat on me switching horses mid-race. He told me he still wanted to hang out again, that he was into "non-exclusive relations" but didn't want to end up playing wingman for me all the time. I found every element of this exchange very confusing. It all seems very contradictory.

And now I am out of cigarettes and it is pouring rain again.

wander:lust

2010-02-01T21:45:00.003-03:00

It has been an eventful two weeks.

I met my Little Brother in Lima, where transit strikes canceled our first set of plans. This wasn't such a big deal. We managed to make it to Machu Picchu, despite some serious train problems, and then once we got there, we were stranded in the town of Aguas Calientes for almost a week with about 2,000 others. It was a really intense week--a slow roller coaster ride, to borrow a choice phrase from my friend Chris. Every day we got up hoping to figure out what the hell was going on, sort of hoping we could get out and continue on our journey to Lake Titicaca. But that couldn't and didn't happen. We were finally airlifted out on a helicopter on the sixth day.

So much went on that it's hard to figure out where to begin. There was a weird breaking off into tiny communities of nations: the Argentineans, the Brasilians, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Chileans, the Australians, the Americans. There was the animosity that developed as nation-centric rumors of corruption and bribery rippled through the town. And then there was the underlying panic concerning shortages of food, water, and level-headedness. But nobody really knew what was going on. With no organized way to disseminate information, everything was just hearsay. On the other hand, the stranded tourists were mostly 20-something backpackers, so every night was kind of a party. It was a very strange dynamic--something like Lord of the Flies meets Woodstock.

In the midst of all this, you'd think I would have some very interesting things to rant and rave about. Like how cool it was to ride in a Peruvian military copter over the Sacred Valley. Or what it was like to live in limbo for a week in such an international community. Or how the guy from the U.S. embassy in Lima sent out to mitigate Argentinean-American conflict looked kind of like Orlando Bloom. And I do...but somehow the biggest thing standing out in my mind from this hugely dramatic experience is that when I finally got to check my email somewhere around Day 4, I'd received a 30-word email from a boy I met in Uruguay just before New Year's, which sent me into a complete state of ecstasy despite the tenuous circumstances. And this, instead of all the other tremendously more interesting things that happened this week, is all I really want to think about.

I'm just as fucked up as so many of us in this regard. More than natural disasters and states of emergency, what fascinates and excites us the most is the possibility that there could be someone out there who finds us as appealing as we find them. And this is where the real excitement begins.

sexy feet, sexy life

2010-01-14T08:35:00.003-03:00

I have to confess that yesterday I did something so incredibly frivolous and girly that it was like I was almost possessed: I got a pedicure. I've never gone and done that before. But I have been thinking about it for a while, mostly because I walk around here staring at my feet all day. You have to, to avoid stepping in dog shit, tripping over the ruined sidewalks, or falling into a hole. Or, oh god, I almost stepped into a thick pool of blood congealing on the sidewalk the other day. There had been a traffic accident--a car and a motorcycle. I was ---> this <---- close to putting my sandaled foot in the blood. It shook me up so bad that I actually crossed myself and felt strangely better. The culture is pervading me in bizarre ways. I don't quite understand.

Anyhow I got this pedicure and then I walked around staring at my feet like they were someone else's feet, someone who knew what was going on, and I was just following her around. My friend and I went together but had to have back-to-back sessions so we were in the salon for a really long time. But it was cool inside, and I was excited to indulge. I started the week off in kind of a grim cloud of anxiety and apprehension. That is what happens when you do a bunch of stupid shit and then you have nobody to talk to about it. Treating myself to something nice made me feel better about everything. Okay, so I also treated myself to some ice cream and a brownie and a big salad for lunch and a pair of cheap sandals that I really needed...but the pedicure was the best.

So I feel the need to apologize for my last post, which was a little bleak and trashy. Not that I believe that I should have censored myself really, but I think it is a little unfair to write about shit like that when you are far away and not in constant contact. It causes people to worry about you.

But I am back to work on things in my slow, plodding way, and I feel good. I submitted my second magazine article this week and landed a third assignment this week which will be really fun to work on. I think I will even get to shoot photos for it! Everything is okay when I take a deep breath and say, "Be patient; things are slow; things take time." When I remember to say this to myself and keep moving forward according to plan, everything is fine. It's when I give into the Asian-American (maybe the worst combo of Type 'A' personalities) shrieking in my head that I think "Ohmygodwhatthefuckisgoingon, whatkindofchoiceshaveimade, whodoithinkiam, whatdoihavetoshow, whatamiworth, whoamikidding, youarethirtyyyearsoldnowactlikeit!!!!!"

Deep breath: as I was saying.

new decade, new continent, same shit

2010-01-10T14:14:00.005-03:00

It is 90 degrees and raining here in Buenos Aires and I am just lazing about my house, eating things and feeling the heat emanate from the walls.

It is my first "day off" in a while. After two action-packed weeks with Sexy that bled into some intense partying, I am feeling a little drained and sad. Part of it is because I am not doing a good job at keeping in touch with people so I sometimes feel lonely. The other part is that I have been wondering more and more what the hell I am doing down here, because it's definitely not working. But the biggest part I think is that in order to avoid thinking about this, I have wandered back into some choice addictions: booze, men, and cocaine, all of which are cheap, plentiful, and of decent--if not varying--quality in Buenos Aires.

I will tell you a secret. I am the worst kind of female in a lot of ways, a big romantic at heart who struggles against this perceived tendency towards sappiness through wanton hookups. But anyhow, I bring this up because I sort of thought I could detox from this hapless man-addiction I have down here, and was doing an okay job of it. But then I started down the slippery slope, and have already slept with more men this past week than I have in the past six months. It is a strange time.

I can have NSA sex sometimes, but it seems to be getting more difficult, like the strings want to attach themselves when I least expect it. Then I want to shy away from the whole scene altogether just to avoid any potential tricks my mind has in store for me. There was a moment last week when I was lying in bed with a gorgeous man, all aglow and happy, when I let my thoughts take me too far away and plunged me into deep regret. I started thinking to myself, "I couldn't marry this guy. Our first kiss was in a bathroom stall well past sunrise after doing a bunch of blow. What kind of story would that be at the wedding?" And as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I had to bolt, even though all was just fine and dandy until then.

Why can't things just be one way or the other? I'm fully aware I'm not going to meet the man of my dreams in some sleazy Buenos Aires nightclub. But I still get a perverse sense of satisfaction out of these encounters. My brain gets attached to these sorts of familiar melodramas. I'd been keeping a low profile, which is easy because I don't know anyone here. But also...not knowing anyone can get you into a lot of trouble. Because you just don't give a damn what anyone thinks.

Anyhow. I can't have the first post of 2010 be like this. So let me tell you that I had an incredible New Year's in Punta del Diablo, this small beach town on the Uruguayan coast about an hour away from the Brazilian border. We were walking down the beach under the full moon to a party when fireworks starting going off all around town: in front of us, behind us, to the sides. And everywhere there were boys. BOYS! We drank and danced and ate and kissed cute boys. That's pretty much all I want out of life, trite as it may seem. I'm not very demanding at all.

hobo holidays

2009-12-28T19:54:00.003-03:00

I have been couchsurfing here in Montevideo with Sexy for the past few nights. It has been a good time. A chatty Israeli made me eggs on Xmas Eve, and then I left to explore. The city was like a ghost town. I ended up attending Mass. When Mass ended, a woman enlisted me to walk her home because she did not feel safe because the streets were so deserted and dark. I went to retrieve Sexy at the hostel and we went out with some other travelers and partied until 8 in the morning with a group of Italian boys. Who knew people went out to discos on Xmas Eve? I think it was the first Xmas I was ever hungover. Later in the day we took a bus from our hostel to the house of our couchsurfing host. We wanted to make dinner for him and his other two surfers, so we went out to look for food. Everything was closed, so we ended up buying canned food at a gas station with an impressive alcohol selection. Our Xmas dinner consisted of a strange canned corn and chickpea tortilla, pasta with canned mushrooms, and champagne, beer, and white wine, all purchased at the gas station.

Yesterday the streets were still deserted, so Sexy and I wandered around taking photos and plotting our escape. We were walking through the Ciudad Viejo--the old city--when we heard some music coming from a back alley and saw some kids that we had seen dancing in a plaza earlier. We went to investigate and as soon as they saw us coming down the alley, they surrounded us and began chattering excitedly. At first we were a little frightened, and I couldnt understand what they were saying, but then said in unison: WELCOME!

Everyone in Montevideo is so friendly, and everyone always asks us the same thing: Why did you come to Uruguay? It is pretty charming. These kids were great. They ranged from about ten to eighteen years old, and they were dancing to a music they called techtonika. They welcomed us and offered to teach us some dance moves, and we chilled with them for a while. When we left, they even posed for a big group photo, which was to-die-for adorable.

Tomorrow we will take a bus to the beach and stay through New Years. We hear there will be a full moon on New Years Eve, which will be incredible! I still havent made my New Years resolutions, which I am very serious about. But I have some bus time to work this all out. I think it will have something to do with balancing work and play, trying to live a life of fewer extremes. But I dont know.

home in the rain

2009-12-19T14:00:00.003-03:00

I left my new house this afternoon to go shoot the pato semifinals at the Campo de Polo in Palermo, but it started sprinkling the second I stepped outside. It was also deadly hot and humid, so I thought about it and reluctantly turned home. Twenty minutes later, it was POURING. You could probably paddle across the cobblestone street right now.

Because it's raining, let's talk about a few of my favorite things (thus far in BsAs):

Colectivos
The city buses here are a crazy jumble of different colors, designs, and breakneck drivers. Some of the buses feel like mobile discotheques, decked out in glitter and stars. They're a great way to see the city, and cooler than the subway.

Heladerias, Librerias, Empanderias
These are my favorite 'ias.' The ice cream here is great, there are so many bookstores, and cheap empanadas.

Movie Clubs
I've been to see two movies so far, one for free, the other super cheap. Both were shown in tiny theaters (less than 20 people), and were just DVDs projected onto a screen. They were fantastic.

Jasmine
Everywhere, they sell jasmine flowers for 10 pesos a bunch. The other day I was on a bus and the bus driver had a few flowers sitting in a jar next to him.

Cute boys, all sorts
The men here are attractive without looking like they care or notice. There are men of European and Latin descent, bankers, artists, hippies. It is a little overwhelming. I have been unable to talk to the men here. Then yesterday a cute British boy said hello to me and I was too unused to talking to respond. I have only met one American boy so far, and he turned out to be a good friend of Joe's, which I found out later. I don't want to have anything to do with any kind of boys at the moment. (Except, of course, for the man I'm going to marry, who is providing me with a nice email affair for the moment. )

My new home
It's nice to have a real home to hide inside when it is raining. I think it would drive me a little crazy if I were stuck in the hostel downtown right now. But I'm not! I have moved, and I now have keys to a beautiful split-level home on the edge between Villa Crespo and Paternal, about a 40-minute bus ride from where I was before. I'm sharing the home with a charming gay couple, both of whom are extremely attractive, so it is the best of both worlds for me. I get to look at cute boys but not deal with any drama. I also have a beautiful terrace where I can hang my underwear to dry. Turns out I kind of love doing my laundry by hand.

diagnostics

2009-12-15T18:55:00.002-03:00

This week I had a terrible headache for about 168 hours. And I do mean 168 hours, and not 7 days. I would wake up in the middle of the night with my head aching, and in the morning my first thought would be, "God, my head still fucking hurts." It was awful.

The mosquitoes here are something fierce. My first day here, I was attacked by so many mosquitos in the nature reserve that I had to come home to wash up because my hands were covered in blood from swatting them. Naturally, I came to the conclusion that I had dengue, and just rested a lot and drank lots of water. But I didn't have a fever.

I thought it could be the red wine, so I stopped drinking red wine. I stopped drinking white wine. Then I stopped drinking beer. Still, headache.

Then a fellow student asked if I was eating anything different. Like any frugal traveler, I've been making some meals in my hostel, namely powdered soup. She suggested to check the soup ingredients; maybe it was MSG. I checked, and yep, they all had MSG. So I stopped eating the soups, but the headache still persisted.

My teacher said, "Maybe it's the cigarettes." I thought about this. The first day or two, I was still smoking my Winstons from home. Then I bought a pack of Camels (which give me a slight headache, even back in the States), and then switched to Parliaments. It seemed like the only thing left. I thought, "Good lord, what if I have to quit smoking?" I resolved to quit smoking and lasted six hours before I thought I'd switch brands again and see if it helped. So I found a store that sells Winstons and continued on my merry smoking way. I also drank a bottle of red wine.

After 168 hours, my headache disappeared.

Then, during class today, I suddenly had a random nosebleed.

10 days in

2009-12-11T18:14:00.004-03:00

I have begun to feel strangely comfortable here in Buenos Aires, even though I can't speak the language and I have no friends. The Internet helps a lot, I must admit. Also, things have started to move along in their own little way, and I am glad for all the distraction.

My biggest piece of news is that I sold a second story to a magazine, and it is a FOOD story, so maybe this will be the first step to writing about things that I love. It is a short piece, but it will be published in a nice, glossy magazine and they are paying me enough to almost pay a full month's rent here. Maybe that is the ticket to my existence as a writer, to get paid in US$ and live abroad.

That leads me to my second piece of news, which is that I have found a place to move into on Wednesday! I looked at three apartments in different neighborhoods. My instinct was to move into the first one I saw, which was in the trendy San Telmo neighborhood. I would have shared the house with four or five other students, and a young couple and their daughter. The place was appropriately untidy for my taste, and full of young travelers. But I think I am getting old, because I'm taking a place much further from the action, in Villa Crespo. It lacks the obvious charm of San Telmo, like the cobblestone streets and myriad cafes and galleries, but it feels more peaceful to me. And instead of living with a bunch of rag-taggers like myself, I will be sharing the house with a couple, two young men who are both artists in their own right. If I had known they were a couple right off the bat, I probably wouldn't have gone to see the place because I don't really like the idea of living with a couple. But everything just seemed so fucking perfect. They were so charming and hospitable, and their place is cute, cozy, and out of the way. I'm surprised that I am so excited to get out of the buzzing downtown area where I'm staying. But, like I said, I must be getting old. I also thought I'd be dying to meet other Americans and travelers, but it turns out I don't really care at the moment. I think more than anything, I am dying for a good night's sleep, and it turns out downtown Buenos Aires is not the place for that. After the drunk people and trash collectors have disappeared from the street, the street cleaning truck crawls down my block every night around 3 a.m. to wash away the grime with a high-pressure sprayer, and it is maddening.

There is only one other person in my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) class, a woman who is my father's age. She is all the company I need. Today we finished the first week of the two-week-long course, and it is boring and annoying for the most part, but sometimes interesting to think about one's native language in such elementary ways. I found the practice teaching to be incredibly fun. The students (six adults) were all over the place, but they were engaged. Of course, the first ten minutes of my class consisted of the students interrogating me about my ethnic heritage. Why do you look Asian if you were born in the States? There aren't too many Asian people here in Buenos Aires, although all the supermarkets seem to be owned by Chinese people (who actually speak Chinese). They were intense, but overall, delightful. One of the students invited us to a party as his house tonight, but I have been so crushed by this weird headache that I had to say no. I hope that he will extend the invitation some other time.

I think the real turning point for me was the other night when, for whatever reason, I started to think about returning to the States in April and I was seized with this feeling of anxiety and dread. I don't really know why the thought of going back freaks me out, but I'm going to let that simmer in the back of my mind and probably let it terrorize me late at night when I am done wondering if this persistent headache is a symptom of dengue.

tempting towns

2009-12-04T14:04:00.005-03:00

This morning I headed out to explore the barrio Retiro, another neighborhood abutting Microcentro, where I am staying. I passed by (another) protest in front of the University of Buenos Aires, gilded shopping centers, sidewalk cafes, and then went into the Retiro train station to have a look around. I love train stations.

With only a vague idea of which direction I was going, I followed a major road a short way to where it was no longer major. The road was suddenly unpaved, and the buildings now had numbers painted on by hand. There were dogs lying in the doorways, and the types of looks I was getting had changed from mostly indifference to curiosity. Instead of being another buzzing member of the glamorous hive of downtown, I was now walking slowly through a static town-within-a-town.

This part of town had a completely distinct personality. It was protected and segregated by highway overpasses, rusting train containers, abandoned tracks, and swaths of dusty roads. The residences ranged from cardboard lean-tos to brick cubes stacked two high, adorned with narrow, steel, spiral stairs. I wove my way through the lanes of houses. There were tons of people out, cooking, chatting, and of course staring at me. The past two days here, I've felt like I could be anywhere. But this morning I felt like I was somewhere new. I was incredibly happy.

I have been carrying my espresso-machine-sized camera haphazardly in a large canvas tote bag. Although my padded camera bag would be much better for it, I feel like it attracts a lot of attention. You know how in New York you can tell who the tourists are because they're wearing the backpacks on their stomachs and strangling their handbags while walking down Park Avenue? Well, here everyone does that. I've never really been the nervous type about my belongings--mostly since I'm more likely to damage them than anyone else--but here I've already been told to put my camera away twice. I am trying to be good about taking it out quickly to compose photos and then stashing it back. I desperately wanted to shoot photos while in this neighborhood, but instead I wandered blithely through. Although there was an appropriate amount of activity to make it feel safe, there was also an element of stillness that alerts a cautionary sense in me. It's like approaching a dog that is bounding around wagging its tail versus a dog that is just staring at you with its head sort of bent down.

It wasn't until that I emerged on the other end that I took my camera back out. Then I came across the entrance to a more decrepit-looking collection of homes. I couldn't tell how big it was because it was level, unlike the maze of two-story buildings I'd come through. I got even more excited because I am a hugely privileged dork fascinated by poor people and old-school urban development. Cogniscent of the cluster of police cars sitting in a clearing just there, I took out my camera and snapped a quick photo, then stood for a moment assessing the best way into this second village.

Promptly a policeman approached me and told me to leave, telling me it was very dangerous. I wondered whether he would prevent me from entering the encampment. If I were to walk through with my camera concealed, was it a sure thing that I'd be robbed? It was the middle of the day. I've been told I'm quite risk tolerant, and I briefly thought of just ignoring him and plunging in. On the other hand, I didn't want to be stupid. There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and if I were to get my camera jacked on my third day here, well, I would definitely see exactly where that line was. I followed his directions to get back to the preapproved areas of town, the whole time plotting a return without any belongings except my keys.

alone in argentina

2009-12-03T19:30:00.000-03:00

I got into Buenos Aires yesterday morning. After the very friendly taxi driver tried to charge me more than twice as much for the fare, I was deposited onto the bustling Calle Lavalle, a pedestrian-only strip surrounded by restaurants and shops and portenos marching around at a NYC pace.

The four-story climb to my hostel is worth it. My room is set with three single beds, separated by two nightstands. The senora of the house instructed me to sleep in the middle one. I would have laughed if I hadn't been so confused, because she had also just told me that the room was all my own. But, like a good houseguest, summarily took a shower and passed out in said middle bed. I love my room. It has a perfect one-foot-deep balcony with French doors draped in transluscent yellow netting, bathing my room in a golden glow of sun and cigarette smoke.

It is something like heaven.

Because I will be here for so long, I don't feel compelled to charge around in tourist mode. I spent a few hours yesterday and today trawling around and perfecting my use of three words: hola, si, and lo siento. "Hola" of course is hello. Then I say "si" to show that I can understand, but not really respond in a much deeper manner. And then I say "lo siento" to everyone who asks me for money or any further information, because I neither have the language capacity nor the pesitos to be of much help at all.

Last night it was my intention to take a nap and then go out for dinner, but I was so exhausted and overwhelmed that I just ate a granola bar and went back to bed. And, although I'm no stranger to eating in restaurants alone, the thought of it made me lonely more than excited.

Cue surreal single-note piano music.

I thought it would take a few days, por menos, for me to feel lonely and confused, but it only took ten hours. The night before I left, I dreamed of the boy who I went out with on Monday. Last night, I dreamed about Joe. And during today's highly unsettling afternoon siesta, I dreamed of Ex. This is not the kind of loneliness I was anticipating. It is deeper and weirder and more unwanted than any loneliness I've had before. But it is not alarming, mostly because I have nobody to talk to about it. And it only surfaces in my sleep. I guess that is reason enough to stay conscious.

The big-city aspect has a lot to do with it. My last two solo travels, I went to small places, where people would stop and talk to you and welcome you. When you come to a buzzing metropolis, the world does not slow down to fold you in. Big cities are all alike in that way. Part of me wants to leave and go to a smaller town, but I know I will stay here at least until Christmas. I am definitely the kind of person who pushes herself through things, the more distasteful the better, just to prove that I can do it. I also believe that the harder something is, the bigger the reward: no pain, no gain. But this trip isn't really about proving anything to anyone, and besides, I just pushed myself through a crappy two-year program and I really don't think I'm any better for it. This trip is supposed to be just about doing whatever the hell I want to do. The problem is, a really large part of me just wants to go out and drink tons of booze.

Why is that always what I want to do?

But no, mother, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm going to be patient, try to enjoy myself, and finish up this novel that is apparently too long according to first-novel publishing guidelines. All this not-being-able-to-communicate is going to be good for my novel. I can tell.

last minute freakout

2009-12-01T02:00:00.000-03:00

I got pulled over (again) today. Welcome back to Illinois! It did not stay my day off right.

This is going to be a somewhat frenetic post. I've ingested a lot of coffee and cigarettes.

Packing tonight was a tricky maneuver. I want to bring nothing and everything. I am obsessed with my summer dresses but cannot bring them all. And, more like, I will end up going out how I went out in New York, in disgusting cutoffs and dirty tee-shirts. I almost don't want to bring them to force myself to look better. But somehow I crammed a bunch of clothes into a bag and am now contemplating this obnoxious thing of beauty, my tripod. It is a separate piece of luggage. I can't not take it and yet I can't imagine taking it. The tripod has become a metaphor for all of my problems with this endeavor at all.

Got home last night after twelve intense days in California. Top 10 Highlights: 1) Eating a burrito with the dog in Dolores Park an hour after landing at SFO, 2) crashing a City Hall function with booze and schwag and hors d'oeuvres, 3) seeing that Ex is still adorable, 4) a 24-hour date with my peripatetic life partner that included a) biscuits, gravy, waffles, and crab for breakfast, b)watching the Heimlich Maneuver performed at dinner one night, and c) Point Break Live, 7) tailgating with Raiders fans and getting drunk by noon, 8) a sleepover party with Joe, 9) spending soft time with my friends at my old apartment, and 10) the idea of family time.

Bottom 5 buzzkillers: 1) breaking my very-needed cell phone my first morning in SF, 2) a return to the serious boozing and ensuing sicking, and 3) witnessing the fallout of a long-standing friendship gone bad, 4) helping a bloodied, beaten up man to his feet just down the block from my apartment, about an hour after I passed him drinking what smelled like cologne with his buddies, and 5) pissing all over myself in a port-a-potty.

I slept a blessed eight hours last night and then set about freaking out today, starting with getting pulled over. Tomorrow I get on an airplane and fly for fourteen hours. I think what I like best about airplane rides is that the act of booking a ticket and then actually going somewhere works well with my mentality of shoot first, ask questions later. I hate obsessive anxiety, which is going to party out tonight with the three shots of espresso I had earlier this evening. I know it wasn't the wisest move, but I had a lot to do, and I was on a date with a sweet boy who I will probably marry. I will tell you all about it some time. The date had two purposes: the minor one was to take away four hours of pre-trip anxiety. But the real reason I had to go out on a date today is because one thing about me that you probably don't know is that right before I make a big move or decision, I have to fall in love, have sex, (and not necessarily with the same person), then leave. This way, when I leave I can direct all of my obsessive, cyclical thoughts to dramatic romantic fantasies rather than putting myself through the wringer of decision-making anxiety. I recommend it highly. Why second-guess yourself when you can just escape to a fantasy world where everyone is in love--it's just the timing that is off?

Timing: It is everything that matters, completely out of our control, and, in the end, completely inconsequential. It's the perfect abstract concept to take the blame for everything.

See you in South America.

pre-perepatetic prep

2009-11-17T23:34:00.000-03:00

"Go, go, go, go, go you restless soul...you're going to find it."
Daniel Johnston, Go

The countdown is on (again). Tomorrow I'll be roaming the streets of my beloved San Francisco for the holidays, followed by a final day of teeth-fixing back in the Chi before heading off to the southern hemisphere for the winter. It's all very exciting. I can only think two things: 1) I am so ready, and 2) I am so scared.

I should be packed by now but I haven't really done shit. I tell myself that I'm going to a major metropolitan city after all, not the middle of the Amazon. Pre-trip prep in this case is really about mental preparations and not remembering to bring band-aids and floss (although I've read that tampons are hard to come by in Buenos Aires--really?).

But let's be honest here. I've largely avoided any kind of preparations largely out of fear, though, and not out of confidence. Because when I think about spending the next few months abroad, I get very nervous and scared. Specifically I fear the night that I don't have any planned distraction and end up feeling incredibly lost and lonely and think that as much as I try to elude this feeling, it will always be there. Furthermore, the more I move about, the more likely it is that I will feel lost and lonely. This makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

I think that a week in SF with friends will help to remedy my low levels of self-confidence. My extremely peripatetic friend (thank you, Bill Waterson, for teaching me this wonderful word) will be in town, so I am looking forward to hearing some of his insights on why we are so goddamn antsy. It's funny; I used to think he was somewhat delusional. It seemed like any time he was dissatisfied with things, he just picked up and moved somewhere else. This boy goes through apartments the way normal people go through underwear. I viewed his tendency to relocate as something of a neurosis, but lately I've been thinking that maybe he's onto something. When you fear being lost and alone and force yourself through this all the time, the possibility of this becoming a reality either fades or intensifies, and the outcome appears to be entirely under your control. This is a tremendous rush and relief, and it is quite addictive. In my little tastes of solo travel this past year, I got huge charges out of finding peace of mind both by myself and in the company of strangers in surreal circumstances. One day I will write a book about it.

Until then, I'll continue to pursue these frightening situations. It's a little masochistic, but I've become quite driven by it. I don't indulge in any more desperate fantasies that by switching locations, I will suddenly become enlightened as to my place in the world, or to the meaning of life, but I know the more I risk loneliness and confusion, the happier I am (and the more likely it is for me to meet my charming foreign life partner). Although not knowing what's going to happen is scary, what's even scarier is feeling like I know exactly what will happen...day...after day...after day...

why

2009-11-13T02:25:00.001-03:00

...have I been getting requests for platonic friendships on OkCupid?

Is this a Chicago thing?

on the wagon with help of phantom doctor

2009-11-09T20:30:00.003-03:00

I really miss Detox Doc. I try to imagine what he would say to me, what I would say to him. The conversation, I think, would be like this:

DD: Nice to see you. How are things?

SB: Ugggh, I'm back on the wagon. I haven't really had a drink in a month.

DD: Well, this sounds great! It sounds like you are successfully establishing your own boundaries with alcohol.

SB: Big freaking whoop.

DD: You don't sound too excited about this.

SB: It's easy to do this here because I'm in the woods with my parents. And I'm not exactly thrilled by these new boundaries. I just want to go back to my wily old ways.

DD: Well, you were back to your wily old ways, weren't you? But you stopped. Why? What was it like being back?

SB: Well, it was kind of different because here I have to drive, and driving drunk is very illegal. Other than that, things were okay. I was only drinking on the weekends, instead of every night. The nights were entertaining. And as sick as it may sound, I actually missed my hangovers. I get these great hangovers that are like being kind of tipsy all the next day, and everything seems silly. I can also then feel entitled to take naps even though I'm unemployed and live with my parents.

DD: Okay...but you stopped drinking.

SB: Partying is weird when you're unemployed and not in school or anything.

DD: (laughs) How so?

SB: Well, when you have all that pre-approved stress in your life, living it up a little is a pre-approved way to get rid of said stress. But when you're not doing anything, it's like, "What's your deal? What are you trying to avoid?"

DD: Does drinking always mean avoidance?

SB: Come on.

DD: All right. So what are you trying to avoid? People can have stress even if they're unemployed. In fact, that's even more stressful than being employed. When unemployment rates rise, so does substance abuse.

SB: I suppose so.

DD: So, you tried coping with the stress by drinking but weren't okay with it. Why?

SB: It was making me feel guilty.

DD: Guilty?

SB: Like, Jesus, I'm being a complete waste of space. After the happy-hangover effect wore off, it was always replaced with feeling like a waste of space. It's kind of stupid. I didn't really change what I did in the meanwhile, I just stopped drinking to avoid that fucking feeling.

DD: Well...that's a good thing, I guess. Where do you think that feeling was coming from?

SB: I don't know. Like I said, it was a stupid feeling. If I think about it really hard, I don't have anything to be ashamed of. I just have some downtime now, that's all. But whenever I got the post-hangover hangover going, it turned me into some sort of self-loathing freak of nature that wouldn't cut me a break at all. So actually, it wasn't the drinking that was the problem, it was that feeling of completely illogical guilt.

DD: Was it completely illogical? It helped you to moderate your drinking habits.

SB: But they didn't really need to be moderated.

DD: Everyone has different reactions to alcohol. If you were just drinking occasionally but they were having negative effects, it was an appropriate decision to change your drinking habits to avoid those negative effects. This is unlike before, when you just kept drinking through those negative effects. You should be proud of that. It's difficult to change your behavior, and it looks like you are doing it.

SB: You're right; I'm a fucking genius. Thanks, Doc.

DD: Seriously.

SB: It's just annoying because I'm drinking so little and it's making me crazy. I never used to get like this after the occasional drink. It's like all that sobriety has turned me into a pussy.

DD: Well, let's think back to last year. You were drinking between 50 and 60 drinks a week, and the reason why you could drink so much was because you weren't really feeling the effects. So, this new body chemistry is kind of a good thing.

SB: I should have known my genes would catch up with me. Last night I went out to dinner with my parents. My parents really don't drink at all, but my father has acquired this strange habit of carrying one of those double-shot bottles of Glenlivet that you get on the airplane, and he'll add a half-teaspoon of it to his glass of 7up. I'm not kidding. Half a fucking teaspoon. That single-serving scotch will make my father about twenty drinks. Incredulous, I asked him if he could actually taste the scotch.

He says he's very sensitive.

sweet november

2009-11-02T16:30:00.003-03:00

Last night I went to see Prince, my first boyfriend from high school. He wasn't feeling well and it was pretty late, so I picked him up and we just went for a drive around town. I actually had trouble remembering which house was his, and had to call and be reminded. He looked exactly the same. As we tooled around in the suburban darkness, he kept saying that it felt like we were in high school again. We haven't seen each other in more than three years, since Ex and I passed through Portland, where he was living with the girl he's now been married to for two years.

Prince and I were together for a little more than a year. We were each other's firsts, and tried to make it work when we both went off to college. I still hurt when I think back to the Tuesday afternoon that he broke up with me over the phone. I wonder if people ever really get over having their heart broken, or if it's just something we learn to ignore--this thought that someone we loved with every atom decided not to love us back anymore. It's been almost ten years since that happened, and nothing has hurt more than that since then. I've never held this against him. People tell you when you're that age that you're too young to be serious, that part of going to college is dating other people, and we manage to convince ourselves that being committed to just one person is some kind of a shortcoming.

I'm pretty sure his parents had something to do with our breakup, but more so, he probably just needed to get out there and have himself some college sex, and wasn't the type to do so with a committed girlfriend out in the ether. In the end, I have to be glad that Prince broke it off with me instead of trying to have it both ways. I am also glad we have always remained in touch.

As I piloted us around, Prince unloaded his burdens on me. We've always spoken very frankly with each other about the heaviest of existential dilemmas, and nothing tips that into intense self-loathing more than some serious family time. Overall, I got the sense that he's disappointed that all the things he feared would happen to him are happening. His marriage is beginning to resemble his parents' marriage, and in the absence of a serious passion, he's turned to placating himself with pleasant yet meaningless diversions.

After the coldest October turned into the wettest October in recent Chicagoland history, November is beautiful by comparison. Prince asked if we could go down to the lakefront for a little walk, so I parked the car and we walked down a winding pathway to Lake Michigan. There was a full moon out and mild breezes coming off the lake, and we dragged our heels through the sand. When we were in high school with no place to go, we would often come to the lake and do the same thing. We both had problems with our families and didn't like hanging out at home. The day before our winter formal, Prince got into a fight with his father and punched a cabinet so hard he broke his hand. After I got off work, I sometimes went to his house with whatever takeout I had scrounged from the restaurant and eat with his mother rather than returning home. We were both runners then, and running was a good way to get out of the house and blow off steam.

On our lakeside escapes, we would talk through our dramas in family and school and such. I bitched about the irrational restrictions and expectations my parents placed on me, and he would shake his head and tell me to do my best, that I was a good person. And he would express his frustration at his father's demands, and say he felt sorry for his mother. We would hold hands and talk about our futures, how we would get away from all of this. We didn't know why things were the way they were, but we swore that when we grew up things wouldn't be like this. We knew better. And then we would sigh and kiss and drive somewhere to get ice cream or hot chocolate.

Last night, instead of talking about his folks making decisions for him, he talked about feeling like he was in a life that he hadn't really chosen for himself...that it was just there, by default. It's not a bad life, but it's not what he had dreamed of. He hadn't really dreamed of anything other than getting away. And now that he's away, he's simply constructed the same cage of discontent for himself. There was no more talk about getting away and things getting better, but about not understanding how things got to be this way. It was like our talks from ten years ago, only without the hope that things would get better.

It made me very sad, but I identified with him completely. Detox Doc and I often talked about how resigned I was to being unhappy about a lot of things. I thought I had to go and save the world, to please my family, to "do the right thing," all difficult things to do, because anything worth doing is not only hard but requires sacrificing your own happiness. I was only sure I was doing the right thing if it made me miserable. This kind of thinking, Detox Doc told me, was just fucked up. It was an "error of logic." Throughout our time together, Detox Doc pointed out to me a number of such errors in the way I think about the world, thoughts that I really wanted to blame on my parents mostly, but what was the point? He told me the best thing to do was just to recognize these thoughts as errors, and not to give into them. Otherwise, you live in a constant state of discordance and misery, tolerable only with consistent sessions of ritual conciousness-deadening, like boozing and television.

Just when I was reaching the apex of my motivational/spiritual diatribe, Prince noticed a set of headlights at the top of the hill, and a few minutes later we were accosted by a pair of Glencoe squad cars. Two of the most good-looking cops I have ever encountered informed us we were trespassing and, after running our IDs and failing to appear threatening at all, told us to leave.

Back in the car, Prince asked me to take him home. The radio was playing Boston's "More than a Feeling," and I forced myself to talk over it, rather than doing what I normally do when I hear this song: turn it up, sing along, and indulge in the warm fuzzy memories that accompany any of the songs from the many mixtapes Prince made for me when we were dating. It was a strenuous effort. I told him about how I had gone to the Atacama Desert hoping to think my way out of a tedious situation, only to realize that for vague problems like these, thinking doesn't get you anywhere, only doing. When I dropped him off, I made him promise me that he would take some sort of action this year. Life is passing him by and he's just scared to make a move, scared to take matters into his own hands.

His wife didn't come out to Chicago with him this trip, and he told me things weren't bad with her, but they weren't exactly good either. And yes, ten years later, I still thought to myself that we would have been happy together. I thought of the tortuous relationships I'd endured and the blissful encounters I'd had, and honestly I think I could have traded it all for being with him the entire time. Somehow, it's nice to know that there is someone I still love and believe in after all this time, even if he is married to someone else and still afraid of cops. But in the end, love isn't enough to make a person happy if they're resigned themselves to pereptual malaise, to struggle with situations rather than coming to terms with them. It's the fucking serenity prayer: Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I really did learn a lot in that 12-step program, even if I only did some of the steps, and they were all out of order.

on the trigger

2009-10-15T18:44:00.003-03:00

Yesterday I left the house for the first time in two days and got a speeding ticket. 75 fucking dollars for going 41 mph in a 25 zone. I didn't even try to argue with him, which is totally unlike me. I haven't gotten a speeding ticket since I was clocked going 107 on the interstate in southern Illinois. That was 10 years ago. It didn't feel like I was going that fast. You'd think that for someone in my position of Not Doing Shit, going even 5 mph would feel incredibly fast. But I'm just really trigger happy lately. To make up for all this NDS, I am in extreme mode whenever I do move. Extreme Consumption, Extreme Velocities, Extreme Moodiness, which includes Extreme Impatience and Extreme Irritability. In other words, my existence lately is Extreme Extended PMS.

This is incredibly unfortunate for Mom & Pop, since our three-day grace period has long expired and it is the coldest Octotber in 22 years. Cold October, Family Time, and NDS is Serious Business's least favorite cocktail.

Now that I am back at home, many tasks I previously did on my own now have to pass the scrutiny of M&P. This includes eating dinner, going to the dentist, replacing broken equipment, and purchasing plane tickets. I was ready to get a flight to Buenos Aires in two weeks, but my parents asked me to stay until Christmas. The compromise was Thanksgiving. But instead of dipping into my Year of Serious Business fund, my father insisted I spend every waking moment compulsively checking his airline for an available flight on which I could use his frequent flier miles.

Just like female condoms, frequent flier miles sound like such a good idea until you try to use them. They sound convenient, more or less under your control, and kind of a no-brainer. But then you see the sad truth: the timing and situation has to be absolutely perfect, and when you finally get it to work, it's just not as good. Between now and January, there are only three days that I can fly out. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but to seal the deal I put a deposit on a Teach English/Learn Spanish course that starts the first week of December. This leaves me in that aggravating position of jockeying for a flight, and hoping that prices don't go up, or pulling the trigger now only to see seats open up later for less or better. I've never worried about shit like this before because I just don't care. I'll pay a little extra to not worry about it, just to have the ticket secured. But once someone else insists I care, and gives me reason to, it just about drives me crazy. Because at the end of the day, I still don't care.

Not being able to take care of these things drives me crazy and exacerbates my parentally-directed bitchiness. It's made even worse because then Pops will call me and say something like, "What do you want to do for dinner tonight? We'll go anywhere you want." Because this means that I will inevitably have a very upset stomach. An appetizer of self-loathing, an entree of hard-boiled love marinated for years in obligation, and finished off with a guilty dessert of vague anxiety is way too extravagant a meal to indulge in every fucking night.

Tonight, I really want some barbecued baby back ribs, though. Oh god. Ribs.

wired

2009-10-07T01:38:00.003-03:00

After living without a television for ten out of the last eleven years, I am suddenly spending a lot of time with a giant one that could crush us all. I stayed away from it for the first week or so, mostly because I didn't know what to do with it. Honestly, I didn't know that the cable box had to be turned on separately. And then I didn't know how to change channels. Then once I got that all figured out, I didn't know what to watch. So I just gave up.

Then one evening my friend Ash told me he was going to teach me how to watch television. He showed me the joys of his Tivo, and forced me to watch one episode of 30 Rock and one episode of the new 90210. I didn't really understand the humor behind 30 Rock, and 90210...well, everyone knows how to watch that. It has gotten much more risque since the Brenda/n Walsh days of my youth.

Although I wasn't too impressed with this foray back into television, I did like the "I'm-doing-something-but-not-really" feeling I got from it. So I started to watch things. Any movie set in New York (about 80 percent of all movies). Cartoons. The Office. When I found myself watching an America's Next Top Model marathon, though, I knew something had to change. So I shut off the television and promptly burned myself by placing two fingers, deliberately, on the coffee burner. I was seeing if it was on.

I really feel much more stupid when I'm at home. Part of it is because my mother doesn't allow me to cook, which means the huge segment of my brain devoted to gathering, preparing, and consuming food has gotten soft. The other part is that my father doesn't allow me to take care of things, like replacing my cell phone which broke last week. Another part is because of increased access to television. And still another part, I really think, is because survival in the suburbs is so much less involved than survival in the city. I no longer plot the seventeen different routes I can take to get somewhere and still pass by the bodega that sells the cheapest cigarettes, miss the hill that gets slick in the rain, get on the A train before it stops running express, and be above ground for the most likely part of the day that my latest crush could call me for drinks. No. Survival is now so bloody likely that I have to drink four cups of coffee a day to keep from falling asleep because so many circuits in my head have stopped blinking.

Until then, I have online dating to distract me. But even that is reaching its limits.

weekend warrior

2009-09-30T00:59:00.004-03:00

Last night around midnight I found myself in the backseat of a car cuddled up with a cute boy whose name I couldn't remember. I'd come out of a club where I was shooting photos of a high school acquaintance-turned-rap-star and was going to head back to my brother's place when this kid ran up to me and said, "Hey, nice boots."

Most people would say thanks and keep walking, particularly if they're tired as hell and still hurting a little bit from the cornucopia of free drinks with which I was paid Saturday night. But I haven't had sex in about six weeks now and am toeing the "fuck anything that moves / no really, I don't need sex" line in a tenuous way.

I really, really, really wanted to take this guy home, but I couldn't very well take him to Little Brother's apartment and further traumatize the one person I care about most in the entire world. And homeboy was on tour with his fellow art-school posse and had no place to take me to. But I think I was secretly hoping that if I drank more, I would be okay with anything. So there we were, killing a bottle of whiskey in an SUV parked right in front of the club.

This is when it came out that he was 25 and I am 29, and for the umpteenth time this year, I got the "really?" that sets off something weird and defensive and confusing in me. I get this a lot lately. I got it Saturday night from the 22-year-old who was shooting photos of drag queens with me, too. People always make some remark about how I should be thankful to be mistaken for being younger, but it always makes me feel incredibly immature and somehow stunted, like someone my age shouldn't be doing whatever it is I'm doing--like having random sex, being paid with booze, or smoking pot with eight young men I'd just met until 3 am on a Monday night. Then tonight I ended up at a fundraiser for a political candidate who turned and asked me if I just graduated from high school or college. This was because I was sitting between my folks, and it made me think that yep, living at home was yet another thing someone my age should not be doing.

I spent the day yesterday watching the entire first season of the show Party Down. Um, hilarious? One of the main characters debates moving home with his parents until the crew has to work a 20-year high school reunion and he's confronted with what happens when you move home. This part was a little too real for me to find hilarious. But still...

Anyhow, the point of this post is to say this: it's getting cold in Chicago and if I don't leave, my weekend boozing is going to go out of control as it pumps up to offset my creeping feelings of complete failure. I've decided to go to South America for at least three months and use Montevideo as my base. I wanted to leave on Oct. 20 but my pops wants me to stay through Thanksgiving. Also, I wanted to tell you that I suddenly understand the health care fiasco. Blue Cross Blue Shield denied me coverage because I was in substance abuse treatment last year. The funny thing is that if I hadn't been in treatment, I would probably be in much worse shape right now, but they would insure me.

Those fuckwads.

shady characters

2009-09-25T13:51:00.004-03:00

I am car-less in the suburbs today, and the rain has thwarted my plan to ride my bike into "town" to go food shopping. So, I am attached to the Internet and this is what I have discovered:

A)my ex-boyfriend is still as cute as ever

B)the guy who I'm shooting photos for tomorrow night is allegedly shady

I responded to a craigslist ad looking for event photographers for some party tomorrow night. When I called to get the details, I ended up talking to this Dude for about half an hour. Although all I wanted to know was how much I'd be paid and where/when to show up, he just wouldn't stop talking. During the course of our conversation, he let me know that he is A) gay-friendly, B) 6'3" and in great shape, and C) rich as all hell.

He also told me that I'd be paid "a C-note and some drink tickets" and that my photos didn't really matter. They are hiring five photographers, basically for the paparazzi-buzz effect. So I'm going to look hot and fire my flash a ton for a couple hours, then get wasted and walk back to my brother's apartment.

I was curious about this gregarious, burly rich guy so of course I googled his name. The second hit that came up was from this blog called Vengeful Purpose, run by a guy who is getting sued for libel or something. A former employee of Dude, he called him one of the most cunning and mean people he'd ever met. He wrote:

"I did see him actually fight (as in fist fight) and it was something I will never forget. I watched him get punched right in the face by a huge man he was arguing with and it seemed to have no effect on him. He wiped the blood from his face and then simply beat the man senseless!

He never made a sound or raised his voice- he just simply kept beating the man until the police arrived. The cops asked HIM what happened and then his ever present lawyer showed up and took [Dude] home.

Can anyone say special treatment?

I was told later by a co worker that "as long as [Dude] is talking you have nothing to fear - when he stops is when you should be concerned"

Hilarity! I cannot wait to meet this man.

dear anonymous commenter

2009-09-21T01:26:00.004-03:00

Thank you for your kind words on my blog this week. They really floored me--mostly because I was pretty sure of the fact that my readership was limited to a dozen people whom I know intimately on either coast, but also because it gave me the immensely satisfying and secure feeling of being appreciated by and connected to a complete stranger in this volatile world during a transitory time in my life.

Things are going as okay as they can be for someone who is a) freeloading at the suburban home of one's parents, b) dangerously sober most nights of the week, and c) steadily padding on some midwest poundage. On the bright side, I'm a) not working, b) getting a lot of sleep, and c) getting a much-needed root canal this week, hopefully. You know it's a weird situation when dental work is on your top three highlights list without the slightest bit of irony.

I haven't been doing nothing, though I don't feel like writing much lately. Without the glamorous backdrop of a boozy, sultry metropolis, engaging writing requires a lot more effort. Not that I haven't been having fun out here. Since my last post I danced myself sweaty at an amazing soul party, profiled a Wrigley Field beer vendor, took another lens in for repairs, went Girls Gone Wild in the photo booth at a dubstep show, took a walk through not one but TWO cemeteries, ate fried cheese at a Celtic festival, and trolled Hipsterfest (aka the Renegade Craft Fair) on an online date with a poet. And all this I've done in this massive Chicagoland Area without ever driving drunk a single time, thanks to the open-door policy I have at Little Brother's pad downtown. Yes, Moochfest 2009 is in full effect, now with Zero Shame Down!

Secret Plan 500c is slow-going, but I'm working on it. Thanks, to Mom and Pop, for putting me up and slowing me down (in the best possible way), and to Al Gore, for inventing the Internet.

soberland

2009-09-11T17:25:00.006-03:00

I also want to share with you something pretty personal. It's a book called Going Dry that I made for Detox Doc (lord how I miss him). Although the book was printed with a dedication to him, it is for you all as well.

It's short and mostly photos that you're familiar with. If you click the image, it'll download the file, which is 1.6 MB. I hope you like it.

xo

Update: Someone asked me to post a link to purchase a bound copy of 'Going Dry,' so here it is.

suburban mindfuck, or, life as a freelance journalist

2009-09-11T16:21:00.004-03:00

So, last night I was lying in bed with the window open, listening to the crickets and such when I heard a man cough and do the phlegmmy EKKRRR...ECK! thing with his throat. I didn't think too much of it for a few seconds when I suddenly realized "I'm in the middle of the woods! WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT?" You know, still in the NYC mindset of being okay with sirens, beatings, drunken shenanigans and car crashes going on within earshot. But in the suburban woodlife, a man clearing his throat outside your window is BLOOD-CURDLING.

Oh I miss New York. I've figured this out, that in order for me to live in New York as a freelance writer and photographer, I need to sell about 4,000 words a month for a dollar a word. That should get me one bedroom in six-bedroom house in Flatbush, health insurance, a MetroCard, incidentals such as replacing equipment I break when I am drunk, and just enough food and beverage to stop my gradual transformation into a Fat Girl. I currently have fucked up teeth and it turns out that even if I buy dental insurance right now, I'd have to wait 18 months before having the work I need done. So fuck that, my parents are going to pay for it because I carry their genes and they know that no quality gentleman wants to reproduce with a toothless girl.

Anyhow. My first story was published yesterday, and I was paid about fifteen cents a word for about 800 words. So, in terms of survival skills, it looks like I have enough to jump into a well wearing wearing an oily lead suit.

Or I could just live here with my Mom and Dad, which means I smoke less, drink less, and experience some sort of mental deterioration that I can only liken to adult onset retardation, with tendencies toward violence.

regression theory pt II

2009-08-25T11:45:00.003-03:00

The 970-mile drive from New York was surprisingly fun and fast. I was worried that I'd get bored and fall asleep and wake up dead, but with a stereo and a pack of cigarettes, I am pretty set. I think I'd be a great trucker. I drove a brand-new Ford Escape with 2 miles on it, and the second day I realized it was equipped with Sirius satellite radio. Pennsylvania seems like an absolutely beautiful state, full of rivers and green hills and little towns. Ohio and Indiana...mmm...not so much--although Ohio has some bitchin' metal stations. But I'd still love to do a photo series on the Midwest--with a larger format camera f'sho.

So: this brings me back to tha 'nois. All of my worldly possessions are, for the first time in 11 years, under one roof. The fact that the roof belongs to my parents is somewhat disturbing, but for some reason this isn't as alarming as it was, say, last year. Moving back home? Swell! I am the dog's nanny. It's hard to be upset when you are surrounded by pie and dinner in a rent-free environment where the landlords can be stressful and moody but in the end think that you're just the best, even though you don't do a damn thing.

The hardest thing for me is to restrain myself from telling my parents how to do things. Obviously, they've made it this far in life without melling them what to do, and of course I can appreciate that if they try to tell me what to do, I'd probably throw a 10th-grade-style tantrum. 10th grade was the last bastion of insanity, because you didn't have a driver's license, so there was never a good suburban escape plan; all you could do was scream. But sometimes I listen to my parents complain about things, or see the things they put up with, or the things that I feel like will destroy them, and I want to say something. It takes a lot of reserve to respect their lifestyles sometimes, or to understand the seeming contradictions in their lives. And then I kind of know how they feel when they see me doing stupid shit as well, things they don't understand, and I see why they are totally unable to restrain themselves from saying anything. They don't have to--they're my mom and dad.

And instead of changing things, you're just more likely to hide the things that other people find contentious, because you're sick of the same discussions. For me, it all comes back to smoking. This is something we will never be okay with; it is beyond discussion. And particularly as long as I'm living at home...nope. It does, however, mean that I am moving back into my early childhood bedroom, the one with a bathroom that has a window.

But seriously, what am I thinking? I'm not moving home. This is temporary. I gotta get myself on a boat right quick.

I miss New York. I always do.

I Love New York madonna
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last-minute love affair

2009-08-19T15:00:00.002-03:00

Taking a break from packing, cleaning, packing, cleaning.

Listening to this song nonstop:

It's pretty awesome.

So, because moving is stressful, I've been in an extreme form of pleasure-seeking as distraction. True to form, I've spent my final days in The NY being extremely lazy, boozing hard, and shacking up with a soon-to-be-24-year-old boy. My extreme-dating for a last-call love affair turned up 'meh's, so I gave up on it and then met this attractive Kid. I always said that 25 was my lower limit, but this isn't exactly dating, just fucking and talking about motorcycles.

It's exactly what I needed.

I'll be the first to admit that I have a somewhat tenuous relationship with sex and intimacy, and yes, I know the two are related. I always thought that I needed to be emotionally intimate with someone to really have good sex, but my experiences this past year have shown me two things: 1) intoxication is a pretty good substitute for emotional intimacy and 2) sex can often lead to intimacy. This second lesson I found somewhat surprising. I think I'm extremely dude-like in this respect, because I can totally identify with that postcoital period of feeling extremely open and being able to chat freely without the thought of sex looming overhead.

Sort of related: what's up with strangulation in sex? I guess I get it and I don't. It used to really freak me out, and I would put a stop to it if any guy tried to put his hands around my neck when we're fucking. It's kind of a weird situation that I don't really get--I mean, sort of, if there's nothing else to hold onto. But I totally let Kid choke me the other night, which was highly uncomfortable (as you can imagine) but I was comfortable enough with him to not freak out. I don't know, maybe my sexual tastes are changing. I can understand other forms of violence during sex, but the choking thing is mysterious to me, because there is a chance you could kill someone or pass out, and who wants to be fucking a dead girl? (Is necrophilia the attraction here? Shudder.)

In any case. The transition from intimacy-before-sex (and I'm not talking about high levels of intimacy here) to sex-leading-to-intimacy is a strange shift for me. It makes me feel like I've gotten extremely cynical to the point where I am past being protective of my body, but on the other hand it's very liberating. It leads to unexpected attachments. I guess if I think about it, if sex is something with which I have so many internal hangups, then getting those out of the way immediately helps to bridge the intimacy gap right quick. I know it's somewhat counterproductive for someone who fears being seen solely as a sex object, but sometimes I think that having sex right away will cure that. It's like, "Oh, I already had sex with her. Now do I want to keep doing it? Is she actually worth it?" And that's where the getting-to-know-you part comes in. Otherwise, if I postpone sex in the thought that we'll get to know each other first, I always find myself thinking that he's feigning interest just to get in my pants.

Is this a totally fucked up line of thinking?

recipe for a smackdown

2009-08-15T14:05:00.004-03:00

I almost punched a bitch last night. We were standing in line outside of Artichoke Pizza in the East Village, and I was in a sparkling good mood. I'd consumed 5 glasses of tequila and a beautiful, chocolate-and-ricotta-filled pastry topped with strawberries, hand-delivered and unrequested from a man who works around the corner who apparently has a crush on me and has been trying to seduce me with food. (I should probably marry him.)

There was a chick in the pizza line offering a running whine-a-lot on the line and all the people silly enough to queue, when I made some totally innocuous remark. Pride wounded, she retreated into the safety of her all-Asian-male entourage and called me a fat and ugly bitch. Apparently, this was the wittiest thing she'd ever thought of and she liked the sound of it, because then she started "rapping" this line over and over again: "That bitch is fat and ugly!" and then squealing with laughter.

I was not amused.

I let this go on while we made our way into the restaurant, then decided to try and combat it with love. I went up to her and tried to make nice, but she was terrified of me (rightfully so--don't fuck with a girl who is being wooed by a tattooed man with pastries) and she retreated again. I told her buddies that she needed to shut the fuck up or I'd beat the crap out of her. Her boys apologized profusely and two of them actually stepped out of my way and said "Go for it--she's drunk and annoying." I think they were afraid of me, too.

It was Neighbor's last night in the city, and I didn't want it to be brawl-filled, so I told them to get her out of my face, and they pulled her outside. Then we were rewarded with delicious crab-topped, artichoke-filled, and arrabiata pizza. As we were making our way down the sidewalk, stupid bitch somehow made it within five yards of me and I gave her an extreme verbal punishing that was about to escalate into her face being rubbed in the sidewalk before Neighbor's Boyfriend rightfully talked me down, telling me that annihilating her would be as satisfactory as kicking a seven-year-old's ass. The confrontation was proof of this. When I stepped up to her she cowered again and was like, "I don't know what you're talking about!" How can you possible have a good fight with someone who won't even own their shit-talking? Weak sauce.

It's been a long time since I've been so close to throwing down. Rage is a poisonous thing that I don't enjoy (although everyone tells me I'm great fun when I'm filled with it--go figure). I hate anyone who is provokes me enough to send me into a rage, because it takes a lot. I think the magical combination here is pastry-fueled confidence, tequila-enhanced recklessness, and a pathetic cunt chanting the refrain: That bitch is fat and ugly.

I hate going out on the weekends. If anyone gets in my face tonight, they're going to have to deal with leftover rage: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

move date posted

2009-08-13T13:20:00.002-03:00

Due to lack of foresight, my plans of taking a 2o-hr train home on Sept. 6 have transformed into me renting a fucken automobile and driving home on Aug. 22, approximately 8 days away. Strangely enough, this hard move date is kind of comforting, and the idea of driving back to my parents' house with a car full of shit is soothing. Had you asked me a year ago what this kind of plan would have done to me, I would have probably kicked you in the face for even mentioning it. But somehow, moving back in with my folks and kicking it for a little while sounds like the greatest thing in the world right now.

I've completely been unable to take care of my life lately, even though I'm no longer in school and unemployed and on the dole. This means that all of my bills are past due and my shower has been unusable for a month. I'm sure there are more symptoms of my degenerating systems, but I can't think of any. I push these things out of my head; that's why they don't get taken care of. I like to blame not getting these things done on lack of internet all summer, but I know that's bullshit. I don't do it because I just don't fucking care.

I'm glad to be getting out of New York. I'm having a great time and I feel like something is about to happen. Realistically, I am going to get home and it's going to be suffocating that I'm going to hightail it out after three weeks, max. Who the hell knows where I'm going? Tell me how to get there. I'm listening.

restoring my blogging license

2009-07-29T14:11:00.003-03:00

So, if you haven't heard my embarrassing story yet, the moral of the story is to (a) not be a jackalope and (b) not to post the correct names of anything you publish in an anonymous blog, because the interwebs are interconnected! It was enough to make me want to tear down the blog, considering now that several people have attached the blog to me, it feels like just a matter of time before my parents get online and read about the sordid details of my life.

This is why I could never run for office. Among other things, yes. Shut the fuck up.

Anyhow, I'm tentatively picking up the blog again whenever I get Internet access, mostly just to keep on with the pre-trip planning. I've recently decided to not get on any airplanes, because planes are for people in a hurry, which I am decidedly not. So I was looking up overseas freight travel, where you can get on a cargo ship, only passage to Australia was something like $3,000. And, just like a cruise ship, you can get screwed more as a single person. What does the world have against the ugly?

Next thing I know, I'm on this crazy site called FindACrew where all these dudes--because the site is predominantly older white men with boats, imagine that--are looking for people to sail somewhere with them. I guess sailing and/or boat ownership is mostly a guy's thing? It's a little creepy because a lot of the men specify that they're only looking for female crew members. Hey dude, how's that plan to create a floating harem working out for you? And there's just something a little scary about getting on a boat--where rules and laws and taxes don't apply--and going out into the middle of nowhere with someone you don't know. Ever since I saw the movie Donkey Punch I haven't really been able to look at boats--or boat people--in the same way. I guess it would be okay if there were a bunch of people on board. Otherwise it just sounds like the setup for a rape and homicide in international waters.

I really can't tell when I'm just being paranoid. I wish I could just trust everyone.

big deal

2009-07-22T15:01:00.007-03:00

I'm on the Internet!

I have big news everyones, which is that I have my first assignment. Last week I pitched a story idea to a magazine and they accepted it, and today we worked out the details. It's a small assignment but I'm as excited as can be. Considering I've sent out less than 5 pitches in my entire magazine-writing career, this is very encouraging. I've been taking this great class that is encouraging me to tackle these kinds of things while teaching me the business side of the industry, which is exactly what I need.

In other news, I am going on my fifth date of the week tonight. Yeah, I know. What the fuck am I doing dating when I'm about to leave town? I'll tell you what I'm doing: looking for the last great love affair to define my two-year stint in New York. I've also started drinking again, after a brief digression back into Moderationland. I love Detox Doc, because he basically called AA and NA people the extremists of the recovery world. Drinking is good for me, I just have to keep one hand on the wagon, two feet on the ground.

So far, so good. Whiskey is just as pleasant as I remember it.

fumb as duck

2009-07-13T18:07:00.002-03:00

I took a leave of absence from Soberland, as Detox Doc likes to call it, and tried to go to a place called Moderationland. At first it worked, and then it didn't really work, and then I did some things that were not part of the plan, including cocaine and fucking a friend...something I have managed to not do up until now. Not god-awful or anything, but things continued to go a little haywire and my body just felt on a wreckage course. Still, I would have probably tried to continue my stay in Moderationland only I ended up on this funny date last night...

I haven't been on OkCupid in forever, and then I got a random message from a young guy that really said nothing. But, unlike the last OKC experience, we actually planned a date by the third email. We all know how unpicky I am, but I thought maybe I should actually try and glean some information about him before I met up with him, so I looked at his profile and saw that he didn't smoke, didn't drink, and didn't do drugs--which is pretty odd for a 25-year-old guy who lives in New York City, don'cha think. That's when a light went off in my head and I realized the last time I'd updated my profile, I was deep in the heart of Soberland. I hastily sent him a message, explaining the situation. And the next day, he replied quite charmingly that he had recently gotten out of rehab, and that he'd still be down to hang out, provided we didn't go to a bar.

I can now say that I've been invited, on a first date, to attend, as a second date, an NA meeting. And I can also now say that I've been extremely shamed into hearing the own denial in my voice, when I heard myself saying why I never stuck with the groups, and why I didn't like Soberland, and why I thought I could conquer Moderationland. I sat with this young guy who had just returned from a 60-mile bike ride and was just oozing goodwill and gaining strength with the knowledge of his own limitations while I am still pointlessly pushing on mine, seeing that they are still there, and telling myself I can overcome them by...overcoming them.

I think it was the first time I didn't finish a hamburger.

So, yeah. Moderation...not working. Not really. I can feel it, not working. I don't know why I thought I could moderate drinking, when I can't do it with anything else in my life. And, as a result of this very nice boy being very nice, I wouldn't let him touch me. I also don't know why I went out with him when I'm planning to leave the city in less than two months. I have shit to do, and I am behind schedule.

I am returning to Soberland. Not because it was such a great place to be, but because I am now too tall for Moderationland. Every time I stand up I hit my head in there.

throwing darts

2009-06-15T16:05:00.005-03:00

I haven't been blogging lately because (a) I don't have Internet access at the moment, and (b) things are dull as shit.

In the midst of extreme boring-ness, I've taken a total scattershot approach to life lately, which means I've been trying to write, shoot photos, and get my life in order so I can tackle Secret Plan 500c, which is traveling the world come September in pursuit of whatever comes my way. It also means I've been experimenting with drinking like a ten-year-old. Erm...we can't really talk about it right now.

Anyhow, Thursday night I took my first stab at plotting out my route. Here she is, taking no account of my budget or anything like that, of course not:

Sept. 15 - Oct. 15: The Mosquito Coast (Nicaragua) and Bonanza/Rosita
Oct. 15 - Nov. 15 : Uruguay or Northern Brazil or Mexico...you know...somewhere
stopover in SF
Nov. 15 - January-ish: Micronesia
(meet up with my folks in Sydney for a wedding Jan. 3, 2010?)
Jan - Feb. 15: The Australian Outback
Feb. 15 - March 15: Kerala, S. India
Mar 15 - Apr. 15: Tbilisi, Georgia
Apr. 15 - May 15: Switzerland - Paris (shout out to my buddies, rest)
May 15 - June 15: Djibouti
June 15 - July 15: S. Africa (meet up with Little Brother for the World Cup)
July 15- Aug. 15 : Dakar, Senegal

This is a pretty random list of locations, but I had to start with something so I could focus on...something. Plans are subject to change and have already changed three times since plotting out this list. Or, want to join me on part of my journey? Let me know. Karim has signed up to go to Georgia with me. Karim has also got me re-thinking Zee Outback. But I just love the desert, you know. SAND. Who doesn't love sand?

Things are getting a bit desperate here on the not-doing-shit front. You'd think that having nothing to do in New York fucking City would be the best situation in the world, but throw in the broke factor, a perpetual guilt complex, lack of Internet, and sobriety, and it's not exactly the most winning-est combination. It's actually a recipe for wanting to join the military.

thank god for mountain time

2009-05-23T20:47:00.007-03:00

I meant to write when I was in San Francisco, to keep on top of things, and now I have to write this bumbling post that will take us through the past into plans for the future. San Francisco was a marvelous time. The weather was amazing, very un-SF. Definitely my favorite part was just doing very low-key things with good friends, tooling around town, gorging on things, and talking about life. I also caught up with past lovers--Ex, Love Affair, My New Best Friend, and even Joe showed up in town unannounced, though I couldn't really say I was surprised. I "celebrated" six months of sobriety in San Francisco. I ate many great meals, went for long walks on the beach, and remembered how and why I love San Francisco so much. Strangely enough, I also do not feel compelled to move back there at all--at least for the moment--I think mostly because it is so loving and familiar. The two weeks lolling about SF only reminded me that I have a tendency to lapse into hedonistic complacency in such circumstances. Right now, though, I am looking for some slightly masochistic adventure.

I think I've mentioned before that I hate my psychiatrist, but when I went to get a refill on my shhh-don't-drink-just-sleep pills before taking off for the west coast, she casually asked about my post-graduation plans. Because I don't take her very seriously, I just-as-casually responded that I had a crazy plan to travel around the world and do whatever the fuck I pleased, but it probably wasn't going to happen and would secretly drive me insane. It's something I've never mentioned to my detox doc/therapist, the one I love, because I do take him seriously, and I don't like to waste our time with my fanciful notions (of which there are many). But the funniest thing happened, which is that she said "Seriously, I'm a psychiatrist--and I don't give advice--but I want to say that your plan doesn't sound crazy." And we talked it through and she convinced me that it was worth pursuing, and that I should talk it through with other doc. After hearing her so unequivocally merit my plan not crazy, I pretty much decided that I was going to do it, though of course I've been secretly thinking of it all along.

I spent a lot of time talking through these new post-graduation plans in San Francisco, which are to spend an indefinite amount of time traveling and writing and shooting photos, and to do so ostensibly under the cover of research. More to come on this later, but every night now I have been falling asleep thinking of this, and it frightens me and excitens me so of course I know I have to do it, and I plan to leave in September. There is so much to plan and to worry about obsessively that it is almost enough to distract me from the overarching question of "is this really going to happen?"

Because it is. I stopped looking for jobs and decided, fuck, I'm going to employ myself this next year to do whatever it is I want to do, and I'm going to do a great fucking job at it. Also, I will hate myself forever if I back out of it now, and so this is why I've told everyone about it, including my family (and weren't they excited about it...).

The first person I called (and saw) when I came back was My Friend, whom I missed while I was away. I actually talked to him several times because we were finishing up a project together, and had to go over some stuff. I'd gotten him a graduation gift in SF and wanted to give it to him right away, so I scooted over to his place and we went for a walk. We talked about shit, plans, jobs, and as I sat there with him I felt both relieved and incredibly anxious. I wasn't sure what the feeling meant, maybe just relieved that I had made a decision of what to do and glad that we would have the whole summer ahead of us to fuck around, but anxious that I hadn't actually made any concrete plans. Then I wondered if the feeling had more to do with him and New York, because I'm not ready to say goodbye to New York just yet, or the people contained in it.

The next day we graduated. I hated graduation, but Mom came in to attend, so I had to go. My Friend and I were the only ones in our department who didn't buy graduation regalia; I appreciated his solidarity. Afterwards, Mom and I had dinner with My Friend, his roommate, and our families. It was cute. When dinner was winding down, My Friend squeezed himself between Mom and me and we chatted and I felt good until that weird feeling returned, the feeling of relief and anxiety, and I attributed it to having just graduated and being around proud parents and declining prosecco with a forced smile, and I tried to relax, but something was weird. Then our friend left, and I realized what was weird did in fact have more to do with my friend than the overall situation. The relief, I realized, was like this calmness I get from being around him, and the anxiety is the feeling I get that he is about to leave. It is like...being in love...why I hate being in love...why I have been quoted as saying "When I think I feel myself falling in love, my first impulse is to get into a car and drive as far away from the source as possible." The love-feeling is weird when it involves a friend, particularly when it comes at a moment when you are with your parents and theirs, and you could be getting married or something. Oof. The thought made me blush deeply. And then, in that moment, everything about our relationship flashed before my eyes and came into scrutiny.

Everyone knows I had a crush on My Friend way back when we'd first met, but then our relationship became completely desexualized because I never felt like the feeling was mutual at all, and I am pretty good at changing course. We are so safely couched in platonic-ville that it really can't go back there. But sometimes I feel so fucking attached to him that I wonder. Even more so than Joe, My Friend has been there for me this year. It's actually quite remarkable that we've not gone..there...because I do love the shit out of him. But rather than wanting to go there, I balk, because it's a desire that's completely asexual and I'm really not used to it. Because now it's just in a weird place of wanting to be a marriage without ever having been a romance.

After dinner, as Mom and I were walking home from the subway, I said, "I think I'm in love with My Friend." She just laughed. And that night, I did the typical girl thing of attributing every weird interaction between us to him being in love with me while simultaneously recalling every conversation in which we had specifically talked about various incompatibilities. I stayed up very late that night. The funny thing is that I actually thought everything through to a logical solution, which is to do nothing different and just to love on him the way I do. I love the way our relationship is now. Raising the stakes when I'm about to leave has always been my modus operandus, but I think that has changed. I really don't want to lose him as a friend, and will continue to get my kicks elsewhere if that's what it means. It's going to definitely be on my mind every fucking time I hang out with him now, which is weird, but I have owned this decision not to act on it.

I am now in the Catskills with Mom and Dad, staying at a hotel owned by the B-52s. It pretty much rules. There is no cell phone service up here, but of course there is wireless Internet. Tomorrow I am coming back to New York and I will have two guests waiting for me, kids I met in Bolivia who have been traveling through South America all this while. I have no idea how long they're staying with me.

I've just been bumbling around for a little while now, and I have work to do. I guess I better get used to all this motion and lack of structure.

captain crrunch time

2009-05-03T20:15:00.003-03:00

This was the train of thought today.

All right, Saturday, let's do this shit, and let's do it right.

Wait, it is not Saturday. It is Sunday.

Okay, let's do this shit, and let's do it fast.

Something just struck me as funny. In the midst of me trying to pull together all these disparate elements of my life while wrapping up this degree nonsense, I looked up at the tabs on this here blog: "Posting," "Settings," "Layout," and "Monetize."

That, in essence, is all I'm trying to do. Wrap my head around the content of my life, figure out what settings are appropriate/important, get the layout in order, and then click "monetize." Where is the damn "monetize" tab on my life?

oversaturation

2009-04-27T01:39:00.003-03:00

The lawyer I slept with was quoted in TIME magazine this week, a big 'ol pull quote that I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise but it was gigantic and in one of those sound-byte pages made for people with short attention spans. It made me laugh out loud when I read it today. This is the second time in two weeks that I've read quotes of past lovers in the mass media.

It made me feel like a loser.

ditched.

2009-04-25T22:11:00.004-03:00

I was really excited all week for my craigslist date today with a guy who responded to a post I put up Monday night. I told him that he sounded just like me, but with balls--both literally and metaphysically. He'd moved here from San Francisco to attend grad school, but disliking it, had dropped out. He'd recently given up The Drugs and The Booze and found himself enjoying a "less exciting" life, but felt more happy, productive, and optimistic, and was trying to make it as an artist. He sent me a photo and I thought he was cute, and we made plans to meet up today to enjoy the warm weather and to drop in at my friend's art show in Brooklyn. It was all really easy, and I had a really good feeling about it.

He was running late, but called to tell me so. We met up and chatted for a little bit; it was easy conversation, and I felt comfortable. He was covered with tattoos, which surprised me. I think we talked for about a half hour before walking to the show, which was more like an expose for these very out-of-place luxury lofts in Prospect Heights. I could tell he wasn't into it, but it's not like we were going to stay there forever. He wasn't making an attempt to even feign interest; I think he was too cool for that. Okay. I just wanted to say hello, and then we could go wherever.

The show was at a set of four buildings within a few blocks of each other, and we walked to the second building, met my friends at the top floor, and he said he was going to get a drink on the bottom floor, and I went out to the balcony to chat with my buddies for a bit. I'd had enough of the place already too, so I decided to make an exit as well, and texted him to meet me outside. I went out to have a cigarette and waited, and then called, but he didn't pick up. Hm. This made me uncomfortable. I waited another fifteen or twenty minutes just to make sure I wasn't being paranoid and crazy, to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I didn't think he was an asshole. Would he really just...leave?

I tapped out a stupid message, something like, "Wow, nice to meet you too," but that was just gutless. It was neither here nor there. I wanted to say, "You're really not as cute as your photo either," or "Jesus, at least say you've got diarrhea or something." But I also didn't want to send four text messages. I could only send one.

It was hot and I was thirsty. So I went and got myself a juice, and then sat down to drink it, wondering how I could possibly come out of this situation feeling okay--because really, I was not feeling okay. I have never been walked out on before. What a shitty fucking thing to do to someone for no good reason at all. I was really, fucking angry, and I wanted to be really, fucking mean. But at the same time, I really wanted to be wrong.

So I called him and, going straight to voicemail, was forced to leave a message that went something like this. "So...unless I'm mistaken...it looks like you just...took off...which is really, really, really not cool."

I felt kind of good about this message, because it said all that I wanted it to say: not cool, man. I do not approve. But part of me really wanted to be mean, because my feelings were hurt. I don't know why I couldn't be mean. I really wanted to be. I think the situation warranted it. What he did was mean. I didn't deserve to be treated that way, and I cannot comprehend what a person can be thinking when they do something like that. The situation was so innocuous. It wasn't even five in the afternoon, and we were both sober.

Recently I was talking to My Friend about online dating and how one can just be a complete asshole, because you have no connection to this person. By contrast, if you were set up with your co-worker's sister, or a friend of a friend, or something, you would have to maintain some level of etiquette because of group norms and accountability. I love My Friend and all, but he lacks a certain kind of humanity that some men lack. I would never treat a complete stranger badly, even if I know I'll never see them again. It has nothing to do with it coming back to haunt me, it's because it's a fucking human being, and treating each other badly puts poison into the collective consciousness. Why do we need to do that? How gutless and gross and pointless. To his point, though, particularly in the circles we run in these days, what's the guarantee that you'll never see this person again? That person you treat like shit may end up being your landlord, your creditor, your boss one day. How would that be, then?

I really hope that one day I run into him. One day I'll cover an art opening where he'll be this big success (who knows?) and I'll be there interviewing people or something and I hope our interaction will go something like this:

SB Hi! I hear Untitled #7 just sold for $3 million! That's amazing!
craigslist date who ditched me Thanks.
SB Your work has come a long way. Tell me, though, with your newfound fame and fortune, are you still a spineless asshole?
CLDWDM Huh?
SB You know, do you still just wince out of situations you find uncomfortable?
CLDWDM What...? What the fuck are you talking about?
SB I don't know, let's say you went on a date with a girl and wasn't into it, how would you handle it? Would you make a polite exit like a man, or, like a spineless asshole, just take off, leaving her to wonder what the hell happened for about 30 minutes?
CLDWDM Ah, shit...
SB Still single?
CLDWDM Yeah...
SB Well, let me give you another pointer. Try to keep the mentions of the ex-girlfriend(s) to fewer than fifteen, if you can, at least during the first hour of the date. But congratulations on all of your success otherwise.
CLDWDM ...Seriously? I thought you looked familiar.
SB Yeah, small world. Look for the interview in ArtForum, buddy.