Door Number One

It's been two months to the day and all I can divulge in this one blog's breath is an abstract of that very first week...


Some time before graduation I realized one simple thing: I need to tackle the world while I’m still this young and so brilliantly foolish. As many of you have become painfully aware, time becomes the villain in our lives’ stories all too often. From graduation countdown clocks to biological clocks to the rinky-dink alarm clock we smack with the backs of our hands, we fight the toc of time every single day. I was not going to let my twenty-something ages become another clock to be beat. So instead of wearing the tic of my future around my wrist like watch going round, I got a tattoo instead. Directly over that wrist, atop my pulse, the word “EPIC” spelled out, facing me, with every intention to remind this kid that life is meant to be a story worth telling, not a form to fill out. The periled economy only added to my inclination to abort New York and head somewhere far less familiar and a bit more exotic. I spent all my graduation money becoming certified to teach English; I knew having that in my fanny pack would secure a purpose in whatever country I landed. Yet I’m still not sure how I wound up where I am. I bought my ticket four days before take off, and never took my eyes off tomorrow.

Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A British girl I shared a cab with last night may have said it best, “BA is just so easy. It has every bit of personality as a group of friends back home, and it never quite manages to overwhelm you, no matter how big of a city it is.” She was pretty much dead-on. One thing I do feel here (besides swelteringly hot these days) is comfortable. It has New York’s buzz and Europe’s charm yet cannot hide from being a truly overpopulated Latin American mega-city; unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

So how did I “pull-off” this relocation with nothing more than one suitcase and a thousand bucks to my name? I wanted it.

If you’re reading this, it probably means that travel has crossed your mind or made you think sometime before this moment. I understand that. In fact, travel for me, became an addiction. But more than two-day trips to Paris or Barcelona, I have this unyielding passion to submerse; to live like a distant people and forget what my worries once were. More than just a Eurotrip or some sight to behold if only to cross off our bucket-lists, I have an urge to see the world for what it is, in every corner, behind every set of eyes. Although it proves impossible to live in every town or lie on every beach, I can choose the few to make a life and fall deep into their flow.

Some call it running away from reality. And to be perfectly honest, yes, there were things in my life worth running away from. But the image of a 22 year-old boy sipping maté and lying in the Buenos Aires rose garden listening to live jazz doesn’t quite match with ‘running away’ for me. More than what’s behind, it’s about seeing what’s in front of us, a someplace else. And letting that someplace affect us.

In the beginning, it’s fun to compare the peculiars of our new surroundings with the habits of our old ones. In fact, it’s those comparisons that eventually make us think. And even further, make us change. But somewhere down the line, past the point of being “abroad,” we do have to pick peculiar off our skin and let what life is be. Submerge.

I got off the plane September 9th, 2009 at 9:30AM. I found my bag riding along carousel four and proceeded through customs. Two minutes past the stamp on my passport and 500 feet from the airport exit, I thought to myself “What the fuck did I just do?”

I suddenly realized the meaning of home. It’s funny. The word was so vague to me before that point, always something undefined. Yet within seconds of touching down, surrounded by strangers in every which way, hearing a language I could barely decipher, gripping a then expired one-way ticket, and bracing an untimely winter breeze - I was so sure of it. Home was exactly the opposite of that moment.

Turning around wasn’t really an option. Well, not an easy one. And more than planes and prices, my pride was what truly kept me moving forward. I could never look my friends and family, already befuddled by my haphazard destination choice, directly in the eyes with this whole big dream blown up into a billion mistakes. I was leaving the airport and heading for my hostel whether I liked it or not. Besides, I reminded myself, I was in Argentina. At the very least there were some sites to see before throwing myself under a cab.

My hostel brought me back to life. A self-professed 'Art Factory', it was designed and believed in by graffiti extraordinaire. I meandered through its hallways blemished in artful color, terrible creatures and painted faces with elastic cheekbones atop funny torsos and rubbery legs. Everywhere I looked, imagination spilled. But different than any glass of milk or bundle of apologies, nothing needed to be cleaned up; it was supposed to be dripping off the walls, all of it. And if my aforementioned knapsack of anxiety didn’t already make me feel like a little boy again, this did.

As foreign as the color schemes and gargoyles were, so to were the people I met there. The whole world sort of collides in a hostel, and hellos become ambitions. Most of the time, these people become the faces one ties to a city until you ever return to redefine its affect. Loved ones thought I was crazy for leaving home with no real plan, with no real friends. Yet there I was, surrounded by ‘backpackers’ who may have had a round trip ticket but whose in-between depended heavily on the weather, the people, or simply the inclination. And most, like myself, were alone. So if I was crazy, we were all crazy. And in that case, our hostel must have just been some friendly psych ward with great decor.

My friends were all pressuring me to write. And technically I did do some writing that first week. And by some writing, I mean I wrote the same opening sentence over and over again. On napkins at a café, in my little notebook I bought for the best seller, and unto this very keyboard: “I never felt so alone before”. Depressing, huh? Sad, but true. Yet made easier to bear with the rich culture and friendly foreigners that surrounded me. So what happened to the utopian halfway house? Well, besides a return flight home, another thing that separated us was purpose. They were exactly as their official title suggested, backpacking; a beautiful noun turned verb up there with the likes of google and skype. And so breakfasts became a time to say farewell, and notes were left on pillows with emails and numbers and facebook stage names. I began to invest less in these friends because it was such a tease, yet one I’m grateful to have fallen for in the start. Their interaction, their humor, and that busied presence were just what kept me sane those first few days. But as they’d go off to imagine Madonna singing from Evita’s balcony, I was left a lone ranger, hunting for a job in a color-soaked common room.

Apparently jobs don’t hide beneath sofas or stools or even the Internet in Argentina. It’s all about the doorstep. So I mapped out the location of every job listing I had seen, each language school I knew of, and hit the pavement in my finest gear. I wore through the soles of my shoes and found myself gasping for air at the end of each day. I felt ruined after a week; still no callbacks. And though most people I had talked to told me it would probably take a month or so to find a job, I hadn’t had the heart to tell them that I barely had the finances to last that month.

Every day, all day, I couldn’t shake the numbers from my mind. Until a job came, every facet of life needed to be low-cost. I downgraded from private room to a dorm room despite the shameful amount of luggage I had compared to the fun-size backpackers. I ate grotesque amounts of stale bread and jam at the complimentary breakfast. I walked everywhere, even to the places that warranted appalled faces when admitting to strangers the distance I had trekked. I wore the same t-shirts, the same socks, and yes, even the same underwear for days at a time. The hostel’s advertised ‘laundry service’ was actually a not-so-free laundromat located down the street.

To make matters even more matterful, I knew in the long run that finding an apartment sooner than later would greatly alleviate my finances. So in addition to the job hunt, I was hunting for any apartment listings that even remotely fit my standards. I would sit online for hours, translating which utilities were included and which bus stops were nearby. Believe me, the unemployed life can become a full-time affair. After interviews I’d look at apartments, after looking at apartments I’d send out more resumes. A cycle of life any post-grad could relate to, I'm sure, yet in the beginning I was not so confident that doing it in Argentina was a good idea after all.

It’s likely I’ll never forget the first apartment I went to see, and might I also preface, by far, the cheapest. I walked in silently, too timid to throw mismatched vocabulary at a stoutly stern landlord giving me the evil eye. Immediately I was unsure if I had walked into an apartment or the bitterly cool basement where my mutilated corpse would be found fifteen years from now. The first room was empty save for an uneven mattress lying on the floor, which I understood to be the couch. The walls were concrete, as was the ground, and chips of white paint fell from the ceiling. The Argentine landlord, who I’d come to associate as a female Napoleon Bonaparte, motioned me to follow her. I sensed a Russian winter up the hall yet for some reason let my feet trail her voice. I was baffled into curiosity.

The kitchen welcomed me into the epicenter of BA’s sewage system, and the flies circling about the sink were, if anything, my could-be flatmates. Continuing down the hall, I had two options for my bedroom; one would be cheaper, the other more ‘lavish’. As international rule of thumb goes, I chose to see the bad news first. The cheaper choice brought me into a dim cave, which, I suddenly realized, I would not be alone in. No, not bats or bugs or worse, snakes, but Eduardo, a wonderfully awkward Peruvian man who already called this place home. The surprise behind door number two, he would be my direct roommate if I chose to live there. I smiled, took a step back, and motioned Napoleana to show me behind door number three. It was a bigger room with two beds and the same welcoming chill that concrete always seems to harvest. Somehow I was able to comprehend that I could either pay half the price and accept a roommate at any given moment (which I amounted to never actually getting one but periodically having to deal with other people’s horrified expressions as they toured my cage, and me, now a full-fledged rat, staring back explaining that yes, I was once you), or I could pay the full rent for both beds and be on my own.

I don’t know why I did what I did next, but something, perhaps the toxins, made me gutsy. I negotiated. I knew I would never move into this crime scene, yet for some reason I felt the need to haggle her down to what I saw a fitting price for such a crumby accommodation. I knew my numbers well in Spanish and I had also learned that yelling does not necessarily mean arguing here, it just means yelling. So the two of us spit numbers back and forth at an echoing volume until finally she caved and gave into my value. Inevitably it didn’t matter; I would still choose door number one – the exit. I left, satisfied, leaving her with the hope of a phone call. And though I would never make that call, I was now certain of my survival. I could do this.

And I did.

First, I got a job. Just more than week after my plane had landed, I had landed yet again. Something stable. And though it didn’t satisfy the ideal plan of teaching English in South America, it was a job, and ironically paid better than any teaching gig I could’ve asked for. But there’s always a catch, and in this case that catch was more like…a pitch. Yes, I was going to be a telemarketer. I’d be working for an American company, calling the United States all day, and claiming that what was outside my window was actually a fair-weather day in Seattle, Washington. In so many figurative ways, I was literally outsourced.



More from below sooner than later...
Timmy