I knew that at some point after I left São Paulo for Santiago Wednesday morning, there would be one night where I would be up early in the morning with a lot of thoughts and nothing better to do than write them down.
I suppose tonight is that night.
I am halfway through a debriefing session that is probably more necessary and productive than I would like to admit, because I just want to go home. Once I said goodbye to the five guys in the airport who stayed up all night with me just so we could go to Fran’s Café at 3:30 in the morning, my mind walked off and hopped on a direct flight to Nashville, and the rest of me went to Chile. I have slowly dragged my focus back across the continents to join me, but it has been hard.
It has been hard because I shouldn’t be in this weirdly paneled kitchen with no microwave. I shouldn’t be able to look out the window and see the Andes. Heck, I really shouldn’t be able to wake up in the morning to a cloudless sky that stays that way. I should be dragging myself off my lopsided mattress to the sound of rain and a Blackberry that has served as a very expensive alarm and address book the last four months. I should be seeing guys in various stages of dress making coffee, reading e-mail and greeting me with a hearty Bom Dia. And I should be heading off to university campuses, and Starbucks, and a bakery, and an English school, and an outdoor açai restaurant/car wash.













I read two books in the sofa-ridden, over-caffeinated vacation I took within the city this weekend, and I have fooled myself into thinking that I might have some great thought to impart regarding them. The two works should not share the same bookshelf, for reasons both practical – one is fiction, the other presumably not – and thematic. Although they are of similar length, the first took me two weeks to read; the second, I completed in a couple of hours. Perhaps accordingly, the first would be considered high literature among people who know such things. Those same folks label the second with that most odious modifier: “mass-market.”





