From Rubia to Redhead

It has been 9 months since my departure from the land of good air and my return to the land of good beer.

It has been one blurry and sloggy readjustment, complete with the return of morning hangovers, beer guts and Spotted Cow.

But most importantly it has been a return to the reality of home, of expectations and of the future.

In Argentina, my life extended only 6 months into the future. Six months were easily filled with piropos and my accompanying dirty looks, with teatro and dancing at a gay boliche next door, with trips to Brasil and trips to dipilacion. My only expectation was living to the fullest my six months in Latin America.

But now I have graduated from the illustrious ivory towers of UW-Madison, totting my JBA behind me, and I have the rest of my life as my reality. I have a lifetime of expectations from my family and me to fill.

So of course, in true Niki style, I am panicking … and I am unemployed- the two actions have much more to do with each other than I would like to admit. I am so overwhelmed by the potential of action that I am frozen in immobility.

So yesterday I died my hair red. Yesterday I took an action towards the future.



Yesterday I washed away the rubia of college, of Argentina, and welcomed in the redhead of that scary infinite future.

Check out how this pelirroja takes on the abyss at www.100daysofunemployment.blogspot.com.

Missing the Less Developed

I missed Argentina for the first time in 2 months.

We watched clips from the 2001 riots in Argentina in J621: Mass Media and Developing Countries.

That’s were I was, a “developing country.” I strode through those “backwards” streets of Buenos Aires with ease despite my capitalist 1^st world label. I wonder if an Argentine would be allowed the same courtesy here.

Because our glorious developed country technology wasn’t working in class, I translated the Argentine man’s word in the movie with surprising effortlessness.

I had heard his words before. “There is no future or past here. We only live in today.”

A country of the hopeless middle class. Yet I felt the vibrancy in the UBA halls. It was more alive than the sterilely silent halls of Vilas. And I felt more alive there, more alive because there seemed to always be potential lying around the next broken sidewalk, always a new challenge to meet at the next bus stop, always a new today.

After all isn’t it better to be “developing,” to have something to more to accomplish, to work for?

After all we can’t all be perfect like America.

Frozen in Spirit

I am buried under 3 feet of unbearable winter.

I am trapped in my house, unable to venture out into this world I was looking forward to rediscovering.

I am weighed down in body and spirit, by this deadening winter.

I forgot how spirit-breaking Wisconsin winters are.

So instead of trying to fight the next month of below zero wind chills, I am putting on my sweats, making some cocoa and hibernating until the March thaws.

My infamous driveway where my car got stuck twice, yes twice, in one day.

Third Culture

[First, props to Penny for enlightening me to the term third culture and for just being enlightening in general.]

7 months ago, I left Green Bay, my first culture. The culture I called home for 22 years. The only culture I thought would ever be home. A culture I would soon learn to miss desperately and question critically.

6 months ago, I stopped crying in my second culture. I looked around Buenos Aires and thought profoundly, “This isn’t that bad.” I experienced my second culture, then I lived my second culture and finally I was my second culture.

1 month ago I returned to my first culture, dismayed that it seemed unrecognizable and unlivable. And so in true Fritz fashion, I panicked, labeled it depression of readjustment and boarded myself up until my first culture stopped slapping me across the face with Wal-Marts and McDonalds.

But I am not re-adjusting nor re-adapting nor doing any re-ing. I am experiencing my 3^rd culture for the first time. For my 2^nd culture not only changed me, it irreversibly changed my 1^st culture. So now I am walking through Wal-Mart with new legs. I am looking at the golden arches with new eyes. I am experiencing my third culture and I am living it with a new soul.

And like that first Sunday in Buenos Aires, I am abandoning my useless fear, getting on collectivo 128 and heading for the unknown of this new home. The guards I needed in my first culture, I learned to abandon and burn in my second. And upon reaching my third, I find the old guards are rusting and ugly and have no use in my painfully bright third culture.

My Computer is a Traitor

I have reset my computer's clock three times since returning to Central Standard Time.

Yet inevitably a few days after resetting my traitorous computer, I open my screen to find i am still in Argentine time.

Currently it is 7:47 PM. I am sitting down to eat with mi familia. Maite is hiding under the table trying to tickle my feet. Inaquis is telling me yet another joke in Spanish I don't understand. Gustavo and Angles are exchanging office gossip and Teo is passing me another serving of food even after I pleaded “estoy llena.”

That is according to my computer.

My brain knows it is 4:47 PM. That I just walked home in the most miserable cold rain after a day of lectures I could understand but not feel. My brain knows I need to do at least another 3 hours of homework before I can even begin to fantasize about the folds of my bed.

My heart is in cahoots with my computer. My heart is opening the patio window and breathing in Argentina, breathing in fresh, hot beginnings.

But my body is here, frozen in Madison, frozen in the past, slipping on the sidewalk between the past and the future.

And I am left wondering; has anything changed in 7 months?

Or am I still crying on concrete steps?

My computer and my heart are in denial, hoping by freezing time in Argentina, they can ignore the past here.

But there are the concrete steps, looking slippery with regret.

23 Jan. Missing Me

People keep asking me if I miss Argentina. And I can honestly respond no. I loved my time there but I was ready to go home.

What I miss is me in Argentina, I miss who I was in the streets of Buenos Aires. I miss the risks I took. I miss how open my heart and mind were. I miss how I never took anything for granted.

In Argentina things were easier because they were harder. From hailing a taxi to speaking in class to venturing to San Telmo, everything was a challenge. And because everything was out of my comfort zone nothing was.

Now my comfort zone feels like a prison. I easily fall back to my old routine, my old self, a self I have now outgrown. I feel like I am living in a skin that is 2 sizes too small.

16 Jan. Failing Bodies

After 6 months of relatively health-filled months in Argentina and 2 weeks of holiday festivities my body finally gave up on Monday January 7^th when I woke up at 6 am with a retched flu. I spent the next two days drinking water and flat sprite.

The flu was followed by a body-ache filled cold, followed by bronchitis which was then followed by a round of antibiotics. The pitiful 5-day dose of antibiotics was doomed to fail and thus came the sinus and ear infections. All of this came to a climatic finale with my third trip to the doctor and horse-size antibiotics.

And now I find school dauntingly in my near future. And I’m just not sure my body nor my mind is ready.

6 Jan. Falling off Pedestals

I want to preface this, MOM!, with I love my family and my home. In fact I could write extensive odes to my family, friends and Green Bay but I won’t torture you with my decrees of love for Brett Favre.

That said my first weeks home sucked. Well not sucked so much as didn’t not suck. After torturous weeks of cultural adjustment in Argentina, I thought coming home would be like returning to the promise land. But instead I found myself routinely unimpressed by everything I had been craving for months.

The food felt stale in my mouth, the language brutally cut my eardrums and the winter just plain hurt. The sight of old friends and family brought tears to my eyes, yet soon after heart-touching reunions, the initial brilliance wore off, I found myself staring at still cherished but somewhat duller loved ones.

Absence makes the heart grow founder but returning slaps that heart and brain right back to reality. It is a harsh reality where I beginning to think I am the duller one not the food, winter or people that surround me.

2 Jan Reverse Culture Shock

Wal-Mart scares me. I almost had I panic attack the last time I went in.

I just need a banana. I don’t want to go to a supermarket. I want to walk around the corner to a fruteria and pick it up for 10 cents.

I am craving the norms of what was my life in Buenos Aires.

And I am freaking out a bit. So I am staying under my down comforter until spring. Wake me up with the temperature breaks 50.

26 Dec Change

Grandma was right. Life is all about change and learning to accept change. Life would be boring without change.

Still change always seems to creep on me. Maybe because it is young and my mind is not used to the speed at which our lives can become unrecognizable, maybe because thus far my life has remained relatively constant, change always reserved for some day in the future, a blurry idea not tangible to 22 year young girl.

But tonight as I drove through the lightly falling snow, I felt the world whirl around me like if was being fast forwarded while I sat silently watching from the car.

A few days ago I was melting in the heat of Buenos Aires, now I am freezing in the tundra of Green Bay. I few years ago I was sitting in Maggie’s basement trying to keep up on the LOR conversation, drinking Starbucks and generally talking stupid. Now I am still sitting in Maggie’s house but the conversation is made up of memories, silhouettes of ghosts hold the night together.

The night feels unreal. 6 old friends rewinding time for a few hours only to have to fast forwarded on the ride home. Because time can’t be stopped, or even paused. This change didn’t happen while I was in Argentina, it happened every second since high school graduation and will keep happening every second, pulling some of us closer and making others of us ghosts in the memories of who we were.

25 Dec No need to dream, when a white Christimas is right outside my window

While I made 5 pounds of Christmas cookies, Grandmas sat in a chair in the kitchen, sipped wine and gave me precious jewels of knowledge too big for any box and too beautiful for a bow.

“Nik, I am 66 years older than you…(thinking)…Well Nik I hope you have as much fun in the next 66 years as I have. I think the key is optimism. Pessimistic people turn into old crab.”

23 Dec Long Days and Dashed Expectations

The trip could not have been smoother from Buenos Aires to Miami, Miami to O’hare.

In true Latin America style, we flowed from city to city, plane to plane, with now worries.

And then along with 300 other flights, our flights were cancelled and the abrupt stop of the ease slapped me across the face like the below freezing winds of Chicago.

After being delayed ever 10 minutes for 3 hours, I had boarded my plane only to be told it was cancelled minutes before take off. I wasn’t even angry, I was just crushed, deflated, defeated.

All I have wanted for the past two weeks is to be home for Christmas and all that stood between me and that dream was 3 hours by car and one hell of a winter storm.

I wanted to punch the airline worker singing Jingle Bell Rock.

But instead Mom and I got margaritas and chicken wings, checked into the Hilton across the street, to 12-hours of sleep and had my wonderful father come and pick us up in Chicago.

So now after 36 hours of travel, I home to a white Christmas.

After 6 months of travel, last days and long days and longer days I am finally home.

A miserably cold, snowy flat cow-invested place that I love and the perfect oplace for a welcome home Christmas.

22 Dec Last Days and Great Expectations

I am Miss Havisham sitting in her old spider-invested mansion regretting the past and hoping for the greatness in the near future.

New Year’s Eve, birthdays and last days in foreign conuntires are always filled with great expectations, often so great there is no way reality can achieve such dreams.

But like life, greatness occurs between birthdays and New Year’s Eve, in between the first day and the last.

My last day may not live up it Pip’s dreams but sometimes a bottle of good white wine and a plate of pasta is even better.

19 Dec Gilmore Girls

My mom and I are not the Gilmore girls. It took me a week and a half into the trip to realize that.

But who wants to be skinny, sarcastically brilliant best friend/mother-daughter when you can have Malbec in Mendoza. Yeah I choose my mom and wine over a perfect WB sitcom any day

12 Dec El Calafate

El Calafate is my favorite smell: spring, melting ice, fresh flowers, newness and clan.

El Calafate is el opuesto de Buenos Aires. It is friendly, slow, and clean.

It makes me want to move to Alaska…well at least for a few months in summer.

10 Dec Buenos Aires: a second time around

My feet are diry, really dirty. The tub water runs brown in our old hotel room.

We walked the city today. From Centro to Recoleta to Palermo and back.

We saw what I have already seen but with second-time around glasses. Withoutht he rush, the gardens are prettier, the cemetery more peaceful, the streets more fascinating.

And the people.

When you stop staring at your dirty feet and look up at the faces for the epopel you pass, the city is far more fascinating.

Fake blondes to graying viejos, mulleted jovenes to dirty-faced street kids.

We walked to Plaza de Mayo to see the inauguration of la primera presidenta de Argentina: Cristina Fernandez Kirchner. People, young and old, form the afueras to the centro, blond to Moreno filled the square, beating drums and singing to their new queen.

Buenos Aires is alive and beats with the rhythm of over 3 million hearts. Tonight the drums let my heart beat the same rhythm.

9 Dec The traveling begins

After months of preparation from passports to thousand dollar plane tickets, after overcoming the panic of being panicked in Argentina, my mom is finally here in Argentina (and I think still wishing I had studied abroad in Spain). And she did it all with relative ease.

After a painless flight from green bay, I picked her up at EZE and took her back to my barrio for a brief tour of the house before a much needed medialuna for me and her first malbec.

Now two weeks of mother-daughter traveling lay before us. It should be an interesting trip- and not in the 70’s acid taking way…well maybe, you never know with my mother.