Days 227-241: January 14-28, 2010 (state of the unemployed address)

Position: Unemployed

Days: 15

I have been cast out of the Garden. Thursday, January 14, was supposed to be my first night back at work after my trip to South America, but I received a surprise, late morning call from the owner informing me my services were no longer needed in Rancho Santa Fe. I've appealed the decision, and I await in exile. 

In the meantime, I've begun looking for work elsewhere. I'm applying to long-shot teaching positions for the long-term and restaurants and unskilled labor positions for the short-term. My house painter friend, who is usually a guarantee for some work, doesn't even have a position. As I ask around at restaurants, using all my local connections, I'm hearing the same story: sorry, we're just not hiring. I'm being faced with the reality of this economy; my Rancho Santa Fe bubble has been popped.

I've also begun a third semester Spanish class at the local community college, where I hope to teach English. I ran into a student named Barry (not his real name) who works with his mother's Rancho Santa Fe real estate company. I asked him how things were in the "biz." He said things are bad, but he believes we've seen the bottom. He added, "Foreclosures are unheard of in Rancho Santa Fe, but we currently have sixty-six distressed properties." I asked him if the prices dropped dramatically, like in other parts of the state. "Oh yeah," he said, "I've seen properties that were bought for nine million dollars that are now worth four million." Those numbers astound me. While I've known family and friends whose homes lost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, I can't comprehend how it feels to lose five million dollars. The stakes are much higher when your rich. 

If you'll bear with me, I'll continue posting blogs, updating you on my search for work in this economy, and let you know if I'm admitted back into the Garden to feed the rich. Stay tuned . . .

Days 212-220: December 30, 2009-January 7, 2010 (even in death the rich will have it better than you, sort of [photos included])

Position: Tourist

Destinations: Montevideo and Colonia, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina

Total Spent on Buses/Boat: $253

Total Hours Spent on Buses/Boat: 33 

After an overnight, twenty-hour bus ride from Florianópolis, Brazil, to Montevideo, Uruguay, my girlfriend and I spend New Year's Eve with her second cousins. They break out Johnnie Walker whiskey (whiskey is really expensive in South America––an $18 bottle Jack Daniels ranges from $58 in Brazil to $26 in Argentina), liters of beer, bottles of wine, various meats piled on a cutting board (and eaten with shared forks), mixed nuts, and a stack of these wonderful, thin, crustless sandwiches, called sandwiches de miga. 

Though Uruguay is supposed to be a poor country, they know how to celebrate. The young residents of Montevideo hit the streets midday New Year's Eve for a street party. People play drums and shout and sing. Almost everyone carries a green plastic bottle of inexpensive cider, which they drink and splash on each other, and then throw the empty bottles at buildings or into the streets (you can see pictures on this blog––be sure to scroll down through all the pictures). Also, when you're walking down the sidewalks, residents dump buckets of water from buildings onto unsuspecting revelers and tourists alike, washing or baptizing you for the New Year, I guess. And the streets are littered with people's daily calendars, which they've thrown into the street like parade confetti. In late afternoon, everyone goes home and the streets look abandoned.

                                                   

Then, at midnight, the city explodes with fireworks ( fuegos artificiales). It's not like the U.S., where people sit around watching an isolated, choreographed fireworks show or light off a few firecrackers and Whistling Petes, though that's done as well. It's more participatory, and everyone lights their own skyward bound fireworks around the city, which has an incredible war zone effect. The explosions last a straight fifteen to twenty minutes, during which time some residents emerge from their homes and burn their wall calendars in the streets. Such a cool, symbolic gesture.

A couple days later, my girlfriend goes to visit her grandmother and uncle in Trinidad, and I head for Colonia del Sacramento, then Buenos Aires. Before I leave Uruguay, I email Daniel Chacón (books by this author), a frequent Buenos Aires visitor, to ask him about cool places I can check out. He emails back, telling me I can just come visit him and his wife, Sasha Pimental Chacón (book by this author), because they're in Buenos Aires right now. I'm telling you all this because when I meet up with them they take me to Cementerio de La Chacarita where the contrasts between the rich and poor couldn't be sharper.

Just past the neoclassical entrance to the cemetery the visitor is greeted by a neighborhood of wealthy family tombs, complete with sculptures and yellowish, brick sidewalks. It's unquestionably beautiful, but, as Sasha points out, a little excessive for the dead, who don't need these elaborate coffin houses.

                               

After being reprimanded for taking photos by a security guard, Daniel says he's not interested in this section of the cemetery; he wants to show me and Sasha "the Bronx" of the cemetery. So we walk. Through a park-like section with white crosses, tall trees, and mosquitoes that attack us (the suburbs); then through what looks like a strange park with cement ventilators sticking out of the lawn and staircases leading into a post-apocalyptic underground section. Down here, we wander through hallways of semi-rusting, filing cabinet-like walls that house coffins (I guess this would be the lower-middle-class apartments).  

                                                   

When we emerge, I photograph the coffin elevator, which looks to be out of service for now.

                                     

We keep walking toward the back of the cemetery, where we take time to inspect the partitioned "Berlin Wall" that houses family ashes.

                             

These less expensive and smaller apartments for ashes are in various states of disrepair, some you can't even read anymore, and there's a whole section of the wall supported by wooden braces. Pigeons rest in the apartment doorways, and some marble wall tablets are broken, revealing wooden boxes of ashes and spiderwebs inside.

                      

We follow the wall to the right around the edge of the cemetery, and finally arrive in "the Bronx": a completely unkempt area of hilly dirt, littered with weeds and broken crosses. This is where the poor have come to rest, in death as in life.   

                    

The only consolation for the poor is that they've been returned to the earth, while the wealthy hover on shelves above or below the ground, never quite returning to their source. What they don't realize is that everything fades, even red velvet chairs and ornate coffins. Their money might have bought a little more time above ground, but, as you can see, everything eventually turns to dust. 

                                               

Days 198-211: December 16, 2009-December 29, 2009 (lobster on your salad?; compare and contrast, Brazilian style)

Position: Traveler

Destination: South America

Drinks on Plane: 4

Round-Trip Airfare: $100

Total Time Spent on Planes (RT): 26 hours

 

I've taken a month off to travel to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina to see the countries and meet my girlfriend's family. As you may remember from my day 28 post, my brother is a pilot for Continental Express, and I get his travel benefits. While this is great, I spend half the day in San Diego trying to catch standby flights. I arrive in Houston and anxiously await at another Continental gate to find out if I've scored a seat for my ten hour flight to São Paulo, Brazil, where my girlfriend's parents and brother live. 

I'm ecstatic when the gate agent hands me a ticket with seat 3K on it. First Class. I'm even more excited when I settle in, order a Jim Beam and ginger, and then realize no one is even going to sit next to me. As the coach passengers file past, I get that weird privileged feeling again, thinking the passengers must be speculating about my occupation and ability to fly first class. In my mind, I usually pretend to be a famous author, but I know when I walk through first class to the coach seats, I don't think anything about the first-class passengers except that they're wasting money. 

I get the usual perks of first-class (the hot towel, the free Heinekens served with a real glass, the real silverware, plates and cloth napkin with dinner) but this time we're presented with a restaurant-like, four page dinner menu that spells out the five-course meal, and includes four main course choices (I choose the Southwest stuffed chicken breast). During the salad course, I'm asked if I'd like lobster on my salad. Of course I would. After the main course, they present me with a cheese and fruit plate, then, get this, roll out a metal dessert cart with all kinds of ice cream options. Even though I'm already stuffed, when they announce all the available toppings for the ice cream––sauces, nuts, whip cream––I say, "Yes, please." The flight attendant also asks if I'd like a cognac with dessert. Why not? Pass the Courvoisier. The downside to all this overindulgence is that my sinuses are three-quarters stuffed, so I'm only experiencing food textures (the lobster wasn't such a good idea), an occasional strong taste, and I'm now totally bloated. Which means I can't sleep almost the whole flight, am too tired to read, and end up watching The Time Traveler's Wife and flight data between cat naps.

I also experience a fair amount of flight anxiety, not about the flight itself or the idea of crashing, but from knowing when I land I'll be in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home, where I've been told it's dangerous––my only reference point is City of God––and I don't speak the language. I experience this feeling even when I return to countries I've been to before, like Mexico and Italy. And when I land, I'm usually fine. (Strangely enough, the only time the anxiety never went away was when I landed in a place that I do speak the language: Australia. But that had more to do with my recent divorce at the time than the country itself). 

When the plane turns for its approach into São Paulo, and I see the size and extent of the city, my anxiety kicks up a notch. But when I land, like in Mexico or Italy, I instantly feel relaxed and fine, and my girlfriend and her mother are there to greet me. After spending almost two weeks in this massive, traffic-choked city, I realize something. People here are living out the human tragedy/comedy the same way they do all over the world. People fall in love; they make wedding videos; they divorce; they eat meals (especially meat, lots of meat); some people are rich, many are poor; people go to hospitals for hurt fingers; that woman is sleeping with that other woman's husband; people die from natural causes and car crashes and murders; some people rob other people; a man spreads his seed, and when he dies he leaves children all over the continent . . .

In a massive city like São Paulo (population, 11-19 million), though, life is altered by fear of violence, and the contrasts are magnified. Those with money hide behind taller fences, gates and armed security guards; those without live in shanty towns (favelas), their houses constructed of pallets, scrap wood and tarps. Those with money don't usually flaunt their wealth like in the States, instead choosing to drive modest, compact cars. Those without money take whatever they can from those that have money, usually by force. This makes the rich prisoners of their own wealth. But like anywhere else, the everyday people are kind and generous and gracious, and they live out their lives walking the streets to work, relaxing in the parks, or eating (lots of meat) at one of the many restaurants. 

While I spend a short amount of time in a wealthy man's house, a business friend of my father's, I never spend time in a favela; I only see one or two from the highway. But I learn something very interesting from that business friend; he says many earnings reports in Brazil are fictions, and it's unwise to invest money here. Own a business, fine, but don't invest, because he's been at board meetings where the financial officer went around the room asking the executives their expenditures for the year, and that's what the financial officer reported as their earnings. Cover what you spent. The rest isn't the government's business. They do nothing for us. 

America has it's own business fictions, such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and the recent bank failures, and I sometimes feel investors are unwise gamblers at the mercy of wrongly motivated executives, many of whom are more interested in their own wealth than the company or country's economic health. And even those these types of fictions and corruptions are just magnified in Brazil, they're coming up as a country (not to mention they have the Soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016).  

I also spent time in a young couple's nice, high rise condo, where I ate a wonderful pasta meal and sipped red wine a few blocks away from a favela. And that young couple, their son asleep in his crib, had an infectious optimism and sense of hope for the future. My girlfriend says this is the spirit of the Brazilian people, that no matter how bad things seem or are, they have hope. And they keep on living . . .