My political exile

It wont be easy for me to put this into one coherent post...so here is an incoherent one....

I am the product of economically progressive and socially liberal parents. I consider myself liberal relative to social issues and fiscally conservative (due to my hangbag count, my husband would disagree) but with an emphasis on education and health for all. As far as presidents go, I am still waiting for a leader with conviction that isn't a personal mess. So it wouldn't be surprising to you that the Reagan and Bush Part I years where difficult ones for me. While Carter was honorable he was a micro-manager who was politically naive and ultimately weak. Clinton was effective and inspiring but such a horndog that he himself sabotaged and minimized his achievements.

Needless to say, the last four years of You know who has been extremely painful. Where do I begin? I have alternatively believed You know who was stupid, crazy, a puppet of others or could not possibley be elected again, so who cares, just move on(sorry to say I was wrong there). My current theory is that he is a Christian Fundamentalist who thinks he gets his orders from God. Is that crazy? I guess I shouldn't judge. But he is not the dude cleaning my windshield at the gas station, he is the fucking president. Crazy? maybe not, but dangerous, I think YES!!!! If being inappropriately guided by your religious principles wasn't enough, he has surrounded himself by an array of men who each have their own frightening and diverse agenda anxiously awaiting implementation.

So while we didn't come to Argentina to escape You know who, we are happily oblivious to the daily dealings and misdeeds of the current administration. It takes much more effort to get myself worked up about the state of our union than while I had 24/7 access to our fine news media. While the USA may be the center of the universe, the papers and TV here are void of the pathologically compulsive analysis of the news and the equally obsessive analysis of the press coverage itself. The BA paper reports world news with facts and photos. I know that x number people in Afghanistan were assassinated and the French are being French about the EU constitution. I don't know what everyone and their mother thinks about it. If I want to make myself nuts there is always the the internet and blogs. (shout out to The huffingtonpost.com, my new favorite news/op/ed website)

Here in Argentina local news and news relating to their own whacked out president is spun in a multitude of ways. I find politics here amusing..it is not my government or I would be mortified by the political bad manners here. Politicians are really bad sports. They(woman are well represented in local and national government surprisingly) like to yell at each other, calling each other Nazis, stupid and ugly. Usually they apologize the next day, but you know they meant it.

I suppose using the words political exile to describe myself is a little bit of an overstatement. I suppose I am in danger of minimizing the struggle of real political refugees and people that leave their homes reluctantly because the quality of their life is changing for the worst. So if I have offended anyone, sorry. It is meant as a dramatic literary device. Its ironic..exiled to Argentina?!?of all places and I am a soccer mom from suburban USA. Not the usual enemy of the state.

I hate the current administration (not individual people, I tell my children, you can hate ideas not people). I am saddened by where they have taken us and and frighten by where we appear to be going.

I have people in my life, who I love, that dont feel the same way I do. Which is OK. Most friends in the states may be be on board with You know who, they may be be a little concerned or they are so cynical about politics and world events they have checked out all together. The point being, hardly ever in the ten years I lived in Connecticut, did I have a satisfying political discussion with anyone. And I don't mean an argument that I win. I mean talking, conversing, sharing views that challenge the official line from the White House or the pablem that is dished out by the mainstream media. After 9/11 it was all about flags and preserving the "American" way of life. More that once I made the mistake of throwing out the idea of taking a moment before blowing up Afghanistan and Iraq and think about not why Osama Bin Laden is a lunatic, but try to understand why much of the Islamic world mistrusts or hates us. I think there was a real lost opportunity in not trying to understand how come our foreign policy and their economic sub-strata position in the world was pissing them off. (hint:Blindingly Pro-Israel+ hypocracy and economic opportunism in Saudi Arabia + poverty= Chaos).

I guess when we left I was happy to leave the news, the apparent lack of concern about where You know who was taking us, and the Presidential election. I could never have imagined that You know who would be re-elected. I am certainly in no hurry to get back. But I really do love the idea of the USA........

To the one reader of my blog

This is for a reader who wanted to be in contact. ewogirl@aol.com

If you are a direct marketing company..from best I can tell every commercial enitity that does business on the internet has my email address, so don't bother. If you are lonely, sorry but I have my hands full with my four kids and wouldn't be a very attentive virtual mate. And everyone else...please I don't need anymore SPAM.

The Argentine Mullet

I am a forty- something year old woman of average build. While in the recent past I have been much smaller and bigger (four kids), now I feel like I am at a good weight for me and while keeping toned is a constant battle, I am pretty happy with my body.

Or was happy, until I moved to Argentina. It didn't take more than a few days for it to become apparent to me that I was living in a country of women who are genetically predisposed to long thin legs, tight and high butts and concave stomachs. Apparently eating disorders run rampant here, but that cant explain away the fact that the standard deviation of body types is pretty narrow, literally. Woman generally look great in clothes, lots of low slung pants, little t-shirts and almost always a FM heel. This is a Latin country and the pressure on a woman to appear young and sexy is palpable. Between this genetic gift, an active lifestyle, high protein diet and plastic surgery that your medical insurance covers, women manage to hold it together pretty well. It can be frightening though, when at the gym I see women from the back, tanned, skin tight workout clothes and the long blond ponytail but when you get a frontal shot it is a 60-70ish women that has spent A LOT of time tanning. Not a good look, a haircut and a hat would do wonders.

Speaking of long blond ponytails.....Almost all woman here have long hair. I think that is a very Latin thing. Lots of girls have really beautiful thick dark hair. There are also quiet a few that have very thick and fried orange hair and hair extensions are big here. In theory hair extensions would be a great thing. I might even consider them for fun if I wasn't constantly finding chunks of hair randomly on the ground but most often on the floor of the gym and sometimes stuck to gym equipment, thanks to sweat. It's truly FOUL!!!!!

While not having the gag factor of hair extensions an equally disturbing hair trend here is the mullet. A mullet is normally reserved for middle-north American (Canada is equally adept at the mullet), blue collar dudes. However the Argentine girls have embraced the look and are calling it their own. For those who have no idea what a mullet is I just don't think I have the vocabulary or language skills to properly describe it here. Therefore, I am going to suggest a visit to http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/9195/mullets.html.

My point is that its really unfortunate that these beautiful girls who derive such societal power from their looks would set themselves back at least the 5 or 6 months it will take to grow out all evidence of this heinous hairdo.

My first post....three months later

Here is my inaugural post from February 21. Apparently it got lost in a blackhole or vortex, or some other space metaphor for"I don't know what the hell happened". Well now it happily joins its younger sisters.


My first post...whopee!

Hi there:Its really hot right now in Argentina. Its summer here, being on the otherside of the equator and all. You would be really surprised how many people, college educated people, don't get the concept of seasons, the tilt of the earths axis etc....You probably didn't tune in to talk about the weather or basic geography. The seasonal inversion thing is relevant though, in that its is usually the first of many things friends and family from the U.S. have a hard time understanding about our life here.

I want to put down in writing how my family ended up living in Argentina and what we found. Its been a strange adventure. A year ago we left the security of the known and increasingly banal suburban life for the unknown and increasingly seductive life in a struggling south American country. We are not carpetbaggers here, living the good life cheap for the sake of an economic opportunity. We are here for our four young children, for our marriage and to leave for awhile a country that is not feeling like home.More later, time to pick up the kids and have the car washed. Living large.........

posted by elizabeth @ 2:40 PM 1 comments
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Someone, please tell me why I had four children?

Please don't tell me that I am ungrateful because you and your spouse have been trying for years and after cycle after cycle of fertility treatments you began the adoption process and you were already to adopt a beautiful child from Vietnam and while you were inflight Asia to pick her up, her mom showed up to collect her daughter with her new rich boyfriend already to start over their family life together. Don't tell me that because that's my girlfriend's story......

I ask this rhetorical question because right now I am having a stressful week due to problems that one of my kids is having. I knew being a parent would be hard hard work. I would be physically spent (I have a 9,7, 5, and 2 year old), that I would have little time for myself (although I wasn't prepared for my lack of good and consistent personal hygiene) and that I would be rewarded with precious (abet brief) moments of pure, unconditional love. The part of parenting that I wasn't prepared for is the non-stop worrying. I worry about the alarm not going off in the morning, my child being lice-free (although its not the shameful plague here, its a pain in the ass), that my kids eat a good lunch, that they don't fall of headfirst off the monkey bars, and that they get their school work done so that they can eek out a few hours of fun and relaxation before the whole drill starts again. That kind of worrying I can control. I can ignore the small stuff when I need to. But no matter how in check my incidental neurosis may be, I cant help but worry that my children aren't happy. I worry that my children don't have good friends, that their teachers don't appreciate their specialness, that an older, wiser kid is going to take all the fantasy and mystery from their childhood... But most of all I worry that someone is going to be really cruel to them and make them feel scared or even worse, make them feel like shit.

I know not why this worries me so much. I was not the victim of any profound cruelty or really hurtful behavior as a child. I was fortunate to have two functional and loving parents who made me feel safe and with the usual emotional and social challenges that I faced growing up, I survived just fine. I think that with the exception of 8th grade (yearbook picture: boy haircut+broken arm sling+ peeking case of chicken pox) I have always possessed a sufficient amount of self-esteem, confidence and worth.

When I see my children struggle, it breaks my heart. I inevitably go back to the time that I first looked hard at each of my newborn babies and cried. Cried because I was moved beyond expression by my beautiful babies, but I also think I was in awe of the enormous responsibility to protect and grow these little souls. They couldn't live without me and I was so in love.

Now I look at them and I think about the time when will they start lying to me, steal money to buy cigarettes and really give me something to worry about.

I am a lame blogger

Blog entries are suppose to be spontaneous but thoughtful with some frequency to allow a reader a sense of the writer. Well I am going to try this again. Over two months between blog entries is a quarterly periodical and pathetic and can certainly be improved upon. I do have several dissertations on various aspects of Argentine life, which I can share with you after I have edited them ad nausium. This is not the point of this venue. I am ready to serve up some daily doses of my life!

Dogs barking..... There is a lot of it here. Everyone has a dog here, everyone. Dogs are social by nature and apparently they do their best partying in the middle of the night. They are all behind fences and gates so they resort to barking loudly and other howling like techniques for hours at a time. It doesn't seem to bother anyone except my husband. I would normally sleep through the dog barking but my husband, who curiously was able to sleep through 4 kids worth of late night crying and screaming, is going mad from the dog barking. In the summer we had a air conditioning unit that made a fair amount of noise and between that and the industrial strength iron shutters, we where able to screen out the noise. Now, however it is May and the esposo (husband) had two electric fans going right by the side of the bed. So after a night or two of sleeping in a wind tunnel and waking up with a sore throat and parched lips, I have hidden the fans and am forcing my husband to deal with his irrational sensitivity to noise...

The last word here is on cats...If you are considering a move to Argentina, don't bring your cat. Cats are less than a pet here. Dogs and horses are the only acceptable pets. There are many vets that don't even take care of cats. My girlfriend took in a feral kitten and she went to 4 or 5 vets here (they are on every corner) before she could find one that would give shots and neuter it. This same cat went missing after it started exploring beyond its jardin. Chances it was someone's meal. Unfortunately, there are many people in this city struggling for food and this simply a meal. If you go into the villas (slums), there are no cats, normally found in healthy numbers in other world slums.

On that happy note...have a great day. Its a spectacular Indian Summer Day here!