I'm in the lobby of Ostinatto hostel in Buenos Aires, where Stace has come to see if she can get a job. Eminem from 2000 is blasting on the stereo, the fridge is full of Quilmes and Corona beer and Speed Unlimited energy drink. Blue-LED Christmas lights festoon the railings.
I just took Stace to see her first milonga. She'd never seen people dancing tango in real life before. It was under the summer night sky and full moon in Plaza Dorrego, also known as Plaza Bethlem. Across the Plaza, Candombe Monserrat was finishing up their weekly ambulatory performance of candombe drum music, the blessing and curse of living in San Telmo, but we could still clearly hear the golden-age tango recordings booming from the loudspeakers. I'd been suggesting she take tango lessons; within about ten seconds of arriving at the milonga, she had decided: this is a thing she must learn.
The lobby of Ostinatto is some seven stories tall, with wire staircases crisscrossing in the air under the skylight, which is dark with the night. Stace is hoping to get a job here.
Later we cross over to Tanguera Hostel, where Beatrice and I lived for some weeks, one of a dozen different places in Buenos Aires I've called home. It's beautiful with its marble and tile floors and its elaborate wall carvings, but we stopped recommending that friends stay there when they had a problem a few years back with bedbugs.
I show Stace the fiberglass statues of cartoon characters that decorate San Telmo, and tell her the little I know of each one; but my Argentine comic strip knowledge is pretty limited, and even if it weren't, it's hard to evoke the spirit of a comic strip in words. The statues speak more eloquently than I manage to.
On the bus home, a group of Boca fans are singing and whistling about how River fans are faggots lacking a testicle, and how they are going to kill them. Stace is enjoying it, since that's the kind of thing she goes in for, in fact the kind of thing she likes to organize, but I'm not --- I'm reminded of the last time a group of people called me a faggot and threatened to kill me, which was the crackheads who robbed me on the train in November. And the whistling hurts my ears, but I'm afraid that putting in earplugs will single me out as a target. After about 10 minutes, I get off early and take a separate bus home, angering her, because she feels I am abandoning her; but at the same time, she was complaining I was harshing her buzz from the bouncy football hooligan song. The adrenaline has mostly gone down by the time the other bus arrives.
Earler today, I spent some time with my coworker trying to qualify some off-the-shelf software for a $work task, hoping it can help me to avoid reimplementing its supposed functionality from scratch. So far it's something like fifty times slower than the software we've written ourselves, although our software doesn't yet do as much. I'm not sure if I'm doing something stupidly wrong or if it's really that slow.
I spent most of Saturday sitting in Starbucks reading The Grammar Of Graphics, a book about data graphics, an influential book highly recommended by a couple of different widely-used pieces of data-graphics software. I'm finding it slow going, in part because the abstractions they define are all slightly different from the related abstractions I'm used to. Time alone in the café — all afternoon until it closed at midnight — was helpful in keeping my focus on the book.
Tomorrow I have more off-the-shelf software to try out for the $work task. Or I could try spending some more time with this software.