December 4th.

If there is a deeper symbol of "being successful with the cards life deals you" than sampling your own mother, I have yet to see it. Happy birthday to Hova, and thanks to Gloria.

Terra incognita.

The brain is such a fickle and mysterious organism.  I mean I have reason to believe this statement is true in general, but it's abundantly and profoundly true for the only brain I have ever used.

Lately I've been writing this honors thesis which I will defend at BYU this Monday -- circumstance which has provided the occasion for me to fly home this weekend.  Yes, most people write an honors thesis before they leave college.  I can take a long time to get to things.  I'm working on that.

So for most of the past month, maybe a little more, this paper has been occupying tons of space in my head.  Do other brains work like this?  It's like other interesting thoughts couldn't move in until the lease expired for this nightmare tenant who was renting out every room.  Not even non-interesting thoughts could move in.  I would have liked to use some of that space to figure out what smartphone to buy, which credit card to apply for.  Heck, I could have used some of it to cook myself meals.  Sorry!  No vacancy!  So most of the month I ate bagels and burritos.  I was lucky to remember to apply for a passport just barely in time to get it (fingers crossed!) before I go abroad with my family later this month.  I was not lucky enough to remember to apply early enough to avoid the hefty expediting fee.

And it's not like this tenant used the space productively.  That would be great: I could have one room making connections with existing literature, another room configuring code for maximum efficiency, and one in which to just sit with the sun streaming through the blinds and craft gorgeous sentences.  Alas.  Most of the rooms in the house were devoted to the single-minded production of worry, distraction, and worry about distraction.  This takes up a lot of storage space; new concerns pile on top of old ones, leaving little room for productive work on the paper.  And of course I would worry about how little space there seemed to be in my head for productive work, and the cycle would perpetuate itself.

The closer the deadline got, the more time and space were consumed on the paper.  I even stayed up all night a few times in a subterranean computer lab on campus.  Over the past week especially, fun things started happening to my mind.  Once, in the aforementioned underground lab, I fell asleep sitting up in my chair and had a really hard time figuring out where or who I was when I woke up.  I don't know how long I was out.  Another time I dreamt I had forgotten about my thesis defense and it was the next day, and I was freaking out.  There were a lot of weird data dreams that I won't get into.

Maybe the weirdest thing my brain did was to apparently clear out the room normally used for appreciating a wide variety of music.  I was stressed, so I wanted to listen to soothing music, but I simply had no patience for it.  I couldn't focus on NPR or the podcasts that had been teaching me Portuguese either. There was only one thing I could stand to listen to: Auto-Tune the News.  And I wanted it ALL THE TIME.

Maybe my brain was pregnant?

Well, my brain delivered.  I sent off the paper this morning.  And suddenly the smelly hard-partying coke addict who was renting out all the space in my mind for his industrial worry-cooking kitchen, driving away the nicer tenants -- he's gone, and I can peer out the windows, recall that the world is big and brave and good, and invite in some fresh air.

I turned on Fleet Foxes and almost cried.

***

I have a friend who is of the class of people who get invited to conferences for teenage savant entrepreneurs.  She told me she thinks these people are really good at viewing their brain as a tool, which does what they tell it to do.  "My brain is mine," they seem to understand, whether intuitively or through long practice I don't know.  But it can't be very long practice because a lot of them just graduated from high school three or four years ago.  At age 12.  Somehow they're able to go sit in a coffee shop and work at their computer for 36 hours on a problem they're interested in until they fall asleep, and then wake up and say things like "I don't know what's wrong with me; I've been sleeping way more than usual.  I bet I slept for 20 hours this week."  These are the people.  Their brain is theirs.

And my brain is mine.  But not really in the sense of "My table saw is mine" or "My Camaro is mine" or even "My grasp of econometrics is mine."  Not something I have built or acquired through my own efforts, or over which I exert total control.  I could probably stand to learn to exert more control over my brain.  But I think one of my life's biggest and most interesting challenges so far has been developing a relationship with my brain.  I've learned more about what makes it tick and what it just won't stand for.  My brain is mine, maybe, in the same sense that "My dog is mine" or "My girlfriend is mine" or "My kid is mine."  I don't have any of those things, so I guess my brain presents me a with a good chance to practice learning how to respect and care for and learn from a living creature for which I have some responsibility.   My brain is mine. To paraphrase Stephen Crane:

It is fickle -- fickle.
But I like it
Because it is fickle
And because it is my brain.

Provincial.

Boston's tallest building, if it moved to New York (like so many other people born in the 70s have done), would be #18.  Just behind the Woolworth building, completed 1913.

This is my little town.  So friendly.

Lento.

I'm listening to this song by Julieta Venegas which I first heard in a McDonald's in Morón on a p-day, and feeling the same sensation of nascent possibility and delicate abundance.  Something about the gentle persistence of that drum machine, the easy coexistence of organic accoridons and saccharine synthesizers, the unexpected spaciness of the harmonies on the chorus.  Above all it's the newness of it: the song still feels like something fresh off the plane, like the first day of summer, like sunrise.  It still wears the fragrance of the magic era in which I met it.  I had lived in Buenos Aires for about a year -- just starting to feel like I was part of the fabric of the place, able to move around, familiar but not accustomed.  Julieta sang this song on the radio and seemed to murmur in my ear that I stood at the new door of a world which would open itself to me as my care for it grew.  Where I could navigate the web of buses and trains moving among 14 million people, could hear their stories and tell them mine.  Where I could be surprised and delighted in dimensions I hadn't even been aware existed.

Sé delicado y esperá.
Dame tiempo para darte todo lo que tengo.

It was the word or the look or the smile that suggests things are coming.  It was whatever rare ether occupies the fleeting space between crush and girlfriend.  It was the city fluttering lashes at me, her dark eyes shining like stars.

Montezuma.

Pinocchio's is, for my money, the best cramped cheap greasy pizza joint in all of Harvard Square.  As I waited for my slice to come out of the oven, a long-haired student was telling his friend "...and even if I do go to grad school, I feel like I'll never be smarter than I am right now."  He was younger than me.

Nice work if you can get it.

Note, 12 September 2012: I wrote most of this last summer in Buenos Aires.  I don't know why I never posted it -- probably too busy buying groceries, if the essay itself is to be believed -- but I dug it up and dusted it off today and find it kind of relevant to Current Me.  They're ideas that are on my brain again of late, at least.

I cooked myself mashed potatoes and gravy tonight.  Here, the dish we call "mashed potatoes" in America is described as "potato pureé" -- an equally misleading title for what was in fact a packet of flakes of dubious origin, dumped into a pot of water and stirred.  The gravy was prepared using the same method, prepared from a packet of salty brown dust I brought from the United States because Argentines (inexplicably, given their affinity for meat) don't really believe in gravy.

Say what you will about the sophistication of either my culinary skill or taste.  This much I'll say: the meal was easy.  And that is an enormous relief in a place where lately I've come to the disappointing realization that everything is hard for me.

It's hard to cook.  My supposedly fully furnished apartment contains about 3 dishes, and it is my goal to use these, along with the oven big enough to fit my whole fist inside, to make food that won't kill me or the loved ones I want to make it for.  There are measurement unit discrepancies and ingredient discontinuities to be overcome, but those are secondary to the real obstacle to any kind of culinary endeavor: grease.  There is a certain level of tenacious stickiness reserved uniquely in the world, I believe, for Argentine kitchens.  A layer of grease graces the stove, the tile walls, the pots and pans and most of the dishes, fiercely and immutably resistant to scrubbings with dish soap, yellow side of sponge, green side of sponge, and steel wool.  I've tried them all.

My woes extend beyond the unctuous walls of my kitchen.  All day long I try to get work done on my tiny computer, which defiantly chooses only the most unnecessary moments in which to run smoothly, and otherwise executes commands with all the supercharged velocity of chilled molasses.  Of course this problem is independent of my computer's position on the globe, but here in Argentina I don't have access to the lighting-fast alternatives on my university's campus, like I'm used to.  Buying a new machine is out of the question: thanks to protectionist import tariffs, consumer electronics routinely sell at about double the going rate in the U.S.

Also, truth be told, I'm lazy.  This is nothing new either.  But for some reason I have so much trouble focusing here.  I'm supposed to be performing an evaluation of this gas installation program at the NGO where I'm volunteering.  But I realize that I don't have a very solid notion of what I'm doing and I get overwhelmed and don't know where to begin; I make interminable lists of what I still need to learn in order to get started, a cowardly exercise that leaves me stressed with nothing to show for it.

I wake up most mornings with snot, lots of snot, and I evacuate it from my nostrils (Spanish: fosos nasales = "nasal trenches".  Gorgeous.) frequently throughout the day only to have more of it continue its unflagging exodus from whatever inner region of my body seems bent on filling the whole world with the fruits of its manufacture.  I don't want to go to the doctor, because it takes time (and phone bill -- I pay Arg$2, about 65 US cents, a minute) and I'm enrolled in this online course so I'll be able to graduate in December, which of course consumes way more time than I expected.  All this complicates my ability to just explore this fascinating big terrifying repulsive elegant melancholy gorgeous incomprehensible anthill I live in, which is what I really want to do but it's hard.

I wash my undies by hand in the sink because I always forget to take clothes to the laundromat before I run out.  Always.

The banks charge me Arg$20 every time I withdraw money.

The light in my room burned out.  It's not the bulb; I changed it.

I know this looks like unabashed whining, and in fact that's exactly what it is.  But I'm also observing.  I've never had occasion to do this before -- move far away, on my own, even if only for the summer -- and it's different than I expected.  It's got the romance and challenge of carving a completely fresh life from the raw materials of a new continent, like I anticipated.  It's just that some of the challenges are things like dry-cleaning, and having a fridge approximately the size of a cinderblock.

It occurs to me that I may be experiencing in a small way the frustrations of all immigrants -- the minuscule shavings of value taken off over a wide range of activities, by unfamiliarity and relocation, that diminish one's sense of abundance.  Maybe that's what it means to live in a fallen world: it's less that the world has fallen than that we have fallen into it.  Displacement is uncomfortable.  Is this how Adam felt, expelled into the lone and dreary world?  "What, you mean I have to WATER the plants now??"

Adam's dislocation was, well, probably more significant than my privileged brush with life in a place one tiptoe closer to real need than what I'm accustomed to.  But even he seems to have ended up just fine.  Clearly the million tiny or large shocks that compose migration are things people learn how to deal with.  They stay in new places, settle in, have abundant babies who have abundant lives.  I'll adapt.  I mean, my immigrant ancestors did, so I don't even have to trace my DNA all the way to Adam to find that trait.  But I think Adam's story holds the key to the whole project, which is that of course it wasn't just Adam's story: it was also Eve's.  They each had a meet help, a soul mate (Spanish: media naranja = "half orange".  Gorgeous.) with whom to share the frustration and heartache that come with adapting to a life suddenly turned on its head.  And with whom to share the exorbitant and sweet satisfaction when they finally started, together, to figure it out.

On this day.

Just this: that stories are holy and powerful, that my country is beautiful and incomprehensible, and that God is good.  I'll even say, today as every day, God is Great.  I'll sing it.