Learning how to suck at life

At home I know how to do everything, and if I don’t, I know how to figure it out. I can mitigate the circumstances and control the variables. There are very few surprises in my daily life. Overall, I’m very good at life.

Here in Buenos Aires I completely suck at life. I can’t figure out phone service, public transportation, how to open a milk carton, flush the toilet, or walk on the sidewalk without tripping. I don’t know which store to go to for what thing I need and once I’m in the store I can never find what I’m looking for. I never know what I’m ordering in restaurants, the words mean nothing to me without memories to draw from and context. In the US I can visualize how the food is going to come, typically pretty accurately, based off of norms and past experiences. Here I’m frequently disappointed when my food arrives and it’s nothing like I expected.

I had to be taught how to hang up my clothes to dry, using clothes pins. When I told my friends, born and raised in Latin America, that I had hung up my clothes to dry for the first time in my life, two different people asked the exact same follow-up question. “But then who has been hanging up your clothes your whole life?” Just like they can’t conceive of never having had a dryer, I can’t conceptualize that doing laundry one day means your clothes won’t be available to wear for several more days. I keep running out of clothes—my brain simply can’t grasp it. It would be impossible to only have one set of sheets here, because washing sheets would mean they would need to dry 2-3 days before you can put them back on your bed. Laundry day means something different here.

Here I can’t control anything, much less everything, so I don’t even try. I go with the flow and practice radical acceptance. I walk around lost and confused. And you know what? It feels good.

But for real I don’t understand how people did study abroad before the internet and smart phones. I can barely manage my daily affairs even with constant internet access.