So much whatnotting.

HACIENDA MIXIUHCA

The hacienda, due to circumstances described below, has been somewhat neglected of late. Regardless, I'm gratefully pulling tomatoes off the whitefly-infested vines on the daily. I gave one of my Cherokee Purples to my friend Mizraim for his birthday and he was pretty excited. I won't lie-- I talked it up quite a bit... Of course when Marcos found a little heap of them in the kitchen, he asked me if they were purple because they were full of smog. Very funny, Marcos.

The chickens are bigger on a daily basis. They seem to display normal behaviour despite extremely abnormal conditions. The duck is totally neurotic, but she's another story. Anyway, my students and friends are curiously asking me about my weird plans for chicken dinner. The okra is irreparably stunted and still upside down. The upside down cucumber trick was working remarkably well until it sort of dried up (see: period of neglect).

Natural disasters... many times, when it rains, the drainpipe clogs with feathers. This sucks, because my job then becomes chicken-feather scraper (by means of my broom, because I have to do this by half-sticking myself out of a hole in the side of the cage, which I normally cover with a lovely piece of corrugated fiberglass which I found one day on the roof). This means mucking around in chicken-poop mud. Fun and disgusting, all rolled into one. However, this does mean I've got to be pretty timely about sweeping that stuff up. BUT! But my compost bucket is, as of today, full to the brim. I guess I have to get another one? My worms died of chicken shit overload, I think, and so I think anaerobic fermentation is the only option for me. Anyone got any suggestions???

MY BORING LIFE

Since my last post I've gone through a series of iterations of a daily schedule. I'd taken a job with another company, teaching an advanced English class at the National Polytecnic Institute's Centre for Investigations and Advanced studies. I loved the class, a bunch of scientists: a physicist, two geneticists, a couple of biotechnologists and a few scattered others. It was a really fun class to teach and I learned a few useful things from that school's teaching method. However, I happen to think sleeping is really amazing, and it simply wasn't working for me that I was getting home at ten or eleven at night, and waking up at 5 to be out of here at 6 to get to Politécnico at 7:30. I just wasn't going to hack it anymore. So, three weeks of working that gig (see also making some good money—at triple the pay rate of my current job, I certainly couldn't complain about money!) just about did me in. But now I'm giving private clases to this Argentinian dude, who, (are you ready for an AMAZING COINCIDENCE?) in fact, is working on a documentary about the Ginger Ninjas. Yes, the very Ginger Ninjas that biked into our backyard in Davis, camping out in various of our beds, amusing us with their bicycle-powered music, amazing us with their crackpot journey to the southlands.... so, yeah, that's cool.

Okay, you ask, but what about my free time? And I respond, “WHAT free time??” That's right, folks. Working six days a week pretty much kills any “life” you may or may not have had previously. Regardless, I try to take advantage of the scraps they throw me as much as possible. Chiefly this takes the form of adventure-grocery-shopping (1), wanderings in the center of town (2), and eating, nerding out and sleeeeeeeeeping (3). Later I will recount the doings, seeings and beings of the only trip I've taken out-of-town in many moons, but for the time being let's stick with the quotidian.

The Merced (GPG: Mehr-SEHD) is a big damn market. The following is a collaborative piece by Ricardo and yours truly. We wrote it together on the way to Morelos last week. On your mark, get set, go!

The weather's clear and fresh. It's about ten in the morning. We're groggily going towards Mixiuhca station. Instead of sinking into the metro, however, we catch a shortbus heading to San Lázaro. From on the sunny, bumpy ride to San Lázaro we're laughing and talking in Spanglish, both of us pretty lazy about choosing just one language to speak. Then we jump over some puddles to get to the station, flying down th stairs just in time to watch one of the orange trains disappear. Merde. Well, now we have to wait. It feels muggy in the Metro. Some announcements on the bulletin board call my attention. I'd like to attend some of the events posted, and even firmly promise myself I will. However, I won't; that I can take for granted. God bless the 48-hour workweek. The next train has arrived and we get on it. People generally stare at each other like mortal foes on the Metro (says Ricardo), and I try not to be a part of it. Then a guy selling pop CDs breaks the silence. Cat of course starts to dance, which is more than a little embarrassing, especially when she tries to act like she's with me. We get off in the next station, and again we can see the sunlight.

It filters through the multitude of grimy skylights in Merced Station and we maneuver through the masses and rotating gates, ever closer to the throbbing center of barkers, vendors, pickpockets and shady types, old ladies, pirate goods, housewivery, and deliciousness that is La Merced. Tacos de Canasta, fly sneakers, peanut butter, raw meat, plastic everything-you-can-imagine mah-day en cheena. Anarchy: capitalist anarchy at its hairiest. It's this sort of twisted freaky commercial paradise vacation at a toxic waste pond. This photo is of the feet of a clown and his ever-so-many fans in the center of town.

We more or less know where we're going: first to the old lady in the middle of the shoe part, who sells from buckets of multicolor mole, pastes of every kind, a shrewd grandmother with braids who shovels spoonfuls of the stuff into polyethylene sheets by the quarter-kilogram. We get our PB from her, and snake around distracted

clients clogging the passages to buy some cemitas. The Cemita is the holy grail of Mexican bread products: a circular roll, perfect for these amazing deli sandwiches they make in Puebla. Oh god, they're way way way too delicious.

It's a lazy sunday, of course, so then it becomes extremely necessary to dilute the coffee sloshing in our stomachs with some greaseball tacos from the stand with indifferent and snotty taqueros (GPG: tah-KEYR-ohs) but amaaaaaaaaazing food. I order some carne enchilada tacos, and load them down with fried potatoes, salsa, onion and nopales. Then I merrily proceed to stuff my face.

Then we carry our now quite full bellies with us around from one side of the Merced to the other, not listening to the crooning of the sellers. There's one part with mostly fruit, mostly candy and nuts and seeds, another with mostly veggies, another with specialty veggies, and one side hallway which appears to consist exclusively of nopales, giant heaps of cut-off spines accumulating on the floor as the sellers deftly swipe their knives over the surface of the cactus pads.

We come here because it's cheaper, and not so far from my place. Ricardo and I are coöperating on the food front, so into the front lines we go every Sunday. It's kind of exhilerating, between the split-second bargaining, the risk of being run over by a dolly loaded down with ice, carrots or potatoes, the constant worry of pickpocketing or worse, and the general overwhelming goodness of being surrounded by FOOD, glorious food! Heaps of carrots, tumbling piles of tomatillo, buckets of powders, barrels of beans, glass cases of nuts and candy, racks of mangoes and starfruit, crates of tunas, stacks of jars of honey... anything you want, nearly, you can find it. Ruffly, fragrant mountains of leaf vegetables and herbs, delicate displays of oyster mushrooms, fluffballs of alfalfa sprouts.

GETTING OUTTA HERE: an adventure in Morelos with the Usual Suspects.

The last-minute planning, the running from here to there, the dropout. This, the

dramatic backdrop for our Very Rigid Journey. Then we went to my house (happy independence day?) and ate eggplant and drank guava-ginger agua-fresca. It was admittedly not very patriotic of us.

Oh well! Next day we boogied at some early, but less-early-than-we'd-hoped-for hour, dashed off, ate a way-too-spicy taco at Tasqueña station, and jumped on a bus. On the bus I called Lilia, and asked Chato, who picked up the phone, if I couldn't escape from my pals a bit to spend some time with them, at which point he very kindly invited Ricardo and Karen to come eat with us. We then proceeded to miss our stop. We asked the driver “Scuse us, do you know where the next stop is?” to which he responded simply, “Yes.” and left it at that. What a dick. Well, he let us off at the next town, some nowhere place where we threw ourselves in the grass and happily

wasted half an hour soaking in the sun... anyway, caught the next bus back to We ate at this amazing elegant restaurant with a KILLER view of the town, which is situated in this incredible verdant valley, just luscious with vegetation, life spewing with impunity from every foothold. THIS, this this, is indeed paradise! More next time on our adventures in paradise... it's sleepin' time now.

But as a final... thingy, a study in tropical fruit. I dissected a mamey and a black sapote from the Merced on our amazing new electric-blue tablecloth. This is the result of an intensive, even invasive, study of their physical forms. Both are very specifically mexican. The mamey is Enjoy

My Freakin Uniform

Look at how silly and formal I have to look at work. My mother should be proud of me...

I'm Cultured like Yakult, Sucka!

*Note, this post was written several weeks ago, in fact DURING the Argentina-Mexico game, which brought us all to the conclusion that that we needed was for Chicharito to make fewer damn sandwiches and play more damn soccer. ** --The Editor

In light of the iminent slaughter of the Mexican team by the Argentinians, I think I should direct the topic away from fútbol and toward, uh, other pursuits.

Now, onto more intellectual issues. A museum exposition that I saw semi-recently was "The Invisible World of René Magritte" at Bellas Artes. Maybe I haven't posted a photo yet of Bellas Artes' magnificent orange dome, but I shall do so soon. Regardless I have a photo of the facade, and of one of the amazing wooden sculptures in exhibition outside. These 12 giant wooden heads are supposed to be the Apostles. As far as I can tell each is carved from a single piece of wood, which is to say they used some big damn trees to make this project, which makes my inner environmentalist a little sad, especially knowing a bit about the state of Mexican logging policy ("Log the fuckers!!!!"). Oh well. It's also quite close to the Torre Latinoamericana, an impressive skyscraper with a big antenna on top. Furthermore, the electric buses pass right by on Eje Central/Lázaro Cárdenas. Their little antennae fall off all the time just like the SF buses. Ah, a little bit of home right here in Mexico City.

Okay, so the Bellas Artes building is cool for various reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the exterior architecture, very old-and-made-of-stone looking, big, impressive, with the dichoso orange dome. Secondly, it's another prime and excellent example of the amazing sinking soils described in one of my July posts from last year (holy goodness, I've been here very nearly one whole year!!), as the building is in a funny little well. Thirdly, lots of people hang around in its marbly plaza, and I might remind you that México DF is make-out city, so sometimes you have to observe more tonsil hockey than you'd really like. Fourthly, it's right next to the Alameda, the park in downtown that is the subject of an amazing Diego Rivera mural available for goggling in a nearby museum. Fifthly, the interior contains these amazing art-deco-mexica designs and luxurious period interior design.

The permanent exhibit consists of 2 floors of murals: my favourite is the Diego Rivera one which features a serious-looking Charles Darwin hanging with his homie the chimpanzee, as well as various communistic, scientific and artistic figures of the pre-WWII 20th century. Giant cells and such.

Now, Magritte. The art of course was wonderful, because it was absurd, smooth-textured, oddly soothing in that trippy wild kind of way. BUT the coolest part, aside from the detailed descriptions of the artist's social life and personal history, was the interactive absurdist-art section. It was mainly designed for kids but we overgrown kids found it quite delightful ourselves.

First it featured a shelving unit for mislabeling things (as Magritte enjoyed doing in his day...). It contained everyday objects with profound or ordinary words pasted on labels in front of them, with a kid-friendly explanation that you don't have to call something what it really is, but that you can also use it as a placeholder for another idea. Cool, right?

The next part had a desk full of magazines, with instructions on the wall to cut out words at random and make absurdist poetry. Past that there was a series of giant plywood cards with pieces of images on them: fish head, horse shoulders, lady chest, business-suit crotch, chicken knees, mermaid tail, etc. which you were supposed to use to create physical non-sequiturs on your own body (for the photographic enjoyment of your friends and strangers!). Then there were mirillas, little diorama-boxes built into the wall with the tiniest peephole to see the tiny universe within, sometimes a little figure, or a rock, or whatever. Then , the ginormous blackbord. whereon you were supposed to draw figures. Finally, there was the wall of birds: in the center of the room was a long table with colorful pieces of paper and pencils, with instructions to write and/or draw about a dream you once had and cut out the piece of paper into the shape of a bird, and stick it to the wall. It was pretty cool, seeing little kids' dreams all over the place. I can never remember my dreams so I cut out a bird shape (okay, a duck, really...) and handed it off to marcos, who commenced to draw cockroaches with eyes on their backs (a super cool image, which later he created realistically in photoshop...). This we stuck to the wall.

Now of course for the life update. I'm still working like a dog 6 days a week, trying to live it up on my half-weekends (boy do I feel robbed!) but it's all good. My colleagues are awesome and so are most of my students; today I had an interesting mixture of students: an 18-year-old Nepalese girl and an army liutenent (who's one of my favorite students because he's just so out of control-- he's freakin' hilarious, even in his half-English). I teach kids pretty much every day for at least an hour, and they use this book called All Aboard, which is a pretty cool series, actually. Most of the adults use the book "Interchange" which is a sort of general-purpose life-English, with lots of stupid dialogues and things. Then there's "Market Leader," a British book about business and shit like that. They give me a lot of those classes because they're really into the jive of "hey look at us we have a Gringa! Aren't we special?" But it's cool; most of those students are pretty advanced and there's sometimes cool readings and interviews to listen to; and I can find cool stuff on the internet to supplement the book's hella square attitude (like the other day when I gave one student a short reading on Grameen Bank and microloans, and to another I gave an article about Gross National Happiness... you know, things like that).

Meanwhile, the fowl are getting fowler, fatter, and more sexually dimorphous. I'm bummed to announce that El Morado is indeed going to be a rooster, which means probably eating him younger than I'd like... and that means deciding how I'm going to do the slaughter and fast (where the hell can I go that nobody will see me?? Yargh). The tomatos are tired of growing and although they're small I think I'm going to go ahead and let them flower, throw on some more of the old NPK and see what happens. Next post I'll go on with my special fish-waste/crushed-corn prepared feed which is going to go on hiatus due to the fact that it makes the apartment smell like ASS even though it saves me a bucket of money. Le sigh.

Ah, last bit, tying chamba together with hacienda: the school is offering a summer day-camp in which there are about ten kids who I spent my friday teaching to garden, making little milk-carton seed beds, learning about plant anatomy, guessing plant smells, generally frolicking with dirt, and daring them to touch worms. All told, a pretty successful event that kept the kids rapt for a good hour and a halfish.

Okay, I send long-winded nostalgic greetings to California and all the many people I love who are still there. I toast the pecan-pulque I am currently guzzling to all y'all. Goodnight!

Viva México, Cabrones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czDDfAh67gs

Mexico 2, France 0. Take that, First World.

All the kids were running around during the first goal (62nd minute), which was an amazing clean goal, and I had invaded another teacher's classroom to watch the magic happen... his student didn't have homework for that very reason (they had made a bet: if Mexico wins the game, I won't give you homework). The guy who scored is called "El Chícharo," or, "The little pea", and he's very popular with my kids. The second was a penalty kick by Cuauhtemoc (GPG: KWAO-te-mock) Blanco, also lovely but a lot less exciting than an in-game goal, don't you think?

Hurbanistorias

Mi Rancho

Well. Here I am, center of the Universe, Mexico City, Mexico. Land of deaf-dumb subway singers, endless environmental disasters, lost lonely people from anywhere else, hundreds of years of history, swank hipster hangouts, yuppie rent-a-bike, one of the richest men in the world, starving drunks, singsong accents, and uncountable other oddities. It's the land of constant stimulus.

I live in a neighborhood called Jardín Balbuena, actually a very pleasant place to exist in the bourough ("delegación") Venustiano Carranza (see map), a block away from the metro station Mixiuhca, across the four-lane Eje 3 Sur from Jardín Balbuena, a big park where they put a big tianguis every Monday and Thursday, where you can find anything from forks to blankets and curtains, 15 peso pants, used digital cameras (and good ones!) to produce, tlacoyos and raw chicken (whole or in pieces!). I'm also within walking distance from the Olympic Velodrome they put up in '68. It's a funny neighborhood because though rent's relatively cheap, we're just a couple blocks from some really nice houses. Must be the screaming of landing airplanes...

My roommates are graphic designers. I actually only know one (the one with his name on the lease), because the other one's been in Guadalajara for the last few weeks apparently. I don't even know that one's name. Well anyway, the one I do know is called Marcos, a very San Francisco boy with rectangular glasses and a sort of reserved demeanour (till you get half a bottle of wine in him anyway). He keeps the place very clean and hangs out with me when I get back from work all grizzled and tired. Smiles a lot.

La Chamba

Oh yes, work. The thing that permits me to stay here... I found a job doing the most obvious thing possible: teaching Ingrish. I'm teaching at a private company in the neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec (=> Cha-pool-teh-PEC), which is kind of like Pacific Heights on a Dubai acid trip, all colonial and modern mansions with jararandas in bloom, shiny cars, and glass-and-steel high rises hovering around. Writhing masses of three-piece suits. But the place I'm working at is by and large okay; my co-workers are funny and interesting, the pay is all right, and I feel like I'm doing something useful.

The Metro is my friend. I clock into work just before 1pm every day except Saturday (when I start at 9am) and Sunday (which is obviously God's day of rest so I don't go to work), so I have to go running out of the house around 12:45. Fall down the stairs, two stories down to the door of my building, sprint across the parking lot/playground (go figure) open the front gate and hundred-yard-dash to the Metro stairs, past the fruit stand with the middle-aged guy who greets me every time ("buenas tardes güera!"), the torta stands, and down into the belly of the Metro, that swallows me up as I slip my ticket into the slim silent mouth of the turnstile, disappear into the gum-on-the-ceiling tunnel that leads me to the other platform, the Tacubaya direction platform, where an orange train will sweep me away to the next stage of my trip. Every morning an adventure, the same vendor selling Danzón CDs (I already bought one, but still I always want to dance when he busts out his Benny Moré and Pérez Prado...). Seven stations later I'm in Tacubaya, scuttling around the twists and turns, following the orange arrows to transfer to Line 7 toward El Rosario. Two stations later there I am in Auditorio, probably the deepest station in the damn Metro system, and I'm bounding up shit-tons of stairs, embarrassingly tired as I reach the top, panting like a dog in the summer, and crawl out into the world and onto my Palmas bus, which ten minutes later has me spilling out onto the sidewalk next to the Iglesia Covadonga and the taquero who greets me every day as he unloads his delicious fare from his truck. "No vas a comer tacos hoy, güera?" "No señor, hoy no puedo, voy con prisa, pero mañana seguro." Crossing Palmas is the last dangerous task of the afternoon (provided I have no kids classes scheduled for the day...) and then I wave through the glass door and Rogelio lets me in with the buzzer-button, usually greeting me with some sassy comment or other.

All images come from the Internets. The station symbols are from the Metro website: http://www.metro.df.gob.mx/ and the map is from Wikipedia (the brains of society...)