My birthday, just another day: 15 de enero de 2015

Been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately, and I know I could just not feel like that, but easier said than done. Yesterday was my birthday, just another day. I went to the public hospital super early to see about getting a prescription for Zoloft since my mom can’t send it to me from the states.

Since it was my birthday and nothing bad can happen to you on your birthday, I ended up only having to wait an hour and a half, and they wrote me a prescription on the spot. I thought I’d have to wait at least four hours, having been to public hospitals in other parts of South America…I also didn’t have to make an appointment to come back a different day. I think it was cuz I’m foreign and blonde and don’t understand anything. Or maybe not. I’ll go back in February when they start making new appointments so I can keep getting the prescription.

After that I went job searching. I just handed out a few resumes to random restaurants nearby. Doing that always makes me feel tired, useless, hopeless. Will anyone really want to hire me when I’m going to need a visa, and there are Córdobeses that needed a job here before I did? “Ya estamos completos.” Great, see you later, then.

Added to the fact that I have no idea what I’d want as a job anyway just weighs me down, and it takes so much energy to keep going, but I have to. It’s not that big of a deal, I just have to remember to breathe.

Now I’m sitting outside on the patio in the hostel listening to a Norwegian guy and a Swedish guy talking politics and general world affairs. The Norwegian says he can work in Norway for three months as a schoolteacher and make enough money to live in South America for a year.

Me: “What, how??”

Swede: “Their salaries are so high because the economy is really strong.”

Me: “What, how??”

Norwegian: *Smiles kindly at the clueless little girl with the big red journal on her lap* “We tricked the British into giving us all their oil.”

Me: “…oh…”

Let’s just leave it at that. I’m fucking shit with politics and what’s going on in the world. There’s just so much information I don’t even know where to start, much less know how to filter all the bullshit from the truth. I guess I need reliable sources.

Now a German guy arrives, who I talked to at four in the morning the other night when I was working. I asked him then, “Aren’t you tired? Why aren’t you sleeping right now?” He told me he used to take anti-depressants and it fucked up his sleep schedule. He said he stopped taking them because he didn’t feel like a real person. I didn’t say it out loud, but I immediately thought, “Weird how it’s the opposite with me. How without Zoloft I feel like a vague half-person floating anxiously in and out of my own existence, there but not there, upside-down and inside-out.”

This German is young and boyish, with straight, light brown hair that falls into his eyes, which he was always rubbing with his palms, as if tired of explaining his point of view but needing to as well.

He chattered away about random political tidbits, about how he almost threw up in the German town outside of Córdoba, Villa General Belgrano, because there was a strong Nazi vibe that he couldn’t stand, about the hipsters in Kreuzberg, Berlin with rich parents to pay the rent on their apartments. How girls would say hello to him in the streets of South America and he wouldn’t register it, process it, because it never happens in Germany.

People don’t talk to strangers in his culture, in a way. His German accent made me laugh, especially when he referred to certain politicians in his country as “fucking assholes.”

Now he pulls out a cigarette and mentally joins the conversation. I can feel him listening intently as the Swedish guy, a 25 year-old freelance journalist, outlines his latest project: the corruption of the police in Argentina. I’m leaning back in a white metal chair, drinking a coffee with my feet up, diary perched on my knees, attentive, ready to take notes.

This is what I’m here for, this is what I’m good at, the silent sponge psychologist, ready to ask questions at opportune moments. Again, I’m shit with politics, I don’t understand anything. It feels like a bunch of facts and statistics that I’ll never remember. 

But as the words rumble on, a low, murmuring, accented rhythm, I can feel how it’s a story with many perspectives. It’s all cause and effect, an interconnected karmic empire of history and culture, people’s problems and weaknesses and desires for power as distinct pieces in a puzzle of humanity, a puzzle perhaps never to be solved.

We could go on for hours, days, years, discussing how the world works. And people do just that, our world is buzzing on the high of conversation and ideas, discussions about the solutions to our problems and the creation of them.

I don’t know anything, but I want to know, and I think one of my favorite things to do is sit silently in the background, soaking up information from a variety of sources. La gata rubia, hovering, waiting, poised for a quick escape through questions meant to divert them from my own opinion.

Have I a political opinion? I think not. The intellectuals will continue to astound me, surprise me, explain everything to me without judgment, as long as I remember to phrase my questions carefully, thoughtfully, laced with my own secret intuition.

Now I wander the breezy, shaded afternoon side-streets, alone as usual, big headphones and a ponytail braid, Birkenstocks. Avoiding eye contact because this is my time to think. I need to generate more energy, process everything I’ve taken in so I can channel it, let it go, make room for more. This is an introverted world, don’t mistake it for loneliness.

Last night I talked to the same Swedish journalist, ¡qué buena onda! He confirmed my idea about awkwardness being a fabrication of the mind, and we agreed that the mind creates so many unnecessary anxieties. It’s better to let them slip away into the atmosphere like a helium balloon on a string, snatched away by the wind, than to dwell on them.

Especially when those anxieties are related to other people’s possible perceptions of your own behaviour. It’s best to act natural and according to your own mental necessities than to feel paranoid about what other people are thinking, if they’re making judgments, if they care. Who cares if they care? None of that matters.

I remember feeling so uncomfortable in the house of our couchsurfing host, when Raúl and I first arrived to Córdoba, because him and I were fighting and I needed alone time to figure out my own emotions instead of being shut up in her cage of an apartment. It made her mad that I wasn’t “compartiendo con los otros.” She told Raúl, as he later told me, that she wished I would share more, participate more, take more initiative cleaning or washing the dishes.

After that I felt so paranoid that whatever I did wasn’t okay with her, and then I realized that I did nothing wrong, she was the one that wanted me to be someone I’m not, something I cannot be and will not try to be, because it isn’t my truth. I need my own space, and she wasn’t okay with that.

Sorry if I don’t have the energy to be part of your group, part of any group, wash all of your dishes all the time, entertain you through constant conversation and stimulus. And, anyway, I did clean, it wasn’t like I refused to clean, I guess she just thought I didn’t clean enough. Also, I’m used to cleaning up after myself as I go, rather than cleaning everyone else’s messes, which I realized is very North American of me.

It was just frustrating for me to realize that someone that seemed so open-minded before was actually oblivious to cultural differences and the relevance and validity that exist inherently in those differences.

My anxiety about her perception was my mind’s doing, because I let it affect me when it had no importance in my life and my personal needs. I needed space and time to think, and people that can’t accept that have no place in my life.

I thought about all this while talking to the Swedish guy, and I love that he served as a type of conveyor belt stimulus for my ideas, helping me come to terms with some past mental nuisance. What an honest, self-aware, kind, intelligent, real person. He chain-smoked cigarettes on the patio as I drank iced coffee and showed him my diario de la vida, almost two years of my life in one gigantic leather-covered libro.