Keep in mind I wrote the beginning of this last Sunday night.

There is a point where routine becomes soothing. Rather than progressing into monotony, the routine transforms into something relaxing. You think to yourself, “hey, I could do this with my eyes closed!” so you try it. and as you regain consciousness and watch your car untangled from the fifteen other cars, just before the morphine pumping into your bloodstream starts to take hold, you realize that there just might be a problem allowing routine to lull you into comfort.

A strange beginning to an otherwise normal week? Perhaps. But I have finally woken up. I am off the cold medicine and back on the coffee. nas my body slowly adjusts to life without a slight sedative, I realize that I have been napping(literally, considering last week) for far too long. What am I still doing in this hole of a region? The heat is just silly. My mexi friends are dropping like flies (two leave this week, including my best friend oscar and my one “potential” who was supposed to be a new good friend. The second “potential” I mentioned a few weeks ago? His wife and child just moved down here last week. Two strikes.) and only the white people are staying put. Indeed the world is turning upside down. This is the opposite of what should be happening, yet here we are. Rigodamndiculous.

I have resigned myself to life with no real friends in the immediate vicinity for the next, pause for effect, 8 weeks. 9 if you include this one, which I don’t. 61 days. actually 68 from right now, until summer vacation starts. A long time? Yes. And as the heat becomes more and more intolerable I can only see time begin to slow down. After my two week summer vaca? I am outta this piece. Not sure where. Not sure how. But good god, it is time. It took me 8.5 months to get my fill. And I am satiated. Supersaturated even. It is Sunday and for a town of 30,000, there is not a single grocery story open past 4pm. There are little markets, like pratts in Madison (is that even still there?), which have some food, but no real food variety.

Am I complaining about a very small issue? Of course. But I am somewhat mollified by the knowledge that people have gone crazy from more obscure problems.

So now I am on the offensive. I am so ready to bolt I cannot truly imagine the next 8 weeks, but I think this might also have to do with the lack of sedatives in my system. Another day or so and I will calm down, but I decided, no, you people should share in this feeling of, well, cabin fever for lack of a better term.

I just filled out a rather lengthy application for a high school job in puebla. High school? I know. I cannot really believe it either, but the attraction is, first, a city with an altitude over 8000 ft and thus a temperature that shan’t exceed 95 degrees. Art museums, a cinema, expositions, proximity to an even larger cosmopolitan area, df(mexico city) is about 1 hour away, a friend or two and, get ready for this one, the possibility to meet young professionals my age with, I cannot believe it either, similar interests. Wow. And, the school will pay for me to take graduate spanish literature classes at one of the universities in town (you read correctly, “one of the universities” implies there is indeed more than one, and thus I can teach private lessons quite easily to make more money). I wont have an office with free internet. I will have to actually teach 5 hours a day (as opposed to my current 2). I will not make as much money, but almost. I will probably have to pay more for my apt. the air will not be as clean. But my school day with be shorter. No more working from 8am until 7pm with a 3 hour siesta. No no. 7:45am to 2:45pm. Yahtzee. I can hardly imagine getting off work and having more than 4 or 5 hours before I need to go to bed.

There are positives and negatives. One negative: I don’t actually have the job yet. That slows me down a bit, but the jobs are out there. In cities with normal temperatures. Where it gets cold in the winter. I miss the cold. Another negative? High school kids. Don’t love em. Have not missed them since teaching in orange, but I am willing to give it another go. I am older, have more patience (I can say that, at least) and, amazingly, actually have teaching experience this time. Maybe I gave up on high school too early. Timmay does it. jen “faulkner’s mistress” smith used to do it for a while. Neither of them have gone, um, extremely crazy. Yet. That I know of. Perhaps it aint so bad.

And if I hate it, I quit. Simple. There are hundreds of other schools in the area, many universities, and the possibility of living solely off private lessons. Here? Not so much.

So why not leave? Good question. I have some screwed up loyalty thing that keeps me from walking out next week (which apparently is stopping just about no one else around here). I like my students a lot. I don’t think I have really bitched about them once this semester. The routine is easy. That scares me. I don’t want to get into a routine down here. Next thing you know I have been here for five years, own a vw bug, my wife has just turned 17, we have 3 kids (you do the math on that one) and I am starting to wear jackets in December and January. No no no no no no no.

No. hell no.

Routine. It freaks me out in that way. Close your eyes and where did life go? I am still (relatively) young. I only add that stipulation “relatively” bc my students now remind me that they in fact, are young. I am, well… not as young as they are. Relatively old in their eyes. But what do they know. Anyway, I am young enough, and a safe distance away from my cold medicine sedatives, to realize that this is no place to get into a routine. Time to get movin. Giddyup.

If not puebla, I have an application in chile. Of course, I could just move to chile, Santiago, and find a job relatively easy (private work mostly). But I still have lots to see in mexico and would not mind staying a bit longer.

In the end I am not an efl/esl teacher. I have learned that much. I don’t love this work like I probably should. I use it to travel and learn about new cultures and people and language. That makes me realize I need to be doing something else in the “relatively” near future so that I don’t fall into some loony routine and end up tied to a job I have slowly grown to hate. Or maybe I just need to get out of the istmo and I will learn to love what I do? Who knows.

There is also another option. It involves Virginia, tractors, energy-free watering systems and probably other things. That one is gaining momentum as each week passes, but I am not buying a ticket just yet. Plus, I have not discussed it with papa bill or the man in charge of the troughs, so without their consent and help (after all I would initially have no idea what I am doing), it is all just ideas anyway. But, that could be the relatively near future, if not this year, perhaps next. Would that also lead to routine? Time will tell.

Did you see that coming? Possibly. I have been thinking, and I think out loud, about it for a month now.

Not sure if I got the name of the book I just read correct. The all true travels and adventures of lidie Newton. One of the strangest parts of reading the book was that 3 hours into the story, I paused to get some water or something and realized that at first I did not know exactly where I was. Yes, I was on the cold medicine at the time, but the point is that I was really into the story. I am not sure I have truly had that feeling with a Spanish book yet. I blame it on the fact that there are lots of words I don’t understand (I don’t look up 100% of the words I don’t know bc I often have a good idea what they refer to and my vocabulary is already well beyond the avg person’s so there is no use learning more words that I will never hear or use in conversation. By that I simply mean that the authors’ diction is higher than the normal speaker’s common usage, not that I have some outstanding vocabulary, and thus learning some of these words is fairly futile. But it was truly relaxing to read in English again. Of course, I felt bad for doing so. Every time I don’t spend at least 1-2 hours a day reading something in Spanish, I feel as though I am letting myself down. I have no tv, but sometimes at night I play solitaire and listen to music. Sometimes the music is in English, so then that is bad.

As I write this, on Wednesday night at 11:30, there is a party coming down the main street. Fireworks have been bursting for the past 10 minutes and I can hear the drums and trumpets and horns getting louder. Also the probably 100 people dancing and drinking in the street. Pretty funny in the sense that traffic (ok so there is not much this late at night, or, really ,ever) stops. There is no going through so they wait or back up and go around.

I am truly tired of the stupid fireworks (cohetes) because there is no light display, just the piercing sound of a shotgun. Over and over and over. Well, first the whine as the rockets take off from the ground, but then 5 seconds later there is an explosion. There has not been a week that has gone by that I have not heard these stupid rockets. Sometimes at 4am, sometimes at midnight or 1am, on a Wednesday no less, there is no pattern that I can tell. I am not making an inaccurate generalization when I write that Mexicans truly do love fireworks. Loud noises in general that seem to announce: hey look at me, I am here!

Ya, I am over that. Still gotta love the 4 or 5am rockets though. It means that the bride was a virgin. The groom checks for blood and then launches the rockets. They even hang the bloody sheets up in front of the house for the day to show everyone that the bride was a virgin. Or that she was supplied with animal blood and smeared it on the sheets. Either way, quite a different ritual than I am used to.
They are now passing by our building and anyone who was sleeping is no longer. Kind of obnoxious if you ask me bc people do have to work, even though according to “god’s time” it is barely 11pm. Those of us on “new time” have to work earlier, however. It is weird. You ask someone what time it is and they ask you which time you want. old or new time? God or govt time? Hard to get used to really. Not quite as quaint and fun as you might expect either. All the bus schedules are different. Stores are open later at night but are not open in the morning. Stange.

Now I am just sounding bitter. Time to go.