The best laid plans…
Ugh. What a summer. I had all this reading I was going to do. I was going to establish a regular gym schedule and finally lose that 20# that has been plaguing me for the last 18 months. But no.
D and I are moving to a new place. We've spent the better part of the last two months trying to get this one ready to sell. I am so sick of painting. I am tired of moving crap for new carpet. I am tired of putting it back. I am tired of not being to just sit and enjoy my house. You Cancers out there probably understand why I am so irritable these days.
It's starting to feel like that old mathematics riddle: "Assume it is 1:00pm and you are 10 miles from your destination. If you halve the distance to your destination every minute, what time will you reach your destination?" The answer: never. You can always continue to halve the distance to your destination and (theoretically) never get there. We've made a lot of progress, but there is always more to do. Of course in the real world, you eventually get close enough to call it good (around 1:18pm give or take). I wish there was a mathematical way to predict when we'll get to that point in our preparations. Hopefully some time in the next couple of days.
What this means is by the time I am done at the end of the day, I have had it. I don't want to read. I don't want to write. I just want to sit and veg. So the books I had on my list remain unread. Thoughts I've had about what I have managed to read remain unwritten. And school starts again in three weeks.
See you in April...
Vacation?
D and I spent ten days in Mexico the last part of June and the first week of July. We've been home two weeks now and I've been so busy trying to get caught up I haven't had time to post anything about it. I kept notes on things I wanted to say and worked on them on the plane ride home. OpenOffice, however, had different ideas. It absolutely refused to save my file when the battery started to give out. It kept giving me a disk error. That did not prevent it, however, from believing it had saved the file and wiping out the automated back up and recovery files. I ended up losing everything I had written on the plane. Yes, I was a just wee bit ticked.
So here they are, in no particular order: thoughts and observations about my first trip to Mexico.
- Mexico City seems to subscribe to the Haphazard School of city planning.
- Traffic Laws: They're more like guidelines than actual rules.
- Toilet Paper: You don't put it in the toilet. You put it in a waste basket next to the toilet bowl. I knew this, but the way Americans carry on about it, I expected much worse. Folks are pretty discreet and neatly fold their used TP, and I never once saw a full waste basket, not even in questionable public bathrooms. In a climate where you can leave windows open 24/7, odor isn't much of a problem either.
- Canine Testicles: Neutering is such standard practice in the US seeing so many dogs in tact was almost as odd seeing a dog with two tails.
- Hair product called Gorilla Snott: enough said.
- The Metro: Don't like it. It's too crowded. Even at 10:00 PM the trains were mostly full. I still haven't got over the stop where a group of people bulled their way onto the train. If it had been rush hour or if the train had already been packed, it probably wouldn't have fazed me, but the train wasn't that crowded. There would have been plenty of room had they given people a chance to move. Apparently 10:00-10:30 P.M. is a second rush hour in Mexico City, but I still think it was uncalled for.
- Montezuma's Revenge: Not sure what he's got against a gringo from the U.S. Maybe the angry spirit of the betrayed ruler can't tell the difference between a white American and a white Spaniard, except that I don't speak Spanish. Regardless, he got his revenge on me. Thank goodness for imodium.
- Montezuma's Revenge II: the letter X. It can sound like 'ks'; it can sound like 's'; it can sound like 'sh'; it can sound like 'h' depending on the origin of the word, Spanish or one of the many Indian dialects. There are no rules. You just have to learn each word as it comes along. You know sorta like bow (as in take a), bow (as in to shoot an arrow with), bow (as in to tie one) and bough (as in arboreal anatomy).
- The RIAA are a bunch of f***wads. They get their panties all in a knot about college students sharing music, but there are people on every single street corner in Mexico City selling pirated music CDs for a bit less than a buck a piece (10 pesos). If you buy one of the MP3 discs, you get over 100 songs for your money.
They're not being discreet about it either. We're not talking guys with CDs attached to the inside of trench coats. They have sound systems set up blaring music to attract customers. They are also on the subways, moving from car to car with music playing obnoxiously loud advertising the CD they have to sell. In the course of one longer subway ride, five different people got onto our car, each with a different mix of music. I don't recall hearing the same mix of music twice the entire trip: salsa, 80s rock, techno, big band classics. You name it. You can buy it.
What was interesting was the wide range of vendors: everything from punk teenagers, to the visually impaired, to what appeared to be middle class housewives. You have to wonder if that is their main source of income or is it just a way to earn some extra cash on the way to and from work?
- I've been flying since I was a small child. You would think that it would be pretty routine for me by now, and, for the most part, I guess it is. The flight in, however, was a first: it is the first time I've ever participated in an aborted landing. The flight to Mexico City was pretty much uneventful until the end where it got a wee bit bumpy as we dodged thunderstorms on our way into the city. It wasn't all that bad. I've been in worse. I do find, however, turbulence is more upsetting to me when we are trying to land. Nothing like jerking about as the ground is coming up to make you a bit edgy.
We were within a few hundred feet of the ground when we stopped going down and started climbing again. Apparently there is some altitude where they decide if they will continue the landing or not. After we had leveled off again, they explained that as they reached that critical point, a rain squall moved across the runway and they could not see a thing, so they aborted the landing. We circled for about fifteen minutes and then went down again. The second attempt was pretty routine, but that didn't stop the gentleman next to me from crossing himself when we were finally on the ground.
- One of the things members of the Mormon church pride themselves on is continuity. You often hear how comforting it is to go to church in a different city or state and hear the same lessons in Sunday School you were having at home, etc. D and I went out one evening to check out the night life in Mexico City and as I sat in one of the local gay bars, I couldn't help but draw a similar parallel to the gay community.
The pretty boys were there, flirting with and teasing everyone around them. The nellie boys were there, flirting with spontaneous combustion. Everyone was moving to the dance tunes playing over the sound system, some out and out dancing others just swinging their hips in time with the beat. There was even an old queen sitting in one corner wagging his head in time with the music with regal detachment. I didn't understand a word of what was being said around me, but it felt just like home.
Of course there are a few differences between Salt Lake and Mexico City. For one, Mexican homos drink a lot more beer. Salt Lake homos tend to turn up their noses at beer as uncouth. There was also the go-go boys dancing in nothing but leather boots. In Salt Lake, go-go boys...wait. There are no go-go boys in Salt Lake.
- I'm really not much of a bar person. D and I might go out once or twice in a year. But the best night we had while in Mexico was the night we went to the bars. I can tell you exactly why. It was because we were among "our people" and were allowed to be ourselves. More importantly, we were allowed to be boyfriends/lovers/partners. By the fourth day I was so over being D's "friend." It was nice to be able to hold my honey's hand, to put my arm around him, to kiss him and have it be no big deal whatsoever.