Buenos Aires, it's time I fell back in love with you.

Remember the golden days?  I was enchanted by you.  You were larger than anything I'd even seen, even larger than New York City, because you overwhelmed me and sucked me in to a life of 14-lane boulevards, late nights with too much wine, cobblestone little streets, fairs, SPANISH language pouring from every crack, the tiny adventure of just going outside alone to sit in a café and look at flashcards and feel proud of myself for blending in for being part of this tiny café scene in a giant city, the helpful people on the bus who took one look at my screwed-up lips-pursed face and asked where was I going and thoughtfully asked the bus driver to let me know when to get off.

I've lost my Zen innocence and I want it back.

I remember with fondness when nothing was at stake.  Whatever happens on this South America trip, I would think to myself with blissful equanimity, happens.  Nothing needs to happen for me to have had a worthwhile experience, for me to regard the whole adventure with satisfaction.  When I went to Chile this attitude carried me from decision to decision on a gentle ocean tide.  No pressure to see any one thing, do any one thing.  I roamed wherever Nick and Jake felt like going.  It was a wonderful period of phytoplankton-like existence.  Nick and Jake would talk about which WWOOF farm we should go to next, debating the merits of this farm versus that one and which one was likely to yield the most bang for the buck.   I'd watch them peaceably, having declared my official position as "I'm up for anything"-- knowing that wherever we went, it would be good, it would be travel, it would be exciting.  My beloved travel philosophy was "there isn't a wrong choice, so make whatever choice you feel like."

Now things have changed.

How can one be in South America and not go to Bolivia and Peru?  How could I let myself be lullabied to cozy satisfaction by Argentina and Chile?  I can't walk away from my fears of solo travel.  I can't go back to the US til I have my trascendental self-realization.  I can't return to California unless I come home different.  There's something I must do here, but I don't know what it is, how to achieve it, or when to know if I've done enough and it's okay now.  If you travel to Salta and WWOOF a few weeks, then you can go home, I find myself rationalizing.  What's this?  I have to travel and have fun in order to be able to go home?  Ridiculous.  If that's the case, go home now and use the saved money to rent an apartment in Oakland.

There's a lot of ego caught up in this feeling of travel-insufficiency.  Part of me is looking to the future, eagerly awaiting the day when I can go around wearing the pride of Having Traveled like a pin on my shirt.  I want to earn my "Travel" Girl Scout badge.  A small beam of self-esteem shining out of my memories of the crazy things I'd done and people I'd met, to reassure me in every moment of doubt.  Besides, says my ego, everyone else you know didn't just stick to Argentina and Chile (this isn't true). You don't want to have underachieved South America, do you?

I miss being a phytoplankton.  Seesawing on my doubts about whether to stay in South America through March or go back to the United States to look for a job and start "real life" has sapped a lot of the adventurous spirit that had built up like repressed libido as I waited for my mom to come to Buenos Aires and travel with me for ten days.  I couldn't wait for the day when the door would be flung open and I'd spring out of Buenos Aires and into the rest of the continent, to explore it.  I told myself that I'd leave Buenos Aires the day my mother left.

Yesterday, as I walked to my friend Martín's house in the old-oven heat of Buenos Aires in summer, the realization burst all over me like a balloon filled with watercolor paints: I want to go back to the US and start real life.  What a wonderful release, to admit it to myself.  I just can't wait to move to Berkeley, search out a job or internship, craft a hardworking but pleasurable dream existence for myself in the Bay Area for a year or so, and then go on another adventure somewhere.  When I allowed myself to think Yes, let's do it, I felt a heavy weight lift from my shoulders and relief flood my stomach.  Leave South America and go back to California, where a whole different type of journey --find myself, find work, build a community, seek depth of knowledge-- would await.  I could stop constantly questioning who I am and what will I do with my life, taken out of this limbo-esque waiting space of theoretical self-discovery and transported to greater heights by actual work and the actual business of living somewhere.

At the same time, there's a major flaw in my thoughts.  Why do I feel this urgent need to begin "real life," and why doesn't this trip count as such?  Isn't "real life" (in the sense of jobs and establishment and settledness) what most adults experience for a continuous fifty, sixty years of life?  If so, then what's the rush?  And how is it that I'm not in Real Life right now?  Did I hit "pause" in the movie of my life, step off the screen, and commence to bumble about in an alternate reality, awaiting the day I'd step back into character and press "play"?  Am I currently living in a giant parenthesis?  

There's also the niggling sense of reality that tells me I might not even be able to find a job.

I guess what's most relevant, though, is that moving back to California doesn't necesarily banish back to their cave the questions that swoop around my head like bats and brush me with their wingtips in the dark.  For I am here in South America to have an open mind and see new things, yes, but I also constantly project the new things into the future.  My experiences here are mixed into a big blend of What can I do for a living?  What do I like?  What am I good at?  What needs doing in the world?  It was unsettling when my friend Martín, who is 28 years old and has already been working for a number of years as a computer programmer, followed up our discussion of whether or not I should stay in South America with a discussion about how he doesn't know what to do with his life.  Darn.  I was hoping that I could go home now and come back to travel later, carefree after a few years of establishing my identity as a member of such-and-such a field with such-and-such abilities, thus resolving all the questions.  But it appears that even at the venerable age of 28, the questions persist.

***

Somehow or another, scientists have pinned numbers on the sources of happiness:  it's 50% genetic, 10% conditions (money, location, etc), and 40% attitude.  My own experience upholds this conclusion.  Happiness is mental.  It doesn't matter where I am; I could be in a beautiful place, but if I'm not open to seeing beauty, if I won't let it in, then I won't.  How can I prepare my eyes to open to beauty?  Probably by just opening them.  And taking a deep breath and telling myself I do NOT have to figure everything out right this instant.

***

My grandmother wrote to me in an email that of course I feel like a crazed butterfly (which is how I described the sensation of the last few days, and how I feel in general whenever I'm in Buenos Aires), because I'm just floating, watching time flow away from me, doing nothing.  It wasn't as much an accusation as a fairly perceptive diagnosis of my restlessness.  But, if I am simply fluttering, goal-less... well, that's not why I'm here.  I came here to learn, to be shaken up and out of myself, to be exposed.  I'm not here to do nothing.  If that's what I'm doing, then I want to change and try again before I give up the ghost.

***

I just finished Eat Pray Love after an intense 2-day love affair.  I discovered the book in a tidy corner bookshelf of the hostel I was staying in.  This book could not have come to me at a better time: it's the story of a woman in her thirties who decides to travel for a year in search of balance or equilibrium, happiness, and recovery.  I loved her travel philosophy in Italy:

"when I I told my Italian friends that I'd come to their country in order to experience four months of pure pleasure, they didn't have any hang-ups about it...Nobody once said 'How completely irresponsible of you,' or 'What a self-indulgent luxury.'  But while the Italians have given me full permission to enjoy myself, I still can't quite let go...I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment or a giant science fair project...

"When I realized that only question at hand was, "How do I define pleasure?" and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed.  Everything became...delicious."

Amen.

 

 

This week I spent hours creating, updating, rechecking, data-entering, and evaluating spreadsheets all about $.

Most of my life, money has been guesswork, if it's been anything at all.  What the hell is a budget?  How does one go about establishing one?  I have no idea how much is reasonable to spend on food per week, I've sorta been writing down how much I pay for coffee and salad but they're just strung together in a big list of purchases so I have no idea how much it's been, and maybe I'll just pick a random number, let's say $35, as my monthly budget for fun and entertainment, because that sounds about right.

"What the hell is a budget"-- suddenly I know what it is, I know how to establish one, AND I know how to generate a Google Doc spreadsheet that will, with a written record of my purchases in my purse and the dollar amount in my bank account to inform me, quickly and easily reveal to me what I can spend per day without spending more money than I'm willing to spend overall. 

It's really easy to figure out a budget when you're spending a finite pool of pre-earned money and need to make it last for a set amount of time.  If I want to travel to Peru and other countries in January, which I do, I can't spend all my money living in Buenos Aires in December.

What the hell a budget is: a limited amount of money I've decided I'm willing to spend on daily operations, leaving other money remaining for important things like Rent and The Future. 

In brief, a decisionmaking tool.

I remember learning in Math 51 about constrained optimization, ie, using Lagrange multipliers.  If a function represents "utility" (ie, the happiness you derive from having or spending money), and the constraint is the amount of money either physically or emotionally available to you--

I once spent $100 on a guitar from Craigslist.  Afterward I was feeling bad about that, wondering if it was wasteful; a guitar is a luxury good.  There are people out there who need money for food.  As I walked with my friend down the quiet streets of Santa Cruz she asked me how much the guitar cost.  I told her and she said, "That's a lot."  But in the course of our conversation we realized she's spent that much on shoes.  I don't.  I find expensive clothing a waste of money.

Americans spend 10% of their income on food.  For citizens of other countries, that figure can be as high as 60%. 

***

Yesterday, in a book about the proper valuation of the human body, I read: "We confuse the visible with the superficial."

The nature of money, also, is easily confused with its function.  For years I felt money was disgusting, low, corruptive-- because it puts a hard-and-fast value, expressed in dull arbitrary  numbers, on anything; and so it represented shallowness, thoughtlessness, greed.  "I don't need money," I thought, imagining with delight the little adobe-brick house I'd build, the garden I'd have, the community of people I'd live and collaborate with, a small village far far away from consumptive society, the gross displays of wealth, the endless tiny purchases because our lives would be happier If We Owned This.  Who needs money?

Money isn't necessarily a cheap substitute for real human value, though; it doesn't necessarily degrade what it describes.  Because it's not really money that describes anything.  A price tag is STILL totally valueless; the interpretation is all in the human mind.  Is $100 too much for a guitar?  Is $100 too much for a pair of shoes?  For a 21-speed bicycle?  For a bottle of red wine?  How about something so human-value-oriented that it's become cliche to ask: for a child's education in Africa?  For clean air in Los Angeles?  For emergency surgery to save a war victim? 

Money is the visible of values.

Conversations about money have popped up often in the last few weeks of travel, but they're especially densely-concentrated in Buenos Aires.  I've had enough conversations about money (owned to people, paid to people, available in bank accounts, scraps coming in through random jobs, prohibitive expense of a restaurant, debating buses versus trains) to imagine that even if I was living in my tiny adobe-brick village without any government-issued currency at all, similar dramas over value would play out through whatever money-stand-in we'd come up with: point systems, bartering, hours worked, whatever.  It's starting to seem inevitable that perceptions of affordability and value judgments about worth should be a part of life...

When I first got to Buenos Aires, I lived in an apartment with Nick, Jake, and Gab for one week.  I always called it "Gab's apartment."  Gab would laugh at me, almost offended, retorting, "You paid rent too!"  It didn't matter.  It was Gab's apartment, despite the fact that paying money for an apartment is as close to its ownership as renters ever come.  We all paid money to live there.  But Gab paid the most.  (She'd lived there the longest.)

And in another case: there were five people sharing rent in a house.  Although the apartment was meant for 3 people, all 5 paid equal rent and thus everyone's costs were reduced.  Equal rent-- but, it seemed, not equal power.  G. asked, If we do have equal rights to the apartment, why wasn't there a discussion and compromise before J. asked my friends to leave?  Besides, it was further questioned within the group, why are all five paying the same rent, despite the fact that one bed is private, one's in a loft, and two are in a less comfortable public space?  Doesn't equal rent imply equal value?

I am staying with Rachel in her apartment in Palermo.  It's been 6 nights thus far, and maybe I'll stay with her some more.  But I'm not paying rent.  We already talked about the arrangement, of course; she told me I was welcome to stay.  Not wanting to feel totally charity-dependent I make sure to pay for half of the groceries and feel free to pitch in pesos because after all, I'm not paying rent and she is, and that's a sizable chunk of change I'd otherwise be spending.  Sometimes I reason, She'd be paying rent anyway, right, so why should I have to pay rent just to stay for a week?  On the other hand, isn't she paying rent to buy herself a private space? 

It's fascinating to talk about money with my friends here in Buenos Aires.  We're all on budgets.  We all want to pay as little as possible for as much happiness as possible.  We all decide and cannot judge each other for deciding that it's worth it to buy a bottle of wine or that it's not worth it to rent a bike.  It's fasincating to watch the tensions rise and resolve between friends over rent and groceries.  It's fascinating to notice our different comfort levels when talking about money-- I've gotta pay rent, I've gotta watch what I spend, that's way too expensive, I'm broke.  It's still easier for me to talk about sexual exploits than about my financial situation.

In this video, the Greek debt crisis and its implications for the EU are explained in 4 minutes.

 

The first twenty-four hours in Buenos Aires: pretty representative, I think, of life in this time and place, for as long as the alcohol and swimming community of friends shall last.

I step out of the bus terminal in Retiro and the sun is hot and dry.  In the shade of a bus stop I whip out the transit guide Guia-T and with the unerring accuracy of a leopard I hunt down a bus to Rachel's apartment.

Get to Rachel's apartment and guess which buzzer to push.  Lucky guess.

Take a shower and watch the dirt float off.

Eat some real food for the first time since the previous day's breakfast.

Go to an art opening, two hours late, at 8pm.  The band sounds like a bass guitar in a grinder.  The art opening takes place in an aluminum factory warehouse.  I retreat to a back room to work on Gab's birthday card.

Eat pizza because I'm hungry, practically faint from so little food over the course of the day and the crash and squeal of the crazy musicians and so much cigarette smoke (how frail I feel, how unadapted to the city), craving calories of any sort.  The pizza is a good sort.  I split a small with Rachel and the taste of hot cheese brings me back to life.

Take a bus to 1035 Defensa for Gab's going-away party with Rachel, thinking I'm so tired and sleep-deprived I won't be here long.  We ring the buzzer and then I jump up and down in a doorway with a shrieking Gab in her pink skirt.  Upstairs, Sasha introduces me to Anderson and Sebastian, two boys whose story How-Are-You-Here I don't yet know, and Anderson gives us candy from Colombia.  Drink Quilmes Stout, a sweet dark beer, in a re-appropriated mug, and red wine from the bottle.  Talk in Spanish to Laura and Rachel and Anderson sitting on the floor of the apartment by the couches, and debate the tub of Whole Foods peanut butter.  Play Bonobo from Sasha's ipod, a soft undercurrent below the rise and fall of voices.  Anderson tells me about his childhood in Colombia where he learned about medicinal plants (not least marijuana) from the indigenous people.

Somehow it's 2am already.  Then it's 3:30.  I lie with my head in Rachel's lap as she shuts her eyes and leans against the wall.  The neighbor pounds our floor from below with the handle of a broom.  We quiet down for ten seconds and then resume the noise level that lets us best communicate our amusement with each other's foibles and our gladness to feel a connection with this other person who doesn't speak the same language, and thank goodness for alcohol which loosens the tongue and slackens the stiffness.

Gab runs around the Defensa apartment with her computer, where her friends from Montreal laugh soundlessly and grin out of the screen via Skype.  Her face is pink with sunburn and her pigtails stick out to the side and her smile takes over her face.  There are many people in the apartment I don't know.  Sasha plays "Fuck you," which all the Americans sing with joy, on her ukekele.  When she's done a tall muscled Argentine, a friend of Gab's Man, claps his hands and requests more, more, and so we all sing "Rock me mama like a wagon wheel" and our voices weave in harmony, even Jose Manuel's.

Somehow it's 5am already.  Justine wants us out.  The neighbors are probably right to bang on the floor at this point, even if more and more people are slumping happily to the floor to rest on each other's legs and as a result we make less noise.

Somehow the sun has already risen and the sky is a light, sleepy-faced blue when Rachel and Laura and I catch a bus to Rachel's apartment.  We are so exhausted that we feel quite chipper.  Buenos Aires is beautiful and clean and smells like a fresh breeze at 6 in the morning.

I wake up five hours later, leaving Laura to keep sleeping in the bed, and start to journal because I've fallen behind in my journaling.  I let Laura out of the building with Rachel's alien-ray-gun-shaped keys around noon.  Rachel wakes up at 2pm and we prepare to leave the apartment to go find a Cooperative Cultural Center where the workshops are free and where Alena goes for an arial fabrics class once a week.  We Guia-T our way there, running almost an hour late by accident.  Getting up from his seat, a man in the Metro gives us a copy of a Toni Morrison book in Spanish because Rachel asked him where he found "The Song of Solomon" and I said "Me gusta Toni Morrison."

Buenos Aires. 

Disclaimer: Today's post is a long one because I try and summarize what I've been up to these last few weeks.  I remember once hearing someone say that they hate reading about other people's travels, because who wants to read that?  Well, this is a travel-blog post, and mostly just contains stories that you might hear from me one day in person when we talk about our lives and these things just come up.  But I try to keep the stories bite-sized here, a smorgasbord of appetizers. 

***

But first, some context.

Jake leaves tonight on a flight to SFO.  Nick is leaving for the US on Wednesday. I have the option of staying in Chile by myself-- returning to visit an ecovillage near Linares, WWOOFing again at Llama Azul, making my way north to help a Belgian family with bioconstruction on an eco-school-- but I'm not going to.  I'm going back to Bunoes Aires, to the community that's crystallizing there.  There will be time to adventure on my own, and if there's one thing I plan on, I plan on doing that.

So this, at least for now, is the end of Chile for me.  I've skipped over great hunks of countryside and culture, taking introductory nibbles here and there, discovering that is still more to be seen and done in all directions-- but there would always be more to see and do.  I could stay in Chile a month, in three months, in a year, and the surprise and discovery could go on and on. The same is true of any and all places.

I'm going back to Buenos Aires right after Nick is gone.  Even though part of me is tugging on its leash, hungering to picking up the threads of an adventure in Chile, another part of me fears the terrible desolate feeling of watching a familiar face disappear behind a door.  I will feel deprived of the freedom that comes with familiarity and love.  I'll have to hold myself in my arms on the busride back to Buenos Aires.  It's good for me, I know, to be able to hold myself, but since when has knowing "it's good for me" make difficult things any easier?  It helps that in Buenos Aires are other friends, Gab and Sasha and Alena and Justine and the many incredible rebels and artists that I met in September.  My mother will come to Buenos Aires for the 2 weeks that guide 2011 into 2012.  In Buenos Aires there are people all the time.

Gab is leaving and Theo will arrive and leave and my mother will leave.  Others may stay in BA, who knows.  Impossible to know it now.  All I know is that when nothing ties me to Buenos Aires anymore, when I have laughed and danced in that crowded city-- I am going to travel alone and I will smile and be light.

***

There are so many ways to categorize experience.  I have thought of updating this blog in terms of the generosity we've been shown by strangers, dawning realizations about human nature, wealth and poverty, food, space/time-- selecting a frame for experience based on some of my strongest impressions.

But I am too full of disorderly contentment to shape and frame the last weeks into a semblance of order, to give it a theme and a meaning.  I'm going to just post some pictures again.

 

SANTIAGO (end Oct - early November)

Santiago, the capital of Chile, a city hemmed in by enormous looming mountains.  Nick and Jake and I climbed an abrupt hill in the middle of the city to see the view.

When we arrived in Santiago we had noplace to stay.  A cousin of Nick's friend from Klamath Falls took us in the same day we emailed her from a mall's cyber cafe.  Halloween found us in her apartment.  Since trick-or-treat-ing (dulce o traversura) has spread to Santiago, we decided to trick-or-treat ourselves.  We bought candy bars and gave them to ourselves at the door of the cousin's apartment.  I was a dumbass superhero.  Nick was a robot.  Jake just ate candy. We found a last-minute couch through Couchsurfing.  Ricardo and Benjamin and Pilar live in a surprisingly large house on Victoria Street: surprising because it seems to take up no space at all from the front, but when you open the door the house pushes back, with a bright corridor and courtyard.  Ricardo bought some detergent at the grocery store and it came with a bat costume.  We told our hosts it was a tradition in the U.S. to cook dinner wearing a bat costume, as Nick demonstrated.  We encountered some weird fruits at La Vega Central, the massive food market.  We bought all the cool interesting stuff we could find, though most of it was pretty normal, strawberries and apples and potatoes.  One of the fruits felt like a soft puppy nose and inside are orange-pulp seeds, eaten as you might eat pomegranate.  My favorite fruit was the passionfruit, which we didn't recognize until we'd taken a bit of the gloppy innards.  Passionfruit looks like green vomit inside.  It tastes amazing. Ricardo and Benjamin taught us how to make the Brazilian national cocktail with sugarcane alcohol, ice, powdered sugar, and limes.  Jake was a fan. One Sunday, we marched in a Marcha Familiar.  Thousands poured into the street to defend the students protesting for free education: students, of course, but also people of many generations.  Hence "marcha familiar"-- a family march.  The families came to show to the government that these aren't just crazy kids, as the media has portrayed them.  I saw several elderly couples holding handlettered signs saying something like this (in spanish):  "My son studied to be a doctor in Cuba. His education was free.  My daughter goes to school in Santiago.  Her education costs ______."   The sum of money is enormous by Chileno standards. (I don't remember the figure.)  The University of Chile is occupied by protestors and covered in banners calling for free education.  Nick ducked inside the building during the march and become friends with two of the students.  He almost went with them into the admin building for a 2-day sit-in to try and delay the start of the next semester, but luckily he didn't do that, because the police chased them out as soon as the sit-in started.

I was powerfully reminded of how lucky I am to have had my parents and grandparents to help put me through college.  No, to PUT me through college.  It hit me hard, walking with those protestors, thinking about their cause and what they hope to achieve: I am very fortunate.  If I at first felt like an outsider who didn't belong, I began instead to feel legitimate, a supporter in my own right.  I went to a private university, and I know from experience that a degree from Stanford is considered a big step up in life.  And it costs hella money to receive it, too.  If university tuition is beyond the reach of poorer students, then they don't have the same opportunity others did to receive whatever boost comes from higher education, be it at a private institution or a public school-- and so income inequality persists.  I was glad to be an already-graduated private school student from America's richest league of universities, marching to support free education in Chile.  It made me think of the protests in Berkeley and the other UCs over tuition hikes.  Tuition expenses for students is as consequential in the US as it is here.  If only all the private-school students stood with their public-school counterparts...  thinking to myself "Oh, their battle doesn't affect me" or "that's a lot of fuss over something minor compared to, say, global warming" is neither rational nor ethical.  Human happiness and social cohesion, not to mention ideals of equal opportunity, prosperity, and individual empowerment, are at stake.

 

LINARES (Llama Azul farm)

Llama Azul is a small permaculture farm inhabited by a family from the Canary Islands (property of Spain, off the coasts of Europe and Africa).  One son, two daughters, a father and mother, and various guests who are expected to work in exchange for food but are nonetheless family friends and very much at home there.

The two daughters were like exiled princesses, with raven hair and lovely smiles, cooks and bread-bakers who didn't seem to miss their childhood kingdom at all.  The son was a fifteen-year-old Rambo, with a black faux-hawk and a crooked beautiful smile.  The mother was an herb-witch with gray hair and a meditation yurt, a strict and stout person who tolerated no nonsense and brewed oils from roses.  The father was a lean and independent guy, easygoing, who'd traveled all over and also believed in spirit worlds.  Tomás, a family friend, long-boned and skinny, had warm radiant eyes and a surprising flash of a smile, a young man who told me that every moment is his meditation, because all each moment requires is Observing and Listening.  He seemed supernaturally wise, and yet sometimes he could just be a fun-loving Bro.

After Oktoberfest in Puerto Varas, we became obsessed with choripan, or chorizo sausage on bread.  One day our dreams came true: just after 11/11/11, on a mountain we'd ascended with Tomás and the son for a small meditation party, we got stuck halfway down the trail.  (In a moment of glorious abandon, running down the steep mountain trail, I twisted my ankle so sharply I couldn't walk.)  We camped in a clearing and Nick ran down the mountain and came back with longaniza sausages from a food truck, the only food supply outlet for kilometers. 

I am no longer a vegetarian for long stretches of time.  Only for a few weeks at a time.  Not sure what to think about this.  (Last night I dreamt I bashed a rabbit to a smeary pulp with a rock.  I awoke, horrified, remembering again the ugly lives and ugly deaths of animals raised for meat.)

Anyway, we loved our choripan in an ecstacy of sensory and gustatory pleasure.

 

TEMUCO/ PUNTE MAPOCHO (Newen Mapu)

Temuco: a city in mid-Chile, in the region of the Araucania, the Monkey Puzzle Tree.  The region, with Temuco at its heart, is the home of most of the remaining Mapuche culture-- the culture of the largest indigenous group in Chile.  That is, in fact, why we were there.  Nick, stunned by Chile's Westernization and the Santiago markets full of cheap crap so reminiscent of America, sought to find evidence that others ways of living still do exist by seeking the Mapuche community.

Luis was our couchsurfing host in Temuco.  In Luis' living room we were treated to an amusing example of the "weird moments of globalization" Nick had started to spot everywhere: on his sitar, the Indian instrument he'd learned to play in India, Luis strummed the theme song from "The Simpsons."

On a tiny farm 2 hours outside of Temuco, wind-swept, jagged-hilled, we stayed with a WWOOF couple, Julia and Patricio.  Julia is German, 28 years old, friendly and commanding and practical.  She met "Pato" (Patricio's nickname, meaning "duck;" he is totally unlike a duck, being quiet and dark with a flashing and somewhat snickering sense of humor) while WWOOFing, fell in love, and moved out to his childhood home to live in a small wooden house and only the once-a-day bus to connect them to tiny cities like Melipeuco or Cunco.  Pato is half-Mapuche, and lives on a small plot of land his father apportioned to him from the family land holding.  He is building a new house all by himself for the two of them. 

While their lifestyle was certainly different from Ricardo's and from the family's at Llama Azul-- being much more practical, simple, down-to-earth, and hard-scrabble-- it wasn't exactly what Nick was looking for.  He eventually found that in Icalma, a very tiny town at the end of the once-a-day busline in the middle of fog-blown araucania forests, and you can probably read about it soon on his DIY-themed blog Made in America.  (It's beyond me to accurately describe what Nick was looking for.  When I asked myself about it, I realized that I'm not looking for anything in particular, just turning towards the things I like, like a leaf towards the sun.  Sometimes it's nice to have a mission, something to search for.  But I'm just kind of blowing about now, not knowing the one thing I want in particular, not searching, only looking.)

Meanwhile I thought Julia and Pato's life was quite interesting, something solid and grounding to understand about the world.  They are strapped for money, trying to get an ethno-tourism venture off the ground one day but they first must find land where tourists can come because where they live now is impossibly remote and isolated; and they have decided they need to go to Germany, Julia's homeland and a very different place from hard-eyed and white-smiling Chile, and make money before they can live in Chile again, because the minimum wage and 11-hour days and stress and unhealth of Santiago didn't do much for them when they went there and tried to make money to take back and live on.  On Pato's land, they have some very small home gardens and almost all their land is set on a slope, and they need money to buy food: flour for bread, pasta, lentils, milk.

I made lots and lots of bread for our breakfast, lunch, dinner.  It's a staple food of the countryside now, and as Julia pointed out, diabetes is skyrocketing in the countryside.

There was a young tomcat who whined incessantly outside the door of the house each day.  If he got a chance he'd streak inside and crouch under the warm woodstove, where he'd miaow for hours for food.  Once given food, he might be quiet again, but he might not.  Julia seemed to prefer his stately grandmother, Casimira.  She'd give the tomcat food too, but his pathetic mewling became so annoying that she'd at last stamp her foot hard on the floorboards and shout "AFUERA!" (Out!)  The tomcat would streak back outside.  I didn't have much sympathy for him until the last day, when I watched him rub his back on the patient black dog, for company or for warmth.  If I was a cold and hungry cat I'd miaow and cry all the time too.

 

VALPARAISO

Valparaiso is an ugly beautiful Garden of Eden, a crazy dream playground, colorful and twisted and ramshackle and touristic and ancient.  Warehouses with rusting tin sides.  Concrete steps that shake as you walk up them.  Twisted winding roads and mysterious avenues, lumpy hills scaled in stumpy cable cars, paintings on every surface, graffiti slogans (Educacion gratis!) and painted pixies and demons and human beings and gaudy shaped. 

Our couchsurfing host, an Italian boy named Giacomo, said he picked Valparaiso to study architecture over another city because of the name.  I think he's about 25-50% joking.  Other people echoed this exact same "joke."  More than one person at Giacomo's "Thanksgiving Day Party" (we ate choripan plus the mashed potatoes that the little trio of Americans contributed) mentioned a similar decisionmaking process.  And no one really seemed to love Valparaiso.  It's well beloved by visitors-- we were there because so many people told us to visit it-- but its inhabitants seem weary of its charm.

 

[No photo, though others were taking them; I couldn't bring myself to do it]

While we were walking the flat valley streets we accidentally walked into a cloud of pepper spray fired by police at student protestors.  I couldn't see for the tears burning out of my face.  We stumbled on the plaza where the students were and watched Carabineros, the Chilean police, fire a water cannon at protestors from an armored truck.  It may have just been water, but it was violent.  The water hissed and spit off the tree trunks when it hit them with explosive force.  One student was knocked off her feet onto the ground.  And a crowd of protestors stood on the sidewalks, as if sullen witnesses to a public execution, scattering only when the police began to gas bystanders with pepper spray and hit them with the water cannon.  I thought, the bystanders give power to the protestors: witnessing, watching, learning.  So the police tried to send them home.

Little boys in t-shirts and bigger boys with Palestinian-style neckscarves flung rocks at the massive armored vehicles. The rock-throwing seemed so foolish, almost unconnected from the protest, like a way to pass the time as if in a real-life video game. 

Protesting students want free education, to end the massive gaping inequalities -- in a recent report on the 35 industrialized countries, Chile ranked in the bottom 5 for social justice, as did the US-- created by expensive education that limits the abilities of most people to improve their socioeconomic standing.  But I think the students are only hurting themselves by throwing rocks at the cops.  The police aren't in charge of education.  It's only a distraction, a straw man for the protestors to revile, successfully diverting their energies the way that the "2 minutes of hate" relieved pent-up energies in Orwell's 1984.  Sure, I wanted to throw rocks too-- something visceral about watching that water cannon fire blasts of water, it raised my hackles, got me furious-- so I can understand.  But in the end the police are just an easy target for hate.  They are solid bodies in easily-seen uniforms.  It's much harder to fight a government, a system, an ideology, than to fight another person.

LAS DOCAS

Nick and I left Giacomo's for a short romantic getaway-- camping on the beach together.  Giacomo recommended Las Docas, an isolated little beach without many people.  So we went, a short bus ride, and hiked down to the beach.  It was beautiful.  Steep cliffs enclosed a crescent-moon belt of sand. Sunset at Las Docas.  Little did we know-- though in my paranoia about water and drowning, I sorta suspected-- that the night to come would be an adventure.

The waves crashed with force against the beach the whole time we were there, but they weren't terrifying until it was 10:30pm, a black moonless night, and the waves were crashing 20 feet from our campsite.  I panicked, realizing we were cut off from the main beach.  Even though the worst that wouldn've happened was a cold miserable night with wet feet, I saw the white rush of the surf, lit by my headlamp, and gasped in short little breaths for fear.  We packed up the tent in a hurry, pushed the food bag to higher ground.  And then we ourselves had to escape, for I couldn't stay there, watching the tide come closer.  We had to go UP.

Nick called the adventure "Type II Fun"-- where you're really glad it happened, afterwards.

We escaped the thrashing cold waves, climbing up a steep cliff of rock to reach a narrow plateau; in the narrow beam of my headlight I could've sworn we were in a horror movie.   Then I kneeled on the ground above the waves and rocked back and forth in fear that Nick, climbing up with the backpack, would fall.   But he didn't.  So of course it was all worth it.   We snuggled in a sleeping bag and drank sweet wine and stared up at the million glittering stars.  I even overcame my terror, slowly, slowly, and only occasionally dreamed of drowning and falling.  In the morning we looked down from our clifftop at the ocean, subdued and dropped back to low tide.

The next day we realized that the employees of the beach, who take people's money in exchange for a permit to camp, had stolen my rainproof jacket, Nick's tent, and all our food.  Nick confronted the employees and they lied about it, saying they hadn't even been near our campsite.  Sadly for the thief, he hadn't thought to realize that his distinctive footprints in the sand, leading from our belongings to his camp, would give him away.  But it didn't matter.  We couldn't make him give anything back.  That sucked more than the loss of the things themselves: the barefaced robbery of possessions, almost worthless to anyone but us (the tent was expensive, but Nick still had the tent poles in his pack, and all the thief had was the fabric).  It was a robbery of our limited time together, for without any food, we couldn't stay and had to retreat from isolated Las Docas. 

Yet the whole escapade was another instance of Type II Fun, for we enjoyed the 4 km hike back to tiny pueblo Laguna Verde, where we hung out on a different and more public beach instead, refusing to give up our romantic getaway.  And now Nick and I have a pretty good story to tell.

SANTIAGO

Ricardo, Benjamin, and Pilar in their house on 232 Victoria welcomed us back when we returned, a little raggedy, from our camping adventure.  Last night was a pizza-party farewell to Jake at Ricardo's house, plus delicious ice cream (with milk as the first ingredient!) that I bought for Nick and Jake as a thank-you for carrying me down the mountain in Linares when I couldn't walk. 

And here we are.  Jake leaves later today.  We haven't left the house all day, as is our wont when we are in Santiago, it seems.  Thank god for peanut butter and internet.  We feel safe in this house, a place from which to voyage, a place to recover our scattered minds-- or else to re-scatter them from the simple business of day-to-day living we had achieved while WWOOFing, for the internet is a fascinating and endlessly divergent tool and toy.  I really didn't miss it much, though, the internet. 

Today I spent a good several hours cleaning up a watery mess in Ricardo's house, and as I used Clorox to clean the sink, I remembered the sink in Punte Mapocho, where the sink pipe went through the wall of the house and right out into a little dirt ditch.  You could see the soap bubbles of the dishsoap in the trench.  Here, Clorox magically disappears into the netherworld, whisked out of view and concern.  How strange. 

With my computer in front of me I can spend hours arranging and downloading and uploading photos, writing, reading the news, and it's all good, I suppose -- but somehow when I'm done messing with files and resizing photos I don't feel as good as I feel when I pull my own loaves of bread out of a wood oven.

**UPDATE COMPLETED.**

Dear family and friends, I love you and I can't wait to be home again.  Listening to Nick and Jake talk about Klamath Falls and how they'll be there soon fills me with longing to see your faces and talk with you in person and have a normal life in a familiar place.  I don't plan to come home til March, because there's so much to explore here and I'm happy exploring it, but I'm glad to have something to look forward to.

If you've made it this far in this post I congratulate you.  I hope you're enjoying yourself wherever you are, traveling even if you're staying put in one place, curious about the things you see every day-- and learning something about yourself, which you can do anywhere, anytime. 

Looks like today's post will be a quickie too.  Dear family: I'm still alive!  (Despite some close calls due to some absolutely freezing night weather.)  Dear all: please enjoy the following pictures with almost zero context! 

Sooner or later there might be a comic posted  on this site, explaining why goats are WAY better than lawnmowers.  Really.

El Refugio is the farm owned by Matias Doggenweiler, a chileno who lives with his daughter and parents on 25 ha of beautiful grassland and forest, a mile from the seaside and a mile from a massive lagoon. Matias likes to listen to the news while he works. It probably helps remind him why he chose to live on a farm and practice permaculture.  Romeo is one of the cutest kittens alive.  He's an adorable midget. The ocean.  Where the mussels, clams, limpets, and snails live.  They are delicious and quick easy to catch.  Especially mussels, which stay in one place and are quite obvious. My point exactly.  Delicious mussels.  First boiled, then fried in butter. Pange is a native Patagonian plant.  Its leaves are used to make the traditional dish called mellas, a potato dough sweetened (nowadays, anyway) with sugar and then boiled inside a pange leaf. We bathed in the lagoon.  First cleanliness in a week. Sylvie was a Belgian girl who'd lived in Bolivia and is now walking to Tierra del Fuego, a 900 mile journey that will take until March or so.  She discovered a beautiful patch of sunlit grass through a haunt of trees, like stumbling on Narnia through the wardrobe. We ate a lot of seafood. I finally made myself --with Jake's aid-- the awesome and stylish and comfortable leather shoes that Nick and Jake --and now many others-- sport.  I'm the only one who wears them with socks though. Saying goodbye to the animals of El Refugio.

The wooden house, once lived in by Matias' family, now the dwelling of WWOOFers.  A tree acts as a structural pillar, holding up the roof.

Cooking in our little kitchen on a gas-fired stove.

I'm in Puerto Montt, Chile.  Next to me, Nick is looking up online how to make ricotta out of whey; back at the farm, there are some goat milk curds slowly turning into cheese in a bucket, and it wouldn't be right to toss out the leftover whey considering all the trouble we went through to milk the three easiest goats (and they weren't that easy) this morning.

There's so much to write about, but I'm in this little internet café and I'm anxious to leave.  We still have to hit the bookstore (Nick has read all his books; I inherited his copy of 1491) and the grocery store (we're going to write a cookbook called, "How to rearrange the same basic 7 ingredients so you're never tired of them") to get bulk rice and lentils.  Eggs we can get at the tiny grocery store behind the neighbor's house when we get back to Metri, where Matias lives-- where the farm is.

The tentative plan is to stay at Matias' farm one more week-- at least long enough for Miriam, a friendly neighbor who knows how to hunt for seafood bivalves at low tide, to take us out on the night of the new moon to hassle the shore-bound mussels and clams-- and then travel north toward Santiago.

There's little internet on Matias' farm, so I won't be in contact much.  Puerto Montt, the nearest large town, is a 30-minute bus ride away from the farm, and we won't be making this trip too often.  But I'll try and update this blog as soon as I can, because there are questions swirling in my mind that I want to explore, at least for my own sake, by forcing my thoughts to crystallize into digital packets.

Notes to self:

What is the meaning of Good Work-- what (pre)occupation am I looking for in my life?

What is the existential crisis we American youths seem to have upon entering Buenos Aires?

What is the appeal of farm life, romanticized or not, and how does it relate to Marx's idea of "species-being"-- the labor that every human is at heart meant to do?  (Don't quote me on that one-- Jake told me about species-being and I haven't done my homework yet.)

Sometimes, thoughts of the future, my own future, the Big Questions, the problems and uncertainties, possibilities, interests, desires, fears, crowd one another like the once-upon-a-time bodies of passenger pigeons.  Other times I'm too busy picking the best leaves of chard for dinner (steamed with veritable slabs of powerful garlic in a pan) to really care or notice that there are all these Undecideds swarming overhead.

Socrates says a life unexamined is not worth living, but sometimes the peace and quiet is nice, too.

 

 

 

 

I am surprised to learn that what I believed to be a "universal food for Spanish-speakers" is actually quite specific to Mexico.  The evidence: sometimes José Manuel and Allie have to explain to potential customers what, exactly, "tacos" are.

Sundays in particular are good days to sell tacos.  The entrepreneuring pair navigate the busy street fair that clogs Calle Defensa ("Defense Street") with tourists and craft booths.  They smile and cry "Taco~s delicio~sos!" in happy cadence.  Turns out their business secret is to bring along a full bottle of coke and whiskey.  "It makes it easier to be bright and outgoing for hours," explained Allie.  They list the whiskey as a business expense on the expenses chart posted on the kitchen wall. 

In honor of today, tortilla preparation day-- I helped them make 300 tortillas for the week's tacos-- I am posting the legit tortilla recipe that Allie's Mexican mom taught her.

DISCLAIMER: tortillas are really very easy to make.  SERIOUSLY!

Ingredients:

700 mL wheat flour

1 tablespoon of salt

Hot water

Animal fat (the white block in the picture) (José Manual cuts a half-inch-thick slice off a 6-inch-wide block of fat per batch)

*Makes 20 tortillas*

Ignore the eggs in the picture-- you don't need them.

 

Step 1: basics

Mix the 700 mL flour with the tablespoon of salt in a bowl.  Heat the animal fat in the microwave and set some water to boil. 

Step 2: magic ingredient

Add the melted animal fat to the flour and mix it in with the hands until it's evenly dispersed.  The flour will feel slightly grainy and greasy.

Also, pour yourself a glass: 2/3 coke, 1/3 Hiram Walker whiskey.  It doesn't hurt to be happy and outgoing while making taco parts, too, not only while selling them.

Step 3: make it stick

Add a little bit of the hot water to the flour mixture and begin to knead the dough with both hands.  Keep adding water slowly until the dough is homogenous and holds together, pliant and smooth without being gloppy or overly sticky.  It's probably about a half a cup to a cup of water, all told.

Step 4: mitosis

Knead the dough on the counter.  Then roll the dough into a cylinder, like a kid rolling Play-Dough to make a giant worm.  Divide the worm by pinching it in half.  Pinch it in half again.  This will look a little bit like cell mitosis.  You will end up with four equal balls of dough.

Step 5: che boludo*

Pinch each ball into 5 small balls.  Each ball should fit nicely in the curled palm of your hand.  In the end, you'll have 20 small balls, more or less.

* "Che," by the way, is a slang word meaning "Dude." (Apparently, Ernesto Guevara earned the nickname "Che" by saying "dude"-- in Spanish, obviously-- all the time, just like a surfer from SoCal.)  "Che boludo," also a common slang term, is used as an affectionate greeting among friends.  It literally means "dude balls."

Step 6: chill

Put the bowl of balls in the fridge to chill, which helps them become less sticky.

Step 7: roll 'em out

Take the balls out of the fridge.  Put one on the counter, flatten it a bit with your palm, sprinkle some flour on top if the dough to prevent stickage, and roll it flat and thin with a rolling pin.  This allows the dough to stick to the counter rather than to the rolling pin. 

How thin is thin enough?  Get them translucent and floppy, about 3mm thick.  Y'know, a little thicker than 3 sheets of construction paper, or like thin pizza dough.  When you pile up your sheets of unbaked tortillas, sprinkle a little flour on top to keep them from globbing together.

Step 8:  small fry

Drop each fine-skinned tortilla (so light, so delicate!) into an ungreased pan.  They need to heat on both sides for 1-2 minutes, browning in spots.  Watch out for bumpy ol' pan bottoms: uneven heating can lead to burning.  When no longer doughy, remove the tortilla from the pan and stack it on a plate.  It's ready to eat!

 

Step 9: sing

Develop the Spanish-version lyrics to Death Cab for Cutie's "I will follow you into the dark" and sing it, accompanied by a ukelele, until a neighbor knocks on the door to tell you it's almost 1 a.m. and will you please shut up.  Easier said than done.  We've got joie de vivre and also at least one glass of coke and whiskey inside us.

 

 

Hey, Wall Street Occupiers.  Buenos Aires salutes you.

About 2 weeks ago I was walking along the median on 9 de Julio, the gi-normous boulevard that runs through the city, when I noticed unusually large groups of people hanging out on the grass.  Some of them seemed like workers on a lunch break.  Others were wearing matching blue tunics that said "CTA."  And there were kids playing drums.  How neat, a protest! I thought, and sat down among them.  I'd read about the protests that frequently wrack Buenos Aires in the Lonely Planet guide, which cautions travelers that protests and strikes might delay the trip back to the airport.  Hm, what inconvenience.

I sat and drew the protestors for a while, wrote down the acronym 'CTA' to look it up later.  All the while, I heard a faint booming noise, like the distant popping of guns.  Wasn't sure what that was about.  Kept drawing.

Then I finally turned my head to look down the street.

BAM!  The sight almost knocked me over.  A wave of red flags and hundreds of faces.  No, there must have been a thousand people.  Marching down the street, waving flags, carrying massive 4-man banners with slogans painted in black, playing drums, and pushing strollers, too.  BARRIOS DE PIE, MTA, VIVE TERESA, shouted the banners.  People leading the human wave held small white signs.  SALARIO MINIMO and DERECHO were words I knew: they mean "mininum wage" and (in this context) "human right." The gunshot sounds came from a truck that was firing off some kind of minor explosive, like fireworks without the lights. 

The horde surged down 9 de Julio, and then, suddenly, stopped.  They just stood there.  The drums kept pounding and no one went anywhere.  Traffic sure as hell wasn't going to get through.  I stared at the people, wanting to be one of them, but I was just a pair of eyes.  Although I was afraid to solidify my outsider-ness by being seen with a camera, I sneakily took pictures from the tail end of the protest.

Later that day, I returned with Gab.  Many protestors had set up camping tents, clearly intending to stay for a while, and some groups were playing cards or passing gourds of mate.  The knots of drummers continued to shake out a constant rhythm.  A woman handing out flyers pulled us over and gave us 3 flyers each to distribute.  She and Gab had a jovial conversation in Spanish; at some point I figured out that Gab had told the woman I was Canadian like her.  (Later she clarified, yes, it's better to be seen as a Canadian these days.)  The woman asked us to take pictures of the rally.  She said she wanted us to bring news of their struggle to our (presumably Canadian) country.  The flyer she gave us says, "El salario mínimo es un Derecho!" 

 

 

There's a strong culture of protest here.  This probably has something to do with the extremes the country has seen: the brutal dictatorship, the bad economic crash (1999-2002) that sent tens of thousands tumbling into joblessness and homelessness.  Two weeks ago, the protestors calling for a minimum wage shut down a city block on 9 de Julio .  Last Friday, Jake and I watched as a hundred "Cristina" supporters (she's kind of like Argentina's leftist Sarah Palin) fired mini-fireworks against the side of the building that houses Congress, making a deafening racket.  Two days ago, Sasha left Buenos Aires to join 30,000 Argentinian women at a giant congress of activistas feministas in Bariloche, Argentina.  Families still gather every week in Plaza de Mayo, calling on the government to release secrets about the dictatorship. 

For some reason, it constantly surprises me when other countries, particularly those that don't belong to the "first world," demonstrate an interest and a passion for democracy that exceeds what I've previously seen in the US.  Perhaps my surprise has something to do with the U.S.'s reputation as the bastion of democracy.  Bitterly, I wonder if that reputation now exists only in the minds of us Americans.

So it's no surprise that Occupy Wall Street thrills me.  I get a kick out of reading news articles that claim that this latest wave of democratic protest in the U.S. has followed the example set in the Middle East.  I find that awesome.

Image from the eponymous Facebook page.

In 6 days, according to Facebook, Buenos Aires is going to host an Occupy Argentina event in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protestors in New York.  I'm not expecting a thousand Argentinians to show up.  But even if just the 200 who "liked" the event page on Facebook* gather on 9 de Julio on October 15... the thought gives me that buzzed feeling.  You know the one.  The one that fizzes up when you feel like the equilibrium of the world is teetering on the verge of flux. 

A Wikipedia quote about the 2002 protests in Argentina sounds oddly familiar:

"They engaged in a form of popular protest that became known as cacerolazo (banging pots and pans). These protests occurred especially in 2001 and 2002. At first the cacerolazos were simply noisy demonstrations, but soon they included property destruction,^[15] often directed at banks, foreign privatized companies, and especially big American and European companies."

Maybe the solidarity party in Buenos Aires will be bigger than I expect. 

**** ___****___ ****

(*I've decided to play the game, clicking "Like" on the Occupy Wall Street page to signal to the number-crunchers that the movement is growing.  It's hard to resent Facebook so much after reading an article on the Syrian youth movement that kind of blew my mind with the power of social networks.  And there's also Eduardo's theory.  Eduardo was the old man we met when we stopped to look through a stranger's telescope at bright-white Jupiter, hanging low over the nighttime streets of Buenos Aires; through the lens, you could see the little red rings.  Eduardo said that our generation is already empowered to change everything with the technology we now have at our fingertips.  "In ten years," he said in Spanish, "a revolution is going to happen"-- and brr, maybe it was the influence of Jupiter, but for the first time, it sounded not only likely but probable.)

Image from http://valeriesnerderie.blogspot.com/2010/09/europa.html.>

7:20pm, "the workshop," Buenos Aires.

I have cheese under my fingernails.  My fingers feel just a little greasier and heavier than normal.  It's the mozzarella, all right: gummy.

There are a hundred tacos on the table.  Each is wrapped into a square of aluminum foil.  Every taco contains a delicate mound of kidney beans and ground beef, four little balls of mozzarella, and a sprinkling of shredded lettuce, all of which is swaddled in a fat homemade tortilla.  Finished tacos are piled on the table in pyramids, like bars of silver.  I have a sudden urge to take a blurry picture.  Maybe it's because the foil reflects the light of the rainy sky through the room's textured windowpanes.  Blurred, the stacks of tacos might appear to glow.

José Manuel grabs an armful of tacos and hustles them to the fridge.  Silver bars stacked in a safe.  Tomorrow and Sunday, he and Allie will sell the tacos in the street.  200 tacos a week for 4 pesos each makes 800 pesos, which goes a long way towards rent.  Pesos matter: tacos cost 4 pesos for friends too.  Allie and JM are art students in Buenos Aires.  In fact, the tacos are assembled on the art workshop table.  (As soon as the tacos are cleared away, Allie sits down and starts gluing red and yellow wood pieces to a piece of foam.)  The artistic vibe here is contagious.  One day I am going to catch José Manuel cooking a vat of beans for the taco biz with his shirt off, the way he often does, and I will take a picture of him from the back.  The black diamonds and curls tattooed on his back would stand out against his skin.  Except for the tattoos, his back is the color of coffee with a lot of milk in it.  The photograph would be stark and artistic and would go nicely on a forest-green wall.  Brrr. 

A stack of tortillas piled twenty high on a plate, two empty tortillas like blank canvases in front of me.  A bowl for each building material: beans and meat, cheese, lettuce.  Sometimes we work in silence and I pay attention to taco construction.  But usually we are speaking.  English or Spanish.  About hakkido and "fewer" versus "less" and the traumas inflicted by college roommates and our plans for the evening.

This is 'cottage industry,' I say to José Manuel across the taco table, and I go ahead and tell him the story of the Industrial Revolution.  "In the 18th century in Britain--" I'm saying it slowly so he can follow--  "people used to work in their homes.  They made textiles-- they made fabric and pottery and things and sold them to people from their houses.  That was cottage industry.  And then in the Industrial Revolution factories were built, and people went to work all together, working outside their homes for the first time."  I'm pretty sure that's how the Industrial Revolution went.  In my mind I can see a picture of women in white dresses, frozen over their needlework, almost certainly an amalgamation of the various 18th century woodcuts and ink drawings always reprinted in high school textbooks. 

Usually, a fear of drudgery contains my over-romanticization of the past.  So I am relieved to discover just how humans have managed to drudge along all these millennia: I could have kept on nudging beans into tidy mounds, nestling in the four balls of gooey mozzarella, dropping wet ribbons of lettuce, rolling the grease-skinned tortillas closed, crimping the crinkly corners of aluminum foil-- just as long as I could keep chatting in tranquility.  Hope it's okay that I never want an office job.