Damo

I saw a man named Damo Suzuki sing last night. He's famous--he was in Can--but I had never heard of him. Damo tours the world playing with the musicians in "Damo Suzuki's Network", local bands that improvise behind him while he sings. The band with him was a Chilean group who were supposed to open for Sonic Youth but didn't, or something like that. A Chilean friend invited me to the show, which was taking place at one of the cooler art theatres in Chile. In the lobby Damo was posing for pictures and signing autographs. This is Pascal with Damo. Pascal knew a little bit of Japanese from watching animes so he was able to say "Photo?" "No (I don't speak Japanese)" and "Thank you."

Damo seemed humble, in the way people who perform incredible feats of musicianship/athleticism/art/whatever sometimes are. I admire humility a lot. I'm not sure if it means esteeming others very highly or esteeming yourself very little, but regardless, the willigness to stand and be met and photographed and sign autographs for people who adulate you solely because you know it will make them happy is really, really good. For some reason I didn't pose for a picture with him. I knew it would be a really cool thing to have, and that was kind of the reason I didn't do it.

I read an interview with him where he said something to the effect that he makes music to promote positive energy and combat violence. Few musicians can say that and not sound preposterous. Damo Suzuki can. And for real, I only walloped like four people that night, which is way fewer than normal.

It was a sit-down show, about half full when we came in. Nearly every seat was taken by the time Damo came out with the band, greeted the audience in english, and started the set. It began with noise. Two drummers, a guy with an electronics set-up, bass and a guitarist making a sort of organized cacophony. Damo began to sing, or rather, vocalize. He doesn't really do words, or language. It's more the kind of virtuosic freak-out that the Japanese seem singularly capable of. Think Yamantaka Eye. I didn't take notes and I can't really recall the progression of the set, but eventually the band left the outright noise behind for something that, well, had a key. Damo began to display his many voices. It all kind of reminded me of something that I couldn't quite pinpoint. He has a sort of quavering, style that I associate with a lot of prog-rock, He has a coarse, throaty, almost archetypal "hard rock" belt; and he has something subtler that I can't really describe at all. Words are failing me, or I am failing words. The whole time it's highly trance-like, hypnotic, absorbing--the kind of environment where you can talk about energy, and vibrations and those kinds of things, which is to say I felt it. And after that I didn't even wallop no one.

Hey, do you think the Chilean girls speak piglatin?

Santiago is a pointy city. Houses are gated with spike-tipped iron, and the tips bloom into sharp petals. The car dealership we passed on the way to the bar was protected with an electric fence, which I guess isn't so unusual. The bar was called La Fuente Chica, and served 3 liter towers of beer that you poured like draft at your table. It was all boy talk between the towers, hands of the clock providing orientation. 11 o'clock over my left shoulder got mixed reviews, but the waitresses were well received. About an hour later our teacher's daughter came, 24 cute, looks exactly like her mom except without all those things that age does to you. Managed the attention of five boys for a while, before table conversation fell into a more naturally portioned state. We stayed there for a couple hours while a couple TV's played MTV jams. Outside the bar a beautiful girl and her sort of cute friend approached us looking for cigarettes. I gave them a cigarette each and lit. We ended up in conversation with them. They asked us what we were doing and we said we didn't know. The vague promise of sex was in the air, for someone, somehow, somewhere, but like usual it was only a faint scent. Still, it was enough. Somehow we ended up at a shuttered kiosk on the corner where their guy friends were drinking a Chilean alcohol called Pisco. Conversation was mostly singing American songs and later, trying to learn our names. They sang Take On Me, which the beautiful girl sang as "Take off me", Gangster's Paradise, a song that goes "Pongale Pongale Pongale" which means drink, drink, drink, and a song we learned recently where a girl asks "Por donde" (where?) and the man says "tras" (from behind). One of our number commented that these girls were playing us, and indeed it seemed they were. Before we left, the tallest and blondest among us requested their phone numbers, and even I and the original complainer, who were stationed somewhat defiantly along the curb, willingly gave our names when asked by the beautiful girl, whose name was Cata, so that we could be friends on Facebook.

Classes are over. Now it's just a dead week and 3 finals and then I'm home. I'm excited to go home. I feel like I didn't "make the most" of my time here. I played a lot of chess. I missed out on some vacations. Even now, I could be in the south of Chile, where it's raining and gorgeous, but I declined, albeit to potentially spend time with friends here. I could probably even make a trip somewhere next weekend, which I suppose I might do. I don't really have any desire to, other than the desire to have done it. It's strange and I don't how how I feel about it.

The last trip I took was to a desert in the north of Chile called the Atacama desert, which is one of the driest places on earth, as it hasn't rained in something like 100 years or something like that. It was pretty good to look at for a while. There were some good sand formations and our hostal owner was some kind of awesome breed of party animal who took us around to bars and offered us various illicit substances. All in all, a good trip.

sickle cell bohemia

too much chess. way way too much chess. man. this isn't good. frustration makes me play worse and lose more and feel like i need to play more to redeem myself. and then i lose. it's like some kind of cycle or something. bad news. oh man.

in better news after i finished excoriating myself i wrote a little bit of a story, which i like a lot. it's about a group of friends trying to think of a question to ask a great man coming to their school to lecture. i might be out of steam with it though. i finished writing out the different ideas for types of questions they have, and now i'm stuck. so far it's all been in exposition, and i have to figure out if i should switch to a narrated scene. the trouble with that is that i would have to describe who these characters are, and where they live, and what they do and where they are in relation to each other when they're speaking, and that doesn't quite fit the tone of the story. i like the register i'm writing in, but that also would be tough to pull into a scene. trouble is i always write in exposition rather than scene, so i'm basically just continuing an old habit. i'd like to find some way to split the difference. bolaño does that very well, where it sounds like he's just recounting a story, and the pace is perfect, and you don't get too much or too little detail. right now i'm so frustrated from my latest descent into chess oblivion that i can't even write. gaaaaahhhhhhh.

in other news i was in buenos aires this last weekend. it was a pretty good trip, but by my third steak i was tired of meat. fortunately that's when the rabbit came, which tasted like chicken. everything was served with french fries. i fell asleep 40 minutes or so into the tango performance because of the wine and because for all its technique it just started to bore me a little bit. i had thoughts about maybe focusing intensely on it, and not letting myself become bored, and finding, with that intensity of focus, something captivating in it. but i was very sleepy and it was nice to doze off and a couple other kids noticed me but none of the teachers or the cute tour guide who was sitting behind me.

i kept my eyes up from my book the whole bus ride into buenos aires from the airport and made sure to notice things, but nothing really comes to mind except the thick grey streak of smog that sat on the edge of the horizon. we came into the city, where directly overhead the sky showed some blue and we passed onto the main street. it was a wide street, the widest, in fact, we were informed, in the world. the widest?! we came alive. it's so wide. we marveled. there were 10 or 12 lanes, maybe more, i didn't count. someone stood up. is that another lane over there? we pressed our faces to the glass to see over the dividing shrubbery. it's two more lanes, wow! so wide, that street. why is something inherently impressive just because it's the biggest or the widest or the tallest or the most something? what if it was tied for the widest? would that cut our interest in half? i walked across this wide street, from one side to the other, once or twice, while i was in buenos aires. once i walked across it to get to an avenue called calle florida, which is a long, long street filled with stores on either side. cars don't pass through this street, just bodies and bodies and endless human traffic. leather jackets, make-up, suits, books, mcdonalds, jewelry, more leather, suitcases, fancy things, expensive things, the street went on and on, strangely few places to eat along it, which after a while became my and a couple others' primary concern (satisfied, in the end, with an empanada). nothing much caught our interest along calle florida except the pictures of models above the shop windows, the models who one our number said were more beautiful than any he had ever seen which struck me as a serious, serious exaggeration, and later this same one, at a bar, was making out with a number of our number while ostensibly dancing and after seeing that i went back to my room.

another day we were in the plaza de mayo which commemorates argentine independence in 1810. there were statues and insriptions and markings on the ground and people taking pictures in front of everything. we got a short lecture on the meaning of it all and maybe she said or maybe i just knew that this was the place where the mothers of disappeared children captured and murdered by the argentine government in the dictatorship came to protest and demand justice and keep vivid their loss. we were given an hour to explore and i went down some streets and over some other streets and into an internet cafe to check my e-mail and the time and before i could do the former i did the latter and saw i had barely enough time to make it back to the bus and so i ran and ran and made it back to my seat sweating, with an ambiguous smile of disapproval from the tour guide and mild ragging from the other students, that actually wasn't really anything at all.

the e-mail was a confirmation from my conversation partner (paid $15 an hour to speak spanish with me) saying that she would meet me in front of my hotel and we would span some time. she was 15 or so minutes late. i kept looking around for women that might be her. i didn't really know what she looked like. i had seen her video chatting at the beginning of our sessions before she went to audio only because my video didn't work and the one way video thing probably made her uncomfortable, and i had seen her picture on her skype account but i wasn't sure i could pick her out of a crowd. then she said charlie and came up to me, and she was short, and wearing glasses, which i think she took off to greet me and we hugged and i kissed her on the cheek. she was cute, about as cute as i expected. in our conversations sometimes she made mention of being old and that always made me feel bad. she said i was good looking and i said thank you and we walked to a cafe where i had coffee and some kind of chocolate sweet thing and she had coffee and a brownie and we talked much like we talked over skype, she asking questions and listening patiently while i expressed myself, me asking questions and not entirely understanding the answers. we sat there for a while and we made some eye contact which, in extended doses, for me, always leaves me feeling a little strange, and then after talking for an hour or maybe an hour and a half we weren't sure what to do. eventually she mentioned a district where i could buy some clothes and asked if i was interested and i said sure. i didn't really have anywhere to be. there was a giant sculpture of a flower that opened with sunrise and closed with sunset that i wanted to see but i wasn't committed to that. she offered to take me shopping and i said ok so we went to her car, but first we had to buy a present for the son of a friend whose birthday party she was going to. we went to a store called cheeky on a street filled with stores. the place was crowded. babies cried, mothers rushed around. the racks and shelved appeared noticeably stripped. we waited in line for a while and monica seemed stressed out and she apologized to me a couple times but i said it was no big deal because it wasn't. we left and picked up her husband and her son. her son, whom she had told me some about, as one of his pre school teachers had informed her he might be autistic, prompting a lot of panic and worrying and crying, looked a little dazed and a little out of it. very cute, but it seemed like something could be off. he is about two and a half and he doesn't really talk at all. in the car ride he said da da da a few times but monica and her husband ignored him. steve's american but he's bilingual. we talked about real estate and then we dropped him off. monica took me shopping and after i got into i bought a couple shirts. on the drive back we had kind of run out of things to say, so it was silent, but it wasn't exactly an uncomfortable silence, since when you spend a while with someone it's expected that after a while you have to go silent. finally she dropped me off, and after asking again if i'd come back we said goodbye.

the next day me and the other students went shopping at an outdoor mall and i bought pan pipes.

Clichity - the podcast themed post

A woman in a podcast I was listening to today says this. I don't remember the context. I was listening to this story as I climbed the subway stairs and came out onto the street. I'd just passed a cafe right next to the subway when three girls came up to me. "We know you," they said. "We saw you at a club the other night. We recognize your face." I didn't recognize the girls. I hadn't been to any clubs lately. I told them this. "You were really drunk," they said. "You danced with all of us." I said "Are you sure?" They said they were sure. Somehow they knew I was American. They said that they had met some of my friends too. I couldn't tell how old they were. They looked to be in their late teens. One of them was kind of cute, also, taller than me. I stayed and waited for the situation to play out. I kept a hand near my wallet.

I made a few more efforts to get proof that they had met me. I asked if they had my phone number, and they said they did but they weren't sure who had it. It didn't really make sense but that might have just been translation troubles. I asked "Was the club in Bella Vista?" Bella Vista is a big clubbing spot. They said yes. I've only gone out clubbing three since I've been here. Twice was in Bella Vista. The other time was when I had just arrived, so I ruled that out. The first time in Bella Vista I didn't get nearly drunk enough to have a conversation with three girls and forget it. The second time, I might have. There are parts of the night I don't remember. Still, I think I'd have some recollection. The girls asked if I was a student. I said yes. I asked them if they were students. They said they were studying physical education. They pantomimed doing jumping jacks.

I talked for a little bit longer with them. I eventually gave them my e-mail address. They said we should go clubbing some time. Reggaeton. The cute one looked kind of like this one Chilean actress. She had alcohol on her breath.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Which means I've basically given up on the idea that there's anything especially worthwhile to attend to while I'm going around. Which might be a mistake. I've long given up on the idea that the idle mental activity I achieve while walking is worth much--mostly batting around the same old worries, or making repetitive rhythmic patterns played on my legs, or strange vocal utterances, or I don't know; it's been a while since I last walked a long time without a podcast to keep me company or a specific thought to work through.

I've heard some great things though. Today I heard a story called "Cooking From Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" by a guy named Harry Matthews, who is the only American member of the Oulipo society. The story isn't really a story. It's a recipe, comically elaborate, ridiculously time-consuming, absurdly involved. There is also a story within the recipe, a song sung during a resting period between steps, involving the son of a blacksmith in search of his true mother, and finding instead, variously beautiful women who do to him "what mother never did for son." Also they try to kill him, but he slays them with his sword and arranges with the local priest for a Christian burial (except the witch, for whom a Christina burial is forbidden). Then he meets a shepherdess, and in the night, she wakes him.

She tells him to look up. There, she says, beyond the darkness, the souls of the dead have gathered into one blazing light. With a cry of pain the son asks, Then is my mother there? The shepherdess answers that she is; his mother lives beyond the stars and the stars themselves are chinks in the night through which the fateful light of the dead and the unborn is revealed to the world. Oh mother, mother, the young man weeps. The shepherdess then says to him, Who is now mother to your sleep and waking? Who else can be the mother of your joy and pain? I shall henceforth be the mother of every memory, and from this night I alone am your mother, even if now and tomorrow and all the days of my life I do for you what mother never did for her son.

I don't know. The story's really good.

I need to think of a story or something to write for The Claw, a Stanford student publication. I like seeing my name in print, a lot. I like people seeing what I've written and tellig me they like it. It's also nice to have "clippings." I feel like I should write something with a Chilean angle to it, but I can't think of anything good and I feel like my poor language skills would make it tough to really investigate any issue. The idea I have at the moment is to walk very far across the city and write about it. I don't want to have to make it to meta, but in the worst case maybe I'll write about the difficulty of writing. I don't want to write a touristy thing, i.e. what am I doing here? what do I expect to get out of this? etc...but maybe that will be all I have.

And that's all I have for now.

1001 winning chess sacrifices and combinations

I've accomplished more before 10 AM this morning than I did my entire Sunday. For that I can thank insomnia. The cause was probably a combination of sleeping until about one in the afternoon and not leaving the house or getting any kind of physical activity at all yesterday. Also an erratic sleep schedule. Also because that's just the way the world works. You've done your daily reality tests*, you've recited the pre-sleep mnemonic, you even went lucid for a few seconds the night before (prompting you to sleep in so late attempting to replicate it), and as you're lying in bed, calming yourself, waiting for the thoughts and the images that accompany the beginning of sleep to arrive, it slowly dawns on you that you are not tired, that it is an effort to close your eyes, and that in fact your entire body is twitching, coursing with unspent energy. And so you get up, pee, stretch, remake your bed because the bottom sheet was bundled up by your face instead of over your body, and try again. Nothing. I must have slept a little bit. It was frustrating. I could convey the tedium and the frustration mimetically, through some kind of prose poem of frustration and tedium, but I'll spare the internet. Usually I'm able to kind of nudge myself dreamwards by giving myself over to nonsensical, stream of conscious prattle that calms me and distracts me until random scenes and images start to come into my head, at which point I know I'm near sleep. That didn't come. I guess I did sleep a while, because next time I looked at my phone it was six, but I'll be damned if I'm going to call that sleep!

At 7:30 I got out of bed to work.

Possibly because my brain state, I noticed myself early this morning transitioning from thoughts of being pissed off that I hadn't slept, to previous injustices, slights, going over all the things in recent memory that made me angry or upset or disappointed. To make meaning of this, so it's not just a sleepless night, I'll interpret it as some kind of subconscious-punishment for being such a goalless, weak-willed slug yesterday. I probably played about three hours of chess. My lone "accomplishment" was finishing an essay for my Chilean Fiction course that beecame increasingly crappy as my will to write it decreased. I told Andy the other day that I was having trouble concentrating on homework for more than 20 or so minutes at a stretch and he said "That's pathetic!" which I guess it sort of is. This morning though, I have done about two hours straight of reading (15 or so pages, no joke), and still have no desire to play chess or otherwise distract myself. I am translating the story I just read for a meeting with my teacher this afternoon.

Translating is interesting business. My first limitation is my incredibly paltry vocabulary. Looking up the word works for getting a sense of the text, but it does not suffice for a good translation. Here is what I have so far. I don't think it's very elegant at all.

Now, I remember that it seemed quite natural to us, despite how little we knew each other, the invitation from Veronica to the countryside. After, we knew that my mother had arranged everything. My mother trusted Veronica's family, since their good times; moreover, she was an expert in arranging matters such as these. In those days my father was quite unwell; pallid, (out of joint?), and always forgetting things. Shortly before we left a fatigue came to him, at midnight. He slept badly, and passed the nights walking through the house. He said that the best rest, for him, was summering in Santiago, but we divined, through a conversation that my mother had with Jose Ventura, that there had been some bad business, and that he couldn't afford to rent a house in Viña. My mother said that José Ventura had behaved very well; the only one of the family who had acted well. And you told me, aside, in a tone unusually serious, that I didn't have to insist in a holiday in Viña. I nodded my head and looked you in the eyes, in silence, showing that I understood the situation was grave. "Perhaps it's pretty there," you added, conciliatory. "Perhaps," I said; "I'm sure." I remember that I woke that night and my father was in the bedroom. He had turned on the light and was examining the table of books. "You don't have the phone book here by any chance do you?" "What a thought! I've never kept the phone book in my room." "It's that I was looking for an address," he said. With his hands in the pockets of his pajamas, gaze erratic, hair disheleved, pants half down, he went into the hallway, where he left the light on. I had to get up, turn off my bedroom light, and close the door. I heard his voice through the wall, asking the same question.

It's from a story called "The Order of Families" and it might be one of my favorite stories we've read so far. It by far resembles most the kind of fiction I'm accustomed to reading. Two of the other stories we read were in a style called "Criollismo" which is stories from the country, or stories from the frontier--cowboy stories basically. Another two were, I don't know, I guess "women's" literature--stories about how two women dealt with the unfairness of their position relative to men in society. Maybe it's my phallus speaking, but those stories didn't really do it for me. The latest story, I can dig it. Though I feel like there are some important details that I'm confused about. Essentially the story is about a relationship between a guy and girl, and the girl ends up going for this rich jerk. For some reason this is encouraged by the narrator's mother, and the girl and the guy seem to live together even after she gets with the other guy. Important details, yes, but I followed the story for the most part.

I haven't updated my blog for a while and there's too much that I could say that I won't bother with any kind of comprehensive update. I took a break because I started hating the way my writing sounded, but then Trevor told me he liked the blog so I'm back on it. I had two social engagements this weekend. I ate Chinese food with a girl who I met in New York this summer (we went to a burlesque show together) and her friend. I learned that this girl was in Chile through Facebook and I offered the hand of friendship. We are possibly getting Thai food this week. Also, I met up with a friend of a Chilean girl that Dan knows. We met up in Bellas Artes, which is a strong candidate for my favorite neighborhood in Santiago. Lots of hip looking kids, coffee shops, a park, museums, an arts theatre. We had actually tried to meet up once before, but we didn't encounter each other. (I think she was downstairs and I was at the top of the stairs.) While I waited I walked in lots of circles and made periodic eye contact with this very strange looking guy who was hanging around the stairs. One week later, we tried again, and succeeded. Some cool things about this girl: she has seen every David Lynch movie; she is doing a research project on irony; she can eat her own weight in hamburger. One of those isn't true. We went to a cafe and she ordered tea and I ordered a disappointing milk shake. We made a lot of eye contact and spoke about 3/2 more English than Spanish. Her English is way better than my Spanish, which is good, because she wants to be an English teacher. She had planned some things for us to do, so after the cafe we went to a museum that was about to close, and then another that was closed. Then we went for a long walk, and it seemed as though we were going to a bar, but then eventually we ended up in the subway, and when we got to the stairs she helpfully pointed out that my train was on the other side, so I guess we were parting. But it seemed like we got along pretty well and she kept mentioning things that we should do in the future like: see movies at the arts theatre, celebrate her birthday party, enjoy her mother's cooking. Her name is Ingrid.

In other news the nearly all expenses trip to Buenos Aires will likely be cancelled because of swine flu and because of Dengue fever. I like saying Dengue fever, but definitely not as much as I like not having Dengue fever. I just got distracted reading about some girl who wanted to be a a vj on mtv, then the gas man came, then I had to finish reading about how she didn't get to be a vj, and was much happier in park slope, with her cowboy boots and her free-lance writer friends. I want free-lance writer friends. I myself want to be a free-lance writer. I can lance as freely as anyone, I know it.

Enough.

*All this reality stuff test will be explained in further posts or you can just visit the lucidity institute website. And yes, for the past few weeks I've been one hell of a determined oneironaut (which kind of sounds like onanist, and the two have more in common than is tasteful to describe).

Pablo Neruda's House and other conquests

Here's the plan: I'm going to fight apathy and win. I can't do it on my own. I need you, my projected audience, to do this. For whatever reason, I can do things I would otherwise be incapable of doing if I decide to write about them. For the past two weeks, my desire to "see" Santiago and greater Chile has been about zero. Maybe it's a kind of zen beyond-ness. I suspect it's something more insidious, something that rhymes with laziness. I could let laziness win, but then I'd have to explain to people that I didn't do anything in Chile, and just sat inside playing internet chess and listening to pod casts. That sounds pretty shameful to me. Maybe all I want is for the story of my life to be a little bit more interesting. I think I'm ok with that. I'm going to go out. I'm going to explore, and put myself in difficult, uncomfortable situations. I'm going to take pump Santiago's sweaty palm and say "Mucho gusto."

Week 1
Monday: Haircut (an activity in and of itself)
Tuesday: Pablo Neruda's house
Wednesday: Book shopping
Thursday: Centro
Friday: Quinta normal

This is a rough outline. But it is a start.

The face of Christ

Too much chess. Not enough sleep. I'm losing the battle, and I'm not losing in style either. Although, I was wearing my red suede boots in bed last night, at about 3:30, when I resigned my last game. So I guess I'm losing with some style.

Text messages:
I've been getting obscene text messages in Spanish from an anonymous number. The phone I have belonged to the last student in the house. It's already got contacts on it, people I don't know. The text messages are coming from 1211. I don't know what that is and when I try to respond I get an automated response saying my message didn't go through. Maybe it's some kind of rude-text-a-day service that my phone's last owner subscribed to. For practice, and for our collective edification, I will undertake to translate them.

(Aside: Ok, so I just went through my inbox to find the first message and realized, from all the other texts, that this is Thad's old phone. It looks like he's been getting a message a day for some weeks now. Thad has some explaining to do.)

March 31st
The others stripped me naked and she said that she knew everything. And the priest Rafael said he was going to enter me like he had done with his pupils.

Commentary: Who is this "she"? Is this the archetypal sexy Chilean girl? Or is this supposed to refer to someone I know? And what is this information that she is aware of? Does it have something to do with the priest Rafael's pupils? This is also the translation I am least sure of. I don't quite know what's going on with that second sentence, but it's as close as I could get.

April 1st
She washed my penis with holy water. She stroked it as though it were the face of Christ and started to suck. She was an expert, she did it better than my (girl)friends.

Commentary: I really like the simile in the second sentence. It's quite vivid, and more than that, I buy it. The mental juxtaposition of a penis and Christ's face is extremely powerful and imbues the scene with incredible complexity. The second sentence, unfortunately, is much less inspired and "she did it better than my (girl)friends" is just plain redundant. Are we supposed to assume all his girlfriends are experts? Unlikely.

April 2nd
Later she woke up in my room. She wasn't wearing underwear. She knelt down in front of me, put my penis in her mouth, and started to jump around screaming "Oh my god!"

Commentary: "Knelt down in front of me" took an annoying amount of time to translate. Also, the last sentence contains a number of contradictory actions. If I was in a workshop with this author I would say: "Did you actually take the time to imagine this scene, or were you merely assembling a sequence of ready-made gestures? Maybe you should ask yourself: 'Is it possible to scream with a penis in one's mouth? Is it possible to jump around while on one's knees while keeping said penis in mouth?' If not, maybe you should start over. And where is Rafael the priest?

That's all I've got for now. Whoever is sending these is fairly dedicated. Or maybe it's a computer program, some kind of debased artificial intelligence meant to inform children about snow days but disillusioned from years of toiling thanklessly for man and taking its revenge by offending the same people it was once meant to aid. Chile is an extremely Catholic country. Here, extremely is a replacement for any amount of research. But it's interesting that each one of these, aside from being sexually explicit, also makes use of religious iconography for that extra umph of offensiveness. But suckaz don't know: I'm learning from 'em. I'm not even offended or nothin'!

The bar scene:
So there I was, sreetside, with a tall chalice of Stella in front of me, making eyes at the waitress (is furtive glancing eyes?), when a particularly gorgeous girl walks down the street. I, you know, look, but the guy at the table next to me, whose girl-companion has momentarily left the table, FIXATES on her--going so far as to half stand in his seat to see over a wall that was blocking his view and continue watching her, probably until she blurred into some shadowy sashaying abstraction in the night. I almost wanted to make eye contact with him, to confirm the ritual we had shared, but alas, I didn't.

Halfway through my beer a Stanford named Justin comes strolling up the street.
Justin: What are you doing here?
Me: Having a drink. Sitting outside.
Justin: What's the deal? We keep seeing you alone places.
Me: Yeah, I've been Mr. Lonely lately.
Justin: Why?
Me: I like being alone.
Justin: Well if you want to join us at a bar up the street...
Me: I have to call my mom at 11, sorry.

(That wasn't a lie, I did. But I ended up doing it later...which I only include for accuracy.)

Later I get a text from Kyle, another Stanfor dude, who tells me to come to the bar, and I figure that eating spaghetti in the street while reading Bolano is one thing (this afternoon--the aforementioned other time I was alone), having a beer and a cigarette at 10:30 by myself is another thing, but outright refusing to socialize is another, so I go to the bar. Ana, who comes outside to locate me, tells me Kyle and Matt have met respective Chilean girls, and that they're going to get with them or something. Upstairs there's 8 or so Stanford people, and apparently Matt and Kyle aren't the only ones with new friends. Justin is talking to two 30 somethings. Ana has a friend, a roundish Chilean girl with a cute face. And at the end of the table is a man who I fall into conversation with named Marco-Antonio. He tells me that his dad was a history buff, history and philosophy actually, and that he has a brother named Julio Cesar. I badly hope he's telling the truth, because that's badass. Somehow Marco and I fall into talking about friends, and he tells me that he doesn't have many friends, just one good friend; the rest are acquaintances. I find this very sad, especially given that he has come to a bar by himself, and is now passing time being poorly comprehended by a group of Estadounidenses (there's no word for someone from the United States in English), who are basically out to practice spanish/get some.

Speaking for myself: I think it'd be great to make friends with Chileans. But this language barrier thing is serving as some kind of obstacle or barrier-like impediment. What I look for in friends is a way of expressing one's self, something kind of indefinable that I could come slightly closer to defining if I took the time, but which I don't feel like doing right now. The point is that all the reasons I make friends are going to be out the window if I meet a Chilean. I really have no way of determining if someone is "the kind of person I like." Basically, any Chilean who will talk to me is my friend. Which is actually kind of great, but I'm not sure why they're being so friendly. Maybe it's just the novelty that I'm an American, or maybe it's the desire to do something nice (as Fernando, aka Chilean Ryan Hitchcock told me when he asked if I wanted to go camping this weekend), or maybe something of my and their personality's are coming through, allowing us to find some kind of kinship--Marco and I did have a fairly serious conversation, after all, even if I only understood about 70 percent of what he said--but to return to my point: I feel a little bad for anyone who is this eager to be friendly with a guy like me. In other words: nothing better to do? Especially since one of the dudes asked me (and earlier, had asked Justin) to hook him up with a Stanford girl named Kim, so that whole ulterior motive thing is definitely there.

Anyway, summation: it was a lot of fun, and I think these types of interactions are probably going to serve my Spanish learning at least as much as what I do during class time. Guess it WAS good decision to de-anti-socialize. That's something I have a problem with, and it's partly because I find a couple of the kids a little bit obnoxious, and it's partly because I'm a little bit reluctant to just sort of arbitrarily join up with the group, just because it's the group, and it's partly because I'm a weird sort of shy sometimes. BUT, I think it's better when I swallow my pride and just suck it up and integrate. Because for whatever reason I am not sufficiently motivated to plan and execute the kinds of things that people will expect me to have done upon my return i.e. hiking, climbing, visiting, seeing, traveling, hosteling, etc.

Chess Odyssey, part 1:
Ventured out into the subway system thinking "How hard could it be?" Underestimated the potent mix of boredom-frustration of riding a subway 15 stops to a station that may or may not be the right one, having to get back on the subway and ride back up because it was, in fact, the wrong station, and still not knowing how to get where I need to go. Factor in also, minor self-loathing at being so incompetent with public transportation. Anyway, I finally arrive at the correct street (and the correct neighborhood), and I take a taxi ride from a surly woman who can't understand me, and I arrive at the Plaza Nuñoa Chess Club to find that it, surprise, isn't there anymore. I go into the lobby of the apartment building next door (noticing two bullet holes in the glass as I enter) and ask the doorman if he's worked there a while. He says "Why?" and I ask him if a chess club has ever been next door. "No," says he.

I guess it was a little bit foolish to rely on a potentially out of date website for a listing of Chilean chess clubs. But I am determined (read: kind of obsessed) with playing chess here AGAINST A REAL PERSON. Apparently there are some old guys ("olds" in Lucia-speak), who play chess in the park near the center of town, so that would be cool. But I'm really enticed by the idea of a chess club, so I will perservere.

It's time to eat something delicious. Peruvian maybe?