(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.