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San Cristobal

Tapachula

Summer Isn't What It Used to Be

What a strange summer this is turning out to be. A is in California, with his mother, visiting his family and attending Ivy’s graduation. I am here alone until Saturday. That isn’t the strange part, however. It’s that this is summer, and I have gotten stuck teaching two classes for five hours a day—a total of 25 hours a week, which is more time in front of students than I had to put in during the regular semester. What kind of summer vacation is this?
They are not difficult classes to teach—only five students (two from 8:00 to 10:00 and three from 1:00 to 4:00), but long. I find more than 90 minutes of one activity a strain, and there is a lot stuff to do in preparation for August with no time to take care of it. I know I’m lazy and a time waster, but at this point in my life I treasure my down time and I tend to stretch out those moments until they eat into what should be busy time. Like now, I would rather be writing a journal entry than grading papers.

The Rabbit Died

I didn’t think I’d post another entry so soon, but I’m a little upset and I wanted to note: Tekkie died today. He was left here around four o’clock and seemed fine, but when A and I came into the house around six, the rabbit was dead on the kitchen floor. There was nothing wrong with him on the outside, so we assumed he must have been poisoned by eating dead leaves from the tree outside. I had allowed him to wander around the enclosed patio. It was either that or perhaps parasites from the lettuce he had been fed. Such a delicate little thing. He was turning out to be a bit of a nuisance with the foot nipping and constant pooping, but he really was a cute little ball of fur. I had him here less than two weeks. I can’t seem to keep a pet, and it always hurts when they’re gone.

Alone with a Rabbit

Another depressing weekend sitting here alone, except now there is a rabbit with me—given to me by my students for my birthday, but all he does is crap and bite, so he is not good company.
I have papers to grade and charts to prepare—work which should have been done a week ago, but I haven’t the enthusiasm needed to complete my tasks. In this new position, there is no end in sight. I’m expected to work through the summer now, so days just repeat themselves. This semester will end in a couple of weeks, and the faces will change, but the work will go on and on and on. It is no longer fulfilling.
I don’t get time to write. I’m snatching moments to make this entry. Granted I’ve just passed through my memorial week, when I have vowed not to write, but it is like that most of the time now. There is too much to do—none of which I want to do. I’m feeling old, lonely, and often despondent. Uncreative. Repetitive days do not inspire.
These moments when the space is too warm and I don’t even feel like getting dressed, I sit in front of a fan and smoke cigarettes and stare into space dreaming of things I will write, but those thoughts don’t make it to the page. It seems I often journalize to express my angst, but frequently I don’t even do that. Rather, I often succumb to the numbingness of sitting through a movie I’ve already seen several times because that requires no expulsion of energy, and it can sometimes revive a pleasant memory of the ephemera surrounding the original viewing. Of course, there are times when I push myself to write things down and this has thus become a Journal of Disappointments and Depression, perhaps not something I am ever going to want to reread if the veil lifts.

Ambivalence

This is the time of year I feel so ambivalent about. Yes, it’s spring. Days are sunny, but not so stifling hot, and there is a sense of renewal in the air. But specifically these two weeks in early April are a painful reminder to me of that April of the year 2000… At this juncture, I find it difficult to believe five years have passed, and how much my life has changed. …
April is also tax time and again I become aware of my neglected duties. I am no patriot, but I know what I’m supposed to do. Blank forms are upstairs—I just never get around to remitting them.
This is also the time when all test preparation begins. Third partials are this coming week—then extemps are to be administered—followed too closely by final exams. This year will be different in that I will not have the summer off.
I did not go up to New York during Semana Santa, but hope to, perhaps, make the trip some time in July. I can take two weeks, but my financial situation is not as it once was, so I’m not sure yet when I will return. A is setting up something for a seminar in Spain around that time, and it would make sense to take care of my business simultaneously, but well…
Yesterday was the day of the water dumping. I don’t want to say more about that, but simply note it here to remind myself of how crazy Stress Week makes me. It’s a poor excuse, I know, but some things never change. They just manifest themselves in different ways.
I want to go to San Cristóbal today even though I have so many things to do and should get to them. I mean to go no matter what is pressing. Sometimes I get sidetracked by details, but I am always reminded that, “Life is short. Carpe diem.” Occasionally, I take heed and rush headlong into whatever appeals to me most. There is so little diversion on offer and what I like—I like. When the final tally is taken, I want to come out winning and as I see it, there’s only one way I can. Perhaps there is more than one way, but not many, not by a long shot.

Coazacoalcos

To Coordinate or Not to Coordinate

One month into the position of Coordinador de Idiomas, and I have to admit although the money is good and I don’t want to give it up, I do not truly feel fit for this job. I also have three normal classes at three different levels, and along with the administrative duties, I am exhausted all the time. Only one class is a hold over from last semester, but with the problems of the electronic platform, that one, too, is in disarray. This week coming is for first partial exams, and at the moment I have nothing ready for any of these classes. Kate left in December after briefing me in a schrift (though admittedly, I didn’t pursue the training with so much enthusiasm as I might have), and now I’m finding all kinds of things I don’t know how to handle.
So, I have a confusing job, classes every day, for which I am unprepared, a class on Saturdays, cigarettes are ruining my health, and I have very little free time, which I seem to waste surfing on the Internet. Along with all this, A is only working a part-time teaching job at his father’s school and has a lot of free time. He takes me to Tec every morning, but then I frequently don’t see him again for the rest of the day.
I don’t feel so good about the whole situation, but look forward to some sort of vacation, perhaps during Semana Santa, though I’m thinking before April 15th, I have to go to New York to take care of my taxes. I haven’t resolved them for 2002, 2003, and now 2004 filing is due.
After the last fiasco, I’m almost afraid to go to New York. I’m losing money by the pound, and that’s another reason I want to keep this job. I’m hoping that as the New York money goes down, the Mexican money goes up and it balances out somewhat.
For the 19th of February, I hope to go to Tapachula to apply a TOEFL, and that’s a new thing for me. If I can find enthusiasm for little things, perhaps it will be enough to carry me through. As it is, I just dream about a time when I can retire, laze on a beach, drink piña coladas, and write whatever I want. Actually, I want Jimmy Buffet’s life, only I’m not enough of a pirate to steal away and just do it, nor do I have enough capital to make a start.
Oh, well, the dream is still alive.

Memogate

Documents were presented as authentic on 60 Minutes Wednesday on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the Presidential Election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate the documents, and that they were produced by modern wordprocessing software, which led to widespread mistrust of the Internet.

Sumidero Canyon

Winding Down (and Out)

I feel as if the world is winding down for me. Mentally, I am in a lost place. Some awful things have happened long before I expected the time of final things.
My health is not so good. Many little details bother me.
Financially, I am sitting on the fence of going forward and trying to go home. But to what home?
On October 26th, I finally suffered for not making clear to everyone that the scumbag who has been charging purchases all over the place is not me. A collection agency put a hold on $8,000 of my savings because they think they have the thief. Because I was not in New York to protest, they won a judgment against me. It is not my debt, but I have been told there is very little I can do about clearing this up short of taking the matter to civil court, which I would have to be there to do.
In addition, I have not taken care of my taxes, so the IRS is deducting from the interest. I keep meaning to sit down and right this situation, but I find hours slipping by while I surf the Internet. Withdrawing into the safe place inside my memories, sometimes even there I feel the intrusion of an unfair world. I’ve lost whatever little conviction I was building and no longer feel capable of responding to inequity.
At times, I have projected and thought I would enjoy living to ninety and watching this changing world, but lately, I feel as if I am ready to die soon. There is very little that brings me joy these days.
I don’t say this because of the robbing of my money alone—it is a combination of things that puts me in this mood.
I am a man out of place in his surroundings. When I went to New York in July, I quickly realized how different it had become from the time I felt it was my world. Having awakened too late for my flight to Mexico City, everything, for me, went a little wrong after that. I felt as if I had become a zombie by the time I was sitting in my brother’s car. And now, three months later, I have not returned to life.
I lost my guiding spirit in April of 2000, and so long as I didn’t change the set, I was able to drift through the days, but I came to a fork in the road that December, and I think I may have chosen a path not meant for me. I was distracted by my heart’s yearning, and I made irrevocable choices. Now, I am once again in a place where it looks as if I must make choices and I am reluctant to do anything.

Yellow Light

The yellow light comes at around four o’clock every day. In the narrow passageway between the livingroom and the diningroom at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, sunlight streaming through the windowed doors to the patio meets the light coming in from the kitchen window. The glorious color resulting from this concatenation lasts for about fifteen minutes. If I can arrange to be sitting in a chair having a cup of coffee and enjoying a cigarette, and observe this manifestation, all is right with the world for another day. I’m a simple man. It takes something as small as that to keep me happy.
However, if I’m busy or somewhere else at that time of the afternoon, and I miss my light fix, I feel lost and the day seems wrong, which implies that perhaps I am not such a simple man. If I put such store in this one poetic moment, maybe I need to get a life, as they say.
Day after tomorrow, I leave for New York, and although I can visualize the details of my apartment, I wonder what I will find there. My brother and Charlene have lived there now for more than two years, and they had made changes before I went home last time.
I have my present firmly fixed in my mind’s eye. Please let me recognize my past and keep it in perspective, and not let it interfere with my future.
Time plays a game with or without our sanction. We are the chess pieces. Whenever we stop to observe, we are on different squares from whence we began, never forgetting we are looking to mate to win.

Flying Home

It’s 10:00 pm Sunday, and I have lived alone here for a week. I have finished my summer course and this Thursday I will be flying to New York. I have spoken to A pretty much every day via Messenger (sometimes with webcam) and/or phone. He seems to have gotten through his first week of classes without too much ruckus and this weekend he went to visit his family in Ontario, near Los Angeles, I think. I haven’t had any difficulty being here by myself. During the week I had homework assignments to keep me busy, and I did a bit of house cleaning and washed some laundry.
I have done some work preparing for my upcoming classes, but no personal writing. I read Philip Larkin’s A Girl in Winter and think it will become one of my favorites. It was so appropriate for my time right now. I need to get some more of my books from New York because when I get in a melancholy mood some of them help me regain my perspective—my personal perspective, that is, which I know is kind of tepid and old-fashioned, but I don’t think that will change much at this point in my life.
Tomorrow night I’m supposed to meet Calvin for a drink and some conversation—looking forward to that.
I can’t believe I only have three more days here!

Alone

It is 6:30 on a Saturday. My first day completely alone here in Mexico. A has gone to San diego for a month-long course. I have Module 5 left next week of my Capacitación en Verano, and then on the 15th I am going to New York. Both of us should be returning to Tuxtla on August 4th. Without a friend here, I am bored already, and the 15th seems so far away.
I know I have complained quite a bit about the situation here, but this morning I was more upset to be facing this time alone. Of course, I can read or write without interruptions. I am sitting around too much lately. I have put on weight. My goal is to lose some of it during this novel adventure. I have vowed not to eat any red meat for a month, but now I’m longing for a burger. I have vowed many things over time and have found it difficult to follow through. This is something I kind of have to do, however, as very few articles of clothing fit properly. A month is not very much time to achieve a goal, but it could provide the spur I need to make some headway.
I need to keep busy to avoid feeling sorry for myself. I know many of my problems are of my own making. I just have to discover the way to unmake them. Easier said than done.