Better Risk It?

My great uncle, who is almost eighty-nine years old, recently told me: "I can resist everything except temptation." My close friend is in the sixth month of one of those all-consuming-totally-devoted-to-you-maybe-we'll-get-married-and-reproduce sort of relationships. In a moment of weakness, her boyfriend got rip-roaring drunk and cheated on her, "briefly" (in his own words, whatever that means...). Flooded with such remorse, he went to his girlfriend and confessed his transgression almost immediately.

Some say that this wanker moment would have been better left unmentioned, as an unfortunate miscreant incident to relinquish to the lovely land of denial. By telling his girlfriend about the infidelity, he could do nothing but hurt her. But I think it would have haunted him in a Lady Macbeth "Out, out damned spot" sort of way. Eventually, it would seep into their relationship like an uninvited house guest, a third wheel of doom. But thanks to his honesty, the Romeo & Juliet purity of this couple is a thing of the past.

"Death by Misadventure"

Being in Buenos Aires is like stepping back in time—similar to what I would imagine of Paris, if Paris were in the south of France in the 1960s or '70s. There is an ambient whimsy and spookiness to it, and more vegetation than I have seen in any city—parks and lovely trees at every turn and balconies swathing the apartment buildings. The architecture varies from the grandeur of the French Belle Epoque, with embassy buildings to trump any I've seen, to Bauhaus-era high-rises with sleek marble lobbies and awnings reminiscent of the Riviera.

The Recoleta Cemetery is a mesmeric place in which to get lost for hours, where mini mausoleums and marble façades abound. In fact, Buenos Aires is a city of exquisite marble, elegantly dressed men, beat-up cars from the '70s, vegetal luxuriance, and culinary experiences that would impress even the most persnickety epicure.

Luscious: pleasing to taste

If you are wondering where all the attractive, well-dressed, virile men went... they are in Buenos Aires.

"In Drum Dosing Ball"

We encountered two charming middle-aged men dining at the table across from us in a romantic jewel of a restaurant in Bariloche. At first we had the impression that they were quite attractive and intriguing fellows. Then, we noticed their wedding rings, and we realized that they were married, and probably on a boy's night out. Then, they became increasingly touchy-feely with each other, and we noticed that they were wearing pinky rings, and we decided that they were probably gay. Then, on our way out of the restaurant, they were checking us out brazenly, and we realized that we had been hoodwinked.

The following morning we went down to breakfast in the hotel restaurant and noticed the same two men. They greeted us happily, and we went on with our mornings.

Hours later, we passed the same attractive middle-aged male couple on the street, and we started to feel a fated uncanniness to our repeated meetings. They pulled us aside and asked us if we were leaving for Buenos Aires that afternoon. One of them gave us his business card.

In the airplane en route to the big city, we realized that they were on our same flight, seated just two rows in front of us. Fate may have its way with us after all. We are still mystified by their gay-and-away-on-holiday tendencies. Maybe it is just a Spanish thing. But their pseudo-stalking is suspect.

[The above title is a quote from the poorly translated manual to the washing machine in our Buenos Aires apartment. It's oddly poetic.]

Throbbing Night Music

My jaunt in South America continues, and the language barrier presents more amusing incidents with each passing day.

Gauche Travel Tips for the Deranged Traveler:

1. Use coupons from those little tourist restaurant booklets to redeem complimentary cocktails.

2. If staying in an apartment, go to a nearby luxury hotel and have the concierge make you reservations.

3. After struggling with the local language and speaking only in English, start talking to your waiter in French. That'll throw them through a loop—especially if you don't speak French.

4. Insult the club music that your cabbie has chosen to blast in the background. In English, say something to the effect of: "It's amazing—outside of the U.K. and the U.S., music is just atrocious!" If this a tragic story of gaucheness, then your cabbie will promptly change the radio station and you will realize that he understands English, and that you have acted like a wanker.

5. On the flight, ask a random passenger with a window seat to switch with your back-of-the-bus-close-to-the-lavatory situation. Or, steal someone's blanket and pillow while they are asleep. Or, change into pajamas midway through the flight. Or, steal extra snacks and mini Cokes while standing next to the flight attendants and waiting for the restroom. The truth of the matter is that airplane travel has become such an uncivilized landscape of utter gaucheness that it is a veritable free-for-all. These days, it's considered elegant if a woman wears actual pants, instead of sweats or leggings, on a flight.

A Certain Naïveté

I met the man of my dreams on the chairlift in Bariloche, the romantic Argentinean ski destination. When it is warm in the off-season, it has the feel of the Swiss Alps with a hint of the Virgin Islands and a Spanish sensibility mixed in. The chairlift led to the top of a mountain, where there is a vista of the world below that looks like Never Neverland.

I had noticed my mysterious chairlift companion while standing in the queue; he seemed to possess a South American pimp factor and a sharp sartorial taste, with his fetching leather vest and shoes. Then, fate had its way with me, and we were forced onto the chairlift together, to enjoy our ride to the top. He spoke as little English as I speak Spanish, so our communication was reminiscent of the scenes between Colin Firth and his cute Portuguese maid in Love Actually. It was a delightful struggle.

What a romantic story of first-meeting it would make, if we somehow end up together. He is coming to Miami on holiday in April. Maybe we will meet again, though I doubt there is anything as whimsical as a chairlift in Miami.

Princess of Chile

I am in the Lake District of Chile getting to know a relative-in-law, a Swiss-Italian woman with definite fascist tendencies. In her glory days of Germanic Brigitte Bardot beauty, she was a couture model who hobnobbed with Audrey Hepburn and dated Ronald Reagan. She married my great uncle, a regal Bavarian version of Hugh Hefner, and they eventually retired to a Chilean ranch where they keep about 68 dogs, along with thirty horses who never appear to be ridden. They have become devout Evangelical Christians and have an on-site chocolate factory, so there is as much natural chocolates and homemade marmalade as you could desire. It is a surprising confluence of disparate elements: Jesus-loving former Jet-Set Germans, endearing Spanish servants, tranquil Chilean farmland, afternoon küchen, and a gaggle of formerly homeless dogs.

Gauche Things to do in an Internet Cafe in a Foreign Country:

1. Logging into your boyfriend´s email account to read his incoming and outgoing messages. And then realizing that your boyfriend joined Match.com the day you left for your trip.

2. Reading aloud excerpts from a Wikipedia entry about how said country´s former dictator instituted a period of repression called "The Caravan of Death."

3. Watching Youtube videos entitled "David Byrne Interviews Himself."

4. Looking at photographs of the picturesque lake town in which the internet cafe is located, instead of looking at the actual lake.

"just a really hot day"

Apparently many Americans are moving into motel rooms, indefinitely, because of foreclosures and the recession. That sounds somewhat tiresome, but in a way cinematic and inspiring. Right now I am in Santiago, Chile, exploring the Almodovarian aesthetic and encountering the friendliest and most endearing people. They are so willing to assist whenever it becomes apparent that I speak only three words of Spanish.

People are much freer here with their bodies than the Northeasterners to whom I am accustomed: Chileans often take their shoes off while eating at restaurants, and put their feet up on chairs in public. Today I saw a man washing his face in the outburst of water from a fire hydrant. Last night in the middle of dinner I did a dance for the restaurant guests to the lovley guitar music. The specialty drink here is the pisco sour, and it is delicious with "pamello" (like grapefruit). This morning I noticed a cute Spanish guy wearing a neon-colored t-shirt of Abraham Lincoln. He sat on a picturesque cafe terrace with his barefoot friends, and one of them took my pen and notebook and sketched some primitive portraits of my sister and me. He offered us a midday whiskey and the t-shirt off his back that I had admired.

We also became friends with a French man from Marseilles who was selling crepes in the middle of Santiago and wearing a t-shirt that said "Boston" on it. He was a charmer, having fun all day and strumming his spatula like a violin.

The above picture is of me back home in Beacon Hill with an owl from my neighborhood antique shop.

quiet & sweet & delicate

In the midst of my last-minute attempt to finish a draft of my senior essay, I am procrastinating to no end. Today this meant taking coffee with one of my oldest friends in the world, who was recently elected by the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC, an acronym I never thought I'd understand, let alone use) as their "Hockey Student-Athlete of the Year." This honor seems prestigious.

Gauche Things to do during a reunion with your high school friend:

1. When discussing your social lives: revealing that you have been stalking them (or their older brother) on the Facebook, by saying something like: "Well, you certainly seemed pretty frisky in that green shirt on Saturday night..."

2. When mentioning their high school sweetheart-slash-ex-boyfriend's name: saying, "How's he doing? I haven't heard from him since that night on Fire Island this summer. He pretty much disappeared after eggs..."

3. When ordering food: asking the waiter, "Do you have some sort of business woman special?" This is not so much gauche as a brilliant allusion to a good old-fashioned American epic.

In a Festive Teepee

The past few days have been a veritable mini cruise in celebration of my birthday. It all began when my sister made a trip to New Haven and I showed her a few of its many charms. First there was The Cupcake Truck, where she surprised me with a red velvet cupcake topped with edible gold. That evening we stopped in at the neighborhood cigar bar, the Owl Shop, where a table of middle-aged Connecticut men told us about the nuances of their jobs as liquor promoters. Luckily, just as they whipped out a round of Jägermeister liqueur and insisted on mailing us various alcohol-related "tchotchkes," eight of my friends showed up to steal me away for the first surprise party of my life. Ironically, it was hosted in a sorority house, a place I would ordinarily never be caught dead.

The three-day birthday cruise segued into two incidents of spontaneous guerrilla-style dance: the first took place next to the Yale University Art Gallery's Oxfordian arch, to the mellifluous sounds of Prince's "Delirious" blasting from a Volvo; the second transpired next to the Harvard Square T-stop, to street performers' Andean ethnic folk music.

The birthday finished with a quieter intervention on the Boston T. My sister had found a beautiful eight-foot-long tree branch outside of the Museum of Fine Arts. Thinking it would be a perfect decorative accent to our lavender bedroom walls, I brought the unwieldy branch into the subway with us. When I entered, the subway operator immediately called her supervisor and said, "A woman just brought something like a large tree branch in." The branch's presence in the subway worried a few, delighted some, and mystified many. It's funny to see what a touch of nature does to an urban landscape.

The above picture is of a woman in a fetching fur hat at an ever-popular Yale Center for British Art reception.

"where perhaps someone could lurk"

Sometimes two people are lucky enough to find each other. And then they live an exquisite romance together, for five or even seven days. Sometimes the bliss lasts even longer. Then there is the far-too-inevitable rupture of the affair. It is often as quick and unforeseen as the initial enchantment. My friend recently put his business-savvy mind to affairs of the heart, and went on a veritable rampage of first dates, having up to 17 different drinks/dinners in a month. He even hosted a singles party in an effort to pool together as many females as possible in one room. And all to no avail.

Then, after a chance encounter at a private Manhattan club, he spent the evening with a new lady friend. The next morning he gushed, "I met her—I met the girl I'm going to marry!" Revelry ensued. And for the following nine days, they were inseparable. It seemed that their love for each other had no bounds.

But as with weekend romps in the countryside with old-fashioned tubs and limited local restaurants, boundless things must come to an end. One morning the blissful lovers woke up in bed together and their discussion settled on the issue of faith. It turns out that she believed in the New Age Mayan-inspired mystical (cultish) theory that there will be an apocalypse in 2012. And that was the end of these blissful lovers.

The above picture is of me trapped inside my dorm room fireplace.

Safe Stirrups

There are few things more awkward or irritating than the annual gynecological visit. Well, I can think of loads of more uncomfortable scenarios, but on this icy March afternoon, the last thing I wanted to do was to sit semi-naked, partially wrapped in over-sized white paper towel "gowns," atop a hospital table with its own pair of stirrups. And the doctor never arrives in a timely manner.

Gauche things to say to your Gynecologist:

1. When asked the following question about your sex life "So, you have a steady partner?": Replying, "Yes, at least one of them is definitely steady."

2. When asked if you need a refill on your birth control pill: Replying, "No, I'm pretty sure none of my partners are father-material."

3. When asked if you use condoms: Replying, "No. But let's hope he does."

Overall, the awkward physical aspect of going to the gynecologist is only exacerbated by the fact that half the time, or most of the time, the patient is not even in an intimate relationship, let alone multiple ones (like the gauche and rather promiscuous above-mentioned example). Being alone on a cold doctor's table with stirrups should be more enticing than being in bed with a wanker, but unfortunately, women seem to gravitate towards the latter.

The above picture is of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, New Haven. Please understand that this post advises people to practice safe sex and be as selective as possible with their partners.

Pity. Of Young & Old.

This afternoon Hanif Kureishi, English-Pakistani novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, came to Pierson College for a Master's Tea, blanketing my 4pm procrastination in a bitter British coziness. Kureishi wrote the charmingly geriatric film with Peter O'Toole, Venus: the story of an unexpected relationship between a lazily gauche girl and an elderly actor (a veteran of Britain's stage and screen now type cast as "the corpse").

Kureishi discussed "the crash" that occurs in a writer's process, after the thrill of the seminal idea has subsided: it's like in love—after six months, when you realize what that person is really like, and then you either break up or you come to terms with who they are. I wonder if love is always as bleak and businesslike as Kureishi describes it.

On his unwillingness to sell out, after Kureishi turned down a big Hollywood deal, he said, "I could see the check hovering in my retina all the time." He has the expenses of twin fifteen-year-old boys to consider, but he distilled the fate of the young generation down to the following question: "Do you want to read a book by Tolstoy or do you want to spend the day on Facebook?"

For all his cynical spins on success, Kureishi had a clever finish. His teenage sons say to him of his writer's lifestyle: "Dad, we've never seen you do a day's work—whenever we look in your study, you're always laying on the sofa and listening to the Beatles."