Vacilando

It's amazing how much less efficient our lives are, at least for the moment. The pillows that came with the apartment are just terrible, so we decided to pick up a couple more. We spent probably three hours going in search of them and buying them. Expensive, too -- household items are just pricy here. But I'm not complaining: it's kinda nice to stop being so efficient for a while, especially because I have a tendency to over-optimize most of the time. And on our long expedition, we found a fun little neighborhood, ate some medialunas, tried another grocery store, photographed some more graffiti.

I've always liked the following passage from Steinbeck's odd little travelogue /Travels With Charlie/:

"In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random. we would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it."

I also think a lot about the Situationist concept of the dérive:

"In psychogeography, a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the dérive as 'a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.' He also notes that 'the term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of dériving.'[1] The term is literally translated into English as drift."

The dérive is tougher to achieve in a city you know very well. In New Orleans, every Mardi Gras day, my friends and I used to do the following: walk until we came to a corner (never long on the short blocks of the French Quarter). Once we got there, someone would close their eyes and point forward, and the rest of us would spin them in circles as if they were playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey; whichever way they ended up pointing would be the direction we would go next.

One of my favorite things about being in a new city is that you don't know well is that you don't have to go to such lengths to have new experiences.