Baffling Implications

Resume, Michael Lane

Experience:

Entrepreneur of a bakery operation in Buenos Aires, Argentina specializing in Brownies. Oversaw all aspects of business from loan application, material acquisition, product development, production, sales, marketing, and bookkeeping. Guided growth of the company from start up status to profit generating enterprise.


Yup. Profit generating. I skipped out on another miserable trip to the opera, and instead taught the receptionist at the hostel how to play backgammon while simultaneously re-starting the business operations with a little brownie magic. That's right, I baked more brownies.

And Jenny took her post-graduation break from Spanish class to head off with me to the parque de palermo, where piles of porteños found their way to relaxation at the banks of a man-made canal beneath the brilliant sun. Merchants nonchalantly lined the sidewalks, and the unstoppable duo developed new marketing strategies.

Singing.

Singing at the top of our lungs in opera, falsetto, flamenco styles. BROOOOOWWWWWWWNIEEEEEESS!! QUIEN QUIERE EL BROWNIEEEEEEEEE! AQUI TE LO TRAIGO!! RIQUISIMOOOOOOOOSSS! And they came. The flocked. They bought.

Why is this a big move, you ask? I thought you were already selling brownies no problem, you ask? Well, my friend, because those little over-simplified completely unrealistic supply and demand graphs from microeconomics swooped in and marginal utilities meant a 100 percent price increase to two pesos. And they paid. They all paid.

Swimming in money, we nevertheless decided to swing out of town (I packed the baking pans and flour, don't worry.) toward Cordoba. Of course, bus tickets would put the start-up back into the start-up status with debt piling up; so thumbs did the work.

Three truck drivers later, and plenty of mate gourds full of the mildly narcotic delicacy brought us at 3 am to the shell station on the outskirts of Cordoba city. As we pitched our tent in the parking lot, we felt for the first time (perhaps) just how ridiculous our endeavor had become. Dirty, smelly, etc. And now not in the presence of many others who are likewise dirty and smelly, but instead in a tent in a shell station parking lot sleeping the night away in the shadow of capitalistic luxury. The shame of it all. But alas, sleeping in a parking lot is cheap.

The morning brought us to Adriano´s - a man who entered my life 11 years ago with a stint as an exchange student in my cousin's house. Feelings that we may have invited ourselves to his home when one truck driver insisted he call him to find out just where in the hell in Cordoba province we were supposed to be headed supsided with smiling faces as the whole family greeted us.

A few days of church-seeing, spanish teaching-learning, and shoe shopping to finally fix the problem in my knee most likely exacerbated by second-hand shoes from Kenya lead us to today. Another gorgeous blue-sky paradise, with predictions of delicious asados in the evening.