Okay, this isn’t necessarily the case. But if you look for regular updates from me, or responses to emails, be warned that I may be less accessible during the next few weeks.

1. This YPF commercial is really neat. I mean, it’s a commercial for an oil-and-gas company. But it’s pretty cool.

2. I tried to make a cheese-sauce, Alfredo-like, today. I think I just used a cheese that isn’t supposed to be used for melting, but regardless I ended up with a lumpy butter-sauce, which was delicious but had like eight chunks of cheese that were relatively inedible. I need to figure out which cheeses melt well, I guess? I think this is the problem. I don’t know what else it would’ve been?

3. Tomorrow I go to the public hospital again, for one final time. I am interested, a wee bit excited, and a wee bit nervous. Again. For some reason.

Shrug.

Two things of possible note happened today:

1. I finished “Kavalier & Clay,” which was indeed a devestating moment of separation, but which was also entirely worth it. A really, really good book. It got me interested anew in stage magic (The Illusionist [film] did this as well, but I was always a Harry Houdini kid) and in the World Fair. These are good things.

2. My camera ran out of batteries. I knew this would happen soon. I have a very few photographs from FLENI. I wasn’t going to be allowed to take photos of anything I was actually doing (the kids are, you know, patients, and they have rules) but I still would’ve liked to have gotten a few more photographs. We’ll see what I have when my parents comme and bring the charger.

I feel a little bit guilty, though, since one of the few things the CPGC asks for is photographs. I also don’t know if I’ve really mentioned that the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford College is funding my “internship” here, but I guess I might as well say that yes, they are, and they’re pretty awesome. I was reading through the web journals some of the other “interns” (I put all of this in quotes; I feel like that word is wrong) are keeping on Haverford’s website, and it’s cool to see what we’re all doing. Emily H. is off in Rwanda working with non-violent conflict resolution workshops; Chris H. is in Tibet teaching English to kids. (Their writing is the best of the bunch thus far, I think. Also I’m friends with them and they’re actually bothering to update with details.)

1. This is bloody amazing. It’s a cartoon by this guy named Ryan Pequin called “The Walk.” I know nothing more about the guy. I mean, apparently he’s a Canadian and a webcomic kid, but beyond that — I was just linked there.

Also fantastic is the song “Kilkelly, Ireland,” which you can listen to via youtube (which tells me this version is song by Robbie O’Connell and the Clancy Brothers), and which is amazingly sad. Brendan Dutch played it (via youtube or a CD) to my folklore class, and I was writing a poem today that was sort of chanelling it, so I went and found the song. I almost remembered the name, but was thinking Kilkenny, rather than Kilkelly, and so I had to look it up in my old journal.

2. Movies. At MALBA.

Saturday night I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which you should check up on via wikipedia if you’ve never heard of. (Woah, syntactical incongruity!) For my first time ever seeing it in theatres, I was alone, the majority of the audience had never seen it, and there was neither a floor show nor call back lines. It was a pretty strange experience to hear people actually laughing at the movie. It was subtitled in Spanish, of course, which was similarly strange — not because the translations were bad (although they were certainly funny on occasion; they were off the internet, and I think they were good, but not great), but because the subtitles made me realize that there were actually pointed where in the past I had never had any clue what was being said, but had just sort of brushed over it. I was tempted to call out callbacks on occasion, but I figured that the kids in the theatre wouldn’t understand either the English or the reason behind it, and would just be mad. Anyway, it was fun.

Sunday I structured my day around Vincent Gallo’s visit to MALBA. I got to the museum by noon, waiting on line for maybe ten minutes, and then received a ticket to his talk that evening. Then I wandered around Recoleta (went to the cemetary, had lunch and coffee, and so on), before returning to MALBA by 16:00 for “Buffalo ’66,” Gallo’s critically-aclaimed first film. I wasn’t really expecting it to be either good or interesting, but it was both. I loved the colors of the film (apparently that has to do with the film it was shot on), and the characters were intriguing and reasonably deep. Gallo plays a man who made a losing bet he had to default on, and ended up spending years in jail as payback to the bookie. On getting out of jail at the film’s beginning, he kidnaps a young dancer (Christina Ricci, who plays the part at 17), and takes her to his parents’ home to pretend to be his wife. In the process, we meet his lunatic parents (Anjelica Huston plays his mother), learn about why he was in jail, and learn that he wants to kill the guy who technically lost him the bet — the football field goal kicker from the Buffalo Bills.

In any case, “Buffalo ’66″ ends up being well-done, and while you don’t like Gallo at the end of it (I didn’t, gah he was annoying), I found him at least somewhat intriguing, and I guess I wanted things to work out. I felt like I’d heard the story before (not in the sense that it was unoriginal, but literally I think I’ve heard it before in another form), so maybe that had something to do with my enjoyment of it.

Afterwards, I went and had a coffee. They screened “The Brown Bunny,” Gallo’s second film (he’s acted a lot, but he’s only directed two), but I didn’t have a ticket, and they gave the last ones away while I was talking to my father, and they didn’t let me sneak in.

At around 8:30, I got let back in, and I sat down on the floor in the front of the theatre. It was packed full of people. Gallo is in his late-forties, now, but he still looks reasonably imposing. He’s tall and thin, dark-haired in a way that makes him seem half like a magician and half like an evangelist preacher and an imaginary half like a salesman or a carny. You really oughtta read a bit about him, so you know why it’s easy to assume he’d be a tool. He wasn’t. He was funny, he was normal. He wasn’t the best speaker — sort of funny, sort of conceited, sort of boring. It was nice, and enjoyable, and a cool experience. I got a photo or two of ‘im.

There was a translator provided to translate his English for the non-speakers, but he quickly got frustrated with pausing and would just speak uninterrupted for as much as fifteen minutes before giving the translator a quick minute to sum it all up. (See: arrogance!) He talked primarily about the controversy over “Brown Bunny” (in brief, there’s a sex scene at the end wherein Chloe Sevigny gives Gallo a blow job; the film is overwhelmingly motonous and Roger Ebert, the film critic, and Gallo got into a nasty fight over it; Ebert claimed it was self-indulgent and so on, and said it was the worst movie ever made, and the insults escalated; my personal favorite was when Ebert said that his colonoscopy was more enjoyable than “Brown Bunny”). He said, err, “To get a blowjob… it’s really easy. I didn’t spend three years working on a movie just to get a blowjob.” And, after talking about being shy, he said, “I wasn’t waiting my whole life to show my pecker in a movie.” Which all seems like fair points — he claims the movie isn’t about being narcissistic or self-indulgent, but about showing the pain in loneliness and love, and so on. Shrug; I haven’t actually seen it yet. (Hah!)

He showed us a few short films, then, after the two Roger Ebert reviews. (In one, it’s “possibly the worst film ever made”; in the next, it gets a thumbs up.) The first is “Hunny Bunny” (or, possibly, “Honey Bunny”), a four-minute short he made before “Brown Bunny,” which is a film that primarily consists of objectified shots of women turning in a circle, which at the end changes into a twirling toy bunny, and then into Gallo’s blurry, bearded face. I have no clue. He said, “I still kind of like it,” this version, and that it’s about obsession and fetishization, in a more direct way than “Brown Bunny,” but similarly nonetheless.

He also showed us what he claimed were his two earliest films — “Vincent Gallo as Jesus Christ,” a repetitive stop-motion film that looped maybe five times, of him jumping in the air and holding a Jesus pose; and “Rocky X,” a testament to his hatred for the idea of “Rocky II,” which was a montage of images, including a shot of Gallo being hit by a car. These were both from 1979.

Lastly, he showed us a short film he made while filming “Buffalo ’66,” which he said was of him reacting to his new power (he directed, wrote, starred, did music, edited), but was really just a day-in-the-life. It ends with Ricci on the phone, lying to her parents about where she was. It was called “Looking for Enemies finding friends,” with just that capitalization & punctualization.

I don’t know. It doesn’t blend, but it was interesting. And a good enough time.

3. Dancing.

On Saturday night, after Rocky Horror, I went to Amerika, a club a short distance from where I live. Going to clubs by yourself is strange — especially since I was too cheap to drink anything, and so I was completely sober by the time I got in there. The music was techno, the dancing was fine, but I was reasonably unimpressed — not all too many attractive folks, not all too many good dancers, a poor showing in general. I am not giving up on clubs in general — I think they can be fun when you’re with friends, and I think they can be fun alone if you’re into the music or getting hit on, but I’m just saying I don’t think it would have been all too much more fun even if I’d spoken the language and been able to talk to folks. Still, I was pleased to find that while I still think of myself as a bad dancer, even without anything to drink I was fine with dancing alone. Surrounded by people, of course.

On Monday night, at around 7:30, I walked to the same general area, past Abasto Mall, and to Konex, which on Monday nights hosts La Bomba de Tiempo. I’ve mentioned it before — it’s this really great drumming circle, with thousands of people crowded in to watch and dance. This time, after checking my bag, I bought a beer and drank it (and buy “a beer,” I mean a plastic cup filled with Quilmes, and beer here comes in 950 cc bottles), quickly, watching the people around me. (I wanted to dance, honest.) Mostly the crowd is twenty-somethings, maybe one-third foreigners, but there were a few mothers there with little daughters. I watched this one woman with her two-or-so-year-old on her shoulders, dancing slightly. In front of her, holding the little girl’s gaze, another woman danced with her hands in the air. With perfect facility, the little girl mimicked the older woman’s movements, her face pulled into a huge grin. It was this great moment of THIS is what we’re trying to achieve at work.

And then I finished my beer and danced for an hour, and didn’t make any friends but had a good time, smiling at all the flushed faces, and watching that guy who thinks he’s an eagle again.

I suppose that’s more than enough, neh?

§ I

Yesterday I complained some about work. Today I feel obligated to talk about good things.

This morning I found my way to work, and ended up following Belén around for much of the morning, because Maria was busy. Belén, as I think I’ve mentioned, is one of the instructors in charge of FLENI’s school, which means she supervises the other teacher-therapists with their charges. She has more experience with floortime, so she does some supervising of their work with their students, and gives suggestions of how they can improve their interactions — like, ways of prolonging communication and moments of engagement. It’s cool to watch, although her floortime sessions are so short that they make the day feel much longer — divide an hour into 20-30 minute blocks, and it feels twice as long.

In any case, today we spent the morning working with some kids who were great, even just in terms of affect. (This is what I was talking about the other day in terms of counter-transference: it’s so obvious to me how much I prefer working with the kids who seem to want to work with me, and I feel much fonder towards them. It’s undeniably easier.) In any case, we started the morning with Trini, a little girl wearing a sweatshirt that said “Girls,” drooling slightly but smiling constantly. She seemed to really like me (she kept pointing to me and then pointing next to her, which is apparently Trini-sign for “sit there”), and she literally was constantly smiling; we played with a bunch of colored balls, tossing them in-between each other and her. (I suppose this was Maria, Trini’s therapist Jose[fina, I assume], and I.) This sounds simplistic, and it is, but we were getting Trini to decide who had balls, getting her to ask for things, to tell us to do things, to react to emotions. It was really cool, and fun to see her responding.

When I went back into the floortime room, after walking Trini back to her classroom with Jose, Paola was playing with Ernesto while Belén watched and gave suggestions. Ernesto is rather more advanced than a lot of the kids in the school; he has language when he wants to, and he can do imaginative play; he and Pao were chasing each other with monsters, and it was just absolutely adorable to watch. I really like Paola; she’s been really friendly to me, and when Maria says that Ernesto is her favorite student in the school, I don’t think she’s really exaggerating. Afterwards, there was a failed attempt at playing with Cielo, but because there were complications (she had wet herself), Belén and I chatted for a while, which was actually quite nice. I really like Belén, although she’s quite a bit older, and while my Spanish isn’t enough for us to chat perfectly, we can still have conversations, especially since she’s patient. It’s always funny which phrases just can’t be translated, though.

Anyway, afterwards Maria and I got to play with Justo, who stow (sorry, that’s a lame joke), who was really interesting to work with. His mother was there as well, and she and Maria told me to speak to Justo in English, since he understands and doesn’t like it when they speak it; he told me to speak in Spanish as well, in the end. They seemed to think he’d pay more attention in English; I don’t know. But the play was actually really complex, although not initiated by Justo, he was able to understand it, and they spent almost half an hour involved in a game that involved a rain storm, and a cave, and this kids’ song that I fucking know because they taught it to us in second grade. (Que llueva, que llueva, / la Virgen de la Cueva, / los pajarillos cantan, / las nubes se levantan, / que sí, que no, / que caiga un chaparrón, / con azucar y jamon.¹) Anyway, it was pretty fantastic.

I felt at the end of the afternoon as though this was a much better day — I’d spent all morning doing floortime, I had observed some sessions that felt like actual progress, I had really enjoyed the kids, I felt like I had learned some things about these kids. I’m only here for two more weeks (which is absurd — but also, in some sense, quite reasonable; I feel like I’ve already gotten out of this most of what I want to?), but I’m pleased to realize that a lot of what I wanted to figure out while I was here, I have. I’ve been here a month, now, essentially, in terms of working at FLENI, and I can’t imagine what more I would do with another month beyond what I have left. In deciding to come here, I chose a very specific aspect — floortime — which really interests me, and I feel like I’m getting to experience it very closely. But there’s only so much of that that is worthwhile, I suppose? And after some point it moves from being interested and novel and me feeling as though I’m learning a lot, to me just feeling like I’m not getting that much out of it, and that my presence, while not a burden during floortime sessions (at the very least, I can take part quite often, and Maria likes using other people in play), is certainly not necessary. It’s a complicated sort of feeling that I can’t quite enunciate here as well as I’d like. I don’t feel unwanted, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong, and I feel as though my internship has been useful and interesting and fun at times, but I guess what I’m saying is that leaving in two weeks is better than leaving in two months. I will miss FLENI, but in order to take more advantage of it I’d need to actually have training I don’t have, and be working there in full and not just interning.

Yes?

§ II

The Starbucks that opened in Alto Palermo, a few blocks from me, the first in Argentina, still consistently has a line that extends out the door. This is awful.

§ III

I left work today at a little past noon, which while admittedly early, was just as well, since it took me until 13:20, more than an hour, to get to Pilar, which is really about a fifteen/twenty minute’s drive away. Male (that’s a name) drove me and Gaby and someone else into Escobar (which is the town where the part of FLENI I work at is, technically), and dropped Gaby and I off. We waited fifteen minutes or so to catch a collectivo², which we took into Pilar; we talked the entire way in Spanish, without too many interruptions, and I felt really proud of myself; I felt as though we had actual conversations, about graffiti and schooling and stuff, and not just pleasantries. I got off and caught another one for like five minutes along the highway, to Village Pilar, which is where Elisa’s university (Austral) is.

Elisa met me at 13:30, or so, and we went to this place called, I believe, (yup), Siga la Vaca.³ It’s an all-you-can-eat parrilla, or grill, and so essentially for $35, we got a liter of beer, some water, unlimited slices of beef and sausage, some bread, a mostly-scorned salad bar, and dessert. It was fantastic and kind of awful; we left feeling like we needed an afternoon nap, or two. And like we didn’t need to eat dinner (and, honestly, I barely did so). I had small bits of: vacio (flank) and matambre (only a bit; it wasn’t so good — it’s lower body meat), bife de chorizo (rump) and chorizo (spicy sausage), tira de asado (grilled ribs) and chinchulín (sadly: intestine; gross and salty). Elisa and I shared; she made me try things. Some of it was very delicious (the vacio & chorizo, leastways), and some of it not so much, but so it goes. It was just a fun time.

§ IV

I’ve been reading Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espíritus (The House of the Spirits) in Spanish, which is difficult but rather enjoyable. I’m making pretty good sense of what’s going on, although I’m sure I miss a lot. What’s interesting to me, and I wonder whether this would be true if I understood more, is just how useless the first-person narrative segments seem to me — they seem frustrating and meaningless, and I don’t like the voice at all, although I find the character of Esteban Trueba intriguing in third-person. I don’t know if it’s Allende’s problems with male voice, or my own awkwardness with the language, or whether it’s just a boring character, but I find myself disliking those sections, and much preferring the jerky moments of narration.

I see indeed why so many people refer to this book as a follow-up to García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad, in terms of the sweeping narration and the grandosity of characterization and landscape; I have yet to see feminism explicitly, but that’s okay. I’m curious to see where this novel goes; I’m only 80 pages into it, which leaves me with about 450 to go.

I’m also reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I mentioned yesterday. I can’t read in Spanish when I’m tired, so I often read my English books in the morning and then have trouble putting them down in the afternoon, which is great. I’m loving this story, and following Sam and Joe as they try to make a comic book work; I just finished Part II, and am excited to see where things go. I like reading books — both of these, actually, fall into this category — about which I know nothing more than that they’re well-recommended; I have no clue of the plot of either of these. And that’s a lot of fun.

Tomorrow, yoga & exploring. Tonight, now, sleep.

1. It’s raining, it’s raining, the Virgin of the Cave, the birds sing, the clouds clear, yes! no!, a downpour falls, with sugar and ham.^a I never said it makes sense. I’m pretty sure that I learned it with “la bruja esta en la cueva,” the witch is in the cave. I’m sure it’s a regional thing. I don’t even remember who my Spanish teacher was in second grade.

2. Collectivo is the word they use here for public bus; I’m not entirely sure why, since Spanish for bus is “bus,” or I guess “omnibus.” The bus system here is really good, but traffic is unbearably slow; as I’ve mentioned before, I take the subte whenever I can. The subte is only in Buenos Aires, however. Some bus lines, as this one, have both local and non-local (express) routes; Gaby and I waited for a non-local, since otherwise we would take over an hour to travel into Pilar. The express buses are more expensive, but undeniably worth it — it cost $1.80 for the twenty-minute ride, as opposed to $1 for a local.

3. Siga la Vaca = Follow the cow.

a. Speaking of ham — I mentioned it the other day as being on a pizza with olives (and being gross), but I made things grosser still my translating the word but not the spelling, and writing “jam,” which rather than being a cross between jamon and ham is a sweet fruit preserve. There was no jam on that pizza. I am so amused by this mistake, however, that I refuse to fix it. (For the record, in case you’re confused, the j in Spanish is pronounced like an h in English; my mistake was essentially that I wrote the English word phonetically in Spanish.)

(I wrote this bit last, but it’s really sort of important, so I’m going to move it up to the top.)

At work today I was sort of frustrated. When I first got here, I was sort of frustrated to realize that I wasn’t going to be doing as much as I had wanted to. It’s not so much that I’m not allowed to do more as that there isn’t more I can do — the nature of my project is such that a lot of my time here is just observing and asking questions. It’s great, on the one hand, and I feel very lucky to be getting this opportunity to really get to see what therapy looks like from this standpoint. Really, the amount I’m getting to see, and the number of different kids I’m getting to observe things with, is really awesome. On the other hand, while I don’t know that I was really expecting to do a lot of actual work, I feel frustrated by the fact that I’m completely unnecessary here. They’re doing me a favor, and helping me out; I’m serving a very small part in a hospital with a lot of people. FLENI is a not-for-profit organization, but it has a lot of money and a lot of staff, and that’s awesome. It just leaves me without much I could do to help.

What I really enjoy about what I’m doing here is the stuff I wanted to come here and work with: floortime, the therapy I’ve talked about before. This takes up around half of my time at FLENI, and when we’re doing floortime, I get to be actually engaged. Maria, who I work for, does a lot of teaching and organizing, and all of that is fine, but just a stream of fast Spanish of which I understand only some. When we’re doing floortime, whether it’s with Maria or Belén, I can actually engage with them and with the kids directly — most of these kids have very few language skills, and so my Spanish is generally sufficient to at least attempt to link with them. Sometimes it’s fantastic, and other times floortime is a really frustrating experience, wherein I realize that even Belén or Maria are having trouble engaging the kid, and there’s no way I’m going to. Today was one of those days — I followed Belén’s working with four different kids, and it went from not-so-good to completely-impossible: F., who lay down and didn’t speak, forcing Belén to play with him tactilely. G., who chirps like a bird and who moved from game to game, unwilling to focus, before finally signing that he wanted to leave. And then L., who spent the entire twenty to thirty minutes trying to get up on the trampoline, before finally getting up, becoming scared, and sitting down, not speaking at all. And lastly G., who’s deaf, and responds poorly to anything at all.

One of the DIR concepts is that of vínculo, which I know is a word that just sort of means “link” (it’s the word internet browsers use for “links,” leastways), but which I take in DIR theory to mean more explicitly the moment of engagement between two individuals, wherein communication occurs. And a lot of floortime is about creating these vínculos, and sustainig them. Sustained engagement, circles of communication. And it’s frustrating when I can’t be part of them, but more frustrating still when no one is. When you’re just watching someone else be frustrated.

Anyway, tomorrow will probably be better.

So I bought a kilogram of chicken over the weekend, and I had a giant chicken breast left to figure out something to do with. I complained to Rachel that I didn’t know how to cook chicken, and she told me, well, why don’t you grill it?

At first I was going to laugh at her, but then I realized that hey, Elena has a stove-top grill, which I can totally use. And then I thought, oh-my-god, I can make chicken satay. Then I remembered that I don’t know how to, but I do know how to make a basic marinade with yoghurt and curry. And so I put on some Andrew Bird this evening, after buying two potatoes and some string beans and an avocado, and marinated the chicken in curry powder, plain yoghurt, red pepper flakes, and a bit of lemon juice. I grilled the garlic first, while boiling the potatoes, and then tossed the garlic into the water to soften it up, and grilled the chicken and some of a leftover green pepper. It stuck to the pan like all hell (I guess I should’ve greased it? I’m not sure), but it cooked through well enough, and the garlic & potatoes mashed perfectly with a bit of butter, and the green beans got steamed over potato water with lemon & soy sauce. (The avocado got chopped and set next to the chicken.) The only failure was my attempt at a sauce; I tried to make use of the leftover yoghurt mixture, but I really needed some chicken broth, I suppose, because it wasn’t enough, and using soy sauce to thin it out just didn’t work (it tasted way too salty and soy-y).

But aye: really good garlic mashed potatoes, even without milk; I alternated bites of mashed-potatoes-and-chicken with bites of avocado-and-chicken, and grilled green pepper and steamed green beans. And then I was pleased with myself and decided to write it all down.

I totally don’t know to cook for just one, though.

Speaking of food, I was at a grocery store the other day, walking through the jam section, and I got an intense craving for nutella. So, of course, I looked for it. They didn’t sell nutella, but they did have two chocolate-based spreads: one with hazelnuts that looked like a nutella rip-off to me, and one with peanuts that was cheaper and looked like Argentine industry’s finest. So I bought that one. And it’s absolutely bloody delicious.

My sister Rachel left yesterday afternoon for Chile and thence Bolivia, but that’s okay.

For one, I went yesterday evening with Kateland (Rachel’s friend from her program), her family, Natanya (another friend from her program), and her family, to this place called CAFF (Club Atletico Fernandez Fierro), which has modern tango music on Wednesday nights; it was really good music, and the place was rather cool. They do one Saturday a month as well; I’d like to take my parents there if it works out. The musicians were just, really fucking into the music; there were four awesome accordionists, two bassists, a pianist, three violinists, and a singer, all male, and all dancing to themselves and concentrated. Intense.

And then this afternoon after work, I joined the same group again for a tour of MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires), which I’ve already been to, but a tour (in English) arranged by Kateland’s parents was fun and somewhat interesting. It made me lazy, though, in that I ended up not going to yoga, and instead just talking on the internet and reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (by Michael Chabon), which is pretty damn amazing thus far.

And Monday is a holiday.