My bubble

A word of advice: Stay away from them!

I left Uruguay about two decades ago because even as a teenager uruguayanness made my blood boil, and in order to return I have had to come up with certain "techniques" to prevent stress from ruining my health. You know how it is, whereas in a foreign land good manners and a certain detachment mean you can or should be benignly tolerant of certain questionable customs or actions of the locals, when it's your own country that tolerance is quickly replaced by full-blown indignation.

So our natural choice was to move to "Punta del Este" as it´s less Uruguay than the rest of Uruguay. The second step was to actually be "away from Punta" in a tiny corner of the coast basically unknown by everyone by it´s real name, which is Barra de Portezuelo, because the absence of people makes it less Uruguay than even Punta.

Another self-removal strategy is to abstain from reading the local papers. I only glance at the "Cities" section of El País on Sundays, on occcasion. This morning, seeing as there were lots of headlines about the economy for 2008 in Sunday's paper, I opened the "A" section to find the column by Andrés Oppenheimer, the top journalist Latin America has produced in my lifetime. The voice of reason. The guy can write, but more than anything, he has forged a career (based in the U.S.) doing the unthinkable in Latin America: bringing some common sense to all the folly that surrounds us, calling a spade a spade, something afforded only by the physical distance from his subjects, as otherwise his writings would have been dropped, his paper or TV station bombed or his person eliminated multiple times over the course of his career.

I digress. Still, Oppenheimer and all, I stick by my regime of not reading the papers. I do scan my Google-assembled patchwork of headlines and an occasional item in full, but that's more like entertainment, I try to keep it light. The tiger-mauled brothers, the disappeared Indian girl who reappeard after abandoning her Chicago-area husband, the Canoe Man saga, etc. More to do with "humanity" than with "current events."

Resutls: pretty good so far. When I go to civilization I'm in Punta del Este, a fantasyworld where most people are on vacation and where most of the "issues" I will hear about pertain to Argentina, so no biggie. The rest of the time, I am almost unaware -- in a frame by frame sense I mean -- of all the ridiculous or unreasonable things that could make me angry, stressed or bitter like some people I know who insist on "knowing" and cannot stop ranting about this or that.

The Middle East is blissfully far away now. Whereas until a couple of months ago I experienced the Middle East in the flesh -- by Middle East I mean that confluence of Islamic culture and eternal spring of never ending violence of all sorts -- now I perceive it as something remote, that faraway place where streets crawl with leering men, where people can't even pinpoint anymore why they're so angry or bitter, where bombs and killings are language, where the air is always thick with conflict of many sorts. I now remember it maybe once a week at the most, and I feel a twang of guilt at my mental hygiene process on account of the friends I have there, and of all the good things that are drowned by the bad, unfairly, but -- to pile the cliches -- the bottom line is that life is short.

Altogether, I firmly believe our new life and my newly-implemented techniques will be seriously health-enhancing. And my resolution for 2008 is to keep fine-tuning my bubble, which always seems to leak "real world" from one end or the other. Happy New Year.