after the feast

coming back from the holiday, trying to get my mind back in track, and naturally, procrastinating - er, blogging.

quite the past four days. first thanksgiving, which was lovely and more low-key this year. and then friday - goodwill hunting w/ rosepag, wonderful nap and 5-year high school reunion. the reunion was a lot more friendly than i thought it would be and i was really glad i went (but perhaps even more glad to have pete to look to and say "wanna get out of here?" whenever i needed to.) i was only slightly blown away that we are all Groan Ups, and it was cool to come back into that milieu with five years of being ourselves. some people seem to have grown up out of that pressure and some seem to have settled or compressed inwards... i'll be optimistically subjective (for what else, really, can i be?) and count myself amongst the former. mostly. honestly, though, it was kind of a triumph to be around them and be at ease, to realize that the demons that i fought back then didn't get the best of me.

saturday was goodbyes and a little correcting, then visiting bill en route to the rosen-baiers. we had pizza & beer and jon told horrible, horrible jokes and i read to benny and told leo about zombies. dropped rosie off w/ her boyfriend in lee and then went to the dreamaway. drama as usual, but it was great to see the old crew (or the new-old crew, i guess.) i begin to wonder how much of the bullshit is essential and sort of the engine of the magic and how much is perhaps the premonitions of the ship going down. and then i stop entertaining those thoughts and am just thankful that such a place exists. it's that kind of alternative reality, even if it's only one weird little restaurant, that makes me wonder if i'll always be coming back to the berkshires - if i'll end up there eventually.

and now here i am, preparing for what is actually my FIFTH week of teaching. it feels like yesterday that i started and at the same time feels like i've been there for a million years. and even though it's the hardest thing i've ever done, and won't stop being difficult ever, really, i found myself telling a lot of my old classmates that i love my life. and i do - seeing all of the options that have become people's lives for the past five years, and seeing mine, it becomes clear that dreams do come true (and then usually grow to astonish us with how mundane they are.) i mean, here i am, planning how to teach a bunch of brooklyn kids about the stories coming from the navel, as it were, of the collective unconscious (persephone myth tomorrow). here i am, guided on every side by men and women and places that are as beautiful as they are crazy, and i get to be the conduit of that beauty and insanity. i guess we all do, though; it's just the amounts we receive and give away that vary.

lists

god. i've had three damn days to get shit in order and to miraculously become the best english teacher i can be and you know what? i'm not. i didn't use my time well. i got some work done but there's a million other things i should have done, too.

i'm beginning to get it now - there is a certain under-controlness that experienced teachers exude that gets the kids in line - i don't have that yet. the under-controlness apparently comes from lots and lots of lists. lists of grades. lists of points earned for good behavior (pretty much the only way i can get them to sit down and start learning - the high school equivalent of a gold star. yes, i have to give them meaningless points to make them do anything... although the way they react it's clear that they are anything but meaningless). lists of things that were supposed to get done veteran's day weekend that actually got done.

i guess this is part of the magical process of figuring it out... but i can't help but wish i was there already, for my students' sakes and, of course, for my own.

light and dark imagery

so, last post was perhaps a bit too much of an overstatement. i made it through the first week, am mostly alive, and have learned a couple things.

• number one: no expectations, just knowing what they're capable of. no miracles are going to happen - or rather, the ones that are, i'll hardly see coming anyway.
• number two: don't take it personally.
• number three: just because they don't give a shit (or seem not to, anyway, at least after lunch) doesn't mean i don't give a shit

and things are really pretty good with my first three sections. my schedule works out so that the earlier in the morning, the better they are, and then we have 6th period lunch, and it's a like a swarm of demons overcomes them. and it happens every day, too. it's pretty sorely compounded by the fact that they haven't had a teacher for three weeks, have a brand-new teacher with very little experience, and are a CTT class (which, by the by, is a code for class comprised mainly of students with behavioral and/or developmental issues) so by eighth period i vacillate between deep breathing and suppressing the urge to duct-tape their asses to the chairs and gag them with the homework assignments they didn't do last night. the most shocking thing is that all the adults are really too busy with their own shit to even care - which is to say that the people i'm most accountable to (my students, right?) apparently want nothing more than for me to disappear completely. and people have told me that it's some "they're-rejecting-you-before-you-can-reject-them" stuff, but as far as i'm concerned, it makes my job a living hell. apparently it gets better. i guess i'll spend however long that takes learning how not to throttle them and hopefully also how to make them understand that studying literature can actually make their lives better.

because it totally fucking can. or at least it makes my life better - being an english teacher, and getting to expose people to patterns of humanity and human thought is a really cool thing to be bound to at the end of the day. we're doing a myth unit with the freshmen (two classes of whom are my last two periods, making it even more painful to be denied the opportunity to teach a fascinating topic ... but aren't i supposed to be asking myself how i can make that fascination accessible? or is that a really naive, second-week-in teacher question to ask?), and so i'm reading joseph campbell's "myths to live by" and a whole bunch of global myths from the big compilation i make copies out of. how striking the patterns are! and so much around me has been speaking lately to the end of days theme... this is either because i'm losing my mind or because it really seems to be happening. at any rate, i leave you with a campbell quote:

And of all these warnings and pronouncements, that of Spengler [in The Decline of the West] was the most disquieting. For it was based on the concept of an organic pattern in the life course of a civilization, a morphology of history; the idea that every culture has its period of youth, its period of culmination, its years then of beginning to totter with age and of trying to hold itself together by means of rational planning, projects and organization, only finally to terminate in decrepitude, petrifaction, what Spengler called 'fellaheenism'. Moreover, in this view of Spengler's, we were at present on the point [in the early twentieth century] of passing from what he called the period of Culture to Civilization, which is to say, from our periods of youthful, spontaneous and wonderful creativity to those of uncertainty and anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end.

(love that about the "morphology of history" - i get an image of the sinuous, three-dimensional beast of it.) well, it certainly seems that we're passing from a time of creativity to a time of "anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end" to me. and so what if it is? so what if we are careening from order to chaos, from light to dark, as all the old stories have it? seen in another way, a lot of those students who didn't pass this marking period aren't going to pass this marking period, either. this is not my fault. but my job - and, yes, my joy - takes me back there every day. this is, for now, at least, my own adventure. so the terror and the joy, the shadow and the illumination, are both they as they will always be, and i follow as best i can to where i feel them. because, that, i think, is my greatest duty - to manifest these polarities in my own life, to use them to my benefit.

as the post-act-of-titling coup de grace, i have to briefly also thank all of my previous english teachers - all of my teachers, in fact - for the examples, whether good or bad, they set for me. of particular note is mr. pickard, who with the help of nathaniel hawthorne, drove the nail of light and dark imagery deep in my head, and whom, being a brand-new 23-year-old when i first met him, i think of with renewed sympathy all the time.

a letter to myself two years ago

(ok, i'm going a little jonathan swift on you here... it's not all bad, but once i opened the window and started going, this is what came out.)

Dear Future Ms. P.G.,

While you may think that teaching English to urban youth is your life's calling, please do not take yourself or your ambition too seriously. Once you finally achieve this goal, you will find that it is essentially a joke. Your expectations are so far from reality that you may as well be thinking about an entirely different person's life. Forget everything now. Forget your visions of inculcating your students with The Truth - they will be too busy trying to tear the classroom apart and incite each other to mortal combat (or, alternately, too deeply asleep) to listen. Forget your naive allegiance to the tenets of a student-centered classroom and the laughable, kumbayah ethics of progressive education. And most importantly, forget yourself. Forget all of the moments you spent, yourself a high school student trudging through a thousand dreary assignments, knowing that It Could Be So Much Better than This - your own adolescence was a paragon of opportunity that the students you will come to teach would feign recognize as a high school education, mistaking it rather for a somewhat rigorous engagement at an underfunded country club. Forget all else except the blessed miracle of time's forward movement which will inevitably deliver you to the end of the day - lo, even to the far-off paradise of a Friday afternoon - for this and your own meager wits are all that will sustain you.

But do not be discouraged. Despite the near-total apathy of your students, the complete incompetence of the administration and your own lack of preparation, you will find allies in your coworkers, with whom you will carp endlessly during lunch hours. You will also find succor in the tremendous amounts of coffee you consume daily, and in the glasses of wine that await at a day's end. And, at the very least, at least you aren't selling pussy dye.

Please heed this advice as well as one's previous self, bound by temporal causality, can - your very sanity depends upon it.

Sincerely,
Present Ms. P.G.

good manners & evil queens

i feel something taking shape in myself. i'd like to flatter myself and say it's a good person. by this, i mean someone with good manners. to say "someone with good manners" might be treating everything like a nail a little too much but i realized this summer at camp that the least we should expect from each other, no matter what kind of situation we're in, is good manners. of course, this brings into question from whose culture the manners are referenced, but i suppose the rule of thumb would be first to consider another person's space and how well their needs are being met and to go from there. and so i'm trying to practice this with everyone, including myself. it's a useful sort of compass.

for me, it is good manners to be honest. i have been asking myself a lot lately, "what is your true intention here? what do you really want, and what do you really need?" these questions have helped me already in a couple of situations, but there are blind spots. it seems that the place where honesty breaks down is in the relationships between the sexes. we fall into old, easy patterns out of laziness but more often because of the intoxicating possibility of union with someone else on a number of levels. when i am honest with myself, i see that the sexual is all-pervasive in my thoughts - not because of an desire to experience pleasure as much as the constant lure of a power interplay. but we cannot be honest with each other about sex; we would then be being honest about power.

i just tried to frame a confession in a metaphor, tried to explain how my intentions sometimes aren't pure when i know i have captivated a man's attention. i wanted to talk about how what i really seem to be looking for is a mirror to cast a flattering reflection, and then i realized the parallel between that metaphor and the evil queen in Snow White... and of course being as full of the Jung, RAW and feminist Irish poet as i am, went into the symbolic substance there. the evil queen's most powerful motif is excess vanity - her wish to see herself, regardless of the truth, as the most beautiful woman. her repugnance is her stubborn unwillingness to accept that she not the most beautiful (which can be read, at least by me, as "the most powerful"). so there it is (or perhaps i have digressed too far), that naked clamor for power in the guise of flirtation - ugly, certainly not good manners, but something i recognize in myself. but even as i process this, i realize that without the evil queen and her cruel, insatiable vanity, there would be no story - no Snow White would ever find her Seven Dwarves or, obviously, Prince Charming. and, to recognize that the full cast of characters as possible selves (as i must, Child of Western Archetypes that i am), i may be staring a man in the eyes to see my reflection, but i will always have my eyes open for the possibility of really seeing him for who he is. and if that impulse is not always guided by good manners, it is at the very least governed by honest curiosity.

media & me

double whammy last night of dinner w/ another ESL teacher and watching "the office" w/ alison. dinner was at this great South Indian restaurant on lex and 27th - yummy dosas & Brooklyn IPA and good conversation about students and politics and timespace patterns. so cool to fall into the conversation you knew you were going to have with someone who is essentially a perfect stranger: he said "it's doesn't matter so much whose mouth it came out of but the fact that it came out of someone's mouth." in other words, it's all the same thing - the same thought-impulse coming out of the human organism.

and then watching "the office"- or rather, a kabillion minutes of advertising and "the office." first, i'd like to make the obvious observation that perhaps the popularity of "the office" and "officespace" and related comedies/sitcoms makes a strong case for Western society's dawning recognition that people aren't designed to work in offices. and to take this to its logical conclusion, most of the way we live our lives today is based much more in convenience (mostly economic and social) than it is in any fulfillment of our spiritual or emotional needs. (of course i'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, and - the worse offense - i'm taking the spiritual fulfillment stance, but this is what i see.) watching television is a difficult undertaking for me. on the first level, i'm expected to interact with a story line and a cast of characters that i don't know, whom i know don't really exist. at the next level, i can't help but to constantly interpret them through the filter of my knowledge that it's someone's job to create these people and situations, that testing has even been done to ascertain what will give me or someone like me the most enjoyable television-watching experience. and thirdly is the "me or someone like me" awareness - all of a sudden i'm part of this gigantic entity of Americans who watch "the office" on thursday night, and of every person who thinks like me and sees it for the media machine it is, there are three people (a generous estimate) who buy it whole hog, who probably aren't able to discern their buying it from enjoying it.

because most people like to watch television. most people come home and "unplug" from their work by plugging into the TV. it has become, for better or worse, our fantasy playground, and i suppose that in a lot of ways we need it. i used to think that the entertainment industry was complete fluff and it boggled my mind that billions of dollars are spent on nothing more than making up some stories, but now, after having digested some good ol' Jung, i see that we desperately need our fantasies. (we must, right? how else could the benefits of making another shitty dane cook movie or "reality" TV series versus, say, feeding or vaccinating a few hundred thousand people be explained?)

but here's the thing: i'm not sure if my fantasies look like those ones. i'm reading this kind of dull book right now called "object lessons" which, as far as i can see, centers around one woman poet's experiences discovering what it means to be a woman and a poet at the same time. her thesis is that women and their lives are the object of a poem but are only now becoming the subject of it, and as such we have only been seen from the outside and romanticized or objectified. while this seemed a little facile to me at first, or even untrue (perhaps because of having come into consciousness in the post-women's lib generations), what she writes has begun to sound a deep chord in me, at least when i'm watching NBC on a thursday night. those stories - most of the stories that can be found in mainstream media - don't do it for me. i want to really be entertained - i want real stories. and perhaps the only way to get them is to make them for myself.

a little piece of paper

so: i am cleared to get hired (i think) and ... AM ACTUALLY CERTIFIED TO TEACH IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. i really never thought this day would come - all of the bureaucratic nonsense, and hundreds of dollars of fees, and tests, and paperwork, and phonecalls, to say nothing of the four years of college, the student teaching, visits to 65 Court Street, gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, all of it culminating into this one glorious moment where the little white lie on my resume ("NYS Certified") is finally true. amazing that a stupid piece of paper can make me feel this elated.

i will start teaching on the 29th (yes, two days before Halloween - how fortuitous!). visited the school yesterday and sat in on a couple of my sections. i will tell you this, O Blogosphere, i am scared. i am scared because they say i look about 15 years old, scared because the Bloods are recruiting, scared that i don't have the organizational skills or patience or moxie to do this. but this is what i've been waiting for. as i told patito last night, i have absolutely no idea what it's really going to be like - my expectations have so little bearing on what the reality is going to be that i may as well try not to indulge them.

and i quit my stupid job. i got paid today - i'm so looking forward to the day that getting paid won't make me feel like i've been punched in the face (or make me want to punch someone else in the face.) that being said, i'm trying to hang in there for my students' sakes - haven't yet told them that i'm leaving although i've dropped a few hints. i'm really going to miss my week class but hopefully i'll be able to stay in touch with some of them, and they did teach me a lot (as they always will, right?)

what else... the weather's turning here. it's chilly in the morning - makes it even harder to get out of bed - but i love it, love how a different season can make me see this city in a new light. it's a sort of reprieve, a reminder that things aren't always going to be the same, although with all this change i don't know why i'm looking for more.

tectonic movement

as of my last post, i've had quite a few changes take place. am finally settling into the new apartment, which i'm pretty thrilled with (as of right now). actually had the "this rug really pulls the room together" conversation with pete, and then had the requisite "did we actually just say that" moment. having my first real place, where i pay for it and have my name on the lease and things, makes me have little reflective bursts all the time, like "gee i guess this is what it's like to be a real person." they come now and i'm almost ashamed of them because i know that the rest of the world has been aware of these kinds of responsibilities this whole time and i'm just arriving onto the scene. it's like the awareness after you get your driver's license or turn 21 that all that anticipation leads up to a whole new set of tasks, and that you'll probably be bitching about what you were just celebrating. but i will always be having those moments, i will always be realizing that i'm a new inductee to one legion or another - perhaps the graceful thing to do is to just let it be that moment of newness (or of whatever.)

aaaaaaaaaand. i got a Real Teaching Job. well, sort of. the things i need to do to get the job for real are 1) get a file number/get certified (still? still. fuck me.) and 2) quit ESL job. and it is ever so easy to whine about how difficult these things are going to be but the plain fact of the matter is that this is my in. this is what i am supposed to be doing. this is the time for me to triumph over the gorgon bureaucracy and get myself where i deserve to be. this is not that say that i'm not a little apprehensive about beginning this job. the school is 70% guys, is only 4 years old, and as the AP told me, not without its structural flaws. on the plus side, i'll be able to bike to work (it's in williamsburg) and will no longer need to go to manhattan as much. so. i'm trying to be pragmatic and action action action on this but let me unburden myself as i cannot elsewhere that i'm blown away by the amount of responsibility i'm about to take on. am i worthy? will i do a good job? of how much am i truly capable?

pato visited this weekend, too. it was a nice time - lovely dinner at hearth (i had the bass with calamari and chickpeas), brunch at roebling, indian food, not nearly as much adventuring as i had planned, but taking a nap and eating a good meal were top priorities on my list (lazy-ass that i am.) but nevertheless - some beautiful moments: walking the tree-lined streets of bushwick, smoking under our umbrellas with the storm overhead, the roses on my bureau reminding me of his visit. i fear he showed me a better time than i did him, but i think that might have a lot to do with my slow comprehension of how to let myself be treated. i think that this trip proved him to be a bulwark for me in this new time.

so now to bed for some much-needed rest. i have a lot to take care of in the next few days.

cleaned the shit out of the new apt w/ jay and pete yesterday. after things were mopped and clean(er)-smelling we went around with a tambourine and pot lids and incense and scared the old bad spirits away (the upstairs kitty looking on from the fire escape in bewilderment), then went back to pete's and had sub-par burritos and beer. i'm looking forward to living with those guys.

and then riding back to alison's on the subway, looking at the outer edges of the map where it wanders off into long island, i remembered myself 5 years ago riding the subway looking at the same map. a lot of it has become so much more familiar - i wonder what i would have thought if i'd known how far from manhattan i'd end up. those outer edges used to make me feel twinges of envy of the people whose childhood homes were just on the other side of brooklyn and now i'm making my first "real" home of my own right there, and the longing has diminished to a little pebble. i guess i'm feeling the happy effects of finally settling down after so many years of having my stuff(myself?) scattered all over the place. (although god only knows how long i'll really be anywhere anyway.)

harvest moon

just saw the harvest moon hanging low over met. ave and it was like a huge swollen pumpkin in the sky (eerie orange, i swear to god) and i wish everyone in brooklyn could see it, too, and we could have a big orgy. or harvest things. or something. i always feel like i should be doing more with myself when i look at a full moon.

last year i saw the harvest moon with huck at the dreamaway. it was chilly out (sweltering today, mid-90's) - there was a scrim of clouds across the sky, and huck told me to remember the moment and write about it some other time, which has now finally happened.

in other strange synchronicities, i ate lunch (soggy but passable chilaquiles) in this mexican diner that matt used to live under. mana's "labios compartidos" came on, creating a sort of triad of longing (matt/old life in ny, nicky/summers on the cape and mexico itself.)

into and out of the wild

last night i watched sean penn's "into the wild," and, being the granolaface i am, was moved by it. (which is not to say that i didn't snigger at the shot of him burning his as he set off across the sweltering Arizona desert.) besides it coming right after what could have been a disastrous phonecall w/ dad (Me: Hi, dad. so you're going to move me in on sunday. Dad: Oh. I am?) but ended sanely, even sweetly (Dad: And we're going to get you moved even though it's a tremendous pain in the ass, because you are the most important thing and I love you. Me: [sort of sobbing]) which brought up all sorts of feelings about what it means to really and truly leave home, to become, as i vowed to myself last december under a sky pulsing with stars, "a child of the universe," it set some interesting thoughts into motion.

on the one hand, a complete return to nature is the easiest thing to do - at least from an existential standpoint. the most definite measure of a person, in my estimation, is who s/he is without the adulterating influences of other people, media & the incipient bullshit they entail. and without question, such a change would open the door to a new series of existential problems, but you'd be so busy trying to satisfy the most basic of needs that you wouldn't have to entertain them. (although, having never been in that situation, i can't really speak authoritatively.) taken in this light, it is more difficult to create a self-sufficient, or at least sustainable, lifestyle within the confines of society.

which is not to say that chris mccandless was "right" or "wrong" in doing what he did. i had the interesting experience of being able to see this film and read critical discussion (from the onion a.v. club, naturally) without the impulse to call him either a hero or an asshole - he was just doing what he felt he absolutely had to do. and, of course, i am not really speaking of chris mccandless as a person but rather of the character of mccandless as i saw it in the film.

what i really enjoyed most about the film, beyond the gorgeous shots of the sea, woods and sky, was being able to contextualize my own longing to live "the truth" that i think exists outside the social world we have built. i have entertained fantasies of living in the wild for many years and read books on it and fallen in love with people who i thought were capable of doing it, and i see now that it is (at least for me) a symbol for being able to live the truth of myself. but the truth of myself is who i am right now - perhaps it's a truth i don't fully recognize often enough, but more probably that the truth i want to see doesn't correspond to that which is really there.

el regreso

well! it certainly has been quite a while since i've posted, and as far as i can tell the person who last wrote never really existed, much less lived in another country. i've fallen back into the american rhythm of life - mostly, that is... there was a little incident with me almost dying on a runaway horse - as seamlessly as i left, and now i'm back in new york. teaching grammar. yes, the very thing i said that i didn't want to do now occupies at least 5 hours of every day of my life until the beginning of december.

it's not so bad. the people are great, and their english is so good they can absorb - and even respond to! - my pseudo-philosophical rambling. the things that really suck about it are 1) only sleeping in once a week, 2) working 9-5 both days of the weekend, and 3) my creepy boss. i have a lot of creative freedom, half days from monday to thursday, and, because of the unrestrictive curriculum, a renewed interest in doing the work necessary to keep a classroom afloat. i would even go so far as to say that i'm honing my craft, and that i might even be more suited to working with this population than i am to working with NYC teenagers. or am i? only time will tell - because god may strike me dead if i don't get myself a Real Teaching Job soon. or at least get the weekends off.

y otras cosas - ahora hay un hombre en mi vida. we met this summer and it was like something out of a nora ephron movie (well, if nora ephron movies had protagonists who think actual thoughts and/or smoke drugs) complete with starlit beach cuddling, couples mini-golf and a bunch of other stuff that i am ashamed to say i totally enjoyed... the kind of stuff that sounds horribly cheesy when you're recounting it but was so much fun when it was happening. i can't talk about this anymore - i'm never watching another romantic comedy again, or at least until i can feel like my experiences aren't the montage in some hack screenwriter's first act.

but fuck that. they were beautiful, (dare i say it) meaningful experiences - they may have borne more than a passing resemblance to all of that schmaltzy drek that's forced down our throats from the moment we can say "cinderella," but they felt good when they were happening. this is how it goes, i guess, and it's a terrifying thing, because i can look at my life from one perspective and see it as my own, my experiences and feelings as genuine and irreplaceable, and then i can look at it from another and see myself as a facet of this manifold human beast and see myself as a sort of pawn, doomed to play out scene after scene of The Human Game.

it's so much more than i can even put into words - somehow the act of writing a blog entry with the knowledge that someone i know, or perhaps more intimidatingly, someone i don't know, may eventually read it makes me balk, makes my thoughts (and "Me") come off half-baked, insincere, dimwitted. i wonder how many other people are sitting right here in this very city writing this exact entry about how they don't have any

oh god. that's enough. alright, let's stop with the metameta bullshit - no one's even reading this anyway, so i may as well come out with something straight and readable, something i'll be able to look back on and actually use. so here's the real story, because that's what we're here for, right?: i came back from mexico, had a harrowing experience that left me with a sprained ankle and sense of malaise i can't quite shake (the realization that, a la don juan, my death is indeed sitting - lying in wait - on my left shoulder), taught Nature and got a sweet tan. i met an incredibly sweet guy, a quiet, smart person who brought me flowers for no apparent reason other than that he really likes me (something no one has ever done as far as i can remember), a guy who has that really sexy pair of muscles that stand out on his lower abdomen and what can only be described as Soccer Legs, and we had a tremendous amount of fun, and then i moved to (back) to New York City. i started working for an ESL school, and my students were from all corners of the globe, and i learned more about how to be a good teacher from them, and i saw a bunch of people i hadn't seen in a while. i also realized that i have to tow my own load now financially, that i am indeed a Grown-Up (Groan-Up, more like), and that i am the only person directly responsible for myself and my sense of satisfaction. and there is much much more to tell, and i will be endeavoring to tell it, if i can only get out of my own way long enough to see that it doesn't matter if 10,000 other people almost exactly like me are having the same experiences because this is my goddamn life and my goddamn story.

(...and no one is reading this anyway.)

el ultimo

well, this is my last entry in mexico! i'm excited to be going home... have contracted some sort of unfortunate stomach infection that has made these past few days pretty much a living hell (excruciating stomach pain, diarrhea, fever, chills and a wicked headache). i'm finally feeling better and about to go to our farewell barbeque at the country club. i can't believe that such a big journey is coming to an end - of course everything feels kind of mundane and half-finished. to be honest, i'm looking forward more than anything to sleeping in my own bed (the original version, that is, in mass.)

the reunion of the known and the unknown

eight days until i go back to the states.

i'm overjoyed to go back... looking forward to being immersed in familiar things that i've been apart from for so long, and of course to seeing my family. i know that i can make it as big or little a deal as i want, too, and that i'm indulging myself in making it a big deal, but when i start thinking about how i've been here for six months and then suddenly won't be, i can't help but feel like it's enormous. it's a kind of panic. of course, everything is going to be fine. it's another chapter of my life that is almost over, and i'm lucky that i'll never be the same.

speaking of closing chapters, mom and dad's bid on the house in middlefield went through so it seems that when i get back (in eight days, for three days) will be the last time i spend in my childhood home. i knew this was coming as mom's kept me posted, and i'm genuinely excited for them, but it feels like a little too much today. i guess this is the part where i become a real grown-up.

poems

been writing a lot lately... here are some of the results:

Three Thirty Three

It is enough to see and not to wish.

Because the wish is still there –

It will always be there,

Like the numbers that are nowhere

And yet so easily grasped –

Desire is there giving

Birth to each minute.

And though in the lucky glance

Your watch may offer coincidence cubed,

Want is in them all,

And the wish never stops.

If We are Doomed

If we are doomed

(doomed,

yes, doomed)

if the gaps are closing,

the water rising;

if even in our best minds

we are beaten

before we start,

I, for one, am glad

and will spend my life

taking in what pleases

and spitting out bliss

until I’ve massed a raft

of worthless pearls

to float me into my own

private oblivion.

el viaje de (cumplir) veinte tres anos

oh it has been a long time since i've written, and of course so much has happened. it's funny how excited i was in the beginning to write and now it's become something of a chore... but it's been that way with everything. i think i'm a little tired of the newness wearing off of things, a feeling that comes from the constant knowledge that i'll only be here for x amount of time. x amount of time is getting smaller and smaller and i'm struggling more to be here in the moment. there are times when i can achieve that, when i am here and nowhere else, not longing for anything, but by and large i'm still the same old impatient lucy.

but enough of that: i've got a lot of catching up to do. i guess i'll start with my birthday. i had a lovely party the evening before the 12th with tons of shrimp kebabs (they were amazing, with a great last-minute citrus marinade - i'll modestly defer credit to the many hours i've spent in the dreamaway), an excellent birthday pastel, and almost all of my favorite people here. notably absent were las inglesas who are currently touring mexico and that pinche jous, admirably demonstrating the concept of tiempo mexicano. despite this, and the copious amounts of mexican beer, awful old Spanish wine and tequila i drank, i woke up the next morning with a giant smile on my face feeling nothing if not 23 years old. i went to the oxxo and got a cup of joe and sat in the plaza and looked at the place i had chosen to live in all by myself, and felt pretty great.

the rest of the day played out as follows: hungover packing followed by hungover busriding with my best travelin' gal, josalyn. we arrived in tepic, the capital of nayarit, at about 7. our hotel was dirt-cheap but as well-appointed, clean and well-attended as had been advertised, and after checking in we ambled over to the center. we had a passably good dinner on the balcony of a second-floor restaurant seated far too close to a group of shouting americans watching futbol. we wasted no time in trading glances of the "oh-my-god-can-you-even-believe-how-awful-our-fellow-countrymen-are" sort but it turns out we judged wrong, as they offered to buy us not only a beer and bottle of tequila but paid for our entire dinner. they were actually really cool guys who were from california fighting fires in the region and even offered us a helicopter ride that unfortunately never transpired.

the next day we took a combi to nearby Lago de Santa Maria del Oro, a volcanic lake that apparently has no bottom (although after my initial awe i considered the fact that this might just be because no one has gone to the trouble of figuring it out). bottomless or not, the lake was absolutely beautiful and offered a lot of the tropical flora and fauna. we swam in the lake (the purported whirlpool at the bottomless bottom definitely kept us pretty close to the shore) and caught some great drummers of the traveling hippie variety as they moved through the palapas. finally we caught a combi back to tepic and readied ourselves to set off the next morning for san blas on the coast of nayarit.

san blas, "where the jungle meets the ocean," is a tiny fishing town that nowadays gets the majority of its tourist pesos from mexicans. apparently this wasn't the case 40 years ago, and the great hulks of empty blackening hotels that line the beaches testify to this. despite this, san blas has amazing surf, beautiful beaches and the associated smattering of gringos. we stayed in the "hundred years of solitude"-esque hotel los flamingos where i saw a bath tub for the first time in five months. (they also had robes, a cd for our listening pleasure, and a shoeshine kit.) the best part of the day, however, was the time we spent on la playa las islitas. i met a guy with two horses who came up to us and offered a ride. "too touristy," i thought, but josalyn urged me to give a try, and i'm so glad i did. i spent the next hour galloping across the beach on a white horse and swimming in a estuary where the water showed a rainbow of colors as the sand under it got deeper. when we came back, the owner of the palapa we had been keeping our stuff in gave us free chelitas and some, uh, other stuff. we also met his friend, a wonky old guy who reminded me of Grampy, and he offered us some of his specially crafted tequila and showed us a trick to divine true tequila: if you pour a little bit on your hand and rub them together until dry, they should smell delicately of honey or flowers. if it smells like alcohol, your tequila is crap (not to mention the fact that you'll reek of crappy booze). then he read my palm and told me that i was timid in life, but would have "muchos exitos" in five years' time. when the palapa owner's mariachi buddy started serenading me and giving me the puppy dog eyes, i elbowed josalyn and we hightailed it back into town. we would probably still be there if it were up to those poor old hombres.

the next day we had a great breakfast and left the sweltering heat of the coast for the just slightly less oppressive heat our beloved guz. and that's where i think i'll leave it for now. it was just about as close to glorious as a minibreak can get, and a wonderful way to ring in my 23rd year here.

here is my two-month anniversary blog entry. i know because it's been two months since i had to do grades... right now i'm rewarding myself for doing approximately fifteen minutes of work without stopping.

grades are stupid. if i ever knew how much grades were based on a teacher's objective opinion of me, i probably wouldn't have tried so damn hard in school and coasted more on my good looks and winning personality (i kid, i kid. sort of.) it's terrible but i definitely grade people on how much i like them, or conversely how pathetic they are. i'm trying to get worked up about the ethical implications of this and failing.

if you can't tell from the tone of this entry, estoy un poco enojada. it's a lot of things - grades being due, my simultaneous anxiety about leaving mexico and homesickness (i'm missing SPRING in new york, and of course a million other things), and the realization that what i thought existed between me and The Guy is not what i thought. such a big part of him still belongs to another person, and such a big part of her belongs to him... there's no way he can start something now, and he's known it from the beginning. it's really nothing personal - i accept that, but i've grown so addicted to the feeling of things starting between us that now that they've stopped (or perhaps stalled, because who can know the future?), i'm missing my fix. again, it's nothing personal. if i've learned anything from this trip, it's that about 95% of what happens to us human beings isn't personal, and exactly nothing can be gained from taking things as if they were.

that being said, not taking things personally is the emotional equivalent of choosing brown rice and steamed vegetables over a sundae - it's no goddamn fun, even taking into account the crash that will inevitably follow. oh passion passion passion. when i'm a "real" grown up, will i be more easily disposed to giving it up? will good ol' sane abstinence ever be as attractive to me as crazy and painful indulgence?

as usual, i'm way too far into my own head, but it feels good to get this shit off my chest.

on a totally unrelated note, because i've been procrastinating (having my laptop here has probably halved my productivity, by the way) i've been checking out a lot of new music and have fallen in love with feist's new album, "the reminder," and recommend it highly if you're interested.

semana santa, parte I

these past couple of weeks being semana santa i have quite a lot to cover here so i'll try and do my best.

i'll start with my decision to come home in late june. making this decision has afforded me equal measures of relief and anguish, but i realized that i can't stay anywhere for another person, even if that other person is inside my head, by which i mean to say that i realized if i only stay here to prove to myself that i can stay here, i'll only end up miserable. so i'll be home on june 30th, and then you can find me at Brewster Day Camp on the Cape for my second summer as "WOW Activity Head" (WOW being an acronym, variously, for Wonders of the World, Wonders of the Wilderness, and Wonders of the Worlderness... the preciousness never ceases). again, to paraphrase Katey Grey, now i know that i don't want to teach grammar, that i want to teach Something That Really Matters (or STRM, if you're so inclined) and what else needs teaching more than appreciation of the world we're destroying at an alarming rate? besides, it gives me the opportunity to keep my tan up to snuff and will hopefully afford a smooth transition from mi vida mexicana. and, best of all, i'll be gloriously close to mis hermanas (una de mi alma y una de mi sangre.) the rough sketch of the next year includes me moving back to NYC(!!!!!!!) and getting a teaching job, applying for a master's in environmental ed on the west coast and missing Mexico terribly.

from there we shall skip to Katey Grey and RogPag's visit to the Guz. it was incredible to have the most basic components of my support system in such a foreign setting and to realize how settled in i've really become here. on their second day here, we went on an excursion to el Nevado de Colima with my friend, Hector, who is the most unassuming and most accomplished person i have possibly ever met. he took us almost all the way up the mountain and then into the volcano observatory where we were allowed to don the gear they'd use if it started to blow. after that, we took a ride to the charming little town of Tapalpa where we had dinner and wandered around the plaza which had been converted into an open-air market for the Easter holiday.

the next day, Mom and i went to a nearby ranch called Meson del Colombo. i first went to Meson del Colombo about a week after i got here to see la charreria, which is a sort of mini-rodeo, and i was blown away by how stereotypically Mexican it was, almost like something you'd see in Disneyworld, but it was real and we were the only foreigners there. Mom and i were treated to a drink called paloma, which is a stiff shot of mezcal mixed with sugar and a little bit of Nescafe in an earthenware mug and then filled with milk straight from the cow. when i first heard about it i was a little grossed out but i assure you it's amazing, and so far i haven't died. then we got a lesson from the owner of the rancho - an truly incredible charrero, and watching him ride a horse was like watching one whole creature. Mom, of course, was in heaven.

and then we set out for Guanajuato. i'll spare you the blow-by-blow, but suffice it to say that the trip took us two and a half hours longer than expected, got us lost in Guadalajara, and inspired the following exchange:
"DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUCKING EASY?" [said by Dad as we are trying to find our way in Guad while driving 70 miles an hour in between semis]
"Yes, Roger, I really think this is fucking easy."
we finally rolled into Guanajuato at about 9:30 (not before Mom attempted to drive up a one-way street the wrong way and backed over a median) and gratefully fell into the beds of our surprisingly lovely hotel, La Abadia (or "Labidabiduh," as the folks called it). the next day we poked around town, seeing the gruesome but strangely satisfying Museo de Momias - satisfying, perhaps, because having your remains propped up for all to see is kind of the ultimate worst case scenario, and also maybe because they'd never in a million years put little baby mummies under glass in the States. we also checked out the impressive Mercado, had a nice Italian dinner in the Theater District and caught some flamenco guitar. our ride back on an alternate and seemingly shorter route the next day was, despite Mom and Dad's assertions, longer than taking the Guad road even taking getting lost into account, but it was great to see Mexico up close and i got to further brush up my Spanish asking for directions every fifteen minutes or so. luckily, there is no one in the world i'd rather get lost with in a foreign country.

we got back into the Guz, freshened up and had dinner with the vols and their parents. it was so cool to see everyone's parents getting along so well, perhaps as much because they have a lot in common as because there aren't a whole lot other English speakers hanging around. we had what could generously be described as the worst and most expensive meal i've had so far in Mexico (of course this is without taking the heartbreaking sushi into account) - i had a crab salad that so nearly resembled vomit in texture, odor and taste i took one bite and sent it back, a first for me. (when am i ever going to learn that "ensalada" in Mexico means it will be swimming in mayo?) the next morning, we had a goodbye papaya breakfast and i sent Mom and Dad on their way. it was a really lovely visit in every aspect - even the slightly ugly parts made the rest of it sweeter.

heartbreaking sushi & other stories

had a great but altogether far too short weekend. friday night was disco bowling with the vols and jous. we acted like a bunch of fools, spending as much time on the floor of the lanes as we did on our feet, drinking too much beer and playing stupid arcade games. it was weird; we could have been anywhere - the goofy graphics on the electronic scoreboard for "open" and "strike" and "spare" were the same as they are in pittsfield and cape cod and new york. (my favorite of those graphics is definitely the "open" one where the pins are sneaking out of jail while the bowling-ball-jailer snoozes next to them.)

saturday i had a party - so much fun to get a party together, even despite the experience of blatantly being judged by the convenience store clerk when i, a woman, bought three six-packs of beer. the party itself was a success, too, and turned out to be a great chance for my neighbors, two wonderful gringas from the South (jocelyn and meredith, who live two doors down with meredith's little sons), to meet the vols, jous, and his sweet cousin, marcella. hotel staff came twice and told us to quiet down, but i've heard much noisier fiestas in las villas with many fewer people. i stayed up until about 4 with jamie, jawing drunkenly about how fast time has gone by and other kinds of things that seem really important when you've drank an entire bottle of red wine by yourself, and then slipped into an alcoholic stupor.

sunday morning was heralded by my inability to sleep past 10 on account of my first real mexican hangover. i got out of bed and embarked on a groggy, caffeine-fueled onceover of my apartment's little kitchenette-cum-dining/living room (the whole time thinking of kris kristofferson's "sunday morning coming down": "well i woke up sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt/and the beer i had for breakfast wasn't bad so i had one more for dessert"... although i refrained from beer-as-breakfast), and then invited jous to take me for aguas de coco. we spent the rest of the day driving around (a fun little incident: we were going down a street when the truck in front of us stalled. jous put the car in park, we both jumped out and helped the people push their truck onto the side of the calle, then jumped back in the car and went on our way), and i marinated in the kind of spiritually idiotic mood that hangovers cause in me. then we decided to get sushi. i've been pretty fragile since rosie's birthday last week when i had a homesick meltdown, and am sorry to report that this raw feeling combined with the very unraw fish in my tuna roll (seriously - the tuna was from a can) made me break down again. (note to señor forman: i can only begin to imagine how horrified - perhaps enraged? - you would have been by this "sushi," which made even crappy supermarket stuff seem like the paragon of Japanese cuisine.) the worst part was that i was at the lake, which is one of the most beautiful places i've seen in Jalisco, and i was sitting next to my favorite Mexican who had been gracious enough to take me out in the first place. but of course, he wasn't offended, and cheered me up with an episode of the "The Family Guy" that he had downloaded onto his iPod. and so there i was, eating pathetic Mexican sushi and watching a show about a cartoon family from Rhode Island, feeling once again as though my heart was going to break under the weight of all the beauty and coincidence and crazy, painful joy.

luckily, though, mom and dad will be here in less than a week. just joking around with mom on the phone as she fished around in my closet for the clothes that i should have brought was enough to dispel a lot of my homesickness. i'm pretty tired of being homesick, actually - especially because i'll be able to live in los Estados Unidos for the rest of my life and this experience has already been so fleeting. unfortunately, i think the trick to being present is to avoid dwelling on how things are at home (e.g., the availability of good sushi, proximity to my now-20-year-old sister, to say nothing of all the other people i miss so much every goddamn day). that's the real abyss i skirt - the anti-abyss where even cheesy pop songs are potential for sobfests. oh poor lucy! she has so many wonderful people in her life, so many amazing places she's called home, that she can't help but feel feelings that threaten to overwhelm.

for this reason, i'm almost glad sometimes to retreat to the bland world of english grammar. and, despite my initial disappointment/relief that ESL is pretty much by the book, i'm beginning to try out some new tricks in the classroom. the Cap'n will be heartened to know that i now call the attention of my preteen class quickly and effectively by saluting - they know once their hand goes to their forehead, they are silent and ready to receive my guidance, and have even learned the meaning of "WIPE IT," although they are about as powerless as i am to actually stop smiling. as you can imagine, the whole thing tickles the hell out of me. i'm also loving my teen class despite the fact that they're a bunch of funny-looking knuckleheads - i actually startled myself last week with the realization that i was looking forward to teaching their class. (why i enjoy doing anything with teenagers - much less something as dreadful as learning object pronouns - is still something of a mystery to me, but there it is.)

so all is well, as it always is - but if you're reading this, i miss you like crazy!

el mar de barra y el fuego de san jose (con harmonica)

in flight from existential crises and other types of ennui, melissa and i went to Barra de Navidad (aka La Playa) this Saturday. we left immediately after work on Saturday afternoon, and despite the fact that Barra is a 2 hour car ride away, took 6 hours to get there via Manzanillo. our trip was pretty pleasant - got to see a lot of little villages and agriculture along the way, and we were serenaded by an old campesino who hailed everyone we drove by out the window as though they were his long lost buddies. about a half hour into our trip, he began to whistle ranchero tunes, which i thought was pretty annoying until he proceeded to play the same tunes on a harmonica for the rest of the way to manzanillo. by the time we rolled in - sticky, hot and in desperate need of "doblefibres" (a sort of granola bar that melissa and i are obsessed with due to its exquisite texture and taste - the "linaza" kind are the best) - i realized that i actually kind of enjoyed his playing. (this from a person who is prone to reminding people on the subway who play music from their accursed cell phones for the benefit of the entire car that that's what headphones were invented for.)

we finally got into Barra at 9ish (after being treated to David Carson's 2004 masterpiece, "Unstoppable," o en español "Inparable" - and, yes, I'm being sarcastic) and i felt twinges of guilt at violating Katey Grey's traveling maxim numero uno: "Never arrive in a new place after dark" and was duly penalized with several minutes of wandering around on unfamiliar streets looking for our bungalow. but by 12 we had deposited our stuff at the Mar Vida (with Marcia, its reticent owner who tried to compensate for her frosty welcome by standing in our room fiddling with the TV we never used for a good 15 minutes), eaten delicious sopa azteca at Los Arcos and were sleeping the sleep of ESL teachers who spend their Friday nights salsa dancing and their (early) Saturday mornings teaching verb collocations. the next morning we found the beach (YES, MOM, EVERYTHING IS EASIER IN DAYLIGHT), took some sun, had leftovers from our feast at Los Arcos and i had a gorgeous two hour-nap, then went back to the beach, then ate some more (HEAVENLY fish tacos and cold Indio while watching the Chivas v. America game - Melissa has latched onto America for some reason despite the fact that 99% of Jalisco are Chivas fans... shades of being a Red Sox fan in New York, especially when they won on Sunday night and everyone in the restaurant was glaring at her as she applauded) and went back to sleep. the next morning, we had a lovely breakfast next to the sea at Bananas (i had tropical whole wheat pancakes and a ton of coffee), caught a bit more sun and did some shopping. barra isn't nearly as touristy as, say, vallarta, but i must say i contributed to the gringo factor in town by walking around in flip-flops and a sarong ogling silver earrings and rattan handbags. (and isn't it interesting how tourists in pairs always seem to be two parts of a whole, whether they're married or related or just friends?)

we had one more meal at Los Arcos - enchiladas mole this time, unfortunately con pollo - and boarded the bus for another six hour sojourn back to Guzman. luckily, there was some sort of Merchant-Ivory period thing on the tube and a gorgeous sunset replete with volcanic exhalations and, of course, another nap. jous graciously picked us up at the bus station and i slipped right back into the swing of things with the Guz Cru and finished off a wonderfully relaxing weekend with fried bananas and a castillo is honor of San Jose. (a castillo is a sort of castle made of fireworks. they warm up the crowd - no pun intended - by running around with a kind of bull effigy stuck full of fireworks and threatening to burn people with them. then, when the light the castillo itself, you can see groups of children darting underneath with coats over their heads as if the shower of sparks was actually an april cloudburst. this is all terribly amusing but the piece de resistance was definitely when they lighted the very top of the castillo, which was a little helicopter that took off and flew about 30 feet into the air and then landed, still burning on top of the church. we gringos got a little flustered when the helicopter seemed ready to land on the crowd below but everyone else seemed pretty unphased. jous says that they have a castillo every night in october.)

so, all in all, a wonderful weekend. i danced, napped, got muy bronzeada, and remembered that life exists outside the boundaries of guzman - y, por cierto, afuera de mi cabezita.

painting myself out of the corner

well, here i am in the middle of march, in the middle(ish) of mexico. the ides of march are usually a fertile time for existential crises - and, despite my initial panic at having painted myself into a philosophical corner, me caen bien con ellos... once i'm out of the corner i find that i've figured something important out, or at least something that appears important at the time.

and true to form, i have been visited by a minor crisis this week in the form of a Sunday edition of The New York Times and a Harper's Monthly. (Melissa, that wonderful roommate of mine, brought them from Chapel Hill, along with a bunch of other goodies.) i should have been wiser - of course, after having only the limited stimulation that laboring (en español, claro) through the society pages of the local paper affords, i was bowled over by the foreboding and authority that comes simmering off their pages (really, Harper's should have a warning label on the front that reads "This publication is the intellectual equivalent of a trip to the gallows." and that NYT Magazine article about how we're hardwired to believe in the divine, no matter how contradictory it is, definitely gives me pause as i contemplate the little new-age platitudes i so love on the tags of my Yogi teabags.) but i love it - love that feeling of discovering a little more of the "truth," or if not the truth, a description of the mean of the human experience. and i found myself in something of a triumphant position, if only in that i have the wherewithal to realize i'm in that position - i see now that i have been skirting the edge of ennui here in mi vida mexicana, terrified that if i fall in i'll never find my way out again. but i've fallen in before, in places much more unfriendly (both literally and figuratively) than the one i'm in right now, and mustered the metaphysical strength to fish myself out. just knowing that keeps me on solid ground.

and what a gift, really, to know how puerile (can you tell that i spent this morning, a morning that began, blissfully, at 11:30 - this is my only day to sleep past seven, and will remain so for the next six weeks - reading last week's Book Review cover to cover?) my existence is in a place where, in the gaps of my internal monologue, i answer the question "who am i?" with not only "22 year old Lucy, recently out of college, and currently responsible for only herself" but "22 year old Lucy, in Mexico." so i'm (we're) doomed. now that that's out of the way, i think i'll enjoy myself.

exponential potential

still vacillating... two days ago it was, "i'm definitely staying until next january." yesterday it was "i'm absolutely going to leave in july." today i am caught on the line - or else i've realized that it really doesn't do any good to try and figure out these kinds of things until the reality of my decision is more pressing. long live procrastination!

and yet a definitively compelling case can be made for staying here in two ways: 1) the weather. here's a nice snippet from the forecast for tomorrow night in the berks: "Wind chills may approach -15F." i went swimming yesterday at my boss's country club and while i was floating upside down in the pool, looking at the perfectly blue sky above me, i thought to myself, "why exactly is it that people would choose to live in a place that's cold for half the year?" (actually, i used to think it was because all warm places were like south florida - i'd sleep outside in an igloo if that was my only other option.) and 2) absence makes the heart grow fonder. sure, there are things here that drive me crazy (for example, the negative possibility of finding tamales after 9 o'clock on a saturday night - the basic principle of more demand equaling more supply is a concept that certainly hasn't crossed the border yet) and there are times when i start weeping at happening upon a review of a restaurant in my favorite neighborhood, but i appreciate the places i've been so much more. and, god willing, they will still be there in 6 months or a year or fifteen years - and i'll probably still be here, too.

and on a totally unrelated note: i astonished myself this week by actually working hard (a capability i thought i had lost in the process of toiling 60 hours a week for a pittance to address the world's woeful shortage of color-coordinated body hair). the lens i've been seeing the world with for the past week or so seems to be filtering for exponential potential, which is to say that i've been seeing how things can fuel themselves, that they often only need to be ignited, so to speak, to be set into motion. i see it in my "professional" life (can't conceive of myself as have an actual professional life right now, hence the quotations... although i recognize that this is the beginning; that, despite what the headlines say, at least this grad's degree is going to good use) when my students' successes fuel my own investment in planning lessons and curricula which hopefully in turn helps them to learn more, to learn faster and more completely. and i see it in my own growth. if you will pardon the new-age bent of this metaphor (although who am i kidding - mexico has only made me more earthycrunchy, and by the looks of things, i'm going to be a petrified clod of granola and patchouli by the time i come back), the less debris in its path, the faster the water goes, taking with it whatever was left behind, until the whole thing is clean and ready for whatever comes next. and that's how i feel when i feel most myself - like a big empty noodle that receives life one minute at a time without judgment, and with joy.

el primero

what better time to start a blog than while procrastinating during the end-of-bimester-crunch at an english language school in western mexico?

so why a blog? before i came to mexico, i was content to bore only myself with daily journaling. now people want to know if i'm alive and those sorts of things... i guess it was also a recent surge of self-importance at realizing that i am now technically a grown-up and no one really cares what i do so i may as well do whatever the hell i want. and doesn't everyone have a blog anyway?

i guess i can say that big things are happening in my little life here. of course i'm pretty settled in by now - know my way around (which is to say that there are approximately a half dozen places for a person like me to go in this medium-sized city, and i've been to all of them) and am becoming known at the school as something of a crazy (really the truest sign of being habituated) and am starting to reap the psychological benefits of Living Abroad. To wit:

1) everywhere is just a place under the sky
2) my parents had complete lives before i came along and had no idea who i would be until i got here
3) the concept of efficiency does not directly translate in mexican
4) no one is going to grade me on my life, except me (i'd give it a solid B+ right about now)

there are some others that i can't remember. i'll keep you posted.

other big things: i'm toying with the idea of staying here longer. my justification would probably relate to Revelation Number Four - i am really only responsible for myself, so why not stay here longer? people have certainly spent a lot longer in places they like much less than i like guzman, at least so far. i don't have to start grad school for another couple of years, and heavens knows my spanish is deplorable enough to benefit from a few extra months of practice.

and yes, there is also a guy in this equation; i'm still kind of amazed that things are progressing between the two of us even despite the fact that i used every stray eyelash, shooting star and 11:11 (and even a 14:14 when my watch was on military time) to wish for him in my life in the way he is now - and it's funny how exactly when i surrendered to the notion that the most fulfilling relationship we'd ever have would be friendship was when things went a little further. i know what terrible karma it is to base my plans on a man (and even worse to talk about these kinds of things in a blog, but i'm new at this so hopefully the Internet Karma Police will let me off with a warning this time) but you never know how choices lead to experiences. of course this is coming from a person who decided to teach English in Latin America by putting some options in a hat and drawing one at random (well, to be fair, i did a little centering meditation beforehand) so there are probably less-informed ways of deciding one's fate.

anyway, nothing's set in stone. but really, what's a year? (but really, how else could a 20-something woman end her first blog entry than with a rhetorical question a la Carrie Bradshaw?)