metric relations

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this website dictates that there are more continents on the planet than i was taught actually existed. i also wish i had gotten to keeping track of this whole thing sooner.

sure, i feel like i've been here forever. and in three weeks alot of impressions i've had of this city have come and gone. alot within this city comes and goes, and i ( like always ) expect that i came and will eventually go but still relish in the coming and goingness of everything about here. i left home with a feeling that the lust i have for senseless traffic with strangers was predicated on some actual consistency that was already baked into my life but i'd forgotten about. and that going somewhere newer than all the new places i've sought out might force me to tie something down once and for good. maybe i've already done that, or maybe i'm in the wrong place, or maybe i'm just not heavy enough to really stand anywhere, but i could backlog more stories about senseless traffic in this city than i have time to think about. sometimes i'm struck with the feeling that my personality is just a compilation of anecdotes about dealing with strangers. which i've collected, taken time to edit, even, and refer to to, usually toward the ends of meeting more strangers.

on the other hand, this city is offering me a much different kind of traffic, and i, the "chanki" that i am here, have the chance to be a different kind of pedestrian than ever before. i'm at home in the sense that nobody has any more or less time for eachother here than they do in new york. but i've only recently gotten used to how porteños relate to space. i used to walk my way around, before i got comfortable with the notion that a crowded subway ride here frequently consists of a totally hot, totally anonymous babe moving past you and into the car with a "permiso, cariño" and leaning on you instead of the door for the rest of the ride. you greet a stranger with a kiss, and share every last bit of your mate or cigarette or beer as if it were the last on earth for all of you. i see it as nothing but an issue of unit conversion. some fear of imposition keeps me at a relative distance from people's spaces and property at home. here, that distance is translated into something incalcuably great, something a city is correcting for me.

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Comments

[anonymous]

i had a dream about you once that you were savoring a cigarette way past the point normal smokers savor cigarettes. you really love them on the inside i think, and i'll be the first to suggest that it wouldn't be a bad habit. i'm not a stranger am i? it's ok if i am. as long as i'm your bff stranger. update often. i really like this! and relay call me again with something other than proust. GA