Beliefs

I came across my admissions essay for UT grad school. This is what I wrote:

I have this friend who claims that ours is a generation of limitless potential. He argues that we could do anything, and yet this power, this energy is squandered. Limited somehow. Sometimes I cannot help but agree with him, and I am greatly saddened. Our situation reminds me of a quote by Nelson Mandela, the one about our greatest fear being not that we are inadequate but rather that we are powerful beyond measure. I hear his words, and I realize I do not want this fear. I am not content to eke out an existence in a thankless job. I do not want this meaningless existence for myself or for my peers. I do not want it for future generations either.

But I must confess, I was also influenced by the qualities of a Camp Mystic M Girl:

"...is always human, falling down, picking herself up, brushing herself off, and beginning all over again."

Sometimes I have to remind myself what I believe in.

Since coffee is so dehydrating, I’ve been missing out on my daily coffee ritual for the past couple of days. So I am eating yogurt and banana breakfasts with plenty of water. Except today the water was shut down for some kind of repairs, so I didn’t get plenty of water. Yes, the tap water here is completely potable. And tastes fine. I find myself insulted when people think of Argentina as some sort of slum country in the tropics. We’re at 34˚S. And it’s a highly developed, well-educated country. They just happen to have a corrupt government and have landed on some tough economic times in recent years. (In 1991, the peso was pegged to the same value as the US dollar.) And still, currently the total national GDP is 19th largest in the world. Anyway, I digress. But for some reason it hurts my feelings when people think I’m living in a cardboard box on the beach. I live in a city. Along a subway line that is the oldest metro system in Latin America, the Southern hemisphere, and the entire Spanish-speaking world. I chose to live here. Do you think I would choose to live somewhere with parasitic water and dirt floors? No. I chose to live here because it is cosmopolitan, urban. Yes, there are cultural adjustments, but that goes for everywhere.

Even so, as I eat my Banana con Dulce de Leche “edición invierno” yogurt, I find myself increasingly jealous of girls in sundresses back home. Going winter-fall-winter to dead of Texas summer is going to be a hard adjustment.