Clones and Buenos Aires

Should I get this haircut? That's my doppelganger right there. I'm wearing that same red shade of lipstick right now and it goes with all of the Audrey Hepburns and Marilyn Monroes that hang on the walls of hostels and restaurants in this city. Little kitschy items with their faces in the markets, old magazines with movie stars and fresh babes advertising cars. There is a repository here from the 30's-70's, a collection of odds and ends. Old children's toys, terrifying and dirty in their market stalls, the most fascinating little personalized postcards that parents used to send between countries of their children dressed up in the latest fashionable getup...I found most of this in the Feria de San Telmo.

My heart is heavy light at the moment. Flavored with Brahma Chopp bought at the corner store, unrefrigerated. I'm weighed down only by my own penchant for roller coaster boyfriends. Audrey how did you wear your love? And you Marilyn? Two opposite ends of the feminine spectrum it seems...both adored and salivated after to this day. Phantoms.
Are we stronger in flesh or in after-flesh? Sometimes the answer is less obvious than it seems.

I am not the woman of your dreams. I seem to wish to make that very clear very quickly. Maybe because fantasy is terrifying? I overdo it. Fantasy is what we need to survive. We need Audrey and we certainly need Marilyn. Buenos Aires has a point.

unprecedented chill

The more I remember my melancholy imaginings of what this Chicago winter would be like, the sillier it seems. Ok, so I imagined it would be this poetic misery, me sitting alone in a cozy apartment, huddled over a laptop with a glass of wine with enough memories to pretend to be an old geezer writing her memoirs.

Except the problem is this: to get to the poetic, the sweet nostalgic poetic, you have to get past the misery. And the misery my friends, the frigidity that covers the Chicago streets and penetrates the soul, is awfully hard to get past. You have to cross a frozen Styx to get to a place where you can have enough hope to express yourself.

Misery. Misery. Misery.