sugar

I can pretend to be cool all I want but the truth is I'm...not. Here's a lovely story to paint a picture:

I'm having class with an older, advanced student who is the director of his own architecture firm. The man oozes professionalism, hard work, structure and responsibility. We're having a conversation about some amazing hiking trip he's recently taken in which he was trekking through the ice fields of Patagonia. I nod and listen intently as I put a teaspoonful of sugar into the tea he has brought me.

"Oh yeah?" I say to let him know I'm listening as he talks about his interesting-as-fuck life.

But then my sugar spills around my tea cup all over the pristine surface of the table where we're sitting. I attempt to remain cool and try not to be distracted or to distract him as I slowly collect the sugar into a pile with my hands. But once I have the pile together I panic in my mind, because, what the fuck do I do with this sugar now?

Since I am really *great in these situations, I decide quickly to take the heart-covered, tattered bag I use to carry my books to class and use it as my waste bin.

I continue to look him in the eye and nod, fascinated, as I sweep the sugar toward the opening of my bag at the edge of the table. He suddenly realizes what I'm doing and stops me from myself.

"No! No! Don't do that, please..." He gets up and rushes to find a trash can to bring me so I don't sweep sugar into my bag like a damn fool.

What I learned that day - don't ever try to solve a problem quickly in your own mind without first consulting another intelligent human being.

*great (meaning terrible)

decisions

I make lots of silly decisions in life. Like deciding to eat a peach while I was walking down the street yesterday. What a friggin mess. Could I have chosen a messier snack? Maybe I could have brought along a basket of buffalo wings? Boiled, unpeeled shrimp? Anyway, lots of silly decisions. I'm happy to say that coming here has not been one of those silly decisions. I love it. Every little bit of it with all my heart.

I even love it when I wake up early, go outside and find myself in the midst of sidewalk washin' time when everyone's hosing off their sidewalk and I have to get my $40 peso shoes wet, (they're practically made of paper, so water doesn't help the overall sturdiness).

I even love it when the fruit and vegetable stand man gets mad at me for not having coins because nobody in this fucking city has coins so people hoard their coins and lie when shops ask for coins. I was lying, I DID have coins but he wasn't gettin em. Coins.

I especially love it when I see a woman throw a cup of hot coffee at a man crossing a busy intersection while screaming things so shrilly I'm not able to understand a word, I simply walk 10 feet behind him and watch in amazement.

As I get closer to leaving I feel like one foot is on a little island and the other foot is on another island and each day they get a little bit further apart. One side is pulling me toward home & friends & family & Chipotle & normalcy & English and the other side is pulling me toward friends & medialunas & Spanish & lunacy & constant pleasant surprises.

Right now I'm almost doing the splits and I've still got over 3 weeks to go before I fly.

ten people in a room talking

My brain is like ten people talking in a room at once about different shit. Everyone's on a tangent and just keep going on and on and while this is happening, periodically, one person will hear what another one is talking about and it makes them think of something else and so they start talking about this new topic instead.

Can I focus on what any of them are saying exactly? Not at all. And when I try to zero in on one of them who might be talking about computers, for example, the attempt to focus on one at a time doesn't work.

In this case I'd just think alright, computers. Computers... Apple, Steve Jobs, driven people, angry bosses, I wonder if that movie with Kevin Spacey about bad bosses was any good, remember in the movie "Seven" when Kevin Spacey yells DETECTIIIIIIIIIIIIIVEEEEEEEEE, Kevin Spacey worked with Haley Joel Osment in that one movie I never saw, I see dead people, my grandfather died in 1984, I never read the book 1984...

You see where this would be a problem. I need to find a way to convince all these assholes to talk about one thing at a damn time.

the least attractive

The Huffington Post was kind enough to break down the statistics I was already quite aware of, which puts both Baltimore & DC in the list of the most unattractive people in the U.S. To which I replied GET ME HOME RIGHT NOW PLEASE. May my feet have wings! Fly me back to the land of beauty!

I think it is best to look on the bright side in these situations. Sure, I'm leaving a country of beautiful, beautiful men. And I mean, they're everywhere. You're on the bus, hot guy. You go to the supermarket, hot guy. You walk down the street in the morning to go to work, hot guy. I think you get the idea. That being said, since I'm leaving to go home to one of the ugliest cities in America I should do something to cheer myself up.


First, let's just try to forget about this beautiful boludo above that came from Rosario, Argentina.

Remember that Argentina is also the country that brought us these men...



Carlos Tevez - No this is not a caveman dressed in modern sports attire. This thick-necked man was born in 1984 in Ciudadela, Buenos Aires, Argentina.




Leo Messi - Admittedly I like this guy a lot. His soccer skills are incredible, and, depending on the face he's making on the field, he ain't so bad. But this picture really confuses me. Should I be attracted to him here? Or should I be asking around to all my gay guy friends to see who wants a go at him?




Diego Maradona - One of the greatest soccer players of all time. He may be divine athletically (or was, at least back in the 80s) but aesthetically divine he is not.

Let's go back a little further so I can give myself further reassurance here.




Bartolome Mitre - Liberal President during 1860s. Wearer of John Wilkes Booth hair and Samuel Morse beard.





Jose de San Martin - Main leader of the South American independence movement in the 1800s. Crossed the Andes on horseback which sounds really, really hard. Good at being spooked by things to his left.




And here was his wife - Maria de los Remedios de Escalada - daaaaaaaaaaammmmnnnnn... Buzz, your girlfriend, WOOF.


Not feeling so bad anymore. :)

what i'm going to miss

When I think about my time here slowly ticking away it makes me sad. I'm really excited to get back home to my friends, family & everything else, too, though. So it's a weird, inexplicable mix of sad and happy. Here are a few things I'll miss about being here:

The random things -

- a man sitting on a doorstep reading a Spanish translation of a Sidney Sheldon novel

- the butt crack of a man bent over the passenger seat of his taxi with the door open and his taxi hood up, seemingly fixing the car from the inside

- a car driving down the road that has been transformed into a tank covered in books

- a man on the side of the road at 10 o'clock at night going through an open computer monitor

- a hobo's dong poking through the hole of his onesy

- attractive bus drivers (sorry, DC metro employees but you usually don't have it going on like that)

- stores in which you can't buy just one pair of shoes, you must buy four pairs of shoes on your first visit or you have to leave (actually, this I won't miss)

- no longer flinching when I hear explosions from protests outside on 9 de Julio while I'm teaching at one of my companies

- the worst haircuts I have ever seen in my life, and I've been through the U.S. south a ton of times


More to come, I'm sure...

me and cats

I have come to realize that since I've been here I have collected a pathetically large amount of pictures** of me with cats. "You can take my men but you can never take my cats!!!" - Mel Gibson in Braveheart

**Please do notice, if you haven't already, the tiled picture of the cat in my blog background. Sorry, I know the number of adorable kitty photos is gratuitous but you shouldn't be here if you don't like cats, dick.

be uninterested

I recently had a conversation with a guy friend of mine here about a guy that I was interested in who dropped off the face of the earth after we had a few dates.

My guy friend seemed pretty baffled about this boy's sudden disappearance. He said, "I don't know what could have happened, I thought he liked you." And after that he looked at me and asked me a question with the same tone as someone who was asking their friend if they left a candle burning near the curtains in their bedroom at home. "Did you show signs that you were really interested?"

I thought for a second. "Of course not," I responded, "I tried to make it clear that I really hated him whenever we were together."

What the fuck kind of question is this? I definitely don't blame my friend for asking it because everyone asks it. In the world of dating you have to show just the right amount of interest and disinterest in order to trick the other person into liking you. I can only speak from the female point of view, here. I know that men suffer their own tortures in dating, too, but I'm not talking about that right now.

As a woman, if you say something or do something that shows you are too interested in a guy they read this pretty clearly as "let's have children together, tomorrow." The meanings of what we say and do are as clear as the color coding for a mood ring. For example, while on a date if you mention that you thought about them the other day, this means that you imagined how you would look in your wedding dress as you walked down the aisle toward him in his tux. If you say that you told your friends about him this means that you picked flowers together to play the he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not game and then played the 4th grade game "MASH" for a half hour to see what city you will live in together and how many children you will have.

In order to avoid scaring the guys that you are really interested in, I believe it's important to do the following to make it clear that you're uninterested and therefore win his affections -

1. Always avoid eye contact.
2. Call him by the wrong name sometimes while you're out to dinner.
3. If he offers to pay for dinner or drinks tell him "sure, thanks for nothing, dick" and then leave without him.
4. Try to trip him while you're walking down the street together.
5. If he does something affectionate like grab your hand or put his arm around you scream shout in his face.
6. If he calls or texts you, never respond. And, of course, never text him first, psycho, what are you in love or something?
7. When he asks about some of your interests just belch in response.

This ought to do it. I can't guarantee it will work if you don't follow each of these tips strictly but it probably will. You'll have him in the palm of your hand.