weekend!

Finally, at long last, here I am. This week was really only 2.5 days long, but it feels like months. After my horrible Tuesday came a not-so-bad but still stressful and work-INTENSE Wednesday, during which I wrote two papers and started my third. I worked on that last one (the 6-pager for cinema class) until around 4 a.m. and then gave up for the night, set my alarm for early, woke up and worked on it--with breaks for a shower and food, of course--until 2, when I finally couldn't take it anymore and went to class with something that I could have turned in but wouldn't have been very proud of/wouldn't have gotten a very good grade. I got all the way to class in San Joaquin, only to find the room empty with a note on the door saying that a professor in the department had died and therefore all classes were cancelled for the day. Relief, relief, relief, and as sorry as I am that the department lost someone, my initial reaction was just to giggle. Which I did. Then I went to Rosie's, we got dinner, watched some trashy TV and I came home and slept like the dead.

Until just about noon today (I guess today is technically Saturday, but I'm still in Friday mode), when Rosie called to say, "Hey, are you coming to my doctor's appointment." She had scheduled one for her stomach problems at 1 today and I really wanted to go. After a few moments of confusion I said yes and hauled ass on down to Salvador, met Rosie and went to the clinic with her. We were there for a while, met with a doctor, etc. and then made our way to a park at the end of Line 5 of the metro, which was really quite nice. We sat in the grass and I read (Another Country, by James Baldwin...undecided on how I like it so far...and she wrote in her journal and the sunset was gorgeous. Tonight we went to a new jazz club, Thelonious, which is in Bellavista but a little off the regular path we take there. It was nice, had a good atmosphere, a lot younger crowd than the Club de Jazz. The band was all right, had a couple of really good numbers, it was a little pricey but no more so than the Club de Jazz. I like Club de Jazz more, still, but it was cool to see an alternative. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll meet up with Mara and/or Laura and get to show them around town a little! Now I'm tired and need to go to bed. 'Night.

stressful day

So after two weeks of infirmity and then travel combined with infirmity, I realized today how much homework has piled up under my nose. I had whatever my equivalent is of a panic attack, because I rarely even get stressed out about work, let alone VERY stressed, but I was today. I calmed down, though, and got a chunk done. There's still a lot to go; tonight and especially tomorrow won't be full of sleep, but I think the 11 hours I got last night recharged me enough to make it through without going crazy. I talked to a bunch of people from home today (Julia, Anita, Laura W, Katie, Annamurph, Hannah M) and also had some facebook exchanges with others: Peaches, who is going through hard times, and also Laura Melle (freshman-year-of-high-school girlfriend, for those of you who have forgotten or didn't know she existed), who is in Viña and coming to Santiago this weekend with a big group of kids from her program, including Mara Gay, who's a friend of mine at Michigan. I'm really excited now, I haven't seen or talked to Laura in at least a couple of years and Mara since school got out. In all, though, I've had a stressful 24 hours and my ongoing personal revelation combined with stress about Rosie and classes and also all my conversations with people from home has all combined to make me very homesick, for Silver Spring AND Ann Arbor. I even thought briefly last night that what I really want to do is finish out the semester, then go back to Silver Spring and just get a job, figure out what I'm doing. Obviously that's not going to happen, I'm committed to being here and I'm committed to graduating and in general I'm very happy with all of this, but I'm starting to feel flashes of doubt. All my confusion and realizations and everything are a little too private to share on here quite yet, but they'll come out as soon as I figure out what they all mean. Anyhow, I'd better get back to work. I think I'll make another cup of tea first. 'Night.

by request

Differences I noticed between Bs As and Santiago:

-Santiago's metro absolutely kicks the pants off of the Bs As system...dramatically more extensive, faster and cleaner. Actually, I felt like Santiago (except the air) is just cleaner in general.

-Buenos Aires is bigger: It took a lot longer to get to interesting places in the heart of the city than it does here. Once you're in the middle of Santiago, nothing is really more than 15 minutes away on public transportation or your feet.

-Buenos Aires has nicer water. Santiago has the ugly, smelly, concrete-banked Río Mapocho. Buenos Aires has the enormous, beautiful River Plate and various offshoots, which may be polluted but are still pretty nice.

-Buenos Aires is cheaper in some ways: Public transportation is half as expensive (not to say that the buses or metro here are particularly costly--much cheaper than the states) and taxis are a lot cheaper, less than half of what they cost here, I'd say.

-Buenos Aires felt more like an American city in some ways...parts of it reminded me a lot of Harlem in terms of the height and age of the buildings, the way neon signs run perpendicular down the fronts of the apartments, the underground parking lots. It made me want to go back to Harlem to see if this is a good comparison or not.

-Santiaguinos are darker, shorter and heavier. The relative influence of Europeans and Amerindians on Argentines versus Chileans was striking.

-Santiago feels more modern. The Chilean national IDs, for example, are very advanced, with multi-colored background print, textured surface, complicated barcode, etc....a lot like an American driver's license but more so. The Argentine national IDs are pieces of pink paper with photo and thumbprint pasted on and laminated together.

-Argentinians really DO eat a ton of steak, and it's good steak, but Chileans make up for it by having better empanadas.

I'm sure there are other things that I noticed but that's what I can think of now, off the top of my head. I'm going to publish this and then try to put some pictures up. Bye!

remember how i said i'd write from bs as?

Yeah, so turns out that was harder than I thought, what with the high demand for the hostel's lone free computer and also the absolute lack of free time. So, in lieu of that, here's a synopsis of the trip:

Left just about six hours after I wrote my last post, as expected. Everything about getting on the bus went off without a hitch, except I was sitting next to some old, fu-manchued, tight-lipped Chilean who was convinced that he had the aisle seat, even though there was an almost stupidly clear diagram above all the seats showing which was which...you know the one: person obviously standing in the aisle because there sure as shit isn't anyone floating outside the bus, seat 15, seat 16, window. I was in 15. Moron. Anyhow I ended up spending most of the time sitting next to Rosie anyway, reading some Bruce Chatwin, watching bad movies and trying to sleep. I bought some sleeping pills, given my history of difficulty with falling asleep without being able to get totally comfortable (i.e. anything but a perfect bed), but they didn't help much. I only slept about 4.5 hours total out of the 24-hour ride over the Andes (quite spectacular, I'll add a pic at the end) and then through the incredibly flat Argentine countryside. We got to Bs As around 11 on Thursday morning and went straight to our hostel, El Cachafaz (the lamplighter, I think) Youth Hostel, to check in. It was a nice place, GREAT people, all very young, okay beds, well-kept. One drawback was the death stairs leading up to the third floor, where our room was. They reminded me of the stairs in the bell tower in Siena, but falling apart and wooden. But no one fell, thank goodness. About two minutes (literally, maybe even less) after we got there, who should walk up the stairs but Julia! I seriously haven't been so happy to see anyone in...well, in I don't know how long. We went out for a bite to eat while Rosie and Amalia showered (the other kids were in a different hostel for space reasons). She had a meeting and I went back to the hostel, from which we walked to the Casa Rosada and Plaza de Mayo, where the famous Mothers of May march every Thursday afternoon. They have been around since the disappearances, starting as a small group of mothers whose children had been abducted by the government marching in protest of that and ending up, today, as a huge organization running schools, a bookstore and even a university. And, of course, still marching. Then we walked around the old docks for a while, which are no longer used but now have upscale apartments and restaurants and whatnot. Rosie had never seen the Atlantic Ocean, so after a little MORE lunch (and a Guinness for me! Yay, Guinness!), we tried to go down through a park to the big body of water that ran off the edge of our maps. But the park that leads to it was closed and, we found out later, it's not the ocean at all but the River Plate. So Rosie still hasn't seen the Atlantic Ocean. Oh well, her time will come. That night we ate pasta and then went to a bar near Julia's house. It was fun, and a couple of Rosie's friends from school joined us, and they were both really cool.

Friday was amazing. We woke up, ate a very (even by South American standards) spare breakfast and walked to the Buenos Aires cemetery. After walking around the whole thing trying to find the entrance, we ended up in a beautiful old church complete with a museum of artifacts from the Franciscan (?) brothers who used to live there. At last, we went into the cemetery, which was staggering. Row upon row upon row of beautiful, wildly variable, majestic, ugly, black, grey, blue, white mausoleums. Again, a sample picture or two will follow this post but they won't do the place to justice, the sheer packed-ness of it and the grandeur. Really one of the strangest places I've ever been. After that we ate a steak lunch served by a very strange waiter at a restaurant across the street from the cemetery and went to the very impressive Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Very cool place, some really interesting stuff, especially by a modern Spanish/Argentine painter who goes by a Portuguese name that escapes me at the moment. Leix...something. Anyhow that night we went out to a club where everyone on the first was, get this, doing line dances! So weird, all these kids know dance after dance after dance. Anyhow upstairs there was just regular dancing, so I spent most of the night dancing, mostly after rescuing my friends from sketchy Argentinians.

The next morning we went to the Plaza Italia in search of some gardens that Julia really likes. It wasn't that nice a day and we ended up only staying in the first one we found for a few minutes before hitting up a small feria. I bought Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Marques and Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, used. I'm excited to start them. Then we ate lunch, where they had an item on the menu called a "Maryland special"!!!!! I took a picture of the menu but couldn't bring myself to order it because it sounded gross. Julia and I walked back to her apartment, which was a few blocks from the restaurant, and everyone else walked to bigger feria to do some cheap Buenos Aires shopping. We walked there ourselves and sat and talked for a while. It was a great conversation. I am still thinking about it. Then we went and did a little looking around. I bought a new, genuine Argentine leather belt to replace my beat-up vinyl one and a t-shirt that cracked me up so much I couldn't resist. It was a strange feeling for me...the belt I knew I needed but the shirt was just an impulse clothing purchase, which I can't remember ever making before. Mom and Dad, maybe you know better, but I really can't think of anything. Maybe during the Jnco phase...Saturday night we had a very delicious steak dinner with a very competent waiter; altogether a much better experience than our steak lunch. Also the restaurant provided us with a huge baked Alaska and free champagne because it was Julia's friend Ian's birthday (he had tagged along for the dinner). Me and Tim went with Julia, Ian and one of Rosie's friends (both named Alex, this was the shorter one) to a "board games bar" that sounded super cool but was jammed. We walked around the corner to a little dark bar, where I was mostly just tired, and Tim and I went home after not too long.

On Sunday, we woke up and went to yet another feria, this one mostly full of antiques. But Rosie's stomach was giving her crippling pain, so after a few minutes she and I went to sit down and then she said she wanted to go back to the hostel. So I ran to find someone else (we had planned to meet up about 45 minutes later) to let them know we were leaving, found Tim and Esther and ran back to Rosie. We took a cab back, got an empty bed for her to lie down in, but she was feeling so bad that she couldn't even stay lying down. She told me that she would be in the emergency room if we were in Santiago, but we were in Argentina and leaving in two and a half hours. I said she should maybe go anyway. She went and threw up (which she had wanted to do since the previous night but couldn't) and I talked to a really nice Chilean guy who told me that if we went to a hospital and told them we were foreigners, they would see us fast and for cheap. This seemed brilliant to me, but Rosie took a little convincing. The lady at the desk gave us the address of a close-by hospital and we took a cab there, too. They saw her right away, the doctor was very competent and clear and nice (the clarity was especially nice, considering the strangeness of Argentine castellano), wrote out some prescriptions and some directions for Rosie to help her take care of herself. We were in and out in less than half an hour. There was a pharmacy around the corner, where she got the prescriptions filled. All told, including cabs, it cost less than 35 dollars. The wonders of socialized health care. Back at the hostel, she took her meds, which immediately made her feel better, and we walked to by some bland food and water and then it was back to the bus station.

The ride back was on a much less modern bus, but we had movies and it was 5 hours shorter due to fewer stops and faster drivers, so no real complaints. Also I slept a little more than on the way over, again I really think no thanks to the sleeping pills. Oh well, they cost less than 4 bucks. Got home, ate lunch, checked email, talked to Francisco, left to go do homework with Rosie and bring her roll bag back to her (saved my life, that bag...no way I could have handled a backpack). Ended up having a weird conversation with her, getting a little Spanish done, watching most of a very strange Martin Scorcese movie about Nick Cage as a paramedic in New York over my reading, coming home, finding a bunch of people here to celebrate Francisco's birthday, which he said nothing to me about, eating dinner, drinking some wine and trying to listen to their very fast conversation, then coming in here and writing this.

Moral of the story: Study abroad is worth it for the personal revelations alone. Not that I said anything about that above, really, but it's true. More true now than I even thought before. Amazing. Okay, time to go to bed, I haven't slept a whole lot the past week. 'Night!

update: Okay, blogger is combining with my erratic connection to make uploading photos impossible. I'll try again tomorrow.
update 2: here are the pictures!


Acongagua (the one with the cloud on top)


View of the cemetery from the second floor of the cloister museum; it goes on at least as far beyond that row of trees


A couple of statues in the cemetery


Me and Julia at the big feria; I'm looking at whoever's taking another picture of us


Chilean customs

t-minus 6 hours

Well, I'm leaving my front door a little before 10 tomorrow morning for Buenos Aires. It's 4:15 in the morning and I haven't started packing. Too much else going on in this little head of mine and then too much use of TV to distract myself. Thank you, CSI/Law & Order/Charmed/ESPN/Scrubs. I felt a little sick today, I think as a carry-over from the absolutely insane amount of food I ate yesterday at Luz María's barbecue. But not so much anymore. Sorry I haven't been writing as much as I should on here, I want to write more but it's been a busy few days. I'll definitely be posting from Argentina. Anyhow, time to decide between packing now and packing in the morning. And by that I mean in 4 hours when I wake up. Better start now. 'Night!

sunday, midday

Okay, I can officially use two hands to type again, so here goes my first decent post in a while. First, shoulder update: So after all the stress and phone calls and x-rays and worrying about whether I was going to have surgery or not, it turns out that my collarbone isn't actually dislocated at all. It looked that way on the x-rays in the eyes of the three doctors who looked at it last Thursday, but they brought them to the hospital's top radiologist over the weekend and the conclusion was that I just have oddly constructed collarbones and the difference in angles of the left and right x-rays. This doesn't change the fact that my shoulder hurts a lot and I still can't use it for that much (I still immobilize it when I have to walk a lot because otherwise I swing my arms as soon as I stop paying attention and that hurts). I am very sick of hospitals and doctors, this year has been too full of them.

In other news, we're in the middle of the "Fiestas Patrias." Tomorrow is the actual independence day, but the party here lasts for a week plus, starting last Thursday and going through next Friday. So yesterday I went to a "fonda" in Providencia (one of the comunas next to mine), which is basically like a county fair in the states, with lots of traditional crafts and games and performances and fried food. It was really fun and I'll definitely go to the big main one in Parque O'Higgins tomorrow. Rosie met me at the one yesterday and we walked around and watched things and got a really, really unhealthy dinner (really fatty pork, white bread, baked potatoes and french fries and Pepsi). Then we talked about our whole state of affairs, which was hard and made me sad. We went back to her apartment and picked up some wine and chicha (the official drink of this whole week-long party--it's a fizzy grape drink but isn't champagne) and called Durham and Tim Becker and had a little party in Rosie's room watching Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson. Then we went downstairs to Vickie's apartment, drank some more wine, argued about where we should go and decided, wisely, on Bellavista. We ended up in a tiny little bar off Constitución where there was a guitarist and two singers performing and we got some shrimp empanadas and beers. It was a good time, not crazy or anything because that's still out of the question for me with the shoulder, but still it's always nice to just laugh a lot, and we did. Tim and I split a cab home, but I still ended up paying 3000 because the stupid cabby took a roundabout route and by the time he had taken the turn away from the quick route (it's a fork so I couldn't tell until after he'd done it which way he was turning) it was too late and we were on one-way streets, so I couldn't say anything. Oh well. He's gotta eat, too.

In still other news, for those of you who don't know, Michigan thrashed the shit out of Notre Dame yesterday IN South Bend, 47-21. I was at the fonda during the game but as soon as we got back to Rosie's apartment I checked the score and all my sadness melted away, replaced, at least for a little while, by straight jubilation. Now, I will sing the fight song at the top of my lungs.

HAIL! TO THE VICTORS, VALIANT
HAIL! TO THE CONQ'RING HEROES
HAIL, HAIL TO MICHIGAN, THE LEADERS AND BEST!

HAIL! TO THE VICTORS, VALIANT
HAIL! TO THE CONQ'RING HEROES
HAIL, HAIL TO MICHIGAN, THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WEST (GO BLUE!)!

Now I have goosebumps. Man, I miss school. Also, in the past week, my relative immobility has meant I'm following international news a lot more closely, which has been good. And I watched the whole second season of the Sopranos (unreal), Batman Begins (terrible, Lincoln, you were right) and Rosie and I went on Thursday to see "El Rey de Los Huevones," which is a comedy by Chile's most popular filmmaker, Boris Quercía. It was fantastic and we both understood about 90% of the dialogue and 100% of the plot, which was really cool and encouraging. Highlight from the film: Quercía's character, who's a cab driver, is taking a couple of gringos to a flight at the airport and for reasons I won't go into here they end up being really late, so when he asks them to pay the man gringo says, "No way, I'm losing my flight!" I guess they didn't bother to consult anyone who actually speaks English when writing the script. Also, they're stopped by the side of the road and the man gringo says, "How the fuck did we get ourselves into this fucking mess?" The actor did a pretty good job with an American accent, though. Anyhow I guess I'll cut it off there. Feels good to actually write a full post, better than I was expecting at the beginning. One last thing, for Dad or anyone else who's interested: If you're looking for a new CD to buy, might I recommend "Valentín Trujillo al piano" by, you guessed it, Valentín Trujillo. It's a recording of Trujillo, who is Chile's greatest pianist, giving a concert to a small group of family and friends and a lucky few others of Gershwin and Cole Porter and other old American classics. He's a wonderful player and all his commentary is left on the album, so you can hear him talking about the music. I guess that wouldn't be as cool to you because you don't speak Spanish, but still, he has a great voice. My host brother did the lights for a show of Trujillo's and met him afterwards and got him to autograph the CD. Apparently he's a great guy, to boot. Okay, that's it. Take it easy, everybody.

the past week or so

Well things have been pretty interesting. Sorry I haven't posted in a while, typing is hard with just one hand. As soon as I get the right one back I'll write a long post. Most important news: It appears I won't have to have surgery after all, although we're still not sure. I sent the x-rays to Dr. Kline yesterday and will go to the central Catolica hospital tomorrow to get examined again. I have decided that this is the year of getting fucked with by doctors who can't decide or don't know what's wrong with me. First the whooping cough, then with my "elevated" blood pressure, now this. I'm sick of hospitals and x-rays of my chest and being told I'll have to come back for some more tests. I just want to be fucking WELL for a couple of months. Is that so much to ask? More later...

overwhelmed

So I dislocated my collarbone pretty badly last night playing frisbee. At least I was making a sick D at the time. But anyhow after going home on the metro like an idiot, David and Luz María drove me to the hospital, where over the course of four and a half hours I got examined and x-rayed and so on. I'm going to have surgery next week sometime. So it's been a little intense, in a lot of ways, which I may or may not get into later. Sheesh.

sorry i haven't written in a few days...

Well, the past few days have been kind of rough. Rosie and I broke up, for a bunch of reasons, and it's probably for the best that we did but still it sucks at the moment. I don't feel as bad today as I have for the past couple of days, but still, I don't like it and neither does she. The whole process has also made me think really hard about myself, about parts of me that no one else knows about but that resonate very deeply in my personality and the ways I relate to people. Other than that, though, the past few days have been good. I finally got the stupid fucking reading for my Europe/Latin America class, thanks to Nate. And now, it turns out, he's got the second set of readings we have to do. Joy of joys! I've been plugging away at that; it's not hard at all but it's long--somewhere in the 120-page range. A cinch in English, not so much in Spanish. Last night our Chile, los chilenos y su cultura professor invited us out to a famous historical bar called La Piojera, which is, if not the birthplace, then at least the most well-known place to get a "terremoto," ("earthquake"), which consists of cheap red wine and vanilla ice cream. At least, I think it was vanilla, with the wine working its way in there, who knows? I really liked it, despite all my friends who had tried it before hating it, and had two. And almost everyone from the class went (I think Rosie, Brigid from frisbee, a gringa whose name nobody knew when the prof was taking attendance and she'd left class early, and one Chilean kid were the only ones who had been in class but didn't go), so we had some really interesting discussions about the relative importance of racism versus classism in Chile and the US, literature, the degree to which Chilean culture has begun to drift away from traditional Spanish culture and borrow more and more from American culture as it industrializes and commericializes...pretty much all in Spanish. I was sitting next to a girl named Ann, who's from Luxembourg(!) and speakes Luxembourgese, German, French, Spanish and English. Not fair. But she was really interesting and the gringos to my right were really interesting and the prof is really interesting and the Chilean guy, Gonzalo, sitting right to Ann's left was really interesting, too. He gave me some book recommendations, which I will certainly check out ASAP, because I've been looking for a good Spanish book to read and Inés, which Luz María gave me, I found lacking. Anyhow I really hope this post publishes because I've gotta go buy a bus ticket to Buenos Aires and I have no time for "Could not connect to Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail." Well, hope everyone who reads this is having a good day. And finally, a shoutout to LINCOLN, who's on his way up to college for the first time! Good luck, Blinkin! Represent with respect! Bye for now.

ramshackle

you've been so long
your blind eyes are gone
your old bones are on their own
so take off your coat
put a song in your throat
let the deadbeats pound all around

we will go
know where we know
we don't have to talk at all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

the bargains you drive
buckets and bags
and all your belongings
your train's in the sand
ramshackle land
let the rats watch the races

we will go
know where we know
til we find a one and all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

praises get spent
your trick face is bent
pigsties and prizes
cause there's no kind of wealth
you're suiting yourself
you leave yourself behind

we will go
know where know
til we find a one and all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

-beck

I have listened to this song at least 10 times in the past 24 hours.

valpo

Did you know that the primary difference between Valparaíso and Valparaiso is the use of the accent in the former? Also that one is a beautiful port city an hour and change from Santiago and the other is a college in Philadelphia. But the main difference is the accent. We went to the city today, about ten other COPA kids, Katty and Valeria, and me, and took a shit ton of pictures because it is a very photogenic place, especially on a gorgeous day like today. I haven't uploaded those yet, but there are a lot and some of them are very nice. Only drawback was the early wakeup, which I barely made because my alarm clock failed me. Thank god for having to pee. But despite my continuing inability to fall asleep on or in anything that moves, the fresh air and great views energized me and I was awake for the day. We took a little foray in a tour boat out to the middle of the harbor and back, which was nice if oddly directionless and unexplained, and then walked around various parts of the city. We ate in a weird restaurant with big picture-window views of the ocean (one neat thing about Valpo is that you can see the ocean from EVERYWHERE, because there's a law against buildings being built on the hills that block the view of the buildings behind, that is, higher up. There are 45 hills, all named, and they serve like little mini-cities. Each has its own feria and stores and firemen and when you ask someone here where they're from, they name their hill. Also, it's a working port, so there a few big ships in the harbor and big loading and unloading cranes and containers from all over the world. It used to be a lot more important, but then came the Panama Canal and, well, why go around Cape Horn when you can save thousands of miles worth of fuel and time and risk? Still, there's definitely activity and we got to see the huge dry-dock in the middle of the water, where they float ships in and then raise the platform in order to clean and do repairs and whatnot. There were also three or four navy ships on a special long dock, and sea lions on a little platform, which barked at another sea lion that was trying to join them and smelled horrible.

Anyhow, then we came home and I ate dinner and talked to Gabby for a while, which was nice. It had been a little bit since we talked and he's leaving for Paris on Tuesday, so it was good to talk to him. The fam tried to call but somehow failed (I'm still not sure what happened exactly...), but will try again tomorrow, so that's all right. Lincoln leaves Sept 6 for RISD...exciting! But we've gotta get a conversation in before then cause after that it'll be hard. Less so if Mom and Dad and Jack get Skype (cough cough) at home and Lincoln does at school, but still, harder than when they're all together. I wrote a Spanish essay and now have to do some reading for class tomorrow, which probably won't take very long, and watch some TV because on top of all the activity of the day I have been preoccupied with something vague and strange for the past 4 hours or so and need to veg out and stop thinking about anything. Take care, my peoples. 'Night.

gratuitous picture of sherlock and izzie

Missing home (Ann Arbor AND Silver Spring) a little today, so here are some pics of Sherlock and Izzie, courtesy of Lincoln.

oye

Okay, today it's time to vent about the Chilean university library system. Which, if it was a person, I would want to kill at the moment. So, here goes, and tell me if this makes sense: In la Chile, where the class I need these particularly evasive readings for takes place, the professor tells the library which pages of which book are necessary for the class. Then, the students go, one by one, and check the copies out to go photocopy themselves. This means that any other student, coming by to pick up the readings, is just fucked if they're checked out. Which they always, always are. I've been to the library at la U 6 times now, and it hasn't been there yet. So today, I looked the book up online at la Católica, and found out that I could go to the Architecture and Urban Studies campus (which, incidentally, is quite nice) and get it from their library. So I went. But you need a special card to get into that library as a foreign student, and you have to go to the Casa Central, which is across the street from COPA but far from where I was, to get that. So I got the solicitation form for the credential and left, empty-handed and furious at the sheer idiocy and clumsiness of the system. My plan was to call Rosie, who was feeling sick, and see if she was well enough to go the Nicanor Parra exhibit at la Moneda with me, but when I called she sounded very upset and so I went to her apartment. Turns out she had just been sleeping when I called, but she was very sick, so I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon, evening and night keeping her company in her misery. I finally left her house around 11, having not eaten for 10 hours, and caught a bus home, which was a lot easier than I thought it'd be. Going to start doing that more often. Ooh! Good news! Because I'm going to be here for a whole year, Isa thinks she can get me a transportation discount card that would cut what I pay for metro and bus by 2/3!!! In not-so-good news, I spend too much money and am running low on funds. I would really have liked to go out tonight, but tonight is the beginning of my increased frugality, so home it is. Stressful. Stressful day, but I am surprisingly calm. Hungry, though. So time to eat dinner, at 1:20 in the morning. 'Night.

it IS september...holy crap

This post was going to be a play-by-play of my day yesterday, but I realized that I hardly did anything yesterday worth noting, so in lieu of that, here is a poem I like (thanks, Dad).

"Pi"

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief - a mouse tail, a pigtail - is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.

-Wyslawa Szymborska