Estudiando en Buenos Aires

19/2 After nearly 2 weeks of chaos at Rio carnival, I fly straight back into another bubbling cauldron.. Buenos Aires, home of Tango..

Feeling cheery so head off to a local cemetery. Discover monuments of neglect. Why bury your loved ones if you can lock'em up and throw away the key?

20/2 -25/2 Eat steak, drink wine. Met up daily with my good friend Soraya (whom i met in Pipa, Brazil last October) and we studied together, she helped me with my Spanish, and I with her English. It's nice to have a friend who lives here.

Friday 26th Feb - Monday 8th March

Two weeks of intensive Spanish at Mundo Español. Just round the corner from my hostel this was a great little place to learn the lingo. I had private classes with a range of teachers, all were pretty good. The discipline of going to college for 4 hours every morning also kept me on the straight and narrow.. at least for a while.. though i think the pressure built up....

One of my fellow students was a guy from Germany, we hung out and one day he brought along his sexy young flatmate. She was a lovely girl, had a beautiful innocent look but every now and then she threw in some deliciously naughty comments that made you do a double-take.

Not to seem completely one-tracked, I went on a few tourist jaunts..

Argentinians are probably just about the most football crazy nation, at least on a par with Brazil, England etc. I didn't go to any matches though, some of the stories i heard put me off, and paying 50 quid to be pissed on wasn't my idea of fun. I found the artwork outside quite interesting though, what what. Retire for tea.

Torture myself over my obsession with women. Start streaming my inner thoughts onto paper. Move them into cyberspace. Feel guilty. Worry.

Post personal diary, it's illegible anyway so I'm safe, no? Post extracts in small-print, so I'm safe, no?

Extract from handwritten diary

Feb 28th 2010 Hostel Ostinatto BA

Where to start, what is real? What is really what I feel, and what is stuff I do to protect myself from feeling what I really feel?

I'm fuelled by an imminent conquest - my ego is poised and already moving in on another innocent creature. She is a lovely german girl, I look at her and at times I feel the pain inside me transform into passion and I want to devour her to make her mine. Is it so terrible that I know the end before the beginning has begun? It is so conforting and beautiful to feel her hand in mine. Ok I am scared, I want to cry, I want to pray.

There is no risk in my union with her, because i know the outcome I dislike myself for the cowardice that this represents, but am I being too harsh? Is it not all perfect and to enjoy or live the moment is all that counts. I pray to feel and to live that feeling at all times. God is my will and way. Let it be. Let it be. Let it be. Let it be.

2/3 Flashback to Brazil, a very sexy Carioca is studying in the language school. I make a mental note to look her up when in Rio. She lives in Niteroi, a suburb I've not been to yet, that's a good excuse no?

Date with the German girl. If you want a girl to drag you to bed, take her to "Señor Tango", its an amazing show, incredibly passionate.



Extract from diary 2-Mar

...i'm a little torn as i know this lovely German girl will sleep with me when we get the chance of privacy, but then I also know it wouldn't lead anywhere. The "moment" has passed but we have this pseudo-romantic thing going on. It's pleasant to have someone to hold, to kiss, to caress, but it gives me pain to know that I will lose it and perhaps more even that it is my choice.

If I am being truly honest I would let go of her knowing the moment has gone, and if something happens then this will be a new moment - but how could anything happen except if I crawl myself to this past moment and cowardly grab what I have not yet been able to take.

Next day --

My mind flits over a multitude of images from last night - the tango show was amazing, and then came a moment, which as expected felt as if I had seized it from the past, a cruel and cowardly robbery - or was it?

. . .

This is a journal of cowardice. But my hope is that through the effort I take in exposing myself, I can overcome the fears that make my seek cover in cowardly acts, and instead start to live truely.

Where is the risk? As I feel myself melting into her on the dance floor am I scared?

.. A risk is an act that potentially compromises the ego. A 'safe' action simply maintains the ego stable size.

Sunday 7/3. Depressed. Wander to the local market. See a blond girl i recognise, i assume she is from the hostel. We stop and chat for some minutes trying to work out where we know each other from. Eventually we discover it was Rio carnival. Small world the backpacker circuit. She has a lot of energy and i start to feel better, we go shopping together, and she helps me choose an alpaca jumper which turns out very useful for the chilly south. I give her my opinion on dress colours.

8/3 - 14/3 Week of mayhem, see separate blog entry.

15/3 I consider buying a netbook (=small laptop) for my travels. I make a list of pros and cons and decide against it. "not buying a laptop" appears in my diary under a list of personal achievements:
asking Marina to dinner
dancing Tango while being centre of attention
not buying a laptop
letting people look after their own feelings
adding Mother on facebook

Next post

The Heaviness of Being

It seems amazing to me that everything that anyone ever does has an indelible effect on the lives of every other person and thing in the world, the universe even. None of us is truely invisible. In fact we are wholly part of everything. Perhaps this is what Milan Kundera meant by the "heaviness" in his book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

For example, if a fly happens to fly by your nose and you swat it away, this will have an effect on everything and everyone in the world. It is scientifically impossible for anything to be totally isolated from this event. As a thought experiment (because in reality this experiment could not be carried out perfectly), imagine two video recordings of the world as it would be with and without this fly flying by. Play the recordings from your view of when you next observe some other people. It is possible that you may not see much difference immediately, but I'd speculate that within seconds or minutes these peoples' conversations are differing, and you would start to see corresponding differences in movement.

How about someone on the other side of the planet? Perhaps in the first few minutes you would not see any noticeable difference, but i'd speculate that within hours you would detect visible differences. These differences would escalate over time and after days, weeks, months, there maybe no relation between the two videos, though there would be some weaving a set plans are carried out (eg catching a flight, attending a meeting), but even these co-incidences would fizzle out with time, even for the most hardened planners.

The basic principle here is the well-known butterfly effect. After I just completed the last sentence, a fly just landed on my eye (no joke!) It caught me by surprise, and i swiped at it suddenly. The guy on the computer next to me turned to look for a moment. He is on some internet chat. At the very least, the time it has taken him to make his next response has changed slightly. As has my take on this blog- the text has changed completely. There will be ongoing repercussions of this event forever for everyone.

Perhaps this is why we need faith. There is a limit to the extent to which we can control our lives, ultimately we must accept that we are part of a whole, and with this acceptance comes a sense of holiness (from Old English hāl - whole).

Easier said though. My heart aches to feel this.

Janeiro 2010 - Rio de Janeiro

Where to start? Europeans first sailed up the Guanabara bay in January about 500 years ago, hence the name Rio de Janeiro (river of January), so where better to start a New Year.. in this Cidade Maravilhosa! And what a marvelous city it is...

I'm writing this post 4 months on so its all a bit of a blur now... random memories flash about my chaotic mind.. Ipanema posto 9, Lapa, capirinha, Help no more, mayhem on my birthday, juice bars, acai, bad dates, Emporio, groundhog days, depression, and finally a need to move on south.

Here are a few of the highlights...

1st January - sunrise Copacabana. Hanging on in hope..

New Year Copacabana

Storm building up over Ipanema beach

Hanging out on Ipanema beach

Body bashing

View from Pedra de Gavea of Dois Irmãos and Ipanema

Pensive

Fussvolley Ipanema beach - before the 'choque de ordem'. It is now banned on the waterfront before 5pm

Tudo bem

Birthday cake.. before the mayhem (censored)

Ready to hit the town

Aren't we cool

This was supposed to be a date, but she brought along a few friends. Yaz came along to back me up.

Chilling on high

Frescobol Ipanema beach

Rocinha favela

Recycling

Visconde de Piraja. Lojas Americas, yuk.

Making a bed in flip-flops - watch it with the hammer and chisel. Well it a change from the usual routine.

Things to do with an unmade bed - weight lifting

More pictures on Flickr

Entropy and Love - part 1

It is said that the last thing fish would discover is water. For us, could this thing be the essence of time?

Time passes by, or does it?

In classical physics time is just a variable that can just as well go backwards as forwards. It is not until the second law of thermodynamics that science provides a direction to time – the direction in which things go wrong! E.g. drop a plate and it will smash – never will a smashed plate magically come to mend itself . The direction of time given by this law is known as the thermodynamic arrow of time . It implies that time flows in the direction in which things become more chaotic, e.g. from whole plates to smashed plates.

But this is just one perspective. It is a perspective based on analysis – one provided by the mind. And it is necessarily the perspective of the mind. The mind is a delay-response system – time is a function of this system. Whereas simple organisms receive stimuli and respond directly to these in a pre-programmed manner (instinctive behaviour), more complex organisms such as man have the ability to “store” stimuli in a brain and respond at a later time.
It is this storage of information that creates this sense of time. Why? Because when the brain stores information it is becoming less chaotic relative to its surroundings . Therefore it perceives the world as becoming more chaotic.

A curious by-product of this result is the key to happiness, already well documented by many. The solutions fall into two broad categories:

1. Instead of storing information, release it. Commonly, people do this just by talking – this does work, but at a cost to the listener who is storing information that they too will need to release. More environmental approaches include prayer or meditation.

2. Store and release in equal measure. A good conversation, a good mechanic fixing a car, a musician striking a perfect note, a carpenter striking a chisel just so, doing anything that you really enjoy – are all examples of the mind storing and releasing in equal measure, or of neither storing nor releasing – sometimes known as a state of flow. In such a state we may experience time as if standing still – we are living entirely in the moment.