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I graduated from college this past June and fled the country, is what I tell people I meet here in Buenos Aires.
The real story is slightly more nuanced, but when it comes down it, the statement is not untrue. The months between Northwestern’s late June graduation and my flight out of the country to Buenos Aires on September 15 were filled with hours upon hours of babysitting, supplemented with hours upon hours on LinkedIn and emailing in an attempt to secure any sort of paid writing prospects while down in Argentina. There was also the time I spent freaking out — in a good way — about my impending move and subsequent adventures, as well as in a bad way, silencing the proverbial nagging voice that arose occasionally to question what, really, did I think I was doing? Why wasn’t I just following The Plan and finding a salaried job in the U.S. with benefits? The Plan had been my plan for years, anyway.
When I think about it now (and perhaps it’s because I have spent so much time telling myself this over and over), I really did have sound reasons to hop down to the Southern Hemisphere and start a life, even a temporary life. If, as I decided at some point between junior and senior years, I really wanted to give this whole freelance/travel journalist thing a solid go it would make sense to live in a different country, and one where the cost of living is affordable at that. Additionally — and this was a big one — I had the blessing of my parents, whom I had somehow convinced this move and what I would make of it was all a good idea.
Today’s most popular scapegoat, the economy, also served as an excuse, as I watched intelligent, ambitious, done-all-the-right-things classmates struggle to find jobs for which I also would have been competing. Strength in numbers didn’t hurt either; I’m currently living in an apartment with two other Northwestern 2010 graduates who both independently came to the decision to move here. And then there’s the little network of other recent college grad expats we have developed, because once you start talking with people about where you are and what you are doing, it seems almost everyone knows of someone also living in this great city.
Perhaps we make ideal case study subjects for psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s “emerging adulthood;” maybe we should have been interviewed for Robin Marantz Henig’s “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” in the New York Times Magazine for eschewing the traditional route and, as some might argue, putting off “real life.” (That article, like Google Voice, debuted at a highly opportune time, a couple weeks before I moved down here.) The thing is, people have been making decisions and trips like this for years. The mid-30-year-old manager at an Apple store in Miami we stopped into the day before our flight out, for example, told me his romanticized tale of being dropped off at the Obelisco in Buenos Aires with chump change and two suitcases, the start of a prosperous stint here, personally and monetarily speaking. None of these paths are objectively better or worse, I’ve come to decide, because it is all an individual decision. They’re just different.
We realize we are lucky to have — and have made — the opportunity to be living in Buenos Aires. That said, in no way are we cavorting around dropping pesos without a care. Even though I sometimes guilt myself for skipping out on a structured job my first year after graduating, I’ve realized in my first two weeks here that I still have a lot of “real life” and growing up to handle. We are all working, attempting to make our way in the world (or at least this city), in addition to adjusting to a new lifestyle, culture and language. It is all a challenge we are living for and relishing.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In the August 16 & 23 issue of The New Yorker, you can read a story of obsession, possession, excess and alienation that might fascinate or repel you. It’s the story of John Lurie, an artist whom you may remember as the hypnotizing actor in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law. Or perhaps you recall him as the leader of the legendary Lounge Lizards (above). It’s also the story of John Perry, once John Lurie’s closest friend and devotee. This is the tale of how that friendship imploded (or exploded), and how Perry systematically dismantled Lurie’s sense of stability. Or not. For all we know, it may be that these no-holds-barred bad boys were playing the writer, Tad Friend, like one of Lurie’s saxophones, executing a piece of performance art whereby they co-inflated their shared history into a rift of King Kong proportions.
In the end, were it not for Daphne Merkin, the response might well be: Who cares?
Merkin’s meticulous dissections of depression have set a standard for courage in the face of the mind’s adversities. They deserve respect. They persist in the memory when reading about the mind games and miseries that these men, Lurie and Perry, have apparently inflicted on each other. (To be fair, Lurie was afflicted with an undiagnosed illness with a host of horrific symptoms that rendered him unable to leave his home for six years between 2002 and 2008. That’s enough to make anyone shaky.)
But back to Merkin. She is a cartographer in the land of those who are most dispossessed. A siren on the shore and Odysseus both — calling out to the sailors to wreck themselves on the shoals of the brittle truth about the fragility of mental health, while simultaneously sailing the demon-dominated seas in search of safe haven.
Daphne Merkin persists. In the words of the beleaguered Mrs. Loman in Death of a Salesman, she reminds us that “attention must be paid.” She is willing to risk the label ‘bourgeois’ in her quest for understanding of how each day can be borne. Frank about her upper-middle-class childhood and the more predictable milestones of her adulthood (even dropping Woody Allen’s name with a clunk), she is equally candid when she writes, “I have sat in shrinks’ offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover.”
In both her August 4 New York Times Magazine cover story about being a serial analysand, and in an article in the same publication on May 10, 2009 (from which the “wish to die” quotation comes), Merkin shows the courage of a burn victim on a tightrope. One wonders how she can concentrate, given the severity and visibility of her wounds. One reads and watches her keep her balance just enough to continue detailing what ails her and her relationships, trying to get to a place that might feel like the state of grace that no one is promised but so many seem, to her, to have experienced–the one where we feel seen for who we are.
Reading the New Yorker article about Lurie and Perry, one is stricken by how each man very clearly wants to control how both of them are perceived. One questions whether authenticity enters that picture. It’s hard to ignore the roles that women play in the lives of these two quasi-quasars. The point is very clearly made that both men have enjoyed the kind of downtown Manhattan celebrity that made ‘irresistible’ the starting gate for their evenings. A succession of girlfriends and co-dependents are quoted and often lauded for the ways in which they translate the language of feelings for these totems of aggression. On the other hand, Merkin writes of a solitary journey of “microdot-ing” her past and present feelings to a succession of therapists over four decades in an attempt to come to a cohesive sense of self.
The word had to be mentioned sooner or later: Self. As in self-absorption. As in self-pity. As in self-ish.
Doubtless, the discussion of all those S-words will continue as long as there is a condition called depression and as long as anyone has time and money enough to contemplate, in the company of a professional, his or her feelings about loneliness, isolation, and futility.
What prompts thoughts of Ms. Merkin in comparison to the epic of Lurie and Perry is that she confronts herself again and again–in ways that are excruciatingly revealing and painfully quotidian–with what may be a hope that by risking her audience’s disdain or, even worse, indifference, she may find her own meaning of the hell in which she has so clearly dwelled. It seems that willingness to confront self is the very thing that both Lurie and Perry seem to be avoiding while continuing their sandbox stand-off.
(To read the rest, click here.)

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com