Sensory Overload

Pensamientos Porteños ~

~ Well, not really the literal translation as in "Buenos Aires Thoughts," since I'm not from Bs.As., but more like a few personal thoughts or observations on the nine days I just spent visiting that great city.  Since Buenos Aires is a Port city, residents call themselves Porteños (not only to identify with the City-Port, but apparently to also mark their identity as unique from the rest of Argentina).  Now that I'm back in Oakland, which is also a Port city, I think Bs.As. has inspired me to shake up City Hall with a campaign to call ourselves something sexy like Porteños ~ but that is a post for another day.  If you have any suggestions, let me know.

So, my trip.  For better or worse, given my law school education and legal-eagle eye, my first impression of Buenos Aires screamed TORT(!) and TORT LIABILITY(!).  It became clear to me that, for better or worse, the look and feel of Buenos Aires is not dictated by liability issues, lawyers, and/or an overly-litigious society.  In fact, I became curious pretty quickly about how Porteños view attorneys.  That's why I laughed when I read that the Porteño slang for an attorney is/was "lavandero," which means laundryman in Spanish.  Very soon after this lawyerly intrusion into my enjoyment of Buenos Aires, I did notice other great aspects of the City ~ but let me start first with the tort-related sights.

Deadly Intersections

At many street corners, there is no Stop sign, no stop light, and no painted cross walk for pedestrians.  Nothing.  The controlled chaos was mesmerizing.  One night, I saw two buses careening down two perpendicular cobblestone streets, heading for the same intersection ~ they came within inches of each other, and both screeched to a halt.  Then, while taxis and pedestrians streamed around the two buses, like a river forking into two streams around two boulders, one bus driver calmly gave the signal (like a symphony conductor's swoop of the hand) for the other bus driver to go on through the intersection.  One bus ambled on, its air brakes sighing and moaning loudly about the near-miss. 

At other intersections, most pedestrians, even moms toting young children, often tested the odds, choosing to outrun the car heading towards them ~ believe me, the cars do not slow down when they see you cross the street.  Often, even in a close call between pedestrian and car, everyone seems to treat it as an ordinary event ~ the pedestrian might hang back a little while the car literally brushes past him ~ or the car might weave around the pedestrian at the last minute.  But there did not seem to be a set policy on who has the right of way, or when, or on speed limits.  As any Porteño will tell you: las calles son un quilombo por el transito. 

I began romanticizing the notion of this dance everyone does at the intersections, even the ones with a stop light and/or a cross-walk ~ how you must just "get used to it" and not blink an eye as you face down a taxi barreling towards you ~ until someone told me two buses did collide last week and until I read (when I got home) several articles explaining how traffic accidents and fatalities are a serious problem all over Argentina.

So, while I tested my street bravado a few times, often I would wait until there was absolutely no car or moped within a mile radius before trying to cross a street.  It will be interesting to see how community groups, non-profits, and the government address this serious traffic safety issue.

Sidewalks

Almost every sidewalk I walked down had tiles or bricks missing -- I stumbled more than once, but it seems as if the locals just know how to navigate the fractured sidewalks as well as they know how to careen around the cobblestone streets.  You do not know, or maybe you do, how many Personal Injury lawyers in the U.S. get rich filing "slip and fall" and even "trip and fall" claims against municipalities and private entities for a plaintiff who has injured himself on a "faulty" sidewalk.  In Buenos Aires, and I suspect in almost every place except the United States, the motto seems to be, "Watch Your Damn Step," and "Be Careful," and finally, "If You Trip, It's Your Own Damn Fault."  I liked that.  What a refreshing way to walk down an imperfect sidewalk.

Our walks were incredibly enjoyable and trip-free, and the occasional crack in the sidewalk just made it all more of a Wabi-Sabi Walk.

Children and Families

Like countless other cities, scenes of families enjoying the parks, or working together, or sitting together on the stoop, dominated the urban landscape around me as we enjoyed miles of walking around different Barrios.  Kids ran free, sometimes unattended, in parks, along dusty streets, in plazas ~ I never saw a child on one of those awful parent-child leashes which I see in so many malls here at home.  Even better, there was no yelling of "get back here" or "it's your turn to watch him" ~ adults could carry on their own conversation, with that secret parent's third eye keeping watch.

We talked about how overly protected some kids are, some of the ones we've seen here at home ~ Moms and Dads debating whose turn it is to watch the kids, worrying over child kidnapping stories, wanting to sanitize everything the kids touch, worrying their child will suffer a bump or a bruise while playing, etc. 

I told the story of how, before I started law school, I lived for several months with friends, a new Mom and Dad, and how different they each approached child rearing.  Even when it was the Dad's turn to watch the toddler, the Mom would worry over what her baby girl might be getting into ~ Dad usually left his power tools around, or looked away just at the moment that the toddler placed a glob of dirt in her mouth.  The Dad would usually shrug it off saying, "Aw, she'll just build a stronger immune system ~ a little dirt never hurt anyone," or "Well, she'll learn the hammer hurts if she drops it."  I agreed ~ but I couldn't say so because I don't have kids.

But Gever Tully doesn't have kids either, and he gave a fun TED Talk entitled, 'Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do'.  He describes how allowing kids a certain freedom will nurture them to be creative, confident, and in control of the environment around them.  In Buenos Aires, I saw just that, and parents who were watching but not worried ~ it was nice.

Fortunately, my "Tort Blinders" soon came off and I enjoyed so many other elements of Buenos Aires:

Desayuno

Apparently, croissants are fat-free, low in calories, and good for your skin in Bs.As. because everyone has at least one, often two, for breakfast EVERY DAY ~ yet they are slender and beautiful.  How do they do that?

Most mornings (or afternoons as it were, when I took sleeping-in to new levels), we each had, simply, un café y dos media lunas for breakfast.  After day one, I started adding butter or jam to the croissants.  At a few places, they brought us a basket of croissants and small rolls, so that I may have, ahem, lost count of how many I had on any given morning, (justifying the carb-binge with the long walk we would take afterwards, on the way to lunch, see below).  After a few days I started ordering a fried egg, just to add some protein to the buttery sweetness that jolted me awake each morning.  By day 6 or 7, I just wanted some granola and yogurt ~ but it does not exist, at least not where we were, in San Telmo.  Then, on the flight home from Bs.As., they served medialunas for breakfast!  Ay, if I eat one more carb I think I will explode.  All in all, though, each desayuno was lovely.

Parillas Perfectas

Quite simply, the steak is an art form in Buenos Aires, and there is a parilla on every street.  Everyone will tell you the steaks are cooked perfectly, not really needing much seasoning, and the choice of cuts is impressive.  But what I liked best is that often when you order a steak, that's what you get, a huge slab of perfect steak ~ no need for side dishes, except perhaps a small ensalda mixta ~ and a cup of wine. It is heaven.  I was raised in Houston, where not only are the steaks huge, but they usually came with a side of lobster, a baked potato dripping in butter and sour cream, and even prawns wrapped in bacon. Seriously.  I have seen that platter.  In Buenos Aires, your plate might look like what we had on my last afternoon, at La Raya in San Telmo.  Morfamos como chanchos (pero cute chanchos)!

The Cheek Kiss Greeting

My first day in Buenos Aires, we went to Paula's house for lunch.  When Paula opened the door, I instinctively held out my right hand to shake her hand, but then in that nanosecond I noticed she had leaned in towards me, and reached her right hand up to place on my left shoulder, and had clearly intended to give me a cheek kiss hello ~ which I quickly learned is the greeting all Porteños use ~ for men and women.  I felt so rude!  I meekly walked into the next room, where four strangers were introduced to me ~ and each one warmly grabbed my shoulder as they kissed me hello.  It was lovely.  Later we all shared beer and lunch, and then mate ~ a gringo, una Mexicana, tres Porteños, a Brazilian, and a Norwegian; it was perfect.

The next night, at Paula's going-away party, I was ready for some cheek-to-cheek kissing!  We walked into the party room to about nine smiling faces sitting around a large table filled with food and drinks ~ it took forever to kiss everyone hello, which made it that much sweeter.  Then, every time someone new arrived, we watched as that person ran around the table kissing every person hello (and later, kissing each one goodbye).  I say we all adopt this wonderful custom and kiss each other on the cheek the next time we see each other.  If you're a macho man worried about kissing other men hello, take a moment to read this hilarious post with step-by-step instructions on "how to kiss other men as smoothly and casually as a native Porteño." ~ :)

Pocho Spanish vs. Porteño Spanish

Apparently, Spanish, which was my first language, is "quite good" according to some Porteños.  My first night out with them, though, a few couldn't understand a word I said, although that night, there was Tequila and beer and wine involved, so that might have added to the language barrier.  At that party, someone had to literally translate my clipped pocha Spanish/accent into the fluid Rioplatense Spanish they speak in Buenos Aires.  Believe me, this caused me great grief.  To top it off, when one of them asked me, "que eres?" I automatically answered, as I always do, "soy Mexicana."  Then he asked where I was born and when I said, "los Estados Unidos," he corrected me and said, "Bueno, entonces no eres Mexicana."  Oh the existential angst that crept up for me had to be washed down with a swig of cool Heineken.

And that is another blog post for another day........

musing

It comes in threes for me, it seems ~ inspiration ~ often three seemingly disconnected events dance around me in synchronicity, until I notice how the elements attract each other, how they fit together, and how their combined force amplifies the electricity of the epiphany that shocks, then soothes, me.

Last Saturday night, after about four hours of a grueling hike against the wind to a snow hut that dangles precipitously on the edge of a ridge in the Sierras, I sat at a wooden table with three strangers and two friends.  The low, flickering light from the lone candle cast long shadows on the white-washed walls.  As we sipped wine and Manhattans and Maker's Mark (in my hot cocoa), and as the dense cloud of a marshmallow bobbed up and down in my cocoa, I soaked in the warmth of the night, despite the freezing, frantic winds howling outside.  Later I will write about the actual weekend and the snow trekking that I never thought my body could withstand, but for now I want to think only about the bright smile of the person who recommended I read the book Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

I bought the book a few days ago and put it at the top of my pile of "books to read" ~ the books near the bottom of the pile sighed sadly, resigned to the fate of waiting even longer to seduce me.  But Three Cups of Tea seemed confused when I walked away, leaving it naked and unopened at the top of the pile, wondering what it could have done to entice me right away.  But I was thinking about it ~ and that counts.

Then a couple of days ago, a lovely twitter friend posted a stream of tweets chronicling a conversation with someone she adores, who wanted to tell her about the death and birth of stars ~ she didn't want to forget what he was telling her about the infinite mass (and thereby possibility) of space and time ~ so she flung his words (and her fascination with him) into cyberspace, to seep in under the skin of someone like me.

So I remembered ~ and I checked ~ yes, new stars are born out of the atoms and molecules of stars that have exploded, and gravity is the driving force behind the birth of a new star.  And, although gravity is a weak force, it has an infinite range, so that slowly but surely it pulls the particles together, and they then accelerate inwards.  The process is very slow, but there is all the time in the universe for it to happen.

And I liked that. 

Then it reminded me of the massive midnight-blue sky above me that night at the snow hut ~ I went out after dark to walk around and was mesmerized by the infinite salty sky above me ~ that's what it looked like to me ~ salt everywhere, the seemingly random granules forming protective walls around the beautiful constellations.

So today I took the book with me to the tea shop, and over two pots of tea, as the steam floated up and made the still-present salt in my eyes burn, I read this in the first chapter, aptly titled, 'Failure':

The wind picked up and the night became bitterly crystalline.  He tried to discern the peaks he felt hovering malevolently around him, but he couldn't make them out among the general blackness. ... Sleep, in this cold, seemed out of the question.  So Mortenson lay beneath the stars salting the sky and decided to examine the nature of his failure.

And so I did that a little ~ really sitting at the counter with my Failure and asking it how I did it all so wrong.  It sipped tea with me a while ~ and the tango music on the speakers taunted me ~ we both sighed.  As I finished off my food and sipped the last of the tea, Failure put its heavy arm around me and walked with me outside.  And then it let me cross the street alone, on to the place where I needed to be next.

in a moment ~

~ a perfect moment can seem like the sweetest lifetime ~

On Thursday nights I gather with a small and sweet group of friends to work on a semi-writing volunteer project; it's very private, it's very intense ~  and every Thursday night, the starry sky on my drive home is infused with the pale yellow tint of the laughter they evoke from me, and the brooding midnight-blue of B's smoky voice, the fire-engine red of the sparks that bounce off of Y's curls when she talks, or the copper-coated words of comfort R throws into the pot of proclamations we all take turns stirring up.

On those Thursdays, there is usually a moment, sometimes two or three or six, where my heart lights up as I watch someone's eyes glimmer with Understanding or Passion or, even, Need.  Although we have a certain task to work on, often personal stories come out, and so I have learned bits and pieces of each person's history or home life ~ some of it intensely private so that I could never share it here; but I can share what the experience is like for me, learning about people in this way.  There are some groups where the work is the focus, and personal issues don't seep in as any sort of distraction ~ those groups feel close, without really being intimate.  But intimacy in some groups, for some work, is so vital ~ and I'm so glad to have stumbled upon a group of hard-working people who are so open to being so raw sometimes; and with whom I fall in love all over again every week.  This doesn't mean we see each other during the rest of the week, or that we hold hands and sing Kumbaya on Thursdays.  Instead, I get to experience  jewel-like moments with them that I then get to slip into my pocket so that I turn that moment over with my fingertips, touching every smooth corner of the thought or the sentiment, for the rest of the week ~ it means that I get to spend the rest of the week thinking about these people, and appreciating them, and really taking to heart the things they say.

Last Thursday, someone made a strong statement, and another person asked, "Why would you do that?"  Without pausing, the first person responded ~ "Because I have your heart in my hand."

It shook me up, it rattled my cage of thoughts ~ we haven't known each other very long and I was taken aback that someone would say something that intimate and mean it, and be so protective.  It made me think of the people who say and do things knowing they have my heart in their hands, and so are very careful with it; and it reminded me of the people who don't do that; and it showed me the complete strangers who do that were looking right at me.

The moment hung in the air for a nanosecond, and the conversation continued ~ on to something else ~ but now the conversation, and these relationships I am forming, are cradled in these protective hands ~ so I think I will swing in that cradle for a bit, to see what it feels like when people are careful with your heart.

I wasn't going to write about this but then I heard a show and an album about those moments ~ that flash of a moment where you fall in love, or your world changes ~ and so I felt like the Universe was telling me to just spit it out ~ to tell this little story.

First, I listened to the Valentine's Day episode of This American Life.  Sometimes I like the Prologue much better than the actual acts, and that was the case with this episode.  In the Prologue, Ira Glass speaks with Richard Klein of Cornell University, who explains that the way we view love really began with love poems in the 13th century — an illusion.  Ira Glass asked "what do we talk about when we talk about love?"  His answer ~ "this very moment" ~ the moment you feel it.  Richard Klein said it is that "coup de foudre," that bolt of lightning, of seeing someone and instantly falling in love.  The Prologue wasn't about the aftermath, or the reality of it all, or how love changes ~ it was about simply the moment that your life changes, when you fall in love.  For me, it seems to be every Thursday night.

For Richard Klein, it is Petrarch and Il Canzoniere, which Petrarch wrote for Laura, the woman into whose eyes he looked and fell instantly in love, but with whom he had little or no personal contact, ever.  There is a wonderful collection on-line of Petrarch's work, with the simple caption: For a woman he would never know, For a woman he could never have, He should change the world forever.  The passion that Laura deNoves stirred in Francesco Petrarch led him to compose the first lyric love poems ever written ~ 366 of them to be exact, all an ode to Laura.  I envy the impression she made.  Even near the end of the obsession, in poem 352, Petrarch writes vividly about the profound impact of that first glance:

Spirto felice che sí dolcemente
volgei quelli occhi, piú chiari che 'l sole,
et formavi i sospiri et le parole,
vive ch'anchor mi sonan ne la mente:

Happy spirit that glanced so sweetly
from those eyes, brighter than the sun,
and formed the sighs and speech,
so alive they still echo in my mind:

From an Italian, 13th century Renaissance humanist to a 21st century SoCal self-described pocha blogger, matters of the heart are still what drives us to write with passion, to write about the impact on our being of that first moment we look into that other person's eyes ~ and we are changed forever.  Petrarch wrote that before that moment one lives in a life of distraction, and when we encounter the eye of the other, it turns you into something else ~ all you want to do is to return over and over to that ~~ to that feeling, that impact, that moment.   

In the podcast, Richard Klein also  explained that the ancient Greeks had (at least?) two verbs for "seeing" or "to see."  The first verb means "caring observation" ~ the second refers to "the look the eyes can flash, like lightening, like dragon breath, that not only illuminates the eyes, but sends out the kind of fire that penetrates the eye of the other ~ a separate word for that moment when the eyes flash and imply a fateful encounter."

We all know that feeling ~ that moment of initial rapture ~ we all also know quite well that it doesn't last; it's just a dream.  But it seems to me that the most profound people are the ones who love finding it all over again with the person who elicited the feeling in the first place.

And so Thursday I look forward to falling in love again with the colorful batch of spirits who help me write ~

On that note, I leave you with this song, Tiny Heart and Clever Hand [mp4], by Tender Forever, off their Wider album.  (It's sweet and funny and fun ~ stick around past the howling wolves in the Intro.)  I think Tender Forever's biography fits the theme, and Me, perfectly today:

Melanie Valera is the throbbing heart and head philosopher of the solo band, Tender Forever. She cut her performance teeth on the street of her hometown of Bordeaux, France, covering sixties girl bands standards for money for a whole year as part of the Bonnies. Along with this enriching, character-building experience, this hyperactive lady started a long-distance electro-pop project with an American friend she had met on the very last day of her trip to S.F., Ca. Garrison Rocks, a spontaneous love-at-first-sight band, endured and evolved, up until becoming a Franco-American orchestra including 3 new members. The team performed about 40 shows in 7 months, notably with Little Wings (K recs.) and Ted Leo (Lookout).

Oh, and the Hand Open With Heart is a mosaic by Cleo Mussi.