Why I love the bus

I mentioned earlier that I now take the city bus to school, but I didn't mention the life-changing experiences I normally encounter on the 50-minute bus ride to school.

The bus has became my new favorite place to read because I am free from all other distractions. There is no TV, no internet, nobody to talk to (nobody really wants to talk to anybody on their way to work, and if they try to talk with me, they quickly realize that it's too early in the morning for me to speak Spanish).

On Friday's bus ride I figured out all of life for the second or third time this trip. As I sat there reading Freakanomics, I realized that the general concept of economics is perhaps one of the few elements of society that I can't understand to save my life.

It takes me forever to figure out any basic economic principle and whenever I read any article deeply based in economic lingo it all goes over my head. I've had Argentina's 2001 economic collapse explained to me multiple times and I still don't get it.

I then started linking random events in life (like Freakanomics does for 300 pages) and concluded that the only reason I have this blog is because of my high school economics class. If it weren't for Mrs. Seep's AP economics class I wouldn't have been scared away from a business major and pursued journalism as a plan B before I even attempted plan A.

If it weren't for economics I would have gone the business school root and probably never have created this blog, which was created with the intentions to practice writing and of course find Paul McPherson.

This is not to say that I'm now set on being a writer or that I'm ruling out becoming an economist, it was just a weird correlation that popped into my head.

Then my mind jumped to the idea of actually going hard after P-Mac, finding him, learning his life and then writing an amazing book.

I know it wouldn't be hard to actually find P-Mac if I really tried, because at the end of the day he's just a basketball player, who really isn't even that famous. Plus I've already had a couple of people contact me with his where-abouts, like ChrisH who commented the other day that, "PMac was hanging out on the corner across from my apt this afternoon with shawn marion."

Granted the whole writing a book thing would require P-Mac to have an interesting enough story, me to have enough skills to make the book readable, and the whole find an agent/publisher dilemma. And it probably would take a ton of work on my end to write a book about P-Mac that would appeal to people outside of P-Mac's family and the Southside of Chicago.

Then I scratched the whole book idea and decided I should just get a real job, but somehow have a career that enables me to work for three years and then take every fourth year off to travel the world. I came upon this 3:1 ratio while realizing that one of the main components to Buenos Aires' greatness is the fact that everything is currently 1/3 the cost of it's equivalent in the United States. And Stephon Marbury and Brandon Jennings wear 3, so 3:1 just makes sense.

Therefore if I save my American money for three years and Obama gets shit straight I can ball real hard every fourth year off American soil, then only exist in American society 75 percent of my life.

I was quite content that the bus ride enabled me to have a new appreciation for Mrs. Seep, theorize writing a book, and come up with some retardedly idealistic career plan.

Then I got off the bus, remembered I was still in Buenos Aires, looked at the Thierry Henry advertisement that's right in front of my school and realized that life was pretty good. I'm not exactly sure how Thierry helped the situation, but he did.

I had figured everything out by 10 in the morning. There was nothing I couldn't do and I was set on changing the world. I was going to enroll in some incredible classes that would push me so I could learn everything I possible could about Argentine culture.

Then it came time to actually make my schedule for the upcoming semester.

I was assigned into a pre-intermediate Spanish class, which meets twice a week. This was mildly embarrassing because despite taking nine years of Spanish and living the past 18 years of my life in cities where Spanish is spoken by 50 percent of the population; somehow I failed the evaluation exam badly enough to the point where I was put into a pre-intermediate Spanish class that only 10 percent of the exchange students qualified for (the other 85 percent were in various levels of intermediate and 5 percent were more retarded than me).

This really didn't phase me though as I didn't come Buenos Aires to learn Spanish grammar.

The rest of my schedule goes as follows:

Monday: Arte Argentino y LatinoAmericano Cotemporaneo (3:00-6:00)
--This is a class that meets once a week, often times at a museum where we evaluate contemporary and modern art. Contemporary and modern art happens to be one of my favorite things in life.

Tuesday: No class

Wednesday: Pre-Intermediate Spanish (2:00-4:00)
Migraciones y minorias en Argentina (4:00-7:00)
--I might take this class, if I do it would be the only serious class I'm taking. Therefore I probably won't take it.

Thursday: Arte y nueve tecnologias en Argentina
--Same concept and teacher as Monday's class, except this class focuses only on art made with computers. Trill.

Friday: Pre-Intermediate Spanish (2:00-4:00)

and here is where shit gets crazy... Aves de Argentina y Sudamerica

That's right. Bird watching. It gets better. The class only meets a couple times each month and one of the times overlaps with my Pre-Intermediate Spanish, to which the birds professor said he would give me an excused absence for my Spanish class.

So basically, I'm taking two modern art classes, one Spanish class and a class my friend and I just call "Birds," which happens to provide an excuse to skip one of my only serious classes.

Provided I'm able to get UA credit for all this it will be the most epic achievement of my life.

However you could argue that none of this fits into my whole achieving everything, changing the world M.O. from two hours earlier.

Don't worry I got the rest of the afternoon to pursue the aspirations from my morning bus ride.

So where does the rest of the afternoon take me?

To a parking garage where I'm participating in business I probably be shouldn't be participating in with a silver-toothed crackhead named Juan.

Well, maybe Monday will be the day.