Twenty-three minutes ago I beat both my high score and that of the single friend who ranked above me points-wise on "Scramble," a ridiculously addicting Facebook game application to which my mother dearest introduced me via an online "Scramble Challenge" one insignificant Sunday evening. The game consists of unscrambling letters given to you at random in either a 4x4 or 5x5 square. You are to spell as many words of at least three letters' length as you can in the given three-minute time period. More points given for words with more letters, and all the letters in the word have to be attached.
As if not addicting enough owing to the game's sheer nature (fans of Scrabble, Boggle, and those who find themselves infuriated upon finding the "Word Games" section of complementary magazines on airplanes already completed, in permanent ink, before getting a chance to attempt them for themselves, will relate), Facebook's application has an added feature which allows you to see the high scores of all your fellow Scramble-addicted Facebook friends. As your score updates in real time, so do notifications alerting you as to which of your friends' high scores you have recently surpassed. This cursed and genius feature fuels my competitive nature, and alas, I have had my eyes long set on surpassing David Kuperstein, king of my "Facebook Friends' Highest Scores" hierarchy,'s high score of 161 points, and resultantly vowed not to quit playing Scramble until I had secured that position for myself.. Needless to say, tonight when the last seconds of the three-minute time period evaporated and I found myself with a high score of 163, effectively placing me as new Alpha of the Facebook Scramble Hierarchy after a month of almost nightly sessions, I felt elated. Victorious. Unstoppable.
And then I reminded myself I was playing Scramble. The name itself is nerdy and ugly, and when I say it out loud to myself (try it. Scramble. Scrraaaamble), I feel my pride assume the size and form of one of those shrunken, dried-up worms that litter the sidewalk after a rainy day. I reminded myself that I have a week (ONE WEEK) left in Buenos Aires, and asked myself what I was doing (other than taking advantage of the unusually strong Internet connection) on my computer, isolated in the dark kitchen, wasting away three-minute chunks of time with an online word game.
I decided to resolve my disappointment in myself by walking to the corner kiosk to buy a chocolate bar.
Turns out that the corner kiosk was closed (it was only 11:45pm, what are things in this city doing closed at such an early hour?), so I walked six extra blocks to the 24-hour kiosk on a busier street corner. During the ten-minute escapade, I was whistled at by two men on a street corner, eyed down for an uncomfortably long time by a man on an ice cream delivery moped, and told in Spanish by a little 12-year-old punk at the kiosk that I was the most beautiful woman in the world and would I like him to accompany me home? Luckily, it's not too difficult to pull off the "foreigner who doesn't understand Spanish" look, which I utilized, hard, at that moment, but Dear Lord. It never stops. And I'll remind my reading audience that these compliments and whistles and creeper stares are never founded in anything. Tonight, I was three hours post salsa dancing lesson, hair still frizzy and body not yet cleaned of layers of then dried sweat, and in the act of voraciously stuffing a chocolate bar in my face, yet the catcalls persisted. Perhaps they knew that I was a recentlycrowned Scramble champion.
A part of me will probably miss the attention, as undesirable as its producers may be, upon returning to UCLA, land of the severely overpopulated gorgeous girl breed. But for now, it sends shudders up my spine and makes me want to regurgitate and spit into the face of the catcallers whatever food item I most recently masticated and swallowed.
Prior to embarking on this journey I envisioned, as many do, meeting the love of my life overseas and calling home to Mom and Dad at the last minute and informing them that I would actually not be coming home for Christmas, sorry, but I wouldn't mind so much if you still shipped to me abroad whatever presents you bought me, because I've fallen in love with a tall, dark and handsome Argentine man who speaks to me only in Spanish and I don't understand half of what he says but it doesn't matter because we have such a profound connection and incredible chemistry that words don't matter, but nevertheless he is trying to learn English via the Rosetta Stone audio program he bought because he is planning on proposing to me in a year's time, probably while I'm in the middle of my shift busing tables on the second level of a local restaurant, and wants to impress me and my family and the entire neighborhood who has followed him on his quest to find me in the very the restaurant where I am working with his recently learned, adorably accented and jumbled English. And so what if that last part was stolen from Love Actually? Movies, albeit embellished, are based on real-life experiences, right??? Please???
In reality, the love life I had pre-imagined has been a complete and total failure. While I have been on a handful of dates while in Argentina, none of them amount to the fantasy I had carefully planned out in my head before coming. Perhaps that is why they tell you precisely not to plan out your life before you live it.
But as I count down my days left in this city, and effectively find myself filled with mounting nostalgia as I bid farewell to every store vendor, park bench, and uneven patch of sidewalk I have become very well acquainted with in the last 5 and 1/2 months, I am almost grateful for not having to say one more difficult goodbye (although, in my fantasy, a "goodbye" was not in the picture...it ended with a white dress and Brazilian honeymoon). I will be boarding a plane to the southernmost city in the world in exactly 7 days and 3 hours, and although I am excited to spend two weeks exploring the Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, I have become so attached to Buenos Aires and the thought of leaving kills me. I cannot help but wonder about what the return home will be like. Anxiety is mounting, and I am expecting reverse culture shock to hit me hard. My thoughts are a jumbled mess. But perhaps for this very reason, my nightly Scramble training has not been a complete waste of time. If I have proven my ability to derive coherent 3-letter-plus words from mixes of random letters, I surely will be able to apply this to real life and find some semblance of balance and continuity in my world that is about to experience a massive jumbling. Right?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
What my textbooks didn't teach me
I think sitting in cafes has defined a good 85% of my experience in Buenos Aires. Classes officially ended a week ago today, and although "complete joke" defined the grand majority, they were somewhat mentality stimulating, and that is a feeling for which my brain still yearns now that the semester is over. Alas, I park myself in street-side cafes with a Spanish book (Twilight--as equally unbearable in Spanish as in English, but good for learning vocabulary and how to be overly-descriptive about unimportant details), my grammar book whose pages and already-completed exercises I still pore over and review, or whatever random publicity flier happened to make its way into my hands during the walk to the cafe, be it for a gym membership or organic restaurant featuring whole wheat (shocker! in this city) products. Anything and everything I will take and study to widen my vocabulary. I will read a sentence from whatever reading material I have in hand, commit it to memory, repeat it in my head twice, say it out loud three times, and try not to let the inquisitive and confused looks of other cafe-frequenters, who surely take me for a crazy, get to me.
Instead of taking off for Machu Picchu or Rio de Janeiro like the majority of my friends once classes ended, I decided to leave myself three weeks in Buenos Aires to further explore the city and focus on developing my Spanish. The original goal was to isolate myself from any other English speakers and immerse myself as much as possible in Spanish in a last-hurrah effort to master the language, but alas, I have been unable to stay true to this goal. I have no problems whatsoever doing activities independently- I am perfectly content sitting on a bus by myself, allowing the words of the conversation of two nearby elderly women to filter into my thoughts and translate themselves with the assistance of my mental Spanish dictionary (which still has many pages a-missing), or spending a night out with a group of Argentine friends whose first language is not my own, but whose company I can enjoy, although it kills me that I can not keep up with their humor or wit. However, at the end of the day, I need just an hour to share and relate stories with at least one other English-speaker (not all my friends have taken off for Machu Picchu), so that we can laugh and exchange sympathy and wonder about all the crazy joys and curiosities of being foreigners in a country of seemingly endless idiosyncrasies and cultural obscurities. We usually elect to do this over a cup of cafe con leche, in whatever cute corner cafe caught the attention of one of us earlier in the day.
Regardless of my betrayal of my personal goal of complete Spanish immersion (impossible considering the quantity of English-learning Spanish-speakers who try to impress you with their knowledge of your language, and also irrational considering how much fun I would be forgoing and positive attention not getting from, oh say, groups of incredibly gorgeous Italian men, who seem to so naturally flock to my group of physically-endowed group of girlfriends from California and thus to me as well), I have noticed remarkable developments in my comprehension of the language. It occurred to me tonight, as I was eating dinner with my host family, just how many different forms of communication, beyond that learned in the classroom at UCLA, I have been exposed to since being here. This realization hit me as my two host-sisters broke out into argument at the table over the cause of Heath Ledger's death, over which they espoused differing ideas. I surprised myself in my ability to:
a.) identify, in accordance with their altered tones of voices and selection of vocabulary, that the dinner conversation was quickly turning away from peaceful, ordinary talk about movies featuring species of especially attractive actors, into a heated sisterly debate regarding whose reason for Heath Ledger's sudden death was correct, and accordingly who reigned the supreme knower-of-star-related-factoids and resultantly smarter progeny;
b.) adjust my previous state as contributor of awkward, attempt-at-comic-relief laughter into silent, non-partial observer as the friendly banter became less friendly and, at one point, slightly violent;
c.) recognize insults such as, "Oh, so you suddenly think you're the queen of E! Weekly" and, "Why can't you recognize a joke? Lighten up" and then downright, "You're such a bitch."
That's when my other roommate from the US and I decided to make ourselves look busy and began clearing the table.
Later, from inside my bedroom, I heard my host-mom assume the role of mediator and call the girls to the kitchen to discuss what had earlier unfolded at the dinner table. Of course, I tip-toed to my closed bedroom door and pressed my ear eagerly against it as so to better hear the business that was not mine to hear, and was able to distinguish the defense statements made by each of the girls in raised voices, laden with too many inappropriate words to transcribe in this here blog entry considering my viewing audience. Hey Grams and Gramps!
We never went over the chapter on "dinner table arguments" in Spanish 1-5 at UCLA. We also apparently skipped over the units on "effectively deflecting and avoiding flirtation tactics of unappealing men in bars," and "deciphering the muffled and mumbled dialogue of your host-sister's inarticulate boyfriend." Songs, store transactions, telling jokes, ordering off menus, discipline/punishment, and eavesdropping were also apparently left out of the curriculum. This makes me wonder what, in fact, we actually learned in class, because the aforementioned items collectively constitute a huge percentage of daily life and survival. It is amazing how good at Spanish I thought I was prior to coming to Argentina, and how quickly and abruptly my perception of my own knowledge was changed upon first taking seat in the airport terminal among a crowd of Argentines destined for Buenos Aires so many months ago. I was in for a rude awakening. I have learned a lot, but am left with an even farther way to go. The two weeks I have left in the city before embarking on a two-week trip to the Patagonian South and subsequent trip up the Atlantic coast of the country will prove nowhere sufficient to master the amount of language I desire. But I have found a preoccupation and passion for something that I plan on carrying with me for the rest of my academic (and life-long) career long after I return home from Buenos Aires, and one which leaves me with a very good reason for continuing frequenting those beloved sidewalk cafes.
Instead of taking off for Machu Picchu or Rio de Janeiro like the majority of my friends once classes ended, I decided to leave myself three weeks in Buenos Aires to further explore the city and focus on developing my Spanish. The original goal was to isolate myself from any other English speakers and immerse myself as much as possible in Spanish in a last-hurrah effort to master the language, but alas, I have been unable to stay true to this goal. I have no problems whatsoever doing activities independently- I am perfectly content sitting on a bus by myself, allowing the words of the conversation of two nearby elderly women to filter into my thoughts and translate themselves with the assistance of my mental Spanish dictionary (which still has many pages a-missing), or spending a night out with a group of Argentine friends whose first language is not my own, but whose company I can enjoy, although it kills me that I can not keep up with their humor or wit. However, at the end of the day, I need just an hour to share and relate stories with at least one other English-speaker (not all my friends have taken off for Machu Picchu), so that we can laugh and exchange sympathy and wonder about all the crazy joys and curiosities of being foreigners in a country of seemingly endless idiosyncrasies and cultural obscurities. We usually elect to do this over a cup of cafe con leche, in whatever cute corner cafe caught the attention of one of us earlier in the day.
Regardless of my betrayal of my personal goal of complete Spanish immersion (impossible considering the quantity of English-learning Spanish-speakers who try to impress you with their knowledge of your language, and also irrational considering how much fun I would be forgoing and positive attention not getting from, oh say, groups of incredibly gorgeous Italian men, who seem to so naturally flock to my group of physically-endowed group of girlfriends from California and thus to me as well), I have noticed remarkable developments in my comprehension of the language. It occurred to me tonight, as I was eating dinner with my host family, just how many different forms of communication, beyond that learned in the classroom at UCLA, I have been exposed to since being here. This realization hit me as my two host-sisters broke out into argument at the table over the cause of Heath Ledger's death, over which they espoused differing ideas. I surprised myself in my ability to:
a.) identify, in accordance with their altered tones of voices and selection of vocabulary, that the dinner conversation was quickly turning away from peaceful, ordinary talk about movies featuring species of especially attractive actors, into a heated sisterly debate regarding whose reason for Heath Ledger's sudden death was correct, and accordingly who reigned the supreme knower-of-star-related-factoids and resultantly smarter progeny;
b.) adjust my previous state as contributor of awkward, attempt-at-comic-relief laughter into silent, non-partial observer as the friendly banter became less friendly and, at one point, slightly violent;
c.) recognize insults such as, "Oh, so you suddenly think you're the queen of E! Weekly" and, "Why can't you recognize a joke? Lighten up" and then downright, "You're such a bitch."
That's when my other roommate from the US and I decided to make ourselves look busy and began clearing the table.
Later, from inside my bedroom, I heard my host-mom assume the role of mediator and call the girls to the kitchen to discuss what had earlier unfolded at the dinner table. Of course, I tip-toed to my closed bedroom door and pressed my ear eagerly against it as so to better hear the business that was not mine to hear, and was able to distinguish the defense statements made by each of the girls in raised voices, laden with too many inappropriate words to transcribe in this here blog entry considering my viewing audience. Hey Grams and Gramps!
We never went over the chapter on "dinner table arguments" in Spanish 1-5 at UCLA. We also apparently skipped over the units on "effectively deflecting and avoiding flirtation tactics of unappealing men in bars," and "deciphering the muffled and mumbled dialogue of your host-sister's inarticulate boyfriend." Songs, store transactions, telling jokes, ordering off menus, discipline/punishment, and eavesdropping were also apparently left out of the curriculum. This makes me wonder what, in fact, we actually learned in class, because the aforementioned items collectively constitute a huge percentage of daily life and survival. It is amazing how good at Spanish I thought I was prior to coming to Argentina, and how quickly and abruptly my perception of my own knowledge was changed upon first taking seat in the airport terminal among a crowd of Argentines destined for Buenos Aires so many months ago. I was in for a rude awakening. I have learned a lot, but am left with an even farther way to go. The two weeks I have left in the city before embarking on a two-week trip to the Patagonian South and subsequent trip up the Atlantic coast of the country will prove nowhere sufficient to master the amount of language I desire. But I have found a preoccupation and passion for something that I plan on carrying with me for the rest of my academic (and life-long) career long after I return home from Buenos Aires, and one which leaves me with a very good reason for continuing frequenting those beloved sidewalk cafes.
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