I guess you are more used to your life in the US again. I’m sitting at Alto Palermo’s food court as I write this. I usually don’t eat at shopping malls, but I needed to buy new socks and underwear, since I forgot to do my laundry these last 2 weeks. I remember how you told me you were in love with the city when looking out of the window towards the tony apartment buildings that dot your old neighborhood. I flirted with the idea of Japanese food (too expensive), French (actually baguette sandwiches, nothing fancy) or even vegetarian. But who am I kidding, I went for the deep-fried breaded chicken-breast
milanesa a la napolitana, though I regret not having gone back home and ordered the same dish from the steakhouse round the corner from my place. I’m sure it would have been half as pretentious, twice the size and three times as yummy. Gee, this mall is really sophisticated, it reflects more than any other our 1990s (a.k.a.
década menemista) infatuation with the American Dream viewed with our periphery eyes: consuming as there is no tomorrow. Actually, it was kind of a self-fulfilled prophecy as the unemployment rate rose, millions of jobless families were left with no tomorrow.
Anyway, I’m so happy to have met such an incredibly nice and intelligent person! I really miss our cross-cultural conversations and our nights out at the clubs. I really loved the way you could explain everything with your anthropologist point of view, when even the slightest cultural difference was an outstanding sociological discovery for you! I was walking up Santa Fe avenue yesterday up to “El Ateneo” bookstore. I stopped to look for a book about Idaho, instead I found a road atlas for the whole US, daydreaming that maybe in December I will be working in Sun Valley, and might rent a car to drive across the Rocky Mountains. I found something better that made me drop the Atlas in a second. A book with pictures of the estancias spread across the Pampas: almost unreal Spanish Colonial, French and British looking mansions, that stand proud and extravagant in the middle of nowhere, like their super rich owners once stood in the Argentine Boom Years of the early 1900s.
I then started thinking about my life in general: work, friends, family, plans for the future. And it became quite clear that I will end up living somewhere else. It’s hard to explain, and I know we talked about this before, but I have the feeling, or just an intuition, that I will be better off in another country. Not because there aren’t opportunities for me here, but maybe my upbringing or the experiences in my life lead me to believe that I need to be somewhere else. As much as I love my culture and the amazingly warm and generous people that are part of my life here, Í can’t stand the idea of settling down in Buenos Aires or any other province yet, match up with someone and live happily ever after. . Perhaps it’s my immigrant ancestors genes, or my mormon dad talking too much about how the pioneers walked thousand of miles following their dream of moving to a land where they can be free and not persecuted. I want to be free to be and “work hard for the money” wherever I want, learn from other realities and working methods.
Diego says that I’m running from myself, and that’s why I love traveling so much. I don’t know, it’s such a simple explanation, that really doesn’t explain much of the complexities of someone like me, I guess. Still, I think that after living a couple of years in any country, be it the 1st, 3rd or 100th world, I would start moaning and groaning about how sadly unfair and ridiculously self-destructive life is there, or how corrupt and plain stupid the government is, just like in my home country. I suppose you and me are eternal non-conformists. The good thing about that is that we don’t buy castles in the air, we don’t wait for a savior-like figure to rescue our weary societies from their burdens. Nobody can save us. However, don’t you think that we might be unconsciously waiting for that person that will keep us tied to ONE place? I know, it sounds contradictory, but as years go by, I’m learning that human nature is intrinsically made of the contradictions we despise so much.
