| Wintry Wonder |
[27 Jan 2008|11:36pm] |
It makes sense to me that now is the time I would return to my livejournal. I was thinking about Robyn, wondering how she's doing, where she is, and I thought this would be the best place to find out. I got more than I bargained for though, because it turns out I've stored lots of memories here.
It's nice to recollect.
My birthday's in a week and I'll be 25. Quarters, throw them in the pool and make a wish.
Lots of people are dying lately: Brad Renfro, Heath Ledger, my middle school French teacher's son, that girl Chase from Wesleyan. It's not a good time to be young it seems. I could go on and on about how unfair it all is, but I think what I could've said is well expressed by the sentiments of a "could've".
My application is in--there is officially a large chance that I will scamper off to a random city in the US for the summer for a Leadership Fellowship. Hopefully before that I will ship off to Cambodia and Vietnam.
I wrote my journal this way to illustrate that my life is a string of random disconnected details. I need a unifying subtext. It shall be invented post haste.
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| Mudanza |
[19 Jun 2006|12:36pm] |
Tomorrow afternoon we scatter.
I will trounce to Recoleta and Ariana to Palermo Hollywood, leaving behind our San Telmo home, cats, and an array of experiences that can never be brought back.
It's a strange situation right now, this limbo that I will be in for the next 8 weeks, straddling Argentine worlds before straddling US ones--a week out of my house but still a week away from my flight, followed by a New York City purgatory for another couple days and then dashing to Springfield and Costa Rica before "settling down" in the Western Holy Land. How am I such a vagabond?
Lately Ariana has been making fun of my accent in English. Apparently I sound slightly Argentine (or just weird). Not that I know how to explain it, but it's really just more of my Rochester side coming out because most of the English I speak is with my family. Who would've thought?
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[12 Jun 2006|10:42pm] |
I think one of the first things that changes in my immediate sense of How Things Are And Always Shall be is the date format. It turns out, as I'd long since known but never swalled as true, that it's arbitrary.
Seeing 06/04 versus 04/06 at this moment has absolutely no inherent meaning. I have no idea if we're talking about April or June because it's one of those "translation is pure context rendering" moments that make me feel slightly dizzy when confronted with numbers in this arrangement. Help! Save me from this context-less land, lest I sizzle under the merciless Palabra Suelta sun.
I also keep having these strange linguistic revelations about reflexive verbs, indirect verus direct object usage, and syntax. They're not deep and it's not even about the "clicking" aspect; it's that feeling that maybe your own language forgot something along the way. Though I often end up deciding it was a worthy sacrifice. English seems to have done a lot of grammatical dismissing and opted for great vocabulary variety.
The primary thing I've learned has been something forced on my head like a criss-cross of frayed webbing. Living alone: trapped underneath the net of Isolation(ism). With Andrea back in the states and Ariana on vacation, I'm alone in the house (minus two needy food digesting machines some people refer to as cats), and so on I go, plummetting into an internet abyss of translation frenzy, suffering from a shooting pain in my arms thanks to mild carpal tunnel, and a complete explosion of identity. Being alone makes me feel inhuman, unhuman, un me. How is it that my personality becomes so focused and enlived in the presence of others but becomes dulled and sickly alone. Okay, it's called extroversion. I'm a classic extrovert, who can't seem to crawl out of the abyss of introversion without the inspiration from another.
My senses and mind enter a dead zone and I end up schlepping through the day. I even get annoyed by the phone ringing because it requires contact with others. Needless to say, the vacuum effect caused by being alone in my house is disasterous for me.
Did I mention I'm having slight minimal death freak attacks lately? It's this metaphoric death thing again--leaving here is like a guillotine to the book of my life. The thing that is making it different for me is that I keep looking at this "closure" as one of choice as opposed to when we had to leave Wesleyan and it engendered this panicky feeling that boomed out: "You Have Reached the Point of No Return!" That's truly how it is--it's like we were about to head through Dante's inferno after a trip through Paraiso and you left knowing that you'd be officially excommunicated, no turning back ever because you've been forced out with a boot to the ass in the shape of an 8 x 10 scroll. It is nice that I have this reassuring voice lulling my mind with the soothing words: "you choose to live; you choose to return." I like that I've graduated because I make my decisions--as difficult as it is to possess this kind of responsibility, to be burdened with the charge for to measure out your every step forward. At the moment I'm feeling up on this burden of choice, so often a paralyzing force, but lately an energizing one. So yeah, the panicky feelings return every now and then, but it's not like it was with the guillotine's cruel chopping off of Wesleyan, endowing it with some kind of retrospective phantom limb. You know how sometimes you still feel it, the tender pulse of a Wesleyan existence? And then you kind of realize you maybe didn't need the limb, that one day you might even look at it as a crutch. Doubtful, but at least you know that you can go on to choose what's next.
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[17 Apr 2006|03:07am] |
Lately I've just been collecting idiomatic expressions in Spanish. Satisfied with the fully-harnassable vocabulary but unsatisfied with the colorlessness of my language, I sought out acrylic, oils, and paints to shade in this mutable linguistic monkey.
I think it started when I was out to dinner and after repeatedly asking the water to bring us some chimichurri sauce I gave up and decided to ask the frightening loud group of Texan men behind us if they'd let us borrow theirs.
Their response: "Hey boy, sure, and as we say in America--'Knock yourself out!'" I learned an essential life lesson from thos generous Texans who moments later were shouting out words like "fucking love branding dem cattle!" "shoving shit up their ass," and the like.
It reminds me of the question I used to be asked: "Why do 'yankees' (their nickname for us) always yell?" And it's true, why do we?
Jesus Christ made an appearance in a house full of agnostics, atheists and jews on Friday--Holy Friday--a sign masquerading in watermarks and woodgrain. As I prepared to wipe out the pesky water spot, apparently spilt from the overflowing chalice of holy water nearby, I noticed the oddly face-like appearance in the grain. Upon inspection it was none other than Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
There is photographic evidence to prove this.
I don't know how well-known this phenomenon was (or if it's still going on?) but I remember when ebay took off, launching a frenzy of possibility of "the vendible." Leftover boogers, used underwear, parents, and my personal favorite: a slice of burnt toast crusty with Jesus' face smashed into the middle like some kind of rubber stamp awaiting its inky blotting. What kind of meaning did this have for our culture, or what kind of meaning was it betraying? I mean honestly, the mentality of "one man's trash is another man's trash" is complete capitalist propganda, no? Every item is sale-worthy because some cracked out fool might be willing to buy it.
To my amusement everyone looked at me blank faced and then gasped upon inspection, followed by the comment: "No, that's Che Guevara." "What's the difference?" was the retort.
The lines have blurred over the years.
And so I experienced my first explicit miracle, which made me slightly nostalgic for intellectualism, a round-table discussion that via the clever manipulation of COL headiness would spin us into a discussion of the Form of the miracle. I kind of miss sitting in our little circle, oh so symbolic of our classroom's equal intellectual footing with the professor (for our radial proximity to some fixed center implied the equalled radiating extent of our own intellectualism toward each other). I can hardly even remember what kind of articles I had to read about miracles, the importance, the possibility, and the meaning of a miracle.
I'm actually taking an Art and Philosophy class in a "community college" that is turning out to be kind of dry. With 15 whole pages of reading (reread outloud in class...) and a superficial analysis of the philosophy as my only intellectual stimulation, I'm kind of hurting for a project. I finished my thesis one year ago this week I think.
I'm caving to a cultural difference finally, one that I'd stood my ground on for months now. Phone etiquette. I hate the way Argentines act on the phone, they're so awkward and strange and they expect the person they've called to do all the talking and questioning. I'm bending like a reed in the Buenos Aires wind. Language isn't just about vocab, grammar and idioms, it's a culturally appropriate application of all of the above. And that means playing their little phone game.
They've won.
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| Fraud |
[16 Mar 2006|07:31pm] |
I was really fascinated when seeing Capote about the connection between the story and To Kill a Mockingbird. Trials, justice, fairness, honesty, what can it all mean?
That quote keeps swimming in my head: "We grew up in the same house and I went out the front door and he went on the back." Unfortunately the Spanish subtitles keep swimming in there too and I am getting confused by my literally rendering of the subtitles and the original.
Summer's sliding away and so is my energy to go out and be social. Maybe it's been nice out for too long (we're going on almost a year of winter evasion--season fraud is a serious crime that can result in major fines). Whatever it is, the thunderstorm last night and the "robbing of an alley cat" might have jerked me back into motion. This cat, the splitting-image of one I saw on a Reward poster (500 Pesos, please return Martino!) turned out to be another kind of fraud: cat fraud. After we caged him up in a kitty bag, dragged him home, and endured hours of squealing and whining (and crackles of lightning and howls of thunder), we learned, upon the owner's prompt 8:30 visit, that it was not his cat. Does turning an alley cat loose seem kind of depressing and wrong? Sure it belongs there, but you can't just bring it home, feed it, and then turn it out like that? Or I guess that's what soup kitchens are though.
So maybe I've been jerked into place or maybe I've been jerked into my reality. I have somehow come to recognize the absurdity of time. What does it matter if I sleep 5 hours at night and then 3 during a nap? I have no where to be during the nap so go ahead, take it. But it's so funny to me, so contradictory, that after all this time, it's finally become a reality for me: I have my own schedule and can do with it as I please. I didn't even take this much advantage of schedule plasticity because I often decided not to give myself morning commitments. Who cares if something's in the morning? Who cares if the hours of sleep are consecutive or not? Me less and less.
My existence is a fraud here though. I'm signed up for classes at legitimate universities and paying pennies by American standards; I work whenever I want and have no stress about deadlines; and somehow back in the US, people look upon my time here as legitimate emancipation and life. Though it is legitimate it's just surprising how impressed people can be with me. I mean, I'm impressed by how far I've come, but this is not a protestant life!
But thank god for that. Protestants are so difficult.
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| Hippies are a ubiquitous creature |
[07 Mar 2006|03:35am] |
When I say the word marzo (in Spanish) it doesn't may me think of American time, so there's been some delay in the uptake as regards my realizing almost one year has elapsed since Graduation. Freaking unbelievable.
Last week I went to a hippy town about 13 hours northwest of Buenos Aires. As with any good trip with a small group of people to a small town, it resulted in a benevolent repertoire of local chiding. My personal favorite was the development of FAS taunting.
Meaning:
Stephi's friends were visiting and they speak almost no Spanish so needless to say we conjectured, postulated, giggled, and snored in English. This meant a lot of "talking behind people's backs" because basically Argentineans have little to no understanding of spoken English. How did we know? We performed the fullproof test: vaginal secretion. If we said that phrase and someone in our vicinity laughed, snickered, or looked at us with an appalled face, we knew we were not in safe company. Generally no one laughs, so generally we, following the naughty path of poo, take up a psychological assessment of passers-by, fellow travelers, and dirty hippies whose children are stricken with random physical disorders and disabilities.
First we examine the hippy village we stayed in: "the first and only hippy museum in the world!"; strange lesbian couple living next door; good-natured adulterous family owners of our little home; ample marijuana smells. And yet despite all the raving about free love, the incense-swilled den has yielded a frighteningly high number of "different" children. Which is where my FAS obsession developed: Fetal Alchohol Syndrome. Hippies need to take care of their bodies once they have children or are about to. That's all I say.
My favorite story from the trip though is the emblematic bus drama. We went to the ticket "center," which was closed, and the pharmacist neighbor had us cross the street to visit the lady who "works out of her house." When she hobbled to her door demanding to know who we were, we wondered how it was that we were buying bus tickets to a major city from here, but there she was shelling out tickets and rummaging through her purse for her dentures. (Okay not really, but she might've done that before we entered.) Later the next day when we sat on her porch (the bus stop) she came outside: "What are you kids doing out here!?"
No, we were not waiting for the bus, she told us. There's a strike. Who sold us the tickets? Impossible! When!? Oh, you won't be able to leave here until Sunday. Meanwhile our friend's flight was Saturday morning so we asked her to opine other methods of escaping what amounted to the real Disneyland for hippies. A 3-hour cab ride and 140 pesos later we were sprawling around the busy streets of Cordoba looking for a place that might feed us at the unlikely feeding time of 7pm.
All I have to say is I'm glad the bus home wasn't cancelled.
At least being this far from Wesleyan hasn't propelled me too far from that odious hippy lifestyle. Traces of hippy pain and suffering will follow me my entire life. I'll never forget you Wesleyan, you taught me the meaning of hate.
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| Run away with my Oown |
[15 Feb 2006|06:54pm] |
After that haze of doubt, fear, and panic about returning to Buenos, here i am, 3 weeks later, more than just happy. As I put it to Ariana, it's the activeness of my choice to come back that makes me somehow feel more in control of my life and my happiness here. Originally it was almost like I took a plane to South America and jumped out with my parachute to see where I would land. I spent every second feeling "landed here" instead of "opting to be here." Exertion of will fills this place with a greater sense of purpose and intentionality. I choose you Buenos Aires.
And so life has developed--my job is going pretty well. Translation is a delightful adventure, a piecing together of jigsaw puzzles and a resistance to editting. Translation is a transposition, a mapping and remapping of one language's blue prints onto another's. For me though it is the great resistance to Improvement. I say this because the writing I'm currently translating is grade C music reviews written by underpaid interns. Snippets of my fall from grace cling to me though and I can't resist the occasional amelioration. I transpose your brain, I would muse to them.
And I feel free. No longer riddled by clogged, waxed ears, I can hear. When I went to the local health clinic (and shelled out 7 pesos--2.2 dollars after waiting in line for hours and wondering why beaurocracy can tolerate such little ruminition!) I awndered over to the "otorhinnolaringologo" (ear-nose-throat doctor) to flush out those pesty wax chunks that had trapped even peskier and swishier water in my left ear. When I looked over at the syringe instrument that sunctioned up gobs of water to expel into my ear, those freeing that lodged evil I knew I was saved. The bus ride home was deafeningly lovely.
Did I mention that earlier I had bought a syringe to perform such minor surgery on my own here (failed because I needed perscription ear-drops to soften and loosen the wax) the woman at the pharmacy gave me a syringe with a needle. I almost fainted when I saw it.
My current life also seems ripe for artisism. I am living with Andrea and Ariana and the house has this quality that is a cross beteen A Streetcar Named Desire (which I've never read but am going to buy first chance I get; my only knowledge of it coming from Todo Sobre Mi Madre) and Waiting for Godot. I did a photo shoot with Andrea today after being significantly overwhelmed by the theatrical layout of the room, her outfit, and the sparseness of the scene. Something about it is so quietly desperate and liminal. I want to write a play about it so much.
Living with them also has reminded me what makes me feel safe and happy about being at Wes. They walk around topless all the time, I'm surrounded by queerness, there's constant over-discussion of things like how something is cooked, what would be the best place for some object, etc. There's also something so liberating about not having personal space and realizing that personal space has always been necessary because public spaces suck up personal spaces by draining them of their ability to "background" oneself while with others.
So much for needing articulation--I'm ready to unleash the artist beast from within. And I've found a place to take Modern Dance and another to learn Jitterbug!
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| Articulated |
[06 Feb 2006|01:13am] |
I had been planning an entry on some recent musings about how I have felt inarticulated or maybe unarticulated since college--on how the ways I am are unsynchronized with how I want to be expressed. But the feeling, while still real, has felt distant from my consciousness; its articulation would be mere past-pruning. I still wonder why and how I can reaccess my self. Part of it is a language thing I think, living abroad and trying to stir up a personality with a hodgepodge of words whose subtlety is only partially grasped. In terms of the things of myself that I want articulated more, I am talking about missing dancing, that is a physical manifestation of my creativity, I am talking about lacking proximal friendships with a past, that is relationships of multiple years of shared histories.
The thing that I came to realize in the US is that my fear of losing myself, that is, losing key aspects of my personality to atrophy, was unfounded. I was articulated in my California trip and NYC visit. "Same old Joe!" I might muse some years from now.
Last night I had a long conversation about the US (surprise), and this guy was going on about how the US was like Rome. I said about 4 things that I don't really think I believed in, and I knew it at the time and I know it now and I don't care. Conversation sometimes happens for its own sake not for the sake expressing or articulating the self/true beliefs, and I didn't mind it. I would've a year ago I think.
I've been thinking about projecting into my future a bit, preparing for future articulations. This, in layman's terms, means I am thinking of starting a new language. Oh, and I have this Belgian friend (who every day I end up wanting to refer to as a Belgish friend...) who's made me realize there are a town of places in Europe I haven't considered living in that might be amusing. What if I learned Belgian French?
I need to find a more permanent housing situation than the extra bed in a living room.
I am 23.
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[17 Jan 2006|02:29am] |
Today I learned about a really important Freudian-famed concept-myth: the vagina dentata. This is a vagina with teeth. Freud was NOT pleased.
Please for the love of God go to this website: Disney Dentata
It's fun to see Emily and be silly and giggly.
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| Turning Points? |
[13 Jan 2006|11:58pm] |
It just came to me that I am "resigned" to going back to Argentina, not excited about it. And then I realized--wait, I can stay for as long or as little as I want.
I can't believe I'm less than 8 months free from a pre-paid calling card type existence based on number sequences of grades and calendars and I'm still convincing myself that there is some stringent clockwork limitation on my existence. I can move anywhere I want whenever I want. Sure I am going to Buenos Aires on the 24th, but I can leave whenever I see fit.
Financial matters aside, I can do what I want and never have I felt more aware of it. I am so pleased!
I think this epiphany came to hold real water while sitting talking with my mom last night about how I might apply for this job I would like to have in Austin, Texas. I could just do it. Just like I went to Argentina and then resigned myself to stay for "an indefinite amount of time," meaning, a substantial amount of time that will make my conscience lay quietly in its little hole. And thus cease badgering me and criticizing me for being too impatient.
And I feel more solidified in this belief now that I'm in San Jose. I went out for wine and cheese at this restaurant with my sister and her husband and some friends of theirs and I remembered that I had a dream once to open up such a place: a wine and cheesery. And I could do it some day once I feel settled in a place. Hey, I even defied superstition and flew on Friday the 13th!
However I feel the normal dropping down of principles and personal fundamentals. How high will I rank 1)living with friends 2)having a job I want 3)making money 4)proximity to family 5) free time, etc? These are the same questions I was asking before but I am suddenly in the mood to categorically reevulate my order of operations--which will cancel out which, how hefty will one weigh against another?
And then there's the new wrench to throw into the question--getting accustomed to the labeling of time differently, for example, a year truly isn't very much time. What's a year in the scheme of a possible 80 year life? Of course, milestones can occur in one day, so I think that is part of the reason I am hesitant to adjust to rapidly to a stretched idea of a time. Mere minutes can alter the direction of your life, you randomly meet a lover, you internet your way to a job, you settle into a routine that erupts into a chance encounter with a new friend.
I wanted to get this all down because I've been feeling empty and crashed. I saw Brokeback Mountain last night and it really left me with an open wound that's been edging out its corners eating me up. How could this movie simultaneously make me want desperately to be in love and yet at the same time to give up looking for love because it's bound for pain and unfulfillment?
( Where I pretend to be a film critic )
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| A mere writer de facto? |
[06 Jan 2006|09:08pm] |
I can't get over how self-referential the art world is. And I don't just mean the way writers dye a story like a stain-glass of authorial allusion. Obtuse or blatant, allusions are present and part of the fun. I'm talking about the self-referentiality made to the creation of the work. There seems to be no end to the storyline of a pained, tortured, stumped, lost, uninspired writer or artist, or to the travails of their artwork's production. And that's a generous way of putting it. Falling drop after drop out of the world's artistic fountain is the pitter patter of artist protagonists, doing their artistic thing, having artistic problems and issues. And I'm starting to wonder: why do writers have to be the ones who write?
Obviously this formulation of the question is self-belittling in its simplicity (duh, anyone who is writing is a writer so the only people who are writing are writers by definition of the act...), so I will word it as a negative question: what if the people who wrote books weren't writers? Meaning, what if they were writers de facto but not de jure?
I think maybe there'd be a whole, exciting new gamut of works. I guess technically they would still be the creations of "writers" (although I admit that on second thought I'm suspicious and pretensiously conscious that it would also be trash), but what kinds of perspectives would we gain, what kinds of themes is the artist hirself belittling by pretending an understanding of those people who experience lives outside the art world. I admit that it is another interesting and large assumption that writers actually do write about things/people outside the art world--one because the art world must immediately expand to include whatever new art falls into its fray and two because perhaps a certain kind of world experience predisposes a person to be a writer or to analyze/depict the world as an artist.
Okay, I realize that part of my problem is the formulation of the answer in this "Writers are a Special Caste" way but I don't really know who else except for a self-obsessed caste-member would write about their own caste so diligently, dramatically, and ceaselessly?
I am trying to think of a good analogy with another profession, but other professions aren't in the trade of analyzing/depicting the world, except for philosophers and I'm just as willing to ask the question, "what if philosophers weren't the ones philosophizing?"
* * *
Is there established writing etiquette in LJ for writing about two separate topics? Should I start a new entry? My LJ is more temporal than thematic? Or is it? What if I'm a LJ idiot savant who's created some kind of artistic masterpiece of LJ integrity, wholeness, and brilliance? I'm a VIRTUOUSO!?!? Heh.
Daniel and I were talking about the Gay Market because they've recently begun the broadcast of the gay channel Logo. An article I read attested to a $10 billion dollar advertising market (whatever that is) for US Gays, just slightly behind US Blacks and notably ahead of US Latinos. So we were thinking of ways to tap into the market and we wondered, could we sell insurance to gay domestic partners? It seems to me that insurance agents are in the business of making up things that need to be insured and providing coverage for them and then giving the money according to the stipulations of the policy. Why hasn't anyone thought of this, are we fools? I am going to ask my father.
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| Morbid |
[03 Jan 2006|04:15pm] |
I think I have an aversion to morbidity. Not a real aversion, just a public one. I have a tendency toward morbid thoughts, but whenever I express them outwardly, I shroud them in irony and humor.*
Like I've just been thinking about how I have a lot less anxiety issues lately, and I've joked to my family that it's because "there's no reason to be afraid of dying now that I have nothing to live for."
And honestly, I don't want to be afraid to say it and mean it. But I am because it sounds like a kind of prelude to a failed suicide attempt on a Lifetime movie. It's not that I'm depressed or suicidial it's just that I feel trapped, so resigned and unfrustratedly trapped, in this limbotic state of uncertainty. I feel like I'm a lung that's finished the oxygen-churning stage and has to move onto a new nourishing element but which can't figure out what that element is going be until it inhales a few things to see which energizes me the most.
That stupid psychological metaphor of a chapter in my life closing and representing a figurative death seems to have played out as a pretty honest one.
*Which reminds me of a line from Cheaper by the Dozen when they chastize one of their dozen: "We never say something like that without humor!" This will be my mantra if I become a parent. I like the idea of not scolding a child for words themselves but for the lack of proper intonality
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| Climatizing the weather and the body |
[23 Dec 2005|02:11am] |
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Home sweet home, let the family festivities begin. But first a dozen hours of sleep to make up for 24 hours of travelling and wakeful sleeping.
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| Please have your ticket ready for departure |
[20 Dec 2005|11:17pm] |
Tomorrow I leave for the US. After the 20 some odd hours of travel I will be able to subsume my US identity inside the capsule of "normal" again. Soon all my US foreign policy opinions will be internal instead of expatriotically political. Soon I will be surprised to find that every street interaction will be expected to be conducted in English (even if it occasionally is not). And soon I will miss Buenos Aires.
I'm excited to...
wear my new leather jacket since I'll be in leather-appropriate weather.
meet Sarah's fiance.
see my family.
flounce English words and neologisms around.
come bearing Argentine gifts in a cool-looking, rough, burlap santa sack.
see many friends.
I have the night-before-a-flight nervousness and anxiety. Inevitable.
I'll post upon a safe arrival in good old lake and upstate country.
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| White Latinos |
[15 Dec 2005|07:18pm] |
So I hung out with the aforementioned, potential, supposed novio the other day. We walked to Avenida de Mayo, the ever-sealed off street of protests, marches, parades, and tango shows. The show itself was a dull, geriatric spectacle, but our walk was anything but.
We continued our talk about Nationalism, wading through the roots and knots of identity, politics of self, and the mores of nation-building. The topic twisted into the germane genre of race and racism until finally settling into place into the definitions of Latino. He confronted me and accused me of being racist for not identifying as Latino.
The implications of this statement were so resoundingly different for me than for him that I almost didn't even know if we'd be able to talk about it coherently. My view of race, my US-entrenched past, had not prepared me to believe that this type of accusation could be possible. I am not Latino because I am not Latino. His accusation though was: you are not Latino because you refuse to acknowledge that you are.
Some explanation is in order, but honestly--because he disrupted my paradigm so much, incurred a kind of faze-shift that busted me out of the hitherto unrecognized "comfort zone" where I am just another whitey--I don't know if I can do his argument justice. People in Buenos Aires are Latino. Okay, we can accept that. People in Buenos Aires are generally of Spanish and Italian heritage (indigenous populations having been almost completely annihilated). okay, accept that too. I am of Italian heritage. Check. I must be Latino too. :::::error:::::
The logic isn't much of a leap but it deals a punch in its wake. He attested that the use of the word Latino was intentionally modified to distance certain people from the Latino culture in order to sneak out of the position of oppressed. In addition, our displacement further engenders oppression on those in "Latin" America.
The thing is though, is that social construct or not, the existence, maintainment, and fueling of this new definition makes it the "ennobled" one, the one given all the credit and elevated into our consciousness and reality. But he nonetheless offered an interesting point: there truly has been the creation of a revised definition of Latino that can be used to undermine our common past, perhaps stripping away our connection to the same past and thus "civilize" and "ennoble" us. It's a complicated network of oppressed (them) and oppressor (us) because it counts on current warped definitions of Latino and on unreliable (shifting based on birth place) definitions of Italian and Spanish heritage. Furthermore, it stays convoluted and unnoticed most of the type because in many of the countries of South America mestizaje is the norm, so the "of color" Latinoness carries with it an "expected" skin type. In most places Latino carries with it the implications of mestizaje, mixing of races, and thus part of this past and history. However, here in Argentina where mestizaje is an uncommon phenomonon (though still important and politically/socially repressed reality that many people "se desentienden"--intentionally ignore and "disunderstand").
Of course, the major issue must then lie in phenotype. Because racism here is just as color-based as in the rest of the world. The darker the person the more likely it is that we will see them getting less pay, being excluded from jobs, and being mistreated and mistrusted in daily interactions.
So now I wonder if it's more damaging or helpful to identify as "white latino" in the US. In some ways to associate the past is to raise the "Latino"'s commonness and allow it access to more opportunities, but it also ignores, and in ignoring, fails to undo the system of oppression that operates against these people.
I guess I made my decision.
Food for thought. And this is why I like this boy so much--he keeps making my mind work a mile a minute trying to untangle this network of confusion.
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| Hymenial Freedom |
[08 Dec 2005|09:58pm] |
Guess what day today is! It's Virgin Day! Hooray for virginity! I went to a celebration concert in the middle of the biggest street in South America (so they say), Libertador, the place where Peron gave a speech to millions of Argentineans. The concert starred opera singers and a full orchestra playing really good classical music and featured a climactic fireworks show. Despite the cheesiness of the finale the concert was incredible.
The only point of disappointment was that I couldn't find my date. He doesn't have a cell and although I'm pretty sure he wasn't standing me up, I'm kicking myself in the ass for allowing him to pick a meeting place I'd never been to before. I don't even know if I was waiting at the right place. What's worse though, it was a very good date concert.
Is it weird that the concert reminded me of 4th of July in the US?: picnic blankets, the sale of glowy, sparkly sticks and hot dogs, fireworks, couples lying on knits, summer weather, and evening crepuscule.
Do you think that's how you punctuate that sentence?
Apparently Virginity and Independence have a lot in common.
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[07 Dec 2005|12:40am] |
It seems like an obvious topic for an ex-pat, but for some reason I've never really dedicated much thought to it: Why do I love my country and yet simultaneously hate it?
Really the question for me has begun to boil down to, what is nationalism, what makes it tick, and why can't I shake it?
The subject of the war in Iraq and the US's involvement often treads down the path of the evils of capitalism and the US government, and I've frequently found myself in conversations about the unique beast that is being a US American where we whine and groan about how no other country can understand our situation. And so we perpetuate the superiority and imperialism of the US, thinking that we are indeed above all other countries.
Simultaneously though, I want to criticize a lot of the troublesome, frustrating, damaging things the US has done--the ruthless pursuit of Democracy that seems to strongarm with the sentiment that the ends justify the means (or that certain ends are more endworthy than others): tampering with Iraqi newspapers, garbling the US press, constituting and contributing to hierarchies of race, gender, and class in and out of the US (I could explain but I'm going to take this for granted for the moment), setting up puppet governments, among many other things. And then at this point I stop and think, what the hell is "The US" that I lob around like an agent capable of any of these things? "The US" isn't a person so it couldn't possible act. The US never acts.
Or does it?
Cheesy cut away, but when I think about how I despise the US's internal and foreign policies, I'm constantly prone to defend My country and to rehabilitate our sunken image. There is some power that has infiltrated my mind and turned my home into something much much larger than myself. And so was created the nation, I guess. Nationalism is my imagined connection to something that is in itself an imagined entity of floating ideas, principles, and history. But it works, it works wherever I go and regardless of how opposed to it I am.
So what do I say to defend my great Nation? How does my Nationalism bubble out of me into arguments? And obviously this is where the rub, well, kept rubbing. I say things like, I love US lit., music, the university system, a balance of powers and democratic government, the literature and language of empowerment, and more. And then I think about how Robyn always used to say that "The past is a foreign country." And I have to recognize that none of this is even mine--I didn't take part in these things, my connection to them is circumstancial (if even that) and nebulous, and in countless ways, a spoon-fed version of my identity that I've hardly questioned. Sure I can analyze the imprint society has grafted on me, just like with gender/race/etc. and I can even accept that social constructs are real and powerful beings, but I can't shake that this one is different. This is one that maybe I shouldn't even have to fight against because I'm neither an American nor not an American. But it won't shake, and I feel like there must be something at the heart of it that I'm missing.
Obviously it boils down to my life experiences, which are congealed within my identity and which I attach to having lived in the US and thus being a US American. And then of course there's my life outside of the US when I'm asked if things are a certain way in the US, which they always both are and aren't because in that huge country, can anything be true? can everything be true?
And still without answers.
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[29 Nov 2005|01:43pm] |
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I egregiously failed to note that three weeks ago Christmas season began. With no Thanksgiving roadblock standing in Commercialization's way, Christmas trees, spangled, tinsled, waxy, and ablaze with neon lights, popped up in the beginning of November at the malls.
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[27 Nov 2005|07:51pm] |
I am sick for the first time in South America. Though that's not the crux of the news; rather it's the fluttering of awe at the strange cyclical nature of my life.
Exactly a year ago this week I was querrulously slumping about my home having just discovered that I had mono. Now throat to throat with the same symptoms, only this time caused by a more meager and ephemeral beast, my mind is flitting about the irony and insane coincidence (long I, coincIdence) of physical ailments.
Last year I had the same throat pain, about a months ago my strange wart came back after a year dormant, and in April that stupid razor-induced scab thing tried to reenter my life like a soggy tryst.
Whenever I'm sick I always enter into this fatalistic depression--I will die one day and it will be because I'm sick and too mentally disempowered to rev up my energy reserves to get healthy--and although the virus/bacteria isn't bad enough to have this effect (honestly, this is a far cry from feeble and whiney), I can't help but remember the important epiphany I reached this January. It was probably one of the most important personal realizations of my young adult life: my anxiety is inextricably linked to my physical body. I don't just mean chemically, I mean that I have panicky reactions to my own physical weakness, a pressing, suffocating awareness of my mortality and the unsuppressible fear of my body's slow decline into speckled bones and scattered ash. Whenever I'm sick I think about what would happen if I were *really* sick, to the point where the very fiber of my being is challenged into action. "You must fight for your life or you will lose it!"
I believe strongly in the power of the mind, but when I'm sick my trust in the necessity of positive thinking and hope, gets side-swiped by my resignation and the frustration with my body. I know it's problematic to funnel my mindset into "mind and body" but I can't help it. The mind is me and the body is where I have been unfortunately forced to store it. I wish I could articulate the problems of a mind-body dichotomy, but I haven't thought about it enough and think I need to converse about it rather than write.
So yeah, I don't feel that bad, but I might have strep and it reminds me of last year when I had mono and was lying in bed getting depressed that I wasn't strong enough to think positively while sick.
Did I mention that I think it's lame and pathetic to get sick when it's warm out? Yeah, so it's 80 degrees here and I'm annoyed by my body's newfound willingness to getting sick in summertime.
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[25 Nov 2005|01:58am] |
Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego. (Versión sutitulada)
Premiered. Sold out. Damn.
Tomorrow we go even earlier to buy tickets.
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