A Hipster In His Room

And things are good. A cabrón keeps prank-calling me. I’m not sure I should answer this cabrón. They keep leaving messages, additionally. I don’t know what the messages say. I don’t know how they got my phone number, señor.

Anyway, life is good. Calling me on a Sunday, though? That’s ridiculous. It’s my day of leisure—I mean, come on.

It’s my day of rest. I listen to a good song at the moment. It’s good stuff.

My day, of rest, in order to do the things I planned on all week, etcétera.

I toiled all week for this, now some cabrón is calling me on a Sunday for no reason whatsoever.

It’s unjust.

Now, for the kicker. I have nothing else to do today.

Oh, and I’m listening to a record, actually. It’s a new fad, these days. These hipster kids actually listen to records, these days, you know?

I keep feeling like my phone is vibrating, again, though it’s not, in reality.

I have a loose cannon of a mouth, these days. It’s okay. Nobody will sue me over it.

Journals are good to post to the public, correct? I don’t know, actually. I wish I would stop being autocrítico.

That’s the truth.

Hey, and I wonder, why didn’t the person calling me leave a message? I guess they could have, in a perfectly normal world. But they did not. And so they lost my trust.

I suppose they could have left a message, but they’re just some spammer trying to make ends meet, right? I don’t know.

But they didn’t have to call me.

Nobody has to do anything.

Autocrítico, if you haven’t learned already, is bad.

Because if I’m autocrítico, I don’t publish anything. And that’s bad.

And anti-publishing is anti-me. And that’s not a good policy.

Because these policy wonks are just trying to make things go their way. But they aren’t accomplishing a thing. That’s the truth.

These policy guys, with their degrees and all, don’t get anything done but make their clocks tick.

And is making your clock tick a moral reason to do what you do?

And after all, I don’t know if the cabrón who keeps calling me is actually prank-calling or not. Maybe he or she is not actually a cabrón. (If you haven’t discerned already, the term is not a nice one).

But people who call me on Sundays don’t need my attention, I’m sure. It is my day of rest, after all.

I don’t actually answer many calls these days. Close to zero calls have I answered the past few days. I just can’t spend the time. You know? Because I have a job and all. Not really, however.

Listening to this brass band is good, though.

I like the music, largely because it’s good music.

If you have any grammatical tips for me, I would like not to hear them.

I keep listening to the same record on repeat. Yeah, that part I said about the hipsters was true. It was actually true.

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Coherence

A breeze comes along, blows some trees about, the air, changing pressure, or whatever is alluded to in science textbooks. People smoke a bunch outside of doors, though nobody ever enforces the rules. It’s okay with me, however. I find enforcing these rules myself to be rather much like what they call, “vigilante justice,” even though I’ve never experienced something like this. I just don’t think people care that much. The cord on my headphones is ridiculously long, as if I were a studio musician who needed the cord length in order to span the distance from the control room to the actual recording room. I look like a vigilante myself.

I am rather sick of the playlist that Spotify has prepared for me about the songs I loved for the year. Last year, that is. It would make sense why I’m sick of it. And so I switch it to the Smiths, an artist I guess I didn’t listen to enough last year to get ruined by the Spotify songs of the year playlist that was designed for me individually. Lucky me. I do like the Smiths. And so I guess these songs will be relegated to next year’s songs of the year playlist. And in due time, I suppose I’ll be sick of the Smiths, too. But that can never happen, I can hear you protesting. I guess you’re probably correct. I wrote some fiction here today, thus, completing a segment of novel material. Novel material. Yes, that’s worth repeating.

I used to have a passion for straight razors, I will tell you. I suppose I thought I was Sweeny Todd or something. No, that’s incorrect, I didn’t think I was him, as that would be screwed up. But I did think I was a renaissance man of sorts. And so I used straight razors for about a year for those motives. I stopped after some time, just because it was not a comfortable shave, we’ll leave it at that. I prefer Gillette Mach 3 (yes, I’ll give credit where it’s due, relax). Why do I like the Smiths so much, you ask? Because they’re good. Listen to them. I think they’re irreverent, too, and so that’s a good thing for my taste. Irreverence earns points in my corner of the fighting ring, I suppose. But the material I write isn’t irreverent, is it? I think some of my fiction may be, but I never share that with anyone. That’s because I’m convinced it’s garbage. I know it probably is not. But I don’t need convincing, obviously. I’m just too egregiously self-centered to release it to the public.

Oh, and I guess I should give credit where it’s due to the Smiths, too. Though I’m not making a works cited or anything for this piece. You’ll have to take my word for it. I give them credit. I can’t really tell them, either. So it’s an implicit works cited, I suppose. Just don’t repeat that in your papers for academia, because the teacher won’t like that (it’s certain).

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Chronicle (Part 1)

Story (based on one day in a café):

In this place there are a few tables, all possessing a wood grain that is similar to a cedar tree. Silver poles hoist the tables. My laptop, a spectacle, is silver. Merchandise idles atop the shelves behind the register. My phenomenology now is one of the effects of caffeine pulsing through my nervous system. Backpack man leaves.  I ask for a double coffee. It comes. And I drink the whole thing within a two-minute period. Double coffee means double-espresso, to you people from America (like me). Here in Argentina, they don’t brew regular coffee at cafés, but rather, they brew espresso and call it coffee. This is not treason, but it’s something you have to get used to. When you order a coffee at a café, thus, you will be ordering espresso, not the regular coffee you’re used to brewing at home. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to find a Starbucks down here, at which they have all the regular drinks they normally have (save the really expensive, custom-designed Frappuccinos). I actually don’t know if they brew regular coffee at the Starbucks I’ve been to down here or not. It’s up to you to try that out. Try ordering a coffee at a Starbucks and see what they give you. My best guess is that they’d give you espresso. Isn’t that funny? Yes, it’s a cultural thing, I believe. I believe that the espresso they give you here is slightly less concentrated than the espresso I’m used to in the States, as well. This is because, well, I’m not in the position to speculate. But my conjecture is that this place may even be more coffee-friendly than the States. Yes, I said it. Also, coffee here is more of a social ritual, whereas in the States, on occasion it becomes social, the imbibing of coffee. Coffee in the United States is seen as a necessity for a good day. At least that’s the case for me.

Reflection (about a trip I took recently):

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I am on an excursion to a glacier. On occasion the glacier deposits some of itself into the water, occurring with a loud crash, much like a cymbal being whacked in an open auditorium. This glacier has a name, but I forget it. There are steel-reinforced pathways so that you can traipse around near the glacier and observe it like a scientist would. Though I’m sure a scientist would get closer. We observe like this for many minutes. We ask an intelligent-looking tourist to take our photo (we wouldn’t give the camera to just any old sucker). This glacier is cracked, superhuman looking, with blue shapes and white crests. It looks infinitely more complex than I would have imagined. Glaciers, in reality, tell a story of millions of years, perhaps more. That is the object I see over there near the water. The contrast with the water is immense. The water is blue and then the glacier stands up above the water. The glacier doesn’t want to be near the water. Perhaps someday it will wash away.

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Maté, fast pace, and life

Today I went to the gym to lift and run, completing both actions because I wanted to feel good. Then I walked all the way to Shopping Abasto and wasted time at said shopping mall. Wasted time looking for a coffee maker that would suffice, promising to myself I wouldn’t buy anything new, and leaving the mall with nothing. The competing desire was to do homework, but that’s not really a desire, but a task at hand, that I must complete, otherwise I’m screwed… Regardless of the things I just said, I still went to Shopping Abasto, and the pace of people inside there was glacially slow, and so I had to dodge several people on several different occasions. This was all fine, despite the fact that I felt like a trapeze artist once when I slipped past an elderly lady with a cane on the right side, barely squeaking by the wall and this person, whom I almost ran into, and who probably cursed me silently after I muttered “Lo siento,” under my breath, which means, literally, “I feel it.” I did feel it, but I couldn’t tell her at the time.

I wasted time at Shopping Abasto looking for a manual coffee grinder as well, an instrument I did not find there, and rather, I saw what I thought to be a music store, with Marshall amplifiers and a guitar on display, however, the store had nothing to do with musical equipment, but was a mere clothing store. Needless to say, I was highly disappointed by this mediocre performance by the store to show me, a major guitar enthusiast, an electric guitar setup on display, but to sell nothing of the like in the actual store. How ludicrous this was! And I didn’t even bother walking in, either.

My trip to Shopping Abasto was thus capped off by the fact that I had to wait for the subway on the way home, and this was fine. It concluded there, but then I was inspired to buy a Coke in a glass bottle at a kiosco, (a small miscellaneous food item store). And my impulse to write this blog was spurred by the simple fact that I do not wish to do anything homework-related tonight, even though I have a lot of work to do.

And anyway, the glass bottle Coke was ridiculously good, though it may have been the placebo effect from the bottle being made of glass that made the experience so pleasurable, who knows.

And my little brother called me and we talked of video games we used to play, and he recently started playing one of those long forgotten video games again, and thus I was tempted to log back in, but sanity helped me out and prevented me from doing that. This was a game that I had wasted many hours on in my past.

I ate in a small pizza shop where they played a ridiculously good song whose artist I was luckily able to find. The pizza had ham and some red peppers on it. I waited probably 30 minutes or fewer for my pizza to be prepared. This was acceptable to me. I was hungering for a pizza late in the day. And thus I capitalized on this desire.

And I also had gone to Villa La Angostura a couple weeks ago, which was a fun trip, indeed. It was fun primarily because of the novelty of the location; on dirt roads most of the time we drove, especially when you asked for a taxi, and it was hard to flag one down nonetheless… The location was beautiful as well; large lakes were around us, seemingly in every direction, and this was one of the key highlights. The blue expanses of lakes were quite stunning, there were few boats that I saw, at least, and perhaps they were out there, just maybe more in the distance. We did some biking, riding with about 35 people at once, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you have to, though I was able to enjoy a few moments of relative peace and solace during the bike ride, but a lot of it was spent trying not to hit other people in my group. It seemed like a pretty remote place. We flew in via the Bariloche airport, and after that we took about an hour and a half bus ride to where we were to stay. I bought maté and a cup to make it in, in order to integrate myself into Argentinian culture. Maté is a earthy tea that a lot of folks down here love. It is made in a small cup, and is drunk out of a straw, while not-quite-boiling water is poured on top of the fresh maté leaves. My host brother and a friend of mine both taught me the best methods for cultivating the best cup of maté. There are various techniques, but the most important takeaway would be that you don’t boil the water like you do with ordinary tea because this would scald the maté leaves.

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I check out the bookstore that is built in a theater and the room is cavernous, shelves lining the floor like a ballroom for books instead of people. Volumes on every matter are shelved from the floor to the ceiling, though, the ceiling in some places surpasses the height of any bookshelf. The ceiling is thirty feet high at its maximum. The philosophy section is stocked with every philosopher. Every subject is contained within this building, my paradise. Perhaps it contains most of the world’s knowledge. Large volumes, small manifestos, medium novels, tomes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, photo albums. I envy the people who work here; perhaps they know. It’s an emporium, the clerks selling, and I can imagine the money they pull. The motive is to expand minds. I think about asking the clerk whether she knows she has the best job. “El Ateneo” is the name. This bookstore is strange in its Willy Wonka candy factory way. Stores converted from theaters. That speaks to me as an injustice. Is their motive really to expand minds? I would feel slightly uneasy if it were. It’s a store!

Other places I have been are noteworthy. The poetry workshop meets in a building not too far away that reminds me of a library. The stairways are large and use up a lot of space; the floor is linoleum. I see multiple classrooms. My workshop meets in one of them. The class is in Spanish. I make one remark about someone’s work but that’s the only time I speak except to chat with the instructor afterward. He is a poet after all. Everyone in the class is nice. I am bringing a poem in today that I will workshop with the group. Figuring out poetry in Spanish is hard. Especially when the other poems suppose basic vocabulary you don’t have. Hard to figure out what comment to make about your compatriots’ work. I make it work. This is the first class.

I learn of the fact that everybody lines up in a queue to get on the bus, an unfriendly woman tells me, instead of the vague free-for-all that exists at U.S.A. bus stops, at least as things are in Boulder, Colorado. A guy chats me up after this, asking where I’m from and I say U.S.A., except not trying to brag about it. He grins and asks me about the nature of bus stops in the United States–I tell him that it is a free-for-all there. He says good luck and gets on a different bus, not the one I’m taking. I think about this later. What other parts of American society are strange? The bus stop thing is innocuous compared to certain things. It’s nice when people tell you things you’re doing wrong. Seriously, because otherwise, you’d never know!

I’ll never understand why everyone walks so slowly here. I feel like a pace car, driving pedestrian traffic like a jockey whips a horse. I am used to fast-paced U.S.A. streets, where people get angry when you don’t walk fast. No analogs exist for that in Buenos Aires. Perhaps people get angry when you don’t walk slow enough here. I don’t think people really get too angry in public here, at least to the naked eye of a United States observer. I hear a lot of car horns, but that’s normal. Normal phenomena like that exist in the U.S.A., too. I find myself rushing to compare things. U.S.A. phenomena to Argentinian ones. A bus stop in Boulder, for example, never will have a line formed. One distinction. I can’t tell why this is. Can’t determine whether it’s weird or not.

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The Stuff I Hear, The Stuff I Do

The conversations I hear most of the time are in Spanish, the bus driver speaks Spanish, the baristas speak Spanish, the cashiers speak Spanish. Yes, this is definitely immersion. I thought it might be like this, but really, I had no idea. This is because there is no predicting future situations, in my humble opinion. I could never have imagined that living in Argentina would be like this. I could have never imagined that the way I would feel is strangely inspired. But I do feel that way about my trip here, and that’s a good thing.

I also registered for a poetry workshop while I’m here—it’ll be at the cultural center nearby. I’m pretty excited for that. I’m expecting it to be different. I find the little things funny here, such as the sign on the street that says “Sr. Conductor.” This means something very ordinary in Spanish, but in English, to me, it would probably mean “senior conductor” of an orchestra or something. In Spanish it means the driver of the car, or literally “he who drives.” Or even more literally, “Mr. Driver.”

I have some significant experience under my belt now of navigating things. I still feel a little reliant on my smartphone to get places, but that feeling may subside with time. I have been writing down what I’ve been doing here every day. I am scoping out the music scene in order to find a good spot to go to listen to live music. I took out my own guitar relatively recently for the first time down here and played some music. Elliott Smith songs were the first that came to me.

I found a café called “Café La Poesía” yesterday and ate an enormous hamburger there. It was a nice place, good ambiance. And I whipped out my journal there and wrote a little poetry myself. That’s because “poesía” means poetry, you do know. Took Uber home because I’m not about walking in the rain. I think they may have had literary readings at this particular café as well. That fact would bode well for me because I am about to start writing some poetry in Spanish to use for my poetry workshop that is beginning at the cultural center.

And the café also had a ridiculously good playlist going when I was there. I act surprised that they know about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But, I guess those two bands were definitely worldwide acts, so I shouldn’t be that surprised. Yesterday was a wet and rainy day.

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Argentina Stories #2

I went, for the first time, to a university in a foreign country. First off, I’ll say: things were a little different. First things first, the teacher spoke only Spanish. This was in my Metaphysics class. It was being held at the University of Buenos Aires’s prestigious philosophy and letters building.

I met a few people in the class, including Alan, with whom I’ve arranged to study the work of Aristotle and Jorge Luis Borges. That is our homework for Tuesday’s marathon-like class. I say it’s marathon-like because I’ll have 6 hours of straight metaphysics on Tuesday of this upcoming week. That’s a lot of metaphysics for one day.

Alan is my first Argentinian friend, and I also met some of his friends that very same day. That was probably the highlight of my week: hanging out in the courtyard of the University of Buenos Aires philosophy and letters building with my new friends. The conversation subject was philosophy, of course, though I had to say words like “Phenomenology” in Spanish. I tried my best to express my ideas about philosophy.

I joined a gym as of late and am running there every single day (except Sunday, on which the gym is closed). The gym is nice. It pleases me to go there. It’s also right across the street from where I live. (No excuses).

I honestly didn’t expect to make so many friends in the first week of classes, but I did make friends, and I like them all. A metaphysics class, take note, is a good place for me to make friends. That is a good thing.

I still dream about writing novels down here. I try to write fiction and a journal every single day, as well, knowing my efforts some day will culminate in some sort of opus. Whether it’s an opus of fiction or poetry or an opus of funk (music reference), I don’t know what it will be. But stay prepared.

In whole, this whole Argentina thing was a good idea. I came down here, not quite knowing what to expect, but it is panning out in my favor. That is good–to say that.

The second class I went to at the University of Buenos Aires was a bit of a different story, as it was difficult to follow, and was designed for a student more advanced in the study of linguistics than I was. The class was called Phonology and Morphology (rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) I dropped said class and decided to enroll in another class that seems more manageable. I am liking the aspect of this trip that is related to the concept of freedom. I have a lot of freedom here. It’s not to say that I did not have freedom in Boulder, but I feel like life in Buenos Aires is pretty free. I can do almost anything I want down here.

And so, I will end up with a manageable schedule (that still includes Metaphysics in Spanish). That probably won’t be the easiest course I’ve taken in college. Nonetheless, it seems manageable, and as long as they don’t delve too much into Ancient Greek, I should turn out okay.

I’ve been taking the bus (colectivo) a lot more down here lately because in the subway (Subte), when you ride it, you don’t get to see surface-level things (such as places you’d want to check out later, or whatever else). I like flagging down the buses (you have to wave aggressively to get one to stop for you.) (It’s actually not that hard, but I said that for comic effect).

 

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Argentina Stories #1

I arrived here in Buenos Aires, Argentina two weeks ago exactly. When I got off the airplane I knew I was in a different place. Maybe it hadn’t set in yet, the excitement. But I got off the plane and realized that I had changed environments. This was not only a place in which they spoke Spanish only, most of the time, but a different ambiance. Not only were there Spanish words being hurled around by everyone, but there seemed to be a slightly different pace to the atmosphere. And this was only in the airport that I noticed this. This was my first impression of what Argentina was like.

I got to the meeting point where I was supposed to meet everyone else from my program, spoke a little Spanish with the person who was collecting us all, and then boarded a bus they had arranged to take us to a hotel. As we rode the bus through the city, I noticed buildings we passed; many, many buildings. Some were constructed of white bricks, others, pure glass and metal. The city left a distinct impression on me as we rode through its heart.

There were activities arranged for us when we arrived at the hotel. First, a welcome lunch during which we had to learn the Argentinian way of greeting one another or meeting someone for the first time. Women, and sometimes men, were to be kissed on the cheek and hugged. Men were to be hugged at the very least. This had to be done, otherwise, it could cause a cultural misunderstanding. So, all of us in the group kissed one another on the cheek and doled out hugs like free hug day. (None of us knew each other terribly well at this point).

But there was a camaraderie between us all already. All of us had chosen this program for a reason, of course. Thus, I feel like we all had a similar mindset. We all wanted to be in Buenos Aires, whether it was to study literature or to experience the culture or to travel around or to speak Spanish. All of us, I felt, had a reason to be here, and nobody really had the same reason.

Chronologically next was meeting my host family. Mariana greeted me at the hotel. She’s a lovely blonde woman who lives in Buenos Aires who has two kids, both of whom I’ve met, named Daniela and Hernán. The kids are older than me, though only by a little bit. The family is very warm, very nice.

I’ve taken every form of public transit now in the city. I’ve also taken Uber, which I was told is illegal here, but I took it anyway. The bus system is quite good, as is the subway. I will probably not get into the habit of taking Uber much, since it is far more expensive than the public forms of transit.

I will start my classes at UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires) next Monday. I will be taking Metaphysics and a Superior Logic class (the extension of symbolic logic). The classes will be entirely in Spanish. I will also be taking a Spanish language class at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) which is centered on oral production, as in, giving speeches, I suppose, though I haven’t looked at the syllabus extensively at this point. The FLACSO class starts a week later than the classes at UBA. The classes at UBA will be with local students, while the class at FLACSO will be with the other kids on my program, who hail from all over the United States, and a couple from outside of the States.

I am enjoying my time here so far, and I hope to write a lot more this semester about my experiences here. I have seen multiple cultural landmarks, including the Casa Rosada (the place where the president works), and the Teatro Colón, where aristocrats used to socialize and see shows, and where people still see shows (various operas and classical music) to this day. It is a luxurious theater with some of the best acoustics in any theater in existence today. There are large boxes, seats on the floor, as well as standing room up above at the top for people to enjoy the shows that are presented there.

I am glad to have had time to sit down and write this post, as I’ve been busy here, but not busy enough to prevent me from writing this post.

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