For the first time since arriving in Buenos Aires, I am finally busy. Kind of busy, anyway. No, I don’t have an alarm that wakes me up early in the morning to get a head-start on my days. I may even admit that I wake up between 9am-11am most days (generally closer to 9). If you’re getting ready to judge, just hang on a second while I spill my main excuse. The humidity has driven the mosquitoes out from their winter hibernation or wherever they go, and at night, they go in for blood, my blood, when my defenses are down. So, I wake up many nights frantically scratching and then can’t fall back asleep because the itching is unbearable. Eventually, I always decide to pull the covers up over my head and sleep inside of a little hot box, despite the high temperatures. Thermal discomfort, I guess, is more manageable than the prospect of more itching. For genetic reasons, I am a mosquito magnet. If vampires were real, I would probably be in real danger. Genetic reasons, really? Yes. I’ve seen the welts on my mom and both my sisters from mosquitoes in Wisconsin. Why just us, when there are plenty of people around virtually bite-free? An excellent example is Brandon. He has maybe been bitten 5 times since we’ve been here. Wtf. (Although, his allergies have been so awful that he takes some Argentine form of Benadryl many days, and ends up sleeping or miserable, so I don’t really want to harp on his mosquito “luck” . Btw, I know Benadryl is going to make a person drowsy, but I’ve taken this stuff, and I’m convinced there is something in there that are causing more intensity to these side effects. It’s quite an odd sensation). Anyway, because of this unbalance of bites from one person to the next, knowing my own family’s propensity for bites, I looked it up. Some people just have blood that is attractive to mosquitoes. I’m one of them. Where was I going with this again? Oh yeah, I wake up later than I should. Yet, I’m still claiming to be busy.
But this is exciting! I get up most days and write an article for my freelance writing job while eating toast and having a couple mugs of hot tea. By then it’s noon or so, and I walk Luna for an hour. Sometimes we walk up Puerto Madero. At one spot along that walk, there is a fountain that Luna likes to jump into. Sometimes we walk laps around Parque Lezerma, just a block away. It’s a big, hilly park that is gorgeous, especially now with all the purple and pink blossoms on the trees, and tall palms scattered here and there. Ugh, this is not contributing to my case of: busy. I keep getting sidetracked.
Anyway, six out of seven days, I work on poetry. Whether it’s freewriting, revising, putting a solid poem together from various freewrites or from scratch, I’m working, and this is probably the most important thing to me right now. In addition to that, I’m also reading a lot of poetry, and prose, which is an essential part of my life as well as my writing. Included in the “reading” category is all the workshopping for the writing group and everything that Brandon sends me outside of that (hooray, Brandon is writing a lot too!). This helps keep my brain sharp as far as craft goes. By looking critically at other writers’ work, I’m able to hone my own craft much more effectively—that is, I can see my own work more clearly, and then my early drafts aren’t quite so rough. Plus, it makes me feel smart. Heheh.
So all that counts as busy, sure. But now I’m beginning to have something resembling a social life. Tomorrow night we’re going out with Guy and Paola (our roommates) to a restaurant/bar they love. Then Thursday night is the weekly meeting for the writing group. This week we’re meeting at 7pm instead of 8pm because afterward we’re all going to an art exhibit/party where Michael (one member of the group, a FANTASTIC artist) has a painting on display. Then Saturday night, Steve and Katie (Steve is my aunt’s friend’s nephew who works at the embassy here) invited us to a Chrismakkah potluck at their place. All these plans!
And I recently discovered that the art museum is free, every day! That, with the many, many other touristy things that are available for taking up whole days here, and I’m set for a few months at least.
This is what busy means. A more Argentinean than American definition.
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