Rasmenia

I didn’t know much about Salta. I was told there would be wine & mountains — not wee fucking hills, but proper mountains. That’s all I need to know. I don’t require much more than wine & mountains to be happy. I’m kind of low-maintenance like that.

After  a short flight from Buenos Aires & a 20-minute cab ride, we arrived at our hotel, El Castillo de San Lorenzo.

No, it is not a haunted house. It really is a hotel.

Our first couple of days & nights at the hotel, we were exhausted, so we didn’t do much. We strolled around the area of San Lorenzo, the tiny little town where our hotel was located. We passed a couple of horses, several dogs & a smiley hobo who decided to chat with a tree after he realized we weren’t going to be very good conversation. Neither one of us could understand the poor guy. Not because we couldn’t understand any Spanish, but because we do not speak tree.

We stayed in & had dinner in the restaurant of our hotel, stuffing ourselves with carne & queso empanadas, humitas, tamales & some of the local beer.

And water, because… well, you know.

In the mornings, I stayed in bed, drooling & snoring while Olivier went for his run. We’d already noticed all the dogs. Everywhere you look, there’s a dog or two walking around, hanging out, or just having a nap. When Olivier emerged from the hotel early in the morning, he found his pack waiting for him.

Yes, they did all go for a run together. I imagine they all barked at things together, too.

One afternoon, we took the bus to downtown Salta to have a look around, eat more empanadas & sit on benches in the park while watching birds flutter & people chatter.

After a couple of days spent bumming around Salta & San Lorenzo, it was time to get to a higher elevation. We had a day trip planned with a guide who would take us through the mountains, to the salt flats & through various towns.

Early on a Tuesday morning & our guide came to fetch us at the hotel. He shook our hands, told us his name was Gonzalo. He already had a German-speaking couple from Switzerland in the truck who were friendly enough.

The five of us chatted as we went entered the foothills. None of us were fully awake, the sky still an early-morning gray, the air still damp & cold each time we hopped out of the truck to take a few pictures & let our guide have a smoke.

Our first real stop was at Santa Rosa de Tastil, which is more of an outpost than a town. Other than some of the best coffee ever, there is also a little museum, which is wonderfully weird. This place has everything: a mummy, tiny dead animal carcasses preserved in jars of formaldehyde, a detailed guided tour given by a fabulously kooky museum lady & some very cool stones that play music if you whack them with a little mallet like a xylophone.

Kooky museum lady even rocked out some Beethoven on these bad boys. I shit you not.

As we went up in elevation, we stuffed our cheeks with coca leaves & gawked at llamas & cacti. After a bit of stuffing & gawking, we made another stop at San Antonio de los Cobres. This is a little copper mining town up in the mountains that kind of has a strange vibe to it. But it feels like a real place as opposed to a shining stop to charm the tourists.

Olivier & I, along with our Swiss travelers sat down in a tiny restaurant for lunch where I sucked down yet another pile of empanadas, which turned out to be one pile too many, leaving me unable to even glance at another empanada for the rest of the trip. While we ate, some of the locals & a couple of the other guides pulled out guitars & started singing.

After our little surprise concert, the four of us wandered around the town until our trusty Gonzalo fetched us & drove us out of the Salta province & into the Jujuy province to Salinas Grandes or the big-ass, blinding white salt flats.

We drove on a little more, until we reached the highest point, then we began our descent in elevation. After driving & stopping a few more times, we arrived in Purmamarca. By this time, we were nearing the end of our big day out. It was time for us to part ways with our single-serving Swiss friends. Gonzalo left Olivier & I on our own in the town while he took them to their hotel.

Purmamarca isn’t a big town. It’s quite small, but is remarkable to look upon. The most prominent feature is Cerro de los Siete Colores, the Hill of Seven Colors. It’s no bullshit. This thing is colorful. Everywhere you look, there is a rainbow of color: the stones in the sidewalk, on the buildings & on the graves in the cemetery with their cactus-wood crosses.

By the time we left Purmamarca, my pockets were stuffed with blue, purple & green stones.

It was just the three of us on the road back to Salta. No more stops for photos & strange museums. Just highway & conversation while our guide’s music from the 80′s played in the background.

I can’t even tell you how many times I heard this during our time in Salta.

As we rolled along the highway, chatting about Argentina, France & the U.S., we were abruptly yanked out of our conversation & soothing melodies of Air Supply by the horrible sound of a popping tire. We all jumped out of the truck, but Gonzalo, he didn’t need our help. He had the spare tire on in just a few minutes.

Around 8pm, we pulled up in front of our hotel. We hopped out of the truck to say our goodbyes & silly as it may sound, Olivier & I felt a little sad. Here we’d spent the entire day with our new friend, talking about serious things, joking & sharing stories, but this was a single-serving friend & now it was time to say goodbye.

He gave each of us a big hug & we all wished one another well. As we started across the road to the hotel, we heard his voice once more.

“Hey.”

We turned around.

“I’ll see you in another life, guys.”

I wonder what he meant by that…

I am not going to wish you a Merry Christmas. I am not going to wish you Happy Holidays, a Happy New Year, or even Happy Ass Slap from an Expensive Hooker. No matter what we say anymore, someone’s out there to complain. So, I won’t offer you Xmas cheer, a Happy Hanukkah,  Joyeux Noël, Feliz Navidad or a Happy Solstice.

I wish you more than this. So much more.

When someone says to you: Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Have a nice Tuesday or a bitchin’ Saturnalia, I wish you the clear-sightedness to see when another human is saying something just to be kind, affable & cheerful. I wish you enough common decency to choke down your pettiness, smile & respond in your own kind, affable & cheerful way. I hope you’ll be reasonable enough to comprehend how one person phrases something shouldn’t diminish your joy; that most battles never need to be fought & that being offended is a meaningless thing.

I hope that in the coming year, you’ll have at least one pair of really comfortable shoes & that you’ll wear them on many long walks outdoors, with the sun and wind on your cheeks while holding hands with someone you really like holding hands with.

I hope that this year will be the year you get a grip on the fact that you will never get any free shit from anyone simply by liking & sharing photos of jewelry or lottery tickets on Facebook.

I’m wishing very hard that this year will be the one where you start saying “twenty-thirteen” instead of “two-thousand-thirteen.”

In the new year to come, I hope you will go to a doctor, or visit a drugstore when you are sick instead of asking me to pray for you. If you are a believer, then believe, but please… believe that God(s) work through people. This year, when a catastrophic event occurs (& it will), I hope you will donate your time, food or money rather than making public announcements informing the rest of us that you are sitting on the couch praying for the grieving, wounded & hungry.

I hope that when you do feel the need to pray, you will pray to your god(s) rather than Facebook. (Matthew 6:6, anyone?) I will do my part by not making you listen to me talking on the phone. Yes. It is the same thing.

I wish that this year, you’ll tell someone a story. A happy story. A painful story. Any story at all. The story you’ve never told, but always wanted to. That story you’ve kept stuffed down deep inside you like a dirty, embarrassing secret. Write it down. Tell it in a song or a painting. Whisper it to the person next to you. I wish you the courage to give someone that piece of you.

May you develop an awareness of how deranged you sound when referring to yourself not only in the third person, but as “mommy” to other adults & may you keep this bizarre habit among the sewing circle of mommy bloggers who find this to be normal & healthy. The rest of us are not toddlers. You are not our “mommy.”

This year, I hope none of you will have to listen to any ignorant old white men publicly going on about rape. But, if you do, I hope a massive army of angry vaginas finds a way to shut that whole thing down.

I wish you the pure, unconditional love that only comes from a special bond with a creature that isn’t human. Spooning with a big dog & rolling around with them on the carpet. Cradling a purring cat while sharing a warm rotisserie chicken. Holding hands with a monkey.

I wish that when you check your Twitter feed, you will be informed & amused; that you will engage in entertaining & interesting exchanges with people all over the world instead of being spammed, trolled, or shouted at to buy something, or have to sift through an endless stream of retweeted fragments of someone else’s book reviews.

I truly hope that in the coming year, you learn that Internet memes & macros will give no one the impression you are witty, informative, funny or entertaining. These things are to comedy & communication what lips, hooves & assholes smooshed together & stuffed in packages marked “bologna” are to kobe beef.

May you find yourself able to look at two people, & truly see them… the emotion in their eyes as they gaze at one another & only see the love that one person can for another instead of two men, two women & the limitations of your own ignorance.

May you finally come to the understanding that other countries & other people are not failed attempts at being you; everyone does not want what you want, or what you have. In fact, most people probably don’t. Try to be happy knowing you’re a successful attempt at being you & everyone else is quite successful at not being you.

In this new year, I wish that you will take a few goddamn seconds to think about #thirdworldproblems before making #firstworldproblems jokes because – & someone needs to tell you this – you are not funny. You might even be an asshole.

I hope you will better yourself. Learn a new language or an instrument that you’ve never touched before. Study a craft unknown to you. Try a strange new food before saying you don’t like it.

I hope whenever someone says to you that you can’t do a thing, you find yourself able to laugh at them, then do that thing better than either one of you had imagined.

I hope you’ll stop worrying about your thighs. You look fine.

May you remember in this year to come & all the years to follow that when you choose a side in a war & root for them to win, that these aren’t sports teams. These are real people who feel pain & laughter just as you do… that when you pray for one side in a war to be victorious, you pray for others to suffer in torment, to bleed, to cry screams of grief & agony. You pray for them to die.

I wish for you to be moved to tears by a piece of music, shaken by someone’s story of survival & punched in the gut by another’s suffering. I wish you tears of empathy.

I wish you anger. Rage. Enough dissatisfaction to pull your ass up out of your chair & throw you into something constructive besides pissing & moaning about the unfairness of the world.

I wish you all this… & so much more.

All right, then… it’s been almost 6 months since we moved into this house & lost the luxury of a home Internet connection. Now we finally have it again & I can actually refer to an Internet connection at home as a luxury, rather than a necessity.

Ok… maybe I really don’t believe that. I NEED the Internet. I absolutely need an endless supply of baby animal videos & 10 different columns of nonstop gibberish on Twitter. I require endless stream of commentary on current events to keep me up-to-date & a steady torrent of jingoist YouTube videos on my Facebook news feed to remind me to be patriotic. I MUST have IMDB handy every time I’m watching a movie & can’t remember where I’ve seen that actor’s face before. I fucking NEED Wikipedia to be there every time I have the slightest question about every trivial event or mysterious fruit I happen upon in the produce section.

I can't get on with my life until I've used Wiki to unlock the mysteries of the fingered citron.

These things are IMPORTANT.

Well, until you go for several months without them.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do have a need for the Internet… I’ve been in France for almost 6 years & while it feels like home, I still have another home on another continent. I miss friends & relatives who I communicate with regularly online. I have to be online to blog, to work with my writing workshop via email & to work with online literary magazines so I can add to my ever-growing pile of rejections.

I do have a legitimate need, but after 6 months of disconnection, I have a better view of how much of the Internet is a fucking waste of time. I can look back at how unhealthy information overload really is. Yeah, the ‘net is a tool, but it’s also a luxury & a bunch of bullshit.

So… what did I do with all of that free time?

Books. I read books. Well, I read books before… but I started knocking down my “to-read” pile a little faster than normal while also re-reading a few non-fiction books just to get my nerd on.

I got a sewing machine. No, I didn’t know how to sew or anything & at first, I realized that I couldn’t YouTube any instructional videos, so I had to employ a primitive method of reading the instruction manual from beginning to end, then just figuring the rest out for myself. Get this: it worked. No, no… seriously. It did. I put things in it, sewed them together & made new things. I shit you not.

The Wire. I finally got around to watching all 5 seasons. To be honest, by the time I finished the first season, the strange twitch I had developed as a result of Internet withdrawal subsided. You know why? Omar Fucking Little, that’s why.

Making better use of your time than just about anything else since 2002.

I worked in the garden. I picked cherries from our cherry tree in the summer & raked up the leaves from underneath it in the fall. I put my cat on her leash & sat in my backyard eating strawberries from our garden while doing nothing except for watching the birds & listening to the wind in the trees. What I’m saying is… I went outside. For no reason other than to be outside.

Ok… so it felt strange, but I did it.

I cleaned the house a lot more than I normally would. I polished all of the brass. I bought some old objects from nearby brocantes (kind of like a flea market) & cleaned them up. I baked bread & a cake… just for the hell of it. (This is relevant because I’m not one for baking. Cooking, yes. Baking, no.)

Even though we only had 6 channels until about a month ago, I decided to give French TV a try since I never really watch it & it’s a good way to hone a second language. While I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of shitty courtroom TV & talk shows, I was disappointed to see how much French daytime TV is really just lame American TV dubbed in French. Trust me, those trite Lifetime movies & TV shows from the 70′s don’t get any better with French dubbing. Then again… they can’t really get worse, either.

Yep. Still corny.

Oh, yeah… & I wrote some stuff. But, something strange happened there. My internal motor that normally produces flash fiction began to sputter & lag. Each time I sat down with pen & paper to write a small piece of flash, I ended up with 5 or 6 pages. Is this what happens to people who live offline all the time? Are their attention spans longer? Are they actually able to focus on a single task for more than 90 seconds ALL THE TIME?

After all of this – & more that I haven’t even bothered to mention – I realized that a part of me sort of liked not having the Internet.

After a few months, I dusted off my unused cell phone & handed it over to my husband, who in return handed me a smartphone. With our phones, we had a minimum… a very slow, very weak 3G connection. Just enough to keep in touch with people online & to occasionally refer to Wikipedia in an effort to win an argument.

Occasionally, I would think to myself, “Damn… this real-life, going outside & spending time more constructively thing is incredible. Who needs the Internet?”

Well… I do, for one. The problem with the Internet, is once you have that much information & convenience at your fingertips, you can’t go back. Not really. If you had bothered to read Flowers for Algernon instead of posting your planking pics on Facebook, you would have already learned this lesson. (Another upside of being offline: I just learned about the planking fad a few days ago.)

But, now… we’re connected. My ass is once again parked in front of my 15″ monitor. I’ve got a high speed connection, several tabs & applications open & a super fast WiFi connection all through the house. Now, we’ll see if my expanded attention span will stick, or if like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, I regress back to my previous state.

Fuck it. It’s too much to think about. I’m going outside.