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?)