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.