Rain

So I am doing my big tour of South America now, which has taken me from Santiago, to Mendoza, to Buenos Ares, now to Montevideo , and, eventually, to Rio and then back to Chile, I suppose, though I could spend a month in maybe Montevideo or Buenos Ares and then meet back in April with my parents in Chile.

One of the things I didn’t realize I had been missing, until I saw it and it happened, was rain. Santiago is an incredibly dry city during the months I have been there, and besides one winter frost that happened in the second or third week of September, there has been no rain there. Just day after day of sun, no reasons to stay indoor to watch T.V. or surf the internet, or, with increasing regularity, to put the fingers on the keyboard and write something out. But it rained the day that I got into Buenos Ares, and I stood in the rain, feeling the wetness and the coolness and remembering the hundreds of other times in my life it’s rained and I’ve stood in it, and it felt, to me at least, like a cleansing thing, something that changed something inside of me.

Now, of course, that’s a bit too sentimentalist, and a bit too ridiculous. For me at least, I find the shelf life of an epiphany of this nature is about 24 hours. That’s typically all it takes for me to move on from the epiphany, either through an internal examination of it and the resulting ridiculous of changing ones life based off sudden emotional or thought-related pressure, or through other things happening that easily distract me from the epiphany, and make me forget it. I used to label epiphanies as “moments of clarity”, those few seconds or minutes where things not only make sense, but feel like they make sense. I have had these “moments of clarity” periodically throughout my life: In Acapulco, during a missions trip there;  In college, after a night of writing a paper that I had forgotten to do; Kissing a girl and feeling that the whole nature of humanity is off, or is primitive, and tied too much to the tactile; others that directly contradict the last one, like times when you kiss someone and it seems like it might have been the end goal of evolution and humanity itself, the Plan led you to a perfectly good and true moment, that just turned out to be a kiss, or even a look, or something.  The vague of them all, coupled with their ties to small minutes of my life, makes them seem, in the end, rather pointless.

This hasn’t allowed me to discard them entirely, however. Even though I know that the moments I am speaking of are small and emotional and not very real or sustainable, and that life, if lived for such moments, is drab and depressing, I cannot shake the feeling that they are somehow indespensible, if only to transform the one having an epiphany into something else, to allow them briefly the feeling of correctness, and to remind them that, really, the world isn’t correct, or too good, or kind, but that sometimes it can feel that way, and, perhaps, sometime it might be that way.

I’m not going to read that again, as I don’t feel like either editing it for clarity or removing contradiction. Sometimes you have to leave things the way they are thought, and not refine or revisit.

So I’ve been seeing a lot of new things and doing a lot of new things, both good and bad. I’ve said it before, but the nature of this particular blog forces upon it, or, perhaps, I force upon it, necessary blind spots over anything I do that’s bad. I don’t write about the people I’ve hurt or disappointed in the past year because I want to present myself in a certain way. I also don’t write too in depth about the people I’ve helped. Instead, I hope, I’ve used this blog as an insight into me and my thoughts, into what is going on in my mind, and not the kind of things I do or do to people.

But my mind is sometimes a confusing place. As far as I can tell, most people don’t have an internal dialogue quite like mine: I am constantly talking to myself internally, having elaborate, specific conversations about a lot of topics over the course of a day, typical un- or tangentially connected with the situation at hand. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s almost as if I have small, intense internal Socratic debates with myself. It takes a fair bit of effort to overcome the internal dialogue, though thinking in Spanish and watching T.V. in Spanish both seem to do the trick, though less now, as my Spanish level has increased.

I like Montevideo. It’s an old city, and a dying city (the romantic attraction to the dying city is very strong in me. The… slowness of a cities death is, if not beautiful, artistic) . There are people who will try to rob you and people who will try and ask you for money and there are those who are living in the richer parts and there are those who are living in the poorer parts. There are lots of stories here. I can feel them, almost.

 

A bit of an announcement: I will be coming back to the U.S. in mid-July, looks like. So I’ll see you merry bunch of readers then, and try in the meantime to post more content. Maybe listen a bit more to the muse.

Protest Photos

Briefly, I went to a protest today, though this time I came prepared with plently of lemons and a t-shirt that I made into a mask to cover my face. Example:

The girl in the photo above obviously came more prepared, but something about the gas mask and the summer dress or whatever those things are called struck me as funny — or, at least, very human.

The gallery that follows has a few photos that show me before and after the protest, but not at the protest itself. Anyway, I’ll post something a bit later about being an encapuchado¹ for a day, but right now I’m tired, I have to work in a few hours, and I need to take a shower. So those are the things I’m going to do.

^{1. That is, a masked protester.}

Navidad

Christmas Village in the middle of summer

So Christmas is steadily approaching down here in Santiago, though I can’t seem to get into the spirit of things. 75 degree weather, not too many Christmas trees, few decorations, a kitschy Christmas village in the Plaza de Armas — the lack of identifiers (besides the village) is all a surreal reminder of the otherness that you feel during holidays in Chile. For example, yesterday was the Feast of the Virgin, which  is a national holiday here, and sort of kicks off the whole celebration of Christ’s birth. But, since I’m spending most of my time with travelers and non-practicing Chilean Catholics, I didn’t have any idea that everything would be  closed. Which really confused me, since I needed to do some things at a government office. I should have taken my cue from the closed shops everywhere, but I figured it was just a general strike and that the government buildings would still be open. Nope, that’s a bad call Thomas. So I had to go back today, and queue up for two and a half hours for a ten minute conversation.

Strange times

Panorama of the Plaza de Armas at 6 p.m.

So, I’ve begun working a few hours a day at a hostel for room and board, which basically covers all my normal expenses. It also allows me to focus on enjoying the simple, pleasant life you can lead when you do a bit of manual labor, write some, teach a bit, go out for some delicious wine or mediocre beer, make new friends, and dance till 4 a.m.

For those of you who haven’t gone dancing with me in a while, let me set the record straight: I love dancing. I can think of few things I enjoy more, besides, in no particular order, 1. making out etc. . So I hope that explains how much I enjoy dancing. Techno, rap, reggaeton, electronic, whatever. I’ll dance to it. I love it. Seriously can’t stress that enough.

A former resident’s very specific guide to Valparaíso

What’s up, everybody. I realize some or all of you probably have a poor sense of the places I live or have lived down here. So let’s start first with a map, a brief recap for the lazy, then a song after the jump, followed by a long indepth review of the places and things I did in Valparaíso, la ciudad de mi amor.

It’s a big map, so you can feel free to click on it to study it in more detail. The key locations and neighborhoods are all listed, and we’ll be going through them. Basically, most of my time was spent in the Plan or in Cerro Cordillera, where I lived. If you need a sense of time scale, if I walk, it takes me about 45 minutes to walk to Plaza O’Higgins, where I played most of my chess.  The Plaza is fairly close to the Universidad Catolica, where I taught, and the main market in Valpo, which is on Yungay. I’ll be calling the city by its shorter name (Valpo) most of the time, so brace yourselves. As you head west from the Plaza on Pedro Montt, you’ll eventually find yourself at Plaza Italia (unlabled on the map) and the Hostal where Ben spent most of his time getting hassled by Nani and hanging out with her son. Continuing further, you’ll come across JCruz, the famous restaurant where chorrillana was invented¹. The Servicio de Impuestos Internos, or the Chilean IRS follows shortly thereafter, and shares it’s building with the Extranjeria, where Ben and I spent many days trying to get our visa situation sorted out. Finally, as we continue our journey towards my old home, we come to Plaza Sotomayor, the main and most famous plaza in Valpo, and about a block and a half from my old house. After that, it is a short trip up the 176 stairs of Pasiaje Cienfuegos, which you have to walk up and down, if you’re me, at least four times a day. At the top of Cienfuegos, you’ll find the old, old hostal where I used to stay, and the nice though empty Kafe that was run by my friend Andres and his wife Lorena.

So, that’s the brief recap. Now, follow this jump to the song.

Time

It has been a few months since I wrote anything substantial on here. I find that the more I get involved in a life anywhere, the less I like talking about it or explaining what I am doing. I think this is largely predicated on a latent fear of failure; I don’t like failing, but I seem to do it so often that if no one ever knows what I am doing, I can always be mysteriously living in a shadowy infallible state in the fringe areas of peoples minds. What is Sam up to? Well, I’m not really sure. There are rumors that he’s doing [x], but I haven’t talked to him in so long that I just don’t know.

Which leads me directly into my fear of talking on the phone. I hate talking on the phone to anyone. And as people who have know me for a while can tell you, at some point I stop ending conversations with you unless I am related to you and just hang up as soon as I have acquired the information that I need from you. This is a bad habit, I suppose, but I don’t  know exactly what to do about it. Other people live so much of their lives on the phone, but the mere idea of talking to other people on the phone is distressing to me. That’s not to say I can’t be amicable when I am talking on the phone, or comfortable if I know the person already. But, say, I haven’t talked to someone in a long time, or I don’t know them well, or I just don’t feel good about the phone conversation, I just won’t call them. I think, in some ways, this has led me to a peculiar situation as far as making friends go. I don’t make many new friends unless I meet them for a while face to face first. I just don’t call people I’ve met once or twice to see if they want to hang out. I think this also stems from a general disinterest that I have in meeting new people. It isn’t that I necessarily dislike meeting new people, or the fun that comes with exposing them to my eccentricities of conversation, gesture, and attempts at humor, but, on the whole, unless the person I meet is willing to contact me at some future date, I will not initiate independently a second contact. This has led me to some other conclusions about relationships that I have been in: that is, in general, they last only a few weeks, and have nebulous endings. Now, some of you may say, you know that I have been in one long relationship in my life, but as I get a bit older and think about it more, I am no longer sure what to think about that. I am a creature of inertia more than anything, and if I get going at something long enough, I stick with it regardless. I am not sure if this is a common trait, though I do know that it is not unique to me.

Desigualidad

La fortuna de las cuatro famlias más ricas de Chile equivale al ingreso anual del 80% (más de 13 millones) de los chilenos.

The yearly income of the four richest families in Chile is equivalent to the annual income of 80% (more than 13 million) of Chileans.

By percentile, 1 being the bottom 5 percent