10 + 6

Reader-friend ! ! ! ! ! !

Hi.

¿Cómo andas?

What’s up in your world?

Here’s what’s up in world of Natalie: Classes at la UBA arrancaron de nuevo (began anew); I'm applying for a Fulbright research grant (I’m nervous! Insecure! Filled with doubt! Charging ahead nonetheless...); coaxing, with Christina, iNspired Generation, away from organizational infancy – towards awkward, uncomfortable and hopeful adolescence (please pay no mind to the content of the sitio web, as much of it is defunct… we're in the process of creating a new virtual forum where all of your wildest dreams and goals will self-actualize!); feasting on BAire’s cultural fare (my appetite never ceases – I’m ravenous!); laying foundations for new friendships; adding all sorts of opulence to existing relationships; battling bouts of hardcore Miami/familia nostalgia; attempting to stave off BAire’s usual trickery, as she woos me with her sky and art and people.

I am so full – I feel I might explode. Sometimes I enter a state of abundance-paralysis – I burst with life’s wealth and I don’t know what to do with myself!

That’s my world, reader-friend – bursting to the point of mental paralysis.

You have a world too, revered reader-friend... And I am curious, what is it like in your world??

My fabulous friend from Belo Horizonte, Brasil – Luiza – is always challenging me on various topics: i.e., of late, my strangely manic and habitual need to befriend Everyone. In. The. World. Thank you, Luiza, for directing a flashlight on this peculiar behavior! I now recognize that I do it, almost unknowingly, because I am bursting with curiosity about what it’s like to be in other people’s worlds. Curiosity to the point of intrusion, quizás...

Luiza also likes to challenge me to rethink my USAmerican national identity. Gracias a Luiza, nowadays when people ask where I am from, I no longer say Miami (merits Latin American street cred, obvio); I now declare – usually with apologetic pride – los Estados Unidos (reppin' mi país). USAmerica is undeniably a part of my world, much more so than I previously realized, when I constructed my identity from within my national borders. It’s a funny little paradox – I never felt quite so USAmerican until I decided to venture beyond the USAmerican frontera. Within my país, I always identified with my culture – Cuban (exilio Cuban, that is, the lingering remnants of 1950s Cuba…).

I find that my identity – who I aspire to be in my world, and how I am perceived and related to by others from within their worlds – changes with my circumstances. Here in Argentina, I am a foreigner (with USAmerican nationality), but familiar and similar given the Latin culture that created me (the Latin warmth that pulses through my body), a law student (not quite as respectable in Sudamerica as in the USA, because it’s an undergraduate ‘carrera’ here), a Rotary scholar (yeehaw Rotary!) on the cusp of graduation (thrilling! Terrifying!), standing on my tip-toes to peek beyond the horizon – towards the future that I will ostensibly create.

Identity forms only a slice of our undeniably distinct individual worlds – circumstances and beliefs and histories and cultures coalesce, too, to yield billions of unique worlds, all around this planet. And then we interact and mingle and connect and organize and aggregate. In so doing we are creating new worlds, in addition to the subjective world called Life that we as individuals fervently weave together. These additional worlds of congregated worlds exist beyond us – relationships, friendships, industries, organizations, corporations, institutions, cities, and nations... These worlds are abundant and ubiquitous.

The worlds beyond ourselves, composed of coalescing individual worlds, have identities that are just as – if not more – dynamic than the identities that we create for ourselves as individuals. And, given how individually complex we are it’s no wonder I am mentally numbed when confronted by the complexity of the aggregated worlds I encounter on the day-to-day.

You, reader-friend, may notice that I tend to fall in love with cities much as most of us tend to fall in love with people. (This is a literary technique called – as most of you recall from 8^th grade Language Arts – personification. Jaja.) I personify Buenos Aires because I genuinely believe cities are a lot like people. Cities – like people – have unique characteristics and mannerisms, distinct smells and flavors, are associated with particular sensations, emit and draw energy; cities, like people, have souls; cities, like people, are malleable and dynamic. And, cities, composed of people, relationships, organizations, corporations, industries – of many individuals’ worlds and coalescing worlds – are, thus, themselves, necessarily complex worlds.

(I guess I'm a sucker for complexity...)

With time, I have come to recognize just how dynamic the identity/world of a city can be and is. All protracted relationships (with peoples and cities alike) are like this: seasons change, light shifts, circumstances come and go. With persistent relationships we come to see familiar places and people through new perspectives.

E.g., After 7 months of porteña living, I more or less know Buenos Aires and I recognize just how dynamic she is. Her repeated behaviors have shed their novelty – her swoon-inducing azure techo, her never-ending banquet of art and cultural fare(/fairs), her baffling and disheartening social issues. These days I relate to her differently – she has a distinct feeling now, as winter recedes and the lingering effects of the season remain glaring: trees are bare, the sky is capricious, we're all bundled up, a few layers removed from the air that hasn't been warm in several moons.

As I walk the streets these days, I notice that Buenos Aires no longer surges into me and stirs me as she once did. She's no longer able to overtake me because now, I possess her – she is a part of me. Buenos Aires is now a piece of my identity, and thus, necessarily, (probably more like, obvio) forms a great part of my world.

Are you still there, reader-friend? (Big ups to Mom, Dad and Melissa – I know you guys are still with me!!) Thanks for sticking with me on this circuitous trip through my world. I did my best to weave this piece together – to make it cohesive... And if it looks to you more like a patchwork quilt than the tightly strung duvet I intended it to be, consider this me, offering you – should your curiosity permit – the opportunity to intrude on my complex and mind-numbingly beautiful world.

To ease your eyes away from the black and white of my words and back into the color of your world, check out some beautiful worlds I've intruded upon recently: