📍Buenos Aires, Argentina, 7.27.25

Argentina is turning me into a god damn alcoholic. I swear, I’ve never drank so much wine. But it feels wrong not to and my body is suffering it well. I think joy metabolizes alcohol, so the more drunk fun you have, the less awful your hangover is. I know with absolute certainty that science would back my claim, and so I will live it as my truth.

Last night, Amanda and I swore we would go dancing. So we drank two bottles of wine, went to a bar, and lasted about 20 minutes before we were both dead-tired and fled home to our beds. Wine is clearly not a good dancing beverage. Next weekend we will make it. With vodka.

Amanda is pretty, with dark curls, blue upturned eyes, and limitless energy. I had thought her Latina at first with her Spanish fluency and warmth, or maybe Greek, but no. She’d grown up in Manhattan, then went to American University in DC before fleeing the country to teach English. Once I got to know her better, it made more sense. She has that New York energy.

Tonight, I went to a jazz cafe with Ari, who is from a small town in Russia close to the Ukraine border, and Agnie, from Poland. Agnie had just landed in Buenos Aires for architecture school and messaged me on Instagram to meet up.

The jazz was soft and pleasant, the banana bread was dense, the coffee mediocre. There was one moment we all burst into laughter that I don’t want to forget, so I will write it down. I was talking about my thoughts that I will die young (as usual, someone needs to stop me) because you never see tall old women, so it must be a rule for us, and Agnie said it’s because we shrink. I agreed, but explained that you can hang by a bar every day to stretch your back out and some people grow a couple of inches from that. So you can thwart your shrinkage, at least a little. They didn’t know what a couple of inches was so I held out my pointer and thumb and said this is a lot for a man. There was silence, then laughter of course, because neither age nor gender factor into the humor of penis jokes.