Honeymoon Update

It was November 2007. Jeff and I had just returned from India on a 16-hour coach (gasp!) flight and careened headlong into the worst jetlag of our lives. I won't sugar coat it: it was pure agony. We tried Ambien prescribed by one of Jeff's physician friends, but nothing could cut the sleeplessness. It's hard enough for me to feign emotional stability after sleeping for ten hours in one night, but after waking up at 1:00 and 2:00 am for days trying to get back into a good old American rhthym, I was a complete basketcase. Lack of sleep exaggerates all of my homegrown grumpiness and impatience to a level that is downright certifiable. After India I remember sobbing in a drugstore because it had run out of the Pooh bandaids I wanted. I had walked 1.5 blocks to the drugstore and was apopletic about the bandaid shortage. While I am always impatient, I can usually recover without going all Steel Magnolias right in aisle 2. Right then and there I vowed that my honeymoon location would take into account the rigors of jetlag and my accompanying insanity, which pretty much knocked Asia and most of Europe out of the running.

When Jeff and I got engaged, we soon started planning our honeymoon. Armed with our India experiences of the recent past, we decided that traveling too far east or too far west would be a bad idea. So, then we looked at our choices to the north and south. Canada was out because I really wanted to experience warm breezes and pack flowing summery, honeymoony dresses. We tossed around a Mexican vacation, but I objected because too many visits during Spring Break in college to impoverished border towns really stifled all of my romantic associations with Mexico.

So because we wanted to go someplace farther than Alabama, and less humid than Cuba, we ended up talking more and more about Argentina. I flipped open a guidebook about Argentina and read the first paragraph which said that anyone who travels to Buenos Aires who doesn't look like a Vogue model-- liposuction thin and uber-stylish-- and doesn't want to eat dinner at midnight will not fit in. Not the most heartening news about a potential honeymoon vacation-- I mean, it's my honeymoon and if I wanted to feel like a fat ass and eat dinner when I am normally entering cycle 2 of the REM, then I would just sit on the couch and eat dinner after Conan O'Brien. I read on, though, and we learned that Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, has a lot to offer us, even if we are decidedly un-botoxed and like to eat dinner at 8.

We booked it and are looking forward to our steak-filled honeymoon in the southern hemisphere. I decided to read about Argentina and see what clues exist in its literature to explain this crazy obsession with plastic surgery. What in the world would make a culture drive its peoples to have their falanges cosmetically sculptured?

One night Jeff was reading the Lonely Planet guidebook to me as I was falling asleep and we learned an additional fascinating tidbit about Argentine culture: In addition to being obsessed with plastic surgery (so much so that some women get work done on their toes-- Um, ever heard of a spa pedicure? Usually does the trick for me), it is also obsessed with psychoanalysis. Eureka! Common ground!

In fact, Argentina has the highest number of psychoanalysts per capita in the world, and the Argentine people are extremely committed to psychoanalysis. To learn more about this phenomenon I ordered a book called Freud in the Pampas by Mariano Ben Plotkin. The subtitle of the book is The Emergence and Development of A Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. How's that for hot honeymoon reading? What's with this culture that spends millions of dollars chopping the fat off its body and then millions more learning to gain wholeness through therapy? No wonder it's currency crashed. Don't cry for me, Argentina, kiss my fleshy god-sculpted ass!