In my neighborhood,

you do not receive a parking ticket for leaving your car parked on the street for too long. But you might get robbed.

on closer examination...

Cultural differences abound, everywhere, and I try to be conscious of my U.S.A.-centric baseline, principally when it comes to what I’ll call overall rationality of daily living. On an objective scale, I am convinced that certain aspects of Argentine society simply make no sense, and, with that, dear reader, I shall now unabashedly launch into an overly biased tirade regarding the insanity of Argentine customer service and other sundry irrationalities.

Previously in this forum, I have addressed the most notable inconvenience – the mierda de las monedas. Reconnaissance indicates that the necessity of paying busses in coins, which nobody wants to give you, is a nagging inconvenience due to the bus mafia: the bus companies sell the change for more than face value to black market middlemen who push the coinage back into the market. Today I saw a sign on the front of an ice cream store: “Free kilogram of ice cream after payment of 100 pesos in change.” A kilo goes for about 36 pesos.

However, I am perhaps equally as dumbfounded by the utterly inexplicable lack of change in all but the highest-end retail establishments. We’re not talking loose coins here, we are talking enough bills to make more than a few dollars worth of change for ordinary purchases. For example, in the late afternoon, I went to the post office, a government entity (which, admittedly, probably makes it less likely that they would be fiscally organized, but nonetheless) and sent a few letters. The bill came to twenty-nine pesos (~u$s 8.50), and I paid with a 50 peso note (~u$s15). Cashier #5 (of 6) asked me if I had anything smaller. I answered that I did not (I lied, since it was eminently reasonable to pay with a fifty, and I needed to get rid of that bill when the payment proportion was reasonable, as it is very infrequent that I make any purchase of over twenty pesos). Cashier #5 nodded and left her desk, and returned shortly thereafter to ask me if I was sure that I did not have anything smaller. I repeated my previous (false) statement. (What was I going to do, pay her with all my small bills and then have to buy my seven-peso vegetables with a 50??). After interrupting each of the lower-numbered cashiers to request change, cashier #5 returned with twenty-one pesos.

Now, I cannot comprehend how Cashier #5 could not have had twenty-one pesos to give me. My bill, for a very pedestrian international shipment, was twenty-nine pesos. Surely in the six previous hours, during which time there was a constant twenty minute wait for (mediocre) service, this cashier (indeed, each and every one of them) must have received twenty-one pesos in payment. It would astound me if she had not received several hundred pesos in payment. I myself was paying her twenty-nine pesos, all at once!

Sadly, the lack of change is nothing new to Argentina; all of Latin America suffers from this profound and mysterious affliction. Over the course of a day, the money received by cashiers unfailingly disappears, and with truly devastating rapidity. In my experience, the most absurd episodes of this baffling phenomenon take place in Peru, where small women scurry to the next-door store any time the patron pays with more than two dollars. Nonetheless, the Argentine version of this insidious spectacle is impressive for the part it plays in the country’s already singular culture of customer service; that is to say, lack thereof. The nearest chain-grocery store to my house, the Leader Price, never fails to have exactly one (generally unenthusiastic) cashier working at peak hours, leaving the other four checkout lanes to rest easy. Thus, one can always expect a lengthy wait, exasperation which is, of course, exacerbated by the common cashier practice of calling the manager in order to get change for a 50. (The closest American approximation of the experience waiting in a typical argentine check-out line is the Giant Grocery store at 8th and O in Washington, DC - it’s the one with the police tape out front. I regularly brought my 20-pound law textbooks to the grocery store to head-off certain checkout idleness).

Indifferent, lax, and downright rude customer service is rampant in Argentina – indeed, that attitude represents the leading half of a sub-par service sector dance, working in tandem with dissatisfied but complacent clientele. No customer complains, because everybody knows that complaining will get you nowhere; no employee heeds customer complaints, because workers aren’t used to hearing complaints and have no qualms about screwing the occasional dissident. I write this not to complain (though I’ll admit plainly that I have played the part of the screwed dissident customer on various occasions), but simply to point out what I see as a real cultural difference between Argentina (and other Latin countries) and the United States; Argentines generally tolerate less – and thus, they get less, they don’t tip, and they neither complain nor commend the service on appropriate occasions. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, and me, well, I too often end up cracked and broiled.

My next favorite Argentine irrationality is a new one, historically. Argentina is in a single time zone, Argentine Standard Time (Argentina would never tolerate being in someone else’s zone), which coincides with Brazil, even though Brazil is located almost entirely to the east of Argentina, and the countries directly north of Argentina (Bolivia, Paraguay, sharing the same longitude) are an hour later. You can travel north and change time zones. Now, the country is not wide enough for it to be absurd that there is only one time zone (indeed, it spans fewer degrees of longitude than the U.S. Eastern Time Zone), and Argentines have indicated to me in any case it would be “crazy for the same country to be on different time zones” (granted, on other occasions, Argentines have insisted to me, among other things, that Niagara Falls was man-made). It would make no sense, the reasoning goes, for me in Buenos Aires to call my friend in Salta, in the west, and have it be a different time there than it is here. How would you ever know what time it is there??!!

Since last December, there is a new twist to the time zone tango: Daylight Savings Time. This year, on October 19, clocks sprung forward one hour in exactly 10 of Argentina’s 23 provinces. Thus, rather than having actual time zones, whereby different longitudinal zones are constantly 1 hour apart for the entire year (which, recall, would be crazy), there are now 10 distinct and geographically disparate provinces which are one hour different from the others, for one half of the year. The rest of the year, all provinces are on the same time. The lunacy of this situation requires no further explication.

Small Appliances.

When alone with a stranger in the United States, the commonly employed silence-killing device is talking about the weather. There is always weather. And everybody has an opinion (even not having an opinion counts as an opinion. In fact, that kind of apathy may be even MORE interesting, when the goal is to kill time). When I am in Argentina, my attempts to talk about the weather are futile.

In per-chance interactions, there are two common topics:
1) What I think of the women in the country
and
2) I forget the other one.

People are always trying to ask me what I think of the women in Argentina. Well, I tell them (and honestly), that they've got some darn fine women here. In as many words. In this vein, today I had an especially peculiar and interesting interaction:

I needed to buy a fan, because it is damn hot. (And let us NOT deny that the weather affects our moods, our small-talk, and our consumerism of small medium and large appliances). Also, my bedroom is directly next to the sidewalk (I commonly receive pizza and ice cream delivery through my bedroom window), which makes for a very noisy night if I keep my window open, and fans are as good for white noise as they are for moving air around.

So I went to my neighborhood small electronics store, two blocks from my house. The store was about 10 feet by 8 feet and packed with stuff, like most niche stores in the neighborhood (and those are the only kind of store. plastic thing store, for instance. Or womens undergarment store). I navigated through boxes of floodlights and ducked under some low hanging display chandeliers on my way to the counter, where the store owner was chatting with an old woman.

I should say, he was looking at an old woman, and she was talking towards him. This woman was what many would call - endearingly - a real piece of work. She is definitely somebody's favorite grandma. Appearing about 75, clunky white shoes matching her short cropped white hair and fake pearl necklace. White polka dots held it together over her blue dress. Herself and her grandmotherly paunch held court in the electronics shop, and I have no doubt the stool she was sitting on was well molded to her presumably equally grandmotherly behind. She held a red leash granting a mere six or seven feet of slack to a small white scotty dog who licked my toes intermittently throughout the purchase of my fan. The store owner, in classic small-appliance mold, had an easy smile, a receding hairline and a red beard. He would give his (totally unbuttoned) polo shirt a little tuck-in every time he came out from behind the counter.

I interrupted kindly to let the owner know I was looking for a fan. The old woman, we'll call her Myrna, quickly answered, to let me know just which fan I should get. Of the two fans in the store.

Unfortunately, Myrna's preferred fan was twice the price of the other one. I have to admit, her choice fan sure was a beaut, standing clear as tall as Myrna herself, and just as white. A lot more active even. "You don't have to set this one on a chair!" she said. "just sit there and have lunch and it blows right on you. No trouble at all."
"Well, I don't know," I said to the store-owner.
"I really think you should go with this one here," Myrna answered back, pointing at the oscillating free-standing fan, her finger energetically rotating like the fan (or was she shaking?). "It's great for when you are sleeping, too."
I asked the man to show me the cheaper fan.

Just then, a bald fellow with a striped polo shirt sauntered in, and as he too ducked under the chandelier, the store owner said "what do you say, Pancho?"

I was not sure if he was calling me Pancho, or if this man was Pancho. (A hotdog here is called a Pancho. A really long hotdog a "SuperPancho"). I made an non-committal noise.

"Todo bien," said Pancho.

"You know," said Myrna to Pancho, and pointed to the store owner, who was plugging my fan in, "he used to be quite smitten with my daughter."

brief silence.

". . . but that girl he's dating now is really pretty."

The store owner smiled and flipped my fan on.

"How is the air, Pancho?" he asked, as Pancho was standing directly in fan range.

"Feels good from here," Pancho replied.

I paused to think a minute, and the store owner made a great stab at a pun.

"El tema es el peso, o los Pesos, eh? el peso o los pesos?" (is your issue the weight, or the cost, but weight and cost are essentially the same word here). I told him it was the pesos, and he nodded understandingly. Myrna didn't have a comeback, but Scotty began licking my other foot.

“I´ll take the cheap one,” I told him.

As the store owner was packing my fan into the box, he asked me where I was from. I suppose I could have referred to my Harbor Springs basketball shirt, but I thought “United States” would probably suffice. He inquired when I was to return, and:

“what if you fall in love with an Argentine. What then?” he suggested as he and Myrna smiled.

“Well,” I reflected, “Love matters more than anything.”

And there, the store owner, Myrna, the Scotty dog, and I each pursed our lips and silently nodded, amongst the electrical coils and designer light fixtures.

Pancho was on his way out the door. Some kinda weather out there.

Where Were You?

As the polls closed on the East Coast, it was 11pm in Buenos Aires, and I was savoring the last bites of leftover flank steak, with eggplant and zucchini from the my preferred Peruvian produce vendor, a squat white-haired man who gets red onions special for me and sets up shop in the doorway of the Korean grocer´s ("el Chino," to my roommates) at the corner of Lacroze and Delgado. My roommate Leandro had a Jethro Tull album (that was not Aqualung) playing at a low blast from the next room. Alone at the kitchen table, a desk salvaged from the street and refurbished by my roommate Vero, I pretended for a moment that I would not eat all of the bread I had bought from the Confitería Iris, where a thin red-haired bread lady always asks how my studies are going and laughs when I do not know the name of a single one of the innumerable sweets stacked high on the counters. I killed the last of the bread along with the bottom half of a bottle of Callia Syrah-Malbec, which sells for 12 pesos at El Chino. The wine was still decent, though opened five days ago, on Halloween (I had sworn off drinking following my debaucherous debut as Freddy Mercury, and just Tuesday morning shaved my mustache, a lasting disgusting relic).

The water heater above the sink growled as I scrubbed our primitive toasting apparatus, for use on the stove, and I winked at the multichrome Warhol-esque images of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe stuck above the drying rack.

The computer moved slowly. Clicking on counties led to listless loading times, heightening my hopeful anxiety. The map turned blue. Slowly. Slowly. Turned. Blue. We expected this would happen, but these percentages and graphs and cautious network calls added up to something momentous, something with momentum. Rapt eyes glued to eight open internet pages, I tried to explain to Leandro and Vero what this could mean, but it was too big. I did not realize it when the Tull album ended, and Leandro looked up from his book to request that I skip back to the beginning.

They called Ohio. Luke's status message, posted from the UAW hall in Taylor, MI, read "it's too close to call... in Arizona." McCain aids had already said it would take a miracle. Obama climbed over 200, and I needed a breather.

The eased nerves, the wine, the steak, the sticky relentless humidity. I was drowsy, almost resigned to sleep before the election was called. I laid down, my guitar on my chest, waiting. waiting.

I twitched, strumming my guitar loudly, my subconscious ringing the doorbell, reminding me that this date was worth my attention. Worth being awake. Reticent, I closed my eyes again.

and then, it happened. My Election Moment.

Through the night's heavy haze,

through my open window, a sound

first scratchy and mumbled, but

approaching, ever clearer

an old radio, a car window rolled down,

one single audible phrase as it screamed by my room

a phrase inspiring true American fist pumps,

its energy as American as the Miller Light those fist pumps so often spill:

"Don´t stop

...


Beliieeeevin"


The car vanished. I walked to the computer, refreshed, and saw that Barack Obama had been elected President of the United States of America. A Journey, indeed...

.................


"Barack and Roll" T-shirt on, I climbed into a cab headed to Puerto Madero and mentioned to the cabby that Obama had won. The driver was most interested in discussing Argentine politics, specifically the situation of insecurity that he feels is the most important issue facing the country (in my conversations, crime is by far the number one thing Argentines are concerned about and wish their government would better address.) For fifteen minutes he talked about how he is afraid every night that he may not return to see his wife and children. He wanted an empathetic ear, and that's what I gave him. I like to think we elected Barack Obama because he will lend that same ear.

I arrived at the party, at a club on the docks, around 2:15am. Things were just getting going. The graduating class of law students at my university, Torcuato Di Tella, were throwing the party, and the 17 graduating women were identifiable in their (skimpy) police outfits. The five graduating men had unsurprisingly failed to hold up their end of the bargain, as they were not dressed like narcotraficantes. I had four cans of Quilmes, danced through the sweat rings, and hugged a lot of people.
As the bartenders locked up and left the club, I sat on the lawn with a bottle of water, discussing in half-sentences what a great night this was with my compañeros from the law school. I hitched a ride back to my neighborhood with some of them, and I heard Oasis and an Alanis Morissette dance remix on the radio. Squished beside me was the daughter of a former "guvernator" of a northwest Argentine province, who had been named after Petunia. Not the flower, the girlfriend of Porky the Pig. I live in an acid dream.

I opened up my computer once more and fetched a corner of bread that had escaped my fiendish gluttony hours earlier. Obama was over 300 in the EC now, and I sought out the speeches. First, McCain's gracious speech, emotional as much for its textual calls for unity as for the tone, a noted contrast from the stiff rancor which seemed to define him in recent weeks. Next, I read Obama's humble victory speech, and as the sky slowly lit up the heavy air, I took deep breaths, realizing in some small part what a journey it had been for him; and for us; and how far we all have to go.

I cried. And I fell asleep in my chair, an open jar of peanut butter at my feet.

In Search of Job on Beach

I made a detour in September to Puerto Rico, to interview with Magistrate Judge Marcos López of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. I had been hoping to clerk in precisely that court while slaving away at dozens of federal clerkship applications during the course of the summer – indeed, the District of PR was at the beginning of it all the very impetus for my clerkship search. And when I got an email from Judge López – ultimately the only judge in that District who had posted an open one-year clerkship for 2009-2010 – I decided it would be best for me to make the trip, however long. If it was unsuccessful, I would have no regrets – and I could spend a few days on the beach (or so I thought. Hurricane Ike had just blown through the area, leaving a broken-record 10-day forecast of thunderstorm after thunderstorm).

I arrived in PR and headed to Old San Juan, taking advantage of the FREE public buses (aaaah, paradise… at least until December, when they’ll cost money again), and relished in not having to fumble for change. At the recommendation of my friend will, I sought out “Guest House 205,” located “next to a Chinese restaurant” on Calle Tanca, which is two blocks long. Arriving at Tanca and immediately seeing a Chinese restaurant, I inquired at all the neighboring apartments to discover that Calle Tanca happens to have one Chinese Restaurant per block. Guesthouse 205 is run by Victor, a very friendly heavy-set Goateed man who looks like a tanner version of the average Packers fan, and his elderly father, who I simply called “Señor.” He called himself “Castro,” (his last name) whenever I asked who was pounding on the door of my room – invariably he would yell “Castro” and show me that I’d yet again left my key in the door. I always thanked him sheepishly, and then he would shuffled down the hallway and up the stairs, never wearing a shirt or any underpants under his slightly sagging shorts. I’d thank him and he would respond with his trademark sound-effect, an “oooaahh” that ascended in pitch much like one of those whizzy toys with the fan inside you might find at the circus or in a quarter machine in the front of any large grocery store in the United States.

I spent the first night fruitlessly looking for a dry-cleaner, having smashed my suit into a very small roll-on borrowed from my Argentine roommate. Ultimately I ended up simply steaming up the bathroom and hoping that would do the trick on my suit and shirt: when I took off my flip flops and donned a suit in the cheapest hostal in town to go to a job interview, I felt a bit like I was putting on a costume – my dirty unshaven backpacker life colliding more directly than ever before with notably impending day-job-dom.

I bussed to Bayamón and asked around for the federal court, an unassuming building (except for the big gate and security guard) located a few blocks from the banks and on a street boasting 10% intact sidewalk. I passed the afternoon in the court cafeteria, until getting the call from Ariel, Judge López’ clerk, that the Judge had time to interview me.

The whole interview process was very unassuming – the Judge asked me nothing about the law I have supposedly learned in two (expensive and taxing) years of law school, preferring to focus on my interest in Latin America and human rights, and on the real benefits of the U.S. system that a lot of us take for granted – notably the relatively dependable due process given to criminal defendants (I think it is clear that in many other countries – even “first world” ones – one is much less likely to receive the process you do in the United States, being read your rights, being given the right to a lawyer, presented with the charge against you, etc…). I had also just watched an in-flight presentation of Keven Spacey’s HBO movie about the 2000 election, and it struck me how the population of the United States essentially accepted the decision of the Supreme Court as the end of it. My perception was heightened coming from a Argentina, a Latin American country (like most others) where public protests and distrust of government are so much more commonplace: the day I left Buenos Aires, disgruntled bus companies had staged a dramatic protest, parking several hundred buses on a central thoroughfare at rush hour, paralyzing the city. At any rate, my conversation with the Judge was stimulating and interesting, and I was glad I had made the 17-hour trip for the one hour interview.

The following day, as a sourpuss sandwich maker was constructing my footlong Subway club, I got a call from an unidentified number - Judge López. I answered, of course, and he treaded water much too long before saying that he was calling to offer me the job, which I accepted on the spot. I briefly discussed the details under the burning glare of the peeved Subway girl, and when I hung up, my jubilant vegetable-loading instructions contrasted hilariously (from my perspective) with her unnecessarily annoyed condiment application. I took my sandwich and coca-cola to the beach, and though it wasn’t the sunniest of days, I contented myself knowing that I would have a year’s worth of beach days coming my way. Getting this clerkship in Puerto Rico, I feel like I’ve really swindled whoever it is that runs the game of Life, since I’ll ostensibly be furthering my career while living in the tropics.

That evening, I celebrated a touch, with some fantastic Indian food, fine whiskey, and a train of barstool companions, before returning to recline on the balcony of “Guesthouse 205.” High heels on cobblestones peppered the constant reggaeton backround beat provided by every open-windowed sedan and discoteca in all of Old San Juan. That very spot was bustling hundreds of years ago; I wondered what the Spanish colonists and soldiers would think of the long line descending down the slope of Tanca from the mouth of NOISE, a (clearly) popular discoteca: the street was teeming with teenage girls baring budding cleavage, mini-mini-skirts and hoop earrings (just the kind the pirates wore??) I popped a beer and relaxed with my guitar, strumming some old tune, but the only words that came to mind were something like

What would your mother think
If she could see you now…

Would you show your mother
That much of your breast
And what would she think of
That thing you call a dress

(Or are they themselves somebody’s mother? Soon enough, doubtless.) I’m all for high skin-visibility, in general, but (in that moment at least) I must have crossed dangerously far into a puritan mindset of middle-aged-ism. At any rate, with herds of horny budding reggaetoneros congregating on the street below, I accepted that NOISE was probably not my scene, and went to bed content.

I spent the next day with a stereotypically random hostal crowd –
• A goateed, white linen-shirted Midwestern musician named Randall who had been on a tour of Caribbean islands playing music with locals. We jammed on the porch for a spell, and exchanged info. Another in a long line of hostal-made contacts.
• A beautiful blonde, outgoing Austrian who had in one day developed both bed bug bites and (unrelatedly) a non-sexual (I think) relationship with Randall which was rife with the rancor and playful bickering typical of long-standing marriages. Randall assured me she had made the trip to PR solely to Salsa with her “Brown Boys.”
• Two skinny English boys fresh off of Uni who had been dumping Pounds in the Virgin Islands for weeks. One of them, with bleach blonde curly hair and a Michael Anthony Hall profile, somehow put the Austrian girl under his spell, despite wearing pajama pants to the pharmacy.
• An American named Gene from DC, who thought that Michigan was located where Montana is, and who had come to Puerto Rico to learn Spanish. Randal and I dined with her at some American-style fancy Hamburger joint next to the Cruise liner docks, site of the world´s absolute worst and overpriced meal. I tolerated a subpar piña colada, feeling like I should at least have one on the “Island of Enchantment” before heading back to where it was still wintertime.

The next day, I managed a quick run to the beach, where I faced a dilemma: I was wearing shorts and “runderwear” – a speedo-resembling underpant with a specialized frontal wind panel and wicking microfiber. Should I get my shorts wet, or just rock my underpants? I decided that this was no time to be modest, despite the growing population of retirees and randoms on the beach, and I didn’t want to have to ride the bus with wet shorts, so I happily gave my runderwear their inaugural dip in the Commonwealth’s coves. I’ll stand by my decision (admittedly, I also ran all around the campus of the University of Michigan wearing nothing but my runderwear and my shoes, so perhaps I should not have been so shy… and now, weeks later, having been assaulted with the outgoing Brazilian speedo custom, I realize how silly my modesty really was.. (blog forthcoming)).

That about does it for my trip Puerto Rico – You are all welcome, come October 2009. More nonsense to come regarding the Porteño Primavera, Booze in Brazil, and other instances of overly-forced bilingual alliteration.

Of Change and Discovery.

It has been too long since I left the United States. It was a sign when I put my passport through the wash recently, like when a cat pisses in your shoes because it needs attention.

I have been in Buenos Aires a week now, and I am without a doubt living here. The proof: 1) today I gave a man impeccable directions and 2) took two forms of public transportation and 3) last Sunday I randomly ran into people I had met here (a cadre of Danish dames and a British bloke, at a wine-soaked international fiesta where I was astounded to see that Scandinavia knows all the words to Gin and Juice - even more than the laid back-endo part). I stumbled across them at La Bombonera, Boca Juniors' soccer stadium, full of 50,000 rowdies, no less. 4) I've also developed the necessary keen awareness and agility required to navigate amongst the piles of dog shit that pepper the pavement. Change my accent and sabotage my haircut, and I'm 90% porteño already (porteños are folks from Buenos Aires). I'm also shades away from swearing to you that wherever you live is not as cool as here, a tell-tale porteño characteristic.

Today, I made the best purchase of my still new stint in the country: 100 meters of dental floss for 6.35 pesos (about $2.12). This was not only necessary (given the steak remnants surely swashbuckling through my ivories) and cheap, but when I paid with a 10-peso note, I received change including coins worth 1.65!

Why would I be so excited about this change, you ask? Clearly, you have never lived in Buenos Aires. (scoff. I have. for, like, seven days or so. back off!!!). But seriously, this is an issue. I'll call it "La Mierda de La Moneda." One MUST pay for busses in this city with coins, and coins are very hard to come by. There is no bus pass you can buy, as the myriad of bus fleets are operated by different companies. And there are no change machines, anywhere. Busses generally costs 90 centavos or 1 peso. This means that for a round trip, one must always have at least 1.80 in coins.

Everybody in this god-forsaken town needs change. Its a commodity one must keep hidden away. The first (and best) advice I have received since arriving is to never, ever, admit to a cashier that you have any coins (for instance if you are paying with a $10 note for something that is $8.25, and they want to give you a $2 note instead of 1.75 in change). And be sure to keep the jingle from giving you away. Each day, I am forced to scheme through a schedule of paltry purchases (a mandarin here, an eraser there, the occasional artisanal sconce), hoping to develop a pile of coins large enough to get me home, lest I resort to begging. BA Beggars must make a killing, since people would rather give up a $2 note than 35 cents. At least you can DO something with 35 cents.

Meantime, I am apartment searching, attending classes (truly), and more-than-subsisting on a diet of mostly steak and ice cream. The forearm-sized flank steak I had for dinner last night (and the best steak sandwich ever for lunch today) bled me about six bucks. That's worth your flight down here. Come visit, and I'll have a pile of change ready for you.

Out of the Running.

(published in The Weldon Times, Dalhousie Law School's newspaper first week of October, 2007)


These days, everybody’s got a cause. You can’t hold a pancake breakfast just for the pancakes; it’s got to be about something. With this in mind, I set out to run my third marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC, to raise money for children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa.

Thing is, I’d have run anyway. I run every day as it is. A law student has got to have some escape. I mean, I have some late Thursday nights too, and I put my Facebook time in – but something tells me my running time is more constructive. Still, knowing I was running for an 8 year old orphan with AIDS did help me get out of bed before sunrise, and that motivation really did push me through track workouts. I mean, sure, I also thought maybe this whole do-gooder thing might impress chicks. See Janet Simeon, Why Altruism is Sexy, The Daily Chronicle, Vol 36, No. 3, 145 (September, 1987). Maybe it does; we’ll see how much fan mail I receive from the reportedly very attractive readership of the Times.

All things considered, I’d planned on covering the 26.2 miles in 2 hours, 54 minutes, which, for the record, is twice as far and significantly faster than the half-marathon. The Times' EIC James Lea will tramp through in November. James, responding to an email I sent out soliciting donations, said the paper would donate some money if I could provide some filler in one of the columns. Done, and Done. Much appreciated.

Trouble is, after raising some money, and putting in the work, I’m writing this piece with a gloomy demeanor and an air cast on my right shin. Four weeks to race day (Oct. 28), with hundreds of miles of training behind me, the doctor says I’ve got a stress fracture. Too many hard workouts in a row. One of those uniquely frustrating situations where working too hard directly results in disappointment. Let this be a lesson: approach challenges half-assedly, and your work will not be wasted. Take a cue from those sudsy tots at the fundraiser car wash. They know they don’t actually have to scrub the flies off of your grill. Motorists will contribute nonetheless.

So I won’t actually be running the marathon. But since running is the norm for me, NOT running is an even harder challenge. And so, I humbly request your support. On October 28th, while tens of thousands of people run through the streets of Washington DC, I will wake up late, put on my air cast, hobble to the kitchen, and eat a leisurely breakfast – pancakes for pancakes’ sake. But I won’t run.

On October 28th, I’ll sit idly to raise money for 8-year old Nkosi, (photo attached. He's the one with the sweet truck), who has AIDS. Nkosi's parents both died of AIDS in 2002 when he was 3. He now lives with his 62-year-old grandmother, who is raising him and his two brothers and two sisters. They live in a dilapidated metal shack on a government pension of about $100 a month. Nkosi is not unique. An estimated 15 million children in the world have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Of these, more than 12 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. In South Africa alone, an estimated 1.1 million children have been orphaned by AIDS, which strikes 20 percent of the population there. Tragically, this means the impact on children will only grow worse before it improves. As staggering as these numbers are, the crisis will worsen if parents struck by HIV do not get access to life-prolonging treatment and effective prevention services.

The organization I'm being slothful for, 25:40, is dedicated to Nkosi and all the children like him in South Africa. Through a multi-faceted program, 25:40 supports programs in the rural villages of South Africa that support orphaned and vulnerable children. For instance, 25:40 pays the salary of Nkosi's AIDS monitor, shown at right in the picture. She visits his home regularly to make sure he takes his medication properly. 25:40 also supports the Wesley clinic, which he goes to regularly to see a doctor.

As I undertake an intensive four-week indolence training program to prepare myself for an entire morning of internationally aware idleness, I encourage you to visit 25:40’s website at www.2540.org. You can make a tax deductible donation online by clicking “Sponsor a Runner.” Many runners who put in a lot of tough milage to raise money have their bios up on the page – good people that actually will be running on race day. If you want to donate specifically to my (non-)effort, you’ll find a link next to a photo of me in the desert looking forlorn; be assured I’ll wear that same far-off look on October 28th while doing absolutely nothing. Idleness, now THAT is hot.