Beige

I've blogged at least once a month since January. It makes me quiver like those Mickey Mouse styrofoam shapes on the ends of a car antennas to see those little electronic satisfactions. They're far from perfect, or even professional. They're actually quite odd a lot of the time. But when I see them I feel like I make the perfect snowball or I'm holding a full tube of toothpaste... or I've just opened one of those new jars of peanut butter... the Skippy smooth kind of peanut butter.

But then I realized that I haven't blogged for two months. I'll be clique and say that these past two months have felt like the craziest times of my life. It's like the first squeeze of toothpaste or a knife to that utopian peanut butter. A bit of my heart turned black at the sight of it. Or beige. I tend to be inspired to write when I hear good, new music. And I did. From an Irish lady with red hair and bangs sharply angled across her forehead. My host madré told me that the word for bangs in Spanish is el pelo golpea and I laughed because saying it made my tongue shiver. The Irish bang lady told me to look up Fat White Family and to not watch the music videos. So I did, and now I'm in love with the song Beige and I feel tastefully hipster because it's not even on Google or YouTube (Spotify is my haven). I was also trying to be hipster and not go to Starbucks, but, who are we kidding. Being able to say frappuccino in a Spanish accent has to count for something. I guess need to work on that because I usually just get my coffee black.

Here's a pic of me in Mendoza cause I thought I should put at least one.

I've been watching all of my friends' travel blogs develop, and I love them. With their stories and pictures. With the documentation that I know I'll regret if I don't upkeep too. So I started this blog post with the intention of catching up with myself, which I've realized, in all actuality, is an impossible task. But all I really want to talk about is the Hipodrome, and comparatively, it's not even a big event. I live near a horse track and I decided to take a walk in my aqua blue converse and my horizontally pinstriped shirt rolled up to the elbows. And then I started to pass those people you would imagine would have little circular eye glasses slid three feet down their nose and long spindly legs with chubby little stomachs and vertical pinstripes on their coats. They didn't really look like that, but I did overhear a conversation in a British accent, which was really strange for me in Argentina. So I decided to climb the fence, but I stopped half up, clinging to the metal bars and looking wistfully through them. It was like the back stage of a theater, except instead of costumes there was the closeness of horses' rippling muscles and the smell of the creaking saddles. Dust particles ensured themselves in my eyelashes and I watched the jockey's sweat move to the procession of hoofs thudding on the packed dirt like a far-off heartbeat.

Words. There's some great ones like avuncular in Jack White's song Black Bat Licorice. It has a Latin root and means pertaining to, or a characteristic of an uncle. I think this is my second time referencing him in my blog, but, it's Jack White. There are the words that I used to say over and over until they sounded like mush. Like Fransisco or refrigerator. But I feel so misunderstood when I use words. I think it's because we try to make our thoughts fit the accepted standard of language rather than letting the thoughts choose which words should represent them. A lot of times I feel like the way we use words lowers the standard of what constitutes a thought, conforming it to a mold instead of finding words capable of representing it. I think we are letting language shape our thoughts instead of shaping the language around our ideas. This unconsciously produces a habit, which is accepted as academic English. I think our modern goal is the problem, the mentality we have of just finishing the paper or doing the minimum. So, instead of making an effort to fight for words, I settle and am even encouraged to fall into the mold of things that just sound nice.

Here's an excerpt from old school Ecclesiastes from the Bible:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 

And here's a version in "modern English" from Orwell:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

However, Orwell's text would be the one praised for its academic level. Yeesh. I like the quote by Paulo Freire, “words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” It's rather ironic because later in the same paper he falls straight into the word trap that he had just condemned. I think it's because we need to use words to convey this idea of how not to use words. Like in Jefferson's words (on a a different topic, unless you see words as slavery, which I guess they kind of are), "a necessary evil."

I say all this to say two things:

First, the Bible is simply timeless. There aren't many, and arguably, there aren't ANY books with as much class as the Bible. Class like cigar eating lobster with a silk handkerchief and a patterned bow tie. Even if you don't agree with it, it's just such a beautiful piece of literature. Please read it. Or at least a book in its entirety (start with Isaiah or Luke... a lot of Numbers and Chronicles are exactly what they sound like). 

Second, I could, should, and probably will recount all of my travels in the past few months. But I need to write them when the words can describe what I want to say. My blog posts are random. And scattered. With sentence fragments and misplaced commas... and pretty cheesy at times. But I try my hardest to make my words say what I mean. Sometimes, as a person, I am random and cheesy and scattered with misplaced thoughts and fragments. But I want my words to leak with authenticity, and if those are the elements that comprise me at that time, I think those words can be valuable because I think that the words people omit in their most vulnerable form reflect a lot of their character. I want my words to be written in relevance to the Bible, the most authentic and real script that I know, even if they don't directly reference it. Because the closer I can write to the bare bone truth of life and emotion, the closer I am to becoming what I want my words say. Like Colossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord." I just want my words to convey things in their purity, even if they contain a run-on sentence or a misplaced comma.