At midnight I danced, barefoot in the dust, in the cool wind, at the edge of a swamp, with a beautiful Brazilian girl I hadn't seen in months; later, snuggling with me in the deeper night under a stand of bamboo, she told me about how happy she was to have fallen in love, a week ago, for the first time in more than a year.
I watched the moon and the sun rise, ate mulberries straight off the tree, drank yerba mate with friends, welcomed my father-in-law to Buenos Aires, got pushed down the stairs of a train after an argument, slept in a mud hut, listened to live music, debated fossil-fuels policy, repaired a damaged sign, ripped my shorts riding my bicycle across the city, reassembled a broken computer, sat alone for hours in the moonlight on sentry duty, barked at and petted and was barked at by dogs, started helping a friend organize a LAN party, and looked at her new visual art blog. Not in that order. Beatrice got me a new chair as a birthday present, but I don't think it will last very long. Now I have a midterm exam in this AI class, and I'm listening to more live music under the balcony. It turns out I share my birthday with Alaa Abd El Fattah, who is spending it in prison today. I am happy that I am not, and I wish he was free, too. ---- A couple of nights ago, I was calming down a very excited Cuban who, with the tall top hat over his dreadlocks, was almost a head taller than me. He was demonstrating how he was going to use the machete to chase away the people who had recently attacked some of our mutual friends with knives and fire. (Who are also the reason I was sitting sentry duty this morning.) For once, I was a calming influence in a potentially violent situation, and by the time he finally went to go look, he was a lot less keyed-up. ---- Today is, I think, the five-year anniversary of the huge pillow fight Beatrice and I (and Sarah Gordon!) attended when we first came to Argentina. So that means five years that I've been living in Buenos Aires. (To confess, though, when we got here we weren't sure we'd stay, and we traveled around a bit to see if we wanted to live in Uruguay or Chile.) What have I learned? Well, I'm still trying to figure that out. I do like it here, though. I'm not sure I'd ever want to live in the US again. But everything changes in time. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-journal
