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.

Tiger's Blood.

I was away from my home for the last few months, but I'm back to the American West. Man, this place crackles with magic in the summer. It billows with lazy pride in the faint breeze.

Driving around my hometown with the windows rolled down on a late August evening, through warm dry gentle air like a kiss on the lips -- this is what peace is made out of. I'm convinced drives like this increase the net calm in the world, and I pray that it wafts across oceans and into hearts around the globe. I know what you're thinking: fossil fuels, &c. I'm considering all that and I still think if you were the one driving, and I were in the passenger seat, you would hasten to uphold my claim.

The snow cone shacks, which sprout here each summer from the dry ground, have become sacred spaces to me. I won't let Summer go by without going to burn a candle to the gods of ice and liquid sugar, who must also be the gods of youth and sun-bronzed skin. Their oracles keep appropriately casual vigil at these seasonal shrines to the fleeting, bone-deep joy of mortality.

But without doubt the essence of the season's spark is fresh peaches. One cool point in the Mormon cosmology -- and I don't know where this idea comes from or how institutionalized it is, but I love it -- is that God enlisted the help of his noble and great kids in the creation of the world. Since childhood I've felt that in that great collaborative effort, my baby was the peach. Or at least that I fetched coffee for some assistant producer working on an early draft of the peach. I'm so happy it has done well.

Circumspection.

Annie Dillard: "One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time."

I wanted to photograph that lineup of bright enamel-painted old converted pickups emblazoned with "Danger Towing" out in Bukoto near Kiira Road. But there was always somewhere else to be; it could always wait; and now my camera's broken.

This is something hard for me: the tension between living and reflecting, experiencing and describing. I think it's a tension I'll struggle with as long as synapses fire in my brain. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, seems determined to convince aspirers that Real Writers lead shadowy, anemic lives, deprived of the extravagant richness available to regular humans. They collect gems of experience during their brief forays from their Selectric caves, then chisel and polish them until they glow with something almost like sunlight.

That light, crafted and belabored, has an undeniable beauty and depth. I agree that the unexamined life is not worth living. But I also suspect that at some point a life obsessively and exhaustively examined also starts to look pretty Not Worth Living. We start to live life at one remove. Facebook and Twitter are just new and widespread tools for the old writers' habit: living a recursive life whose substance is describing itself.

I guess what I'm doing right now is life at two removes: writing about writing about life. But I feel like I've spent little enough time examining lately that I can stand to step back for a moment. My real life is enhanced and stabilized by my attempts to articulate it, if only to myself. Still, here I am at the end of the summer, tying up loose ends on one life while I stare down the next, with two dozen embryonic proto-essays languishing in my notebook. It's okay; I had other things to do, I was working, I was exploring, I was making friends. The only direct casualty of all that realness is those pieces, which might still see the light of day, but could have seen it with more brightness and immediacy. Instead I thought about them, second-guessed, hemmed, hawed, feared, and forgot about them as new experiences took their place in my imagination.

I guess I'm saying I want to take time to distill more sparks from my real rich lovely life into thinking and ultimately writing. But inasmuch as writing is also a subset of living, a visceral mortal activity to be drunk to the lees, I could stand to think less and act more.

A gorgeous girl introduced me to Hildegard von Bingen today, a 12th-century German mystic who had a vision. One thing she saw was the embodied and anthropomorphized Fear of God. It's a woman.

Kind and Degree.

. . . and the next thing you know your son is playing for money in a pinch-back suit.  And listening to some big out-of-town jasper here to tell him all about: horserace gambling.  Not a wholesome trotting race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse!  Like to think of some stuck-up jockey boy settin' on Dan Patch?  Make your blood boil?  Well I should say.

I'm just thinking about how human horrors are often rooted in defects we all have, scaled up, left to ferment and multiply in unusually the wrong circumstances. I guess the peace hopeful here is that the same logic should then hold for miracles. These sparks of compassion and humility and courage that fly off us all the time into the night sky -- these are miracle germs.

You are most welcome.

Benson greeted us from the porch of one of the hundreds of indistinguishably ramshackle government dwellings in the police barracks.  "Hello!  You are most welcome."  We explained that we were a couple of university researchers conducting a very brief survey, and talked to him.  He smiled.  He spoke proudly of his family: "In fact, I am having many children."  7.  But keeping them all fed and clothed is a challenge, to say nothing of keeping them in school.  "This one," he said, gesturing back into the house at his teenage daughter, "this one is a wise lady."  But she got a year behind in school after he couldn't afford school fees.  They live, he said, by God's mercy.

Benson is from the north of Uganda, and he came to Kampala 20 years ago fleeing rebel violence.  His parents were killed.  There, he told us, whether you wanted to or not, they would arrest you and bring you to the bush.  Benson escaped, but he showed us the scar from a bullet just above his elbow.

Just seeing us there, in the police barracks, he told us, gave him hope that "I am not forgotten."

Geez.  There's me, smartly dressed bright-faced pink-scrubbed American university student, loving Benson with all the shards of the heart his story has just broken in me.  Basking and cowering in the magnanimous warmth of his acceptance, the sacredness of his sparse sincere narrative.  Retreading all the recurrent qualms, considering in the brilliant light of this human being whether anything I do means anything.  And hoping that to the extent surveys and data and analyses matter, they matter because of this smile, this welcome, this story, the holiness of which I pray I can communicate some germ.  In my uproariously inadequate offering.  Let me have ears to hear.  Let me hear.

God's Plan 3.

The taxis here are called matatus.  They're kombis that run in their foreordained and unalterable courses, like stars, while their conductors lean out the open window and bang the sides of the sliding door, yelling out said courses: "Tambula Wandegeya!  Nakawa Kamapala Wandegeya Kamowkya!"  Like a star, each matatu is unique and has an outlandish name, emblazoned across the top of its windshield in gaudy lettering 10 inches high. "God is Able".  "God is Final".  "Bismillah".  "God's Plan 3".  "Jesus is the Answer".  "Black Jesus".  "Patience Pays".  "Be: Patience".  "Be Smart".  "Sleek Figures".  "BIG".

I don't know who names these sweaty heralds of God's glory licensed to carry 14 passengers.  But I like having them around, reminding me that my life is not my own.  Or that it is.  Depending on which starry, Technicolor matatu names Fate sends past my eyes.  Here's the best one I saw today:

"Love: God | Fear: Stan"